From Nathan Bransford:
When the clock struck midnight to ring in January 1, 2010, I was a literary agent with Curtis Brown Ltd. in San Francisco, I was married, and the ink was barely dry on my first book deal for the Jacob Wonderbar series.
Little did I know that nearly everything in my life was about to change.
Within a year and a half I was divorced, I left the publishing industry to work in tech, and I uprooted myself to move across the country to New York City. I embarked on a career odyssey that took me from tech to a nonprofit and then, incredibly, to the world’s biggest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates.
Tomorrow, when the clock strikes midnight to ring in 2020 I’ll be doing it with friends in New York City, I’ve seen countries I never thought I’d visit, I’m happily self-partnered, I’m a freelance editor, and I have a new novel winding its way through the publishing process.
Amid all this change, amid all of this upheaval and turmoil, there’s only one thing in my life that hasn’t changed.
Books.
. . . .
In 2010, I was all in on books. I worked 8am to 8pm as a literary agent on weekdays and wrote books on the weekends. I read over a hundred books a year on top of all of that. I lived, ate, drank, and slept books 24/7. (Even my ex-wife was a writer).
Now, on the verge of 2020, after trying so many different things, books exerted their inexorable gravitational pull on my life and I’m once again all in on writing and publishing. I’m working on revisions for my new YA novel, building a burgeoning book editing business, and cranking out guides to writing and publishing.
. . . .
So instead I took some scary leaps at the close of the 2010s, and am very happy where I landed. I have a new life I find exciting, my work with authors is meaningful, and I’m happy with the new novel I finally summoned the courage and willpower to write.
. . . .
In a world where things constantly change and often disorient us, there’s something comforting about the way books are stuck in time, artifacts of a particular moment and place. They provide that soothing certainty that we can return to them and they’ll be there, unchanged, ready for us to revisit.
This especially applies to the books we write ourselves. It’s such a powerful and meaningful pursuit to write a book.
As painful as it can be sometimes to re-read things we’ve written, when I was in a bad place last year and feeling lost and disoriented, I cracked open Jacob Wonderbar and the Cosmic Space Kapow for the first time in years. Re-reading it and remembering my mindset when I wrote it helped remind me who I really am and what I can accomplish when my head is screwed on straight.
Link to the rest at Nathan Bransford