My own worst critic..
the grace period.
Every time I read something I’ve written more than two years ago… I cringe. I’m sure that whenever it was written at the time, I thought it was brilliant. I don’t admit that because I have this massive ego either. It’s just that a general rule of thumb is that if I have something published under my name, it’s because I’m proud of it. Simple as that. Now, do I stay proud of it?
No.
But that’s the beauty of growth. If I could read something I wrote two years ago and think it is just as brilliant today as it was when I published it two years ago, then either I’ve reached literary perfection (unlikely), or I haven’t grown.
For that reason, I rarely revisit my books once I’ve published them. Once in a while, I’ll get a message from a reader telling me they found a grammatical error here or there (which I welcome, because I do fix them). But for the most part, I don’t read my own work.
It’s like taking a selfie.
The longer you stare at it, the uglier it gets.
One time, I had a reader reach out like, “Oh, that scene where Kain took Lauren to the shooting range was everything,” and I’ll literally think to myself, “I don’t remember them going to a shooting range.” And so I’ll go back to that book and literally have a moment. “Wow. I guess I did write that.”
It’s really weird.
I say all this to say, if you ever talk to me about older work and I come off lost…
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