Making a Big Deal Out of It

As writers, we spend a lot of time beating ourselves up. That story wasn’t good enough, we didn’t finish it on time, it didn’t sell to our market of choice, it got a bad review, I’m just not happy with it… etc. etc. Too often, we forget what a monumental undertaking writing is in the first place. How many people say they’re going to write a book and never even set hands to keyboard? How many people get started but don’t stick with it? I propose that today, at the start of the Christmas season, we start thinking about how to reward ourselves for our accomplishments instead of letting them fall away in the stew of self-criticism and all the pressure we put on ourselves.

There are many different ways to do this, of course. Hang the reward out there as a carrot or just promise yourself you’ll do something special when you meet that next milestone. For a long time, I bought a print from my favorite musician/photographer whenever I finished a manuscript. (When I ran out of wall space, though, I had to try something different.) I’ve also been known to give myself a day off just to read, watch TV or knit when I finish a project.

A few years ago, I started a charm bracelet. It’s one of those Chamilia bracelets, where you buy the bracelet and then string beads on it as you purchase them. I got the idea when my daughter got a similar bracelet, and now I buy a bead to commemorate book contracts and completed book series. The first bead I bought was a Bestseller bead for my book Where There’s a Will, which was on the Kindle bestseller list. Then I got beads for some of my past books—a Celtic-style bead for The Haunting of Rory Campbell, a black, night-sky-type bead for my Dark Callings series, and a glass bead in ocean colors for my Mara’s Men series. Recently I picked up a bead with crossed hockey sticks to commemorate the sale of Blood on the Ice, and a round bead with embedded stones for Necromancing Nim. I’ve got a pretty good string of beads going, but there’s still room for more before I run out of room on my bracelet.

These beads aren’t exactly cheap. This makes me try to talk myself out of them on a regular basis. But finishing a book is a big accomplishment, and selling it is even more so. So I promise myself a bead for major sales, or for the completion of a three-book series, or for other milestones beyond simply completing a manuscript. It makes me feel good, and when I wear the bracelet, when people ask about it I can revisit the warm fuzzies I’ve gotten from writing and selling these books.

These ideas might not be for you, but I think we as authors need to acknowledge our own awesomeness on a more regular basis. We spend far too much time locked up in our offices churning out words and then telling ourselves we didn’t churn out enough words, or didn’t commit the right words to paper. We need to pat ourselves on the back. We really need to make a big deal out of it.

So think about that this Christmas. If you don’t already have a commemorative system in place, think about something that might work for you, and then treat yourself.

(Beads from top to bottom: Necromancing Nim, Blood on the Ice, Beautiful Music, Puck You, Vampire Apocalypse, Ring of Darkness, Crimson Star, Mom bead (a mother’s day present), Dark Callings, Where There’s a Will, Mara’s Men, Haunting of Rory Campbell).

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Katriena Knights wrote her first poem with she was three years old and had to dictate it to her mother under the bathroom door (her timing has never been very good). Now she’s the author of several paranormal and contemporary romances. She grew up in a miniscule town in Illinois, and now lives in a miniscule town in Colorado with her two children and a variety of pets. For more about Katriena, visit her website and blog