 Hello, I'm Jackie, welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, I'm a writer and sometimes I have thoughts and I do rambly chatty videos about said thoughts. So something I've been thinking about lately is the sense of urgency when it comes to publishing, and maybe urgency is the wrong word, but I recently watched Lindsay Puckett's querying vlogs which are awesome. I highly recommend it if you're looking at a behind the scenes look at what happens when you go through the querying process, and basically I think it took her two years from when she first started querying her book to getting her agent, which first of all it's awesome, congratulations to Lindsay, she seems so happy, I'm so happy for her. And two years might not be that long in the scheme of things, but it is a pretty long time especially when you consider there are events like NaNoWriMo that encourage people to write their book in a month, and the querying is just to find an agent. After you find an agent your book goes on submission and it could be months, maybe even more years before you find publisher, and then once you find a publisher it's probably going to be two years before your book is in print. So that could be five years from when you start querying to when you finally see your book in stores if you're going down the traditional publishing route, and that doesn't even include the writing time, and when I started thinking about this I thought oh I've got to get my butt into gear, I need to get my books out there, I need to start sending query letters now, and I don't know how valuable that is. So on my side I've also been thinking that this year in October it will be two years since I launched my Alpha Tube channel and I'm probably not gonna have anything to show for it by then, even though I acknowledge October is still a fair way away, it's not that long in the grand scheme of things. So I started the channel in October 2019 and I was preparing for my first nano-rivo, and then I wrote my YA Superheroes Meets the Russian Mafia book Powerless, which I love, and I always thought that I'd write it in the end of 2019, and in 2020 I would start querying, and that didn't happen, and that was for a number of reasons, part of it just being that 2020 was a mess I think for everyone, and for a lot of us it made it harder to get as much stuff done. But I also got a new job in there, I ended up getting some unexpected freelance work which took a lot of time, and what it meant was that the process for revising this book took a lot longer than expected. I tried to revise it, I got beta reader feedback, I realised that I should have got beta reader feedback before I revised it because I was focusing on entirely the wrong things, but now I'm in the position where it's been over a year since I did the first draft, I still haven't finished revising and I'm not ready to query, and that's probably not going to change for the next couple of months because at the moment I'm working on a different project, and it just got me thinking about how long the whole process takes if you spend a couple of years writing a book and then a couple of years querying it, and then a couple of years waiting for it to get published, like I don't know about you but it makes me feel like, oh god I'm not spending my time wisely enough, I should be really, I should be putting more pressure on myself, I should be getting up at 5 a.m. every day and putting in a solid couple of hours before I go to work, and all my weekend should be about getting these books done, and this is the one part of the process I can control, so I should be almost putting my all into it to make it happen faster, and I was thinking this, and then I started to wonder, well does it even matter? And to give you a little bit more background on me, so I have a bit of an entrepreneurial background, I used to have my own publishing company for many years, and I think it's very common, especially for women in entrepreneurship, to sort of have these two schools of thought when it comes to business coaches and courses and so on, and on one end you've got the sort of feminine spiritual manifesting side which is take care of yourself, take care of yourself, raise your vibration, put yourself into a really abundant happy place, and everything will magically come to you, and then on the other side you've got hustle culture and no pain no gain, and just grit your teeth and get on with it, the very more masculine side, and I started over here, and I sort of went over there, and now I find myself between these two schools of thought, where on one hand like if I want to do this sustainably, I need to take care of myself and make sure it's actually sustainable, like you can't you know do 80 hours, 100 hours of work a week forever, it's not sustainable, but on the other there's this little voice in my head that keeps from you know this side that keeps going maybe you're just being lazy, you could probably do more than this, and this has been the balancing act over 2020 and the beginning of 2021 because I have not done as much writing as I like, and admittedly there are times when I've probably just been lazy, but a lot of the time it's been because I haven't had the capacity with the job and the freelancing and not being able to go home for two and a half years now, like and see my family, so these two schools of thought and this ongoing battle I've been having with myself and my writing and the fact that the writing process is just taking so long, made me ask one is the urgency necessary, like if you're if you keep working on the book at some stage it'll hopefully be ready for query and hopefully at some point there will be an agent who falls in love with it and it'll be ready to get sent out into the world, but also do you even need to publish? Because one of the things I've been thinking about and this is partly because my current work in progress, my fantasy art mess has been challenging, one of the things I realized just in the last week or two is one of my favorite parts of the writing process is just like imagining these worlds, imagining the worlds, imagining storylines, imagining scenes, imagining arguments and battles and that's so much fun and yeah writing it's fun too like and bringing it to life, but part of me thought doesn't matter if no one else ever sees it, like what if I'm just end up being someone who writes stories because she likes writing stories, doesn't need to be published and I think about powerless and how much I love that story and I've been thinking about like the sequel a lot in fact I think I'm going to turn it into a trilogy because I've got a very good twist that will happen at the end of book two if I can do it and just thinking about it is so much fun and imagining these characters in their world is fun and if the book never gets published it's never going like that doesn't change how much I enjoy the process and if that's the case and if this is the part that I really like about the process then do you really need a sense of urgency, do you really need to hustle and grit your teeth to get the book done when you can just enjoy the process and here we come back to these two schools of thought where on this side they probably say yes enjoy the process and you'll find your muse and inspiration will flow and it should be fun and on this side they'll go yeah but if you're just enjoying the process like you'll never get a book done it doesn't matter like to all of these people over here it doesn't matter if you don't get the book done if the part that you like is the writing and the storytelling it does raise questions about having an author tube channel and never becoming an author but that is a separate topic so I think here is to hear what you think about this topic one that do you feel like there's a sense of urgency to hurry up and get your writing done so you can start the querying and publishing process because that takes a long time or two if you're a writer would you consider or do you write without even thinking about getting published is it just something you do for you and would you not care if anyone else ever saw your work so let me know what you think in the comments below if you like this video please give me a big thumbs up because it helps with the youtube algorithm please subscribe and then you can see more rambly videos like this and I will see you next time bye