So now you have a few books on Amazon and maybe just one or two sales. Of course, that is not the vision you had in mind when you started each book. You intended to sell a hundred books a month after you finished. Yet because you finished each book, you are a successful writer, no matter how many sales or how your books are received. You are tempted to start begging people to buy your books, but you know that would not work. So you are happy and grateful for those one or two sales. As mentioned in the PBS special, The American Experience: Walt Whitman, when Whitman published his first 700 copies of Leaves of Grass, he only got a dozen sales! Knowing that gives you the courage to start and finish as he did. And now look at Walt Whitman. One of the most successful, most accomplished, and most read poets of our time.
Nearly two years ago, you started a blog. As you prepare each entry from start to finish, you hold a vision in your mind that someone somewhere is following every word of every entry and is waiting for the next. When you start, finish, and publish each post, you succeed. Of course, with a blog, there is no finish line. Each month brings to you the opportunity to have a series of starts, finishes, and successes. In the month of February, you may have a total of 29 successes, and you are grateful this is leap year, so that you have that one extra day for one extra success. Regardless of how many page views you got in February, you are a successful writer because you started and finished. You perpetuated the creative energy flow, so you take heart because attention goes where energy flows. Someone is catching on; and, although you hope for that quick fix of traffic to your site, you realize that the best marketing technique is word of mouth. Some quality readers, quietly following, are spreading the news about you. Happy and grateful, you continue writing.
You have proclaimed that March is your miraculous, magical, Master Mind Month, and you are starting a new stage play. In your mind, you are holding a vision that this play is going to be an explosion of words that will create a theatrical disturbance! Regardless of the outcome, regardless of whether or not this play will be produced on Broadway, you hold a vision in your mind that when the audience gets up and leaves the theater, they are reciting bits and pieces of the dialogue they have heard that evening. You just have to start and finish the stage play, shooing away the ghosts of fear. Not even these ghosts, if they really existed, could create such a disturbance. Nothing is going to block you from success. You start…you finish…you are a successful writer.