Celebrate Your Writing

As we prepare to celebrate this week with fireworks and Sousa marches and summer desserts that all deserve a luscious whipped topping, I want to ask you:

When was the last time you celebrated your writing? 

Recently, I received good news about my own writing. The book I’m querying had done well in a contest. When it came to the next round, however, it didn’t move on. 

I felt the sting of rejection and disappointment. 

Then got angry. 

Not at the contest results. 

But at myself. Or rather, my conditioning. 

I immediately made my initial accomplishment small by putting more weight on the negative that came after. 

Ugh. 

That felt icky. And unfair. After all, the initial success was a major accomplishment. 

This week, we celebrate our independence day as a nation. But the day we celebrate is July 4th, 1776 – the day the congressional delegates signed the Declaration of Independence. We celebrate the start.

 An entire war came next. Years and years of war. It wasn’t until 1783 that England signed the Treaty of Paris acknowledging the United States as a sovereign nation. 

But we don’t celebrate September 3 (yes, I had to look it up). 

So take a note from our founders. 

Celebrate the day you decide to write a book, or the day you type The End for the first time (or the tenth time), or the day you query your first agent, or attend your first writer’s conference, or say “I am a writer” for the first time out loud to a stranger. 

Celebrate all the things. 

From the start. 

Don’t just wallow in the rejections. 

Because there is no end to this writing journey (beyond the ultimate one that waits for us all) and we should celebrate whatever accomplishments we can. 

So this week, I am also reminding myself to celebrate my own accomplishments. I placed in the top 5% of writers who entered that particular contest. And that’s amazing. Regardless of what happened after. 

And in a profession where the amazing doesn’t always happen, you gotta take it and make something out of it. 

What can you celebrate in your writing life this week?

Picture it in your mind…

Got it? 

Now enjoy my virtual fireworks for you!! 

(When my oldest was in kindergarten (he’s now a senior in HS! 😭) his teacher would “give out” fireworks for a job well done. I loved it so much I still use it, much to his dismay!)

Feature photo above by DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash

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