Failure Happens
In a writer’s life there is failure. It’s real. It happens. Take yesterday for example. During the month of April I am participating in the A to Z Blogging Challenge where each day of the month (except Sundays) we have a post dedicated to the letters in the alphabet. Yesterday was the Letter – E. Did you see my post from yesterday (which I actually posted today)?
Error-404 was all I could manage. It was a very bad day in my neighborhood. I ran myself into a sh*t storm of stress. If things had gone better I might have actually gotten my Error-404 posted before this morning. Well, I didn’t. So…failure happened.
Today I am up and getting some attention paid to the Letter F. Failure Happens. If you haven’t experienced very much of it in your writing so far then either you are an amazing writer (NICE!!) or you haven’t stuck your neck out far enough. If you fall into the latter category, then you should know what failure feels like. Not so warm and fuzzy.
If it is OK with you I would like to re-name failure. Let’s make it, Challenge, Lesson, or anything besides failure. When that reject letter comes in the mail, or you miss a post you were determined to get done, or you can’t get a single word onto a page, then accept what happened, learn from it, and more on.
Someone once told me to be like a horse when I am faced with a challenge. Horses are amazingly smart creatures. They don’t get hung up on things that didn’t work out. If a horse is munching along, eating their grass, then bumps into an obstacle, they see what’s in they way, fix it, then go around and keep eating grass.
When faced with any obstacle in any aspect of life, be the horse. See what happened, make adjustments, move past the problem, and keep eating grass.
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Today’s post inspired by:
K.J. Scrim, Author 
I had to walk away from my WIP for about a month earlier this year over similar things. Everything just came grinding to a halt and had to be dealt with before I could even think about getting back into the book.
I am at Transformed Nonconformist. I usually write humor pieces, but I am getting serious this month. I’m writing about people who have deeply impacted my life.
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Participating in #AtoZ is a great lesson in dealing with failure by any name. Post dates get missed; no one responds to C is for . . . ; Your Day 8 post has four misspelled words and one totally misused word; Spellcheck#@!%!; A comment on one post takes you three days to accept as not completely negative; You type a brilliant comment on someone else’s blog post only to have it disappear – for any multitude of reasons.
But you move on because . . . the horse.
http://gail-baugniet.blogspot.com
H is for: Horrors of War – mixed-genre short stories
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Spellcheck likes to miss the ones that are spelled right, but misused. That’s where I fail…truck instead of trunk, lead instead of led. UGH! Where’s the horse??? *grins*
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I’m sorry to hear you had a bad day. I hope you’ll manage to recuperate and get back to the Challenge, but if not – it’s not a failure. You can’t control external circumstances, and if you have to make a choice, you’re choosing what’s more important.
Sending hugs and warm thoughts.
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Fantastic way of facing failure. My first reaction as I started reading was ‘challenge’ and then that was what you said. Fluke? Fate?
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I think your E post was rather clever. Stress happens but it seems you’ve bounced back from it. Determination is a beautiful thing. I call failure a “learning opportunity”. Learn from the things that didn’t work to get better and grow as a writer.
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I like “learning opportunity”. Perfect way to say it. 🙂
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