Waiting for Wednesday, Volume 4, Issue 54: Even More Amazing Adventures in Self Publishing!

[Continued from Part Seven.]

I'm starting to scare myself with the amount of time that I spend not sleeping these days (um, or nights, I suppose). I'm at a point where there just aren't enough hours in the day to get to everything I have going on.

For the first time in a long time, my creative energies are hitting on all cylinders, and I just can't bring myself to unplugging. Heck, I'm even finding time to blog again, which, if you'd have asked me a couple of weeks ago, I would have told you was not going to happen for a good, long while.

But here I am, up after midnight after a long day at the office, typing away and sending off countless emails to the artist on my next project. At the same time, I'm emailing and communicating with a number of people about my current project, the children's book I can't seem to shut up about.

I have no idea where any of this is going to take me. And, tonight (or, more accurately, this morning) as I start contemplating the cost of doing these things that I want to do, I have some butterflies in the stomach and a bit of worry, but it's a good, anxious, let's get this done already kind of worry.

I know full well that there's a pretty large possibility that none of the projects I'm currently hammering away on will make one single penny, and that the money I'm about to throw into them may not ever find its way back to me.

But I'm at a point where I can't afford to NOT do this. It's time to take that stupid risk that I have always been telling myself I'd take. It's time to suck it up and let the sacrifices of the past few years mean something. I've saved money and I've made decisions in my personal life that have always been rooted in getting my work out there, in the best-looking form humanly possible.

Nothing is cheap these days, especially within the publishing industry, so the money I'm about to spend is not going to be peanuts.

But I've been smart about saving it, and instead of using the money for other things that will assuredly help me down the road in life, I am going to use the money to try to get this dream off the ground. Because, frankly, I've had my feet planted for far too long.

Saying you're going to do something is nothing. Telling yourself you're going to do something is nothing. Convincing yourself that you're going to do something someday is nothing. It's all meaningless unless you actually go out and do it.

I'm at the point where "someday" is now. Right this moment. We're past the dreaming stage. We're past the let's-find-a-way-to-put-this-into-practice stage. We're miles beyond the, "Gee, I hope people will like this" stage.

We're at the Do It Now, or Do It Never stage.

Time to toughen up, Exfanders, because this is it. Right now is the moment the decision is made. This night (morning) is the one I look back on years from now and say one of two things about. And, even if this all amounts to absolutely zero, I promise you this: When I look back on this moment, I will not say, "I wish I'd just done it."

Because it's being done.

I have no idea what happens next. I have no idea if it's a financially stupid move on the part of a naive wanna-be writer.

The only thing I know is that, moving forward, there are no regrets.

Because I'm doing it.

I'm doing it.