Good is not good enough

Talk to someone pursuing a big goal:getting accepted into an Ivy league school, landing a contract with a record label, being hired as first horn by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and you'll hear how crazy difficult and competitive it is.

Getting my novels published feels as crazy difficult. I realize there are lots that are outside my control: the state of publishing industry, trends, the economy, so I concentrate on what writers are suppose to do, write: revise my first novel, draft scenes of my second, and jot down thoughts about my third. I am also doing what writers who want to be published do: send off queries and submissions. (Can we say roller-coaster emotional rides?)

A sensible sentence caught my attention this morning. It is from Tami Brown at the Through The Tollbooth blog. She says:

But your writing ... must be as good, and in most cases, better than writing you see in published books. Why? The authors of books in print already have relationships. You are new. It takes something extra to break through.

Not a thought that most people who consider encouraging, but strangely, it's encouraging me to keep plowing and polishing so my work will be better, hopefully better than good.

(It's pretty obvious that I was procrastinating. I should be writing, not reading blogs? But hey, every once in a while, those tactics do bring us back to what we're supposed to be doing.)