SO.
I just received an e-mail from a friend advising me that I need to become better at tooting my own horn and take more risks regarding my writing. I know this person well enough that, given the hour, she probably wrote it with her beer goggles on. The fact that she told me, "take that conservative stick out of your ass and treat your writing like you do everything else," made me sure of it.
Well, it got me thinking. Just how accomplished do the rest of you feel you need to be before horn tooting is in order? Do you need to have landed an agent? Do you need to have a book deal? Do you need to have won an award or had an article/story/book published? Or, do you feel like even small measures of success (e.g. you wrote something that someone appreciated or you wrote something better than what you were able to write at this time last year) are worthy of the horn? (Or, maybe at least a chest bump?)
In my real life (as opposed to my inner rock star life where I write escapist fiction) I'm a nurse. I'm a good nurse. I hold a position that the majority of working nurses would not be able to handle, and I worked my arse off to get there. However, I can't imagine going onto one of the nursing forums and saying, "Woot! Look at me folks! I'm rockin' the ER! Last night I had two saves and diagnosed three kidney stones just by the dance the patient was doing!". It just doesn't work that way.
So, what does it for the rest of you? What would it take to really make you want to toot that horn? What would it take for a chest bump?
I'm just curious, and it's quite possible that lack of sleep is making me put entirely too much thought into this. For a true TOOT from me, it would take a fairly significant accomplishment, but I chest bump frequently.
Oh, and sorry to disappoint you if you thought this post was going to be about farts.
I just received an e-mail from a friend advising me that I need to become better at tooting my own horn and take more risks regarding my writing. I know this person well enough that, given the hour, she probably wrote it with her beer goggles on. The fact that she told me, "take that conservative stick out of your ass and treat your writing like you do everything else," made me sure of it.
Well, it got me thinking. Just how accomplished do the rest of you feel you need to be before horn tooting is in order? Do you need to have landed an agent? Do you need to have a book deal? Do you need to have won an award or had an article/story/book published? Or, do you feel like even small measures of success (e.g. you wrote something that someone appreciated or you wrote something better than what you were able to write at this time last year) are worthy of the horn? (Or, maybe at least a chest bump?)
In my real life (as opposed to my inner rock star life where I write escapist fiction) I'm a nurse. I'm a good nurse. I hold a position that the majority of working nurses would not be able to handle, and I worked my arse off to get there. However, I can't imagine going onto one of the nursing forums and saying, "Woot! Look at me folks! I'm rockin' the ER! Last night I had two saves and diagnosed three kidney stones just by the dance the patient was doing!". It just doesn't work that way.
So, what does it for the rest of you? What would it take to really make you want to toot that horn? What would it take for a chest bump?
I'm just curious, and it's quite possible that lack of sleep is making me put entirely too much thought into this. For a true TOOT from me, it would take a fairly significant accomplishment, but I chest bump frequently.
Oh, and sorry to disappoint you if you thought this post was going to be about farts.
