Posted by Jaye Marie

I have been doing a lot of thinking this week, but I think my brain has finally reached breaking point. Since we began this journey into the weird and wonderful world of electronic publishing, an avalanche of information, much of it incomprehensible I’m afraid, has tortured my aging brain.
I have tried my utmost to assimilate what I thought (and was told) was necessary to be successful in this new digital publishing world. You know what I mean… you must have a good and interesting blog to attract what they call ‘content marketing’. You must be on Facebook, Twitter etc… the list goes on and on.
Well, we have tried to do most of those things, but it doesn’t help to discover you might be using the wrong website provider… and that Facebook keeps changing the rules (which I didn’t understand the first time) and there was always that other sneaking doubt, you know, the ‘I might not be good enough anyway’ one. Which, let’s face it, is probably the real reason this website doesn’t attract many visitors, and our books are not flying off the shelves.

So I was gazing out of my window to where all my bonsai live on their shelves, hoping for some divine inspiration, when I noticed something odd. I had to go and have a look, for my eye site is not what it was and I sometimes see things that are not there. But not that time. It was real and I had to take a photograph to prove it. On the shelf, nestled between a pine tree and a Ginko, I had placed this huge pine cone that we found in a forest. It must be about six inches long and it really does tell you about the weather. It closes up tight when it rains and opens wide when the sun comes out.

But what was special that day (as you can see in the photo above) was the fact that tiny mushrooms had sprouted from inside it. Don’t ask me how… it just has. I think it is magical, and it got me to thinking differently about many things.

Maybe I was trying too hard on all the wrong stuff. Because one of the things that has started to annoy me big time, was the fact that what with all this networking, blogging and searching, there seemed to be precious little time left for what is important…writing. And as hard as I tried, I simply couldn’t squeeze everything in. It was simply impossible.

Don’t forget, I am still knew to the writing side of this business and I know there is much to learn about the craft. But I won’t learn it properly if there is no time left to do it, will I?

So I have made a monumental decision. I will keep this blog going because I really do enjoy doing it, but I will stop worrying about it. The rest of it will have to take a back seat for now because I have another book to finish (and I am enjoying that too!)

I have it on good authority, that what you really need to be successful, is to produce brilliant books, so that is what we are both going to do…

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