Seventy-eight, seventy-nine, eighty …
Do you like doing pushups? What about arm curls? Or squats?
Eighty-five, eighty-six, eighty … eighty-seven …
They can take a lot out of you. How often have you been tempted to stop halfway through your exercise routine?
Ninety … ninety … ninety-FIVE … Ninety … SIX.
Or have you only gone as far as you could before the burn set in?
Ninety-NINE … ONE … HUNDRED.
Perseverance is when you keep going even when your body and mind don’t want to.
There’s an element of stubbornness in persistent people. They refuse to give up or go home when things are looking down, when the weather is cruddy, when they just want to curl up and sleep the afternoon away. Perseverance is the tenacious insistence on never leaving a task half-done.
Writers need to persevere. We need to never give up no matter the circumstances. How many books have been left half-finished, never to be read by others? How many books have never been written at all?
The most important thing, I’ve found, is to focus on the end goal. It’s easier (not easy, mind you, but certainly more bearable) to stick with it when you know how close you are to the end. And as I look back, I see how quickly that work time passed. Rather than focusing on present difficulties with drafting my book or stumbling over writer’s block, I quietly focused on the goal of finishing and publishing. It really does help.
Sometimes, I felt like I had nothing worthwhile to say, or that nothing I did say could measure up to other authors. What do you do during such times? You motor on. Perseverance is, quite simply, never giving up.
There’s a lot of books that will never be written. I take satisfaction in putting one more out into the world.
The gods and beings of ancient myth never went away. They just moved on with the times.
My book, A God Walks up to the Bar, is currently available on Amazon.com. Venture into the world of the Greek god Hermes, a world filled with demigods, vampires, nymphs, ogres, magic, and trickery. It’s a tough job, being a god!
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Jake W. Powell 