Jeremy C Kester

I’ve given up.

No, not on writing, or this blog, or on the attempts at making writing a career. What I am giving up on is my excuses. All those reasons I give as to why I am not making progress, they weren’t the problem. I have been the problem.

Life happens; life sucks. Each and every person on this planet have problems that they deal with on a continual basis. Some problems are enormous while others are miniscule. Size matters little in this however, when our perception comes into play. Many individuals have triumphed under the most burdensome of obstacles while some crumble at the tiniest of inconveniences. Stories abound for each. Examples are aplenty, one need only look.

For me, I’ve been allowing my perception to be warped by my own fears for so long that I wasn’t seeing the one thing I needed to see: nothing was keeping me from doing any of this… except me.

This sudden realization came to me as I was going through another extensive planned post on rules and how I had let them slip from my writing, and how that helped to facilitate this precipitous decline in my writing volume. As I was reading through it, I suddenly snapped to the realization that I was continuing to make excuses. “Oh, I was dealing with a family crisis…” or “oh, I’ve been exhausted…” or “oh, I don’t have rules…” or “oh, my favorite show was cancelled…” Allowing myself to list off an excuse was not dealing with the problem.

Do I need to write? Yes. Who is stopping me? Me.

Should I be editing? Yes. Who is stopping me? Me.

Short of being literally out of time because of dealing directly with work or family, I have no reason to give that legitimately excuses all this ranting that I’ve done (outside of just venting).

What am I doing then? What am I doing to get the hell out of this hole?

I am getting to writing, editing, marketing, and all those things I need to be a successful writer. No more excuses.

Featured Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay