MamaManagement

Last night I was on the floor of my daughter's room stretching while she read to us from the biography  Who are Venus and Serena Williams?.  (It's part of the "Who Was/Is" series, which we are pretty much addicted to.) We're a good third of the way into the book and she's reading to me about Venus and Serena's early teen years, right before they joined the WTA and went pro. I stopped her mid-chapter to emphasize what she'd just read...that the Williams' sisters would practice 6 hours a day, during that time, in addition to school work and regular life stuff. Isn't that amazing, I said to her. They clearly had talent, but to become the best, that's how hard they had to work. To win tournaments, to become great, to make it their job, they had to practice 6 hours a day. That's a lot of work, I said, marveling over the fact that they hit more than 100 serves everyday. Can you imagine how tired their arms must have gotten? I asked. ...

Fear is a funny thing. It can invade our subconscious with ninja-like stealth and get us to do things we don't really want to do without our even realizing it. Fear is the creepy puppet master behind so many of our bad decisions. After lots of hard work, I am staring at the near-end of my work on one of my books. I am so excited to get it done and I want nothing more than to share this story with the world. Until fear enters the picture. The next step in the process is to have a few people beta read the book before I ready it for agent pitches and queries. While this is something you can pay someone to do, my plan is to ask people I know to read it and share their thoughts. It's not line by line edits, but bigger picture feedback, like: "It gets a little slow in the middle;" or "I didn't really like this character;" or "This chapter made no sense at all;" or "This totally sucks." As a writer, you hope for mostly glowing...