I think confidence is one of the biggest tools you need to be successful in publishing, at least from the author side of things. And strangely enough, it's one of those things that's also hardest to hold onto, even after you've had a measure of success.

Because in publishing, the goalpost is constantly moving backward, right? Let's say your goal is to finish a book. Goal met! Then get an agent. Goal met! Now you need to get a publisher. Goal met! Now your book needs to come out and do well. Then you need to hit a list. Then you need to hit higher on the list. Then you need to increase your print run-size while still hitting even higher in the list, and oh, can you pull in a bigger audience if they start targeting ads at this new demographic and...

You get the idea.

So where does confidence come in? All over the place, actually. It's confidence that lets you work on the next project. Confidence tells you that the story is solid when you're going through the copyedits, and then the galleys. Confidence lets you resist the urge to rewrite the ending in the 11th hour. Confidence lets you go to sleep at night, even after your publisher tells you the size of your print run.

And it's really, really easy to lose the confidence. It's easy to start a new book that you're excited about and have it lying dead (like a really dead thing) on the page. It's easy to get caught up in numbers or reviews or Amazon rankings. I'm the poster child for neurotic-things-we-shouldn't-track-that-drive-us-crazy but I can't help myself. Normally it doesn't bug me enough to make me stop writing, but somewhere in the past few weeks I've...struggled. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the change of pace, or a switching of projects. Maybe it's because I'm dipping my toes into a new genre and the water's not very warm.

Whatever it was, I lost my mojo.

I didn't realize it right away. Instead, I played video games. Read some books. Played more video games. Watched hockey with the husband. Got out of the house a lot. Surfed the internet a lot. Whined via email a lot. Went to sleep crabby and woke up crabby.

(Author's note - there is NO one that is more difficult to live with than a crabby writer. NO ONE.)

I was seriously avoiding working on projects. And so I wrote a ficlet or two, just for kicks, for no one to see. And it was...really fun. And when I brainstormed a new idea with my agent last week, I put aside the old, frustrating project and started the new one. It's always hard to start a new project, but after I got two pages in this one, it just kind of...flowed. I ended the writing happy with what I had.

And today? Today I am confident again. I am in a great mood despite it being Monday, and a deadline week at work. And it's all thanks to having a good writing day and getting my confidence back.

And sometimes that makes all the difference in the world.