Insecure Writers Group

I can't believe it has taken me until now to join this group, but better late than never huh?  I guess I was hoping I'd become a member of the elite 'secure writer's group', but somehow I doubt that one has many members...

This month's question is about looking back on 2017 and all the successes and failures, and what you'd do differently if you could backtrack.

Interesting question.

2017 has been an interesting year for me in terms of my writing career.  My agent and I parted ways early in the year which left me feeling a little at sea in terms of where to go next.  While I loved working with an agent in many ways, I didn't really feel like diving back into the query trenches again immediately.

A lot of things going on in my life had left me feeling very under-confident about myself and my abilities and that didn't feel like the right place to be coming from when querying.  Plus, I had just been approached by someone wanting me to ghostwrite an autobiography and that felt like something diffferent and exciting to try out.

I spent about six months working on that project, but because the subject and I lived in different cities, it was difficult to get together to talk and for me to gather the material necessary.  Plus she was living in quite challenging circumstances and struggling to get her life back on track.  So while we haven't entirely abandoned the project, we have put it on hold until next year sometime.

I don't regret the time I spent on that project, but I can't help thinking about all the other work I could have done in that time.  I have books in need of revision and other books clamouring in my head to be written, so spending six months not-really-working on this one feels like time that could have been better spent.

But I can't really complain.  I found a new publisher for An Unstill Life, and finally got the opportunity to hold a physical book I wrote in my own two hands, and to see it on the shelf at the public library.  And after a lot of years of working on it, Stumped is finally about to make its way into the world.

What would you do differently if you had the chance for a 2017 do-over?