STAY LIT

Writing is precarious

Amazon seems to want to prune its ranks of unknown Indies. 

 Struggling Indie writers find their novels lost in an ever-growing sea of self-published prose.

Twitter, Facebook, and Blog Book Tours offer fewer and fewer dividends to authors.

It’s a time when it would make a lot of sense to quit 

— and a time when simply not quitting is becoming its own art form.

Academics who left the scholarly world that no longer seemed relevant have invented their own genre --  

Quit Lit.

 Many creative writers today seem to be writing what you might call “STAY LIT” — 

accounts of how the publishing world has bruised and sometimes bloodied their egos, 

and why they’re still writing anyway.

Read the early letters of Mark Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Raymond Chandler --

And you will read the same thing:

Those who quit never win.  

Those who stay the course 

always win their self-respect ... 

if not their dreams. 

Writing lives and writing careers are very hard-won even when they’re successful.

If it were easy, everyone would do it.  Stay the course.