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Laurie Ann Thompson

success

Year-end reflection for 2023: Successes

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Failure is success in progress
 
I love par­tic­i­pat­ing in chil­dren’s author Julie Hed­lund’s 12 Days of Christ­mas for Writ­ers as part of my year-end reflec­tion and new year goal-set­ting process. Day 3 of the series is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to reflect on our suc­cess­es dur­ing the past year. 
 

Here is my pro­fes­sion­al suc­cess list for 2023:

  • I signed a con­tract for a new pic­ture book and deliv­ered the final man­u­script text.
  • I draft­ed an infor­ma­tion­al fic­tion pic­ture book I’ve had in my head for quite a while (but am still work­ing on).
  • I re-envi­sioned and re-draft­ed an old­er infor­ma­tion­al fic­tion pic­ture book man­u­script I’ve been work­ing on for a long time (and am still work­ing on).
  • I fin­ished revis­ing a non­fic­tion pic­ture book manuscript.
  • I took Elana K. Arnold’s Revi­sion Sea­son course and did sev­er­al revi­sion pass­es on my first-ever nov­el (and still have more revis­ing to do).
  • I did a ton of pro­mo­tion for my new books, You Are a Hon­ey Bee! and You Are a Raccoon!
  • I deliv­ered many school vis­its and appearances.
  • I updat­ed my school vis­it presentations.
  • I updat­ed my web­site with the new book infor­ma­tion and speak­ing details.

Per­son­al­ly, I also:

  • spent a lot of qual­i­ty time with my adult children,
  • vol­un­teered as a nat­u­ral­ist with my city’s parks department,
  • vol­un­teered in a vari­ety of roles with Cit­i­zens Cli­mate Lob­by, includ­ing lob­by­ing Con­gress (twice!) to take action to pro­tect our climate,
  • got CPR cer­ti­fied, and
  • took not one but two dream vacations!

I often feel like I’m not get­ting enough done, like I’m not work­ing hard enough, like noth­ing is hap­pen­ing. It’s good to look back and see, wow, actu­al­ly, it was a pret­ty good year!

On overnight success (Surprise! It’s a lot like failure.)

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I post­ed over on the Emu’s Debuts blog yes­ter­day about what makes an “overnight suc­cess.” If you missed it, here’s a lit­tle excerpt:

Both of last week’s posts here were about fail­ure, or at least the con­stant per­ceived threat of fail­ure that so often makes it hard for us to move for­ward. I’m going to con­tin­ue the theme, but on a slight­ly dif­fer­ent note. Our own Emu Empress, Erin MUrphy, once said some­thing along the lines of, “For every suc­cess, there is a wait­ing peri­od that feels like fail­ure.” And in a post on this very blog almost three years ago, she fol­lowed that up with, “But it’s NOT! It’s just waiting!”
Roosevelt quote about failure and successWhen she wrote that post back in 2011, I’d only been with the agency for a few months. One year from now, I’ll have three books pub­lished. That doesn’t seem like very much wait­ing, espe­cial­ly to those famil­iar with the pace of the pub­lish­ing indus­try. Many of my writer friends have walked up to me and said some­thing to the effect of, “Wow, you’re on FIRE!” Some say things like, “I guess you’ve been busy late­ly!” Oth­ers ask, “So, what’s your secret?” as if I’m hold­ing out on them. A few say, “Boy, did you get lucky!” nev­er think­ing that some authors might be a lit­tle bit offend­ed by that. (I nev­er am: Yes, indeed, I have got­ten very, very lucky!)
So, in the inter­ests of dis­pelling myths and keep­ing things real, I thought it might be help­ful to break down my “overnight success:”

You can read the rest of that post here.

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