Letting Go – WN 030

This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 30: Letting Go.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and today I’m going to talk about something that is a little difficult to talk about, and that is the concept of letting go. Letting go is usually associated with loss, with losing something, with leaving something, with hurt, or betrayal, or grief. What I’m saying is it’s not one of those warm fuzzy things, but it’s something that writers have to learn to do on a pretty regular basis. My hope is that by the end of this podcast episode, I mean, I am probably not going to change your mind 100% like oh, letting go is the best, but at the same time we’re going to explore today when it’s a good idea to let go of something, and when it’s beneficial to you to let go of something, and how to see the good in letting go of something.

The idea for today’s episode came from a good friend. She and I were eating lunch together downtown and we were talking about the battles we simply couldn’t, or maybe shouldn’t win. In this context my friend and I were talking about a conflict she had had with her manager at work and how she was so frustrated that he was pushing her to go in a certain way that she did not want to go in, professionally speaking. She was fighting so hard, and she was bringing herself to emotional distress over it, and in fact she was pushing back in a way that she hopes would change her manager, just as he was trying to change her. The whole situation was, as situations usually are, extremely complicated. It wasn’t black and white, it wasn’t good versus evil. It was changing in one way versus changing another way, and this had been going on for several months, and I saw that it was consuming my friend. Finally, and I think that this is the mark of a good and healthy friendship, I said, “You know what? Maybe it’s time to just let this go.” And so then we got into talking about letting things go and when it’s a good idea to let things go and when it’s not, and when it’s right and when it’s wrong, and how do you know.

Finally, she said, “Would you please just do a podcast episode about this?” And I was like, “Yeah.” Because this applies not only to real life, but to everyday writing. Every day when you are writing you’re actively making decisions and choosing paths, and often choosing battles or not choosing battles and trying to fight all of the battles. I know this is really abstract, but I’m going to give you some concrete examples in stories that I think you might be able to apply to your own writing life.

I do have to tell you before we get into the meat of this conversation, there is a certain Disney movie featuring a certain blonde Disney character who sings a very catchy song about letting go, and it has been stuck in my head on eternal repeat ever since I started planning out what I’m going to say for this episode. So if it gets stuck in your head too, I humbly apologize, but also ha ha, you’re right here with me listening to that song in your head over and over.

So today we’re going to talk about letting go as it applies to perfectionism, powerlessness against permanent change, changing other people, and finally letting go of our own self-deception. Then we’ll wrap it up by talking about how to know when to let something go.

So the one I want to talk about first is perfectionism, because I think this is one of the most damaging elements in a writer’s personality. I know this because I am a perfectionist. I have been a perfectionist all my life. What’s even worse is if you’re a perfectionist who is stubborn, and oh, I am stubborn, and I have the feeling that you might be a little stubborn yourself. So not only are we perfectionists, but we’re stubborn perfectionists, or maybe stubbornness is part of perfectionism. Either way, the great tragedy and the great irony of the perfectionist is that they spend so much time working diligently, working feverishly on perfecting a product, be it a novel, or a poem, or what have you, whatever they’re working on. They’re perfecting a work that because they will never stop perfecting it will never actually see the light of day, will never actually meet the public eye, will never go to a publisher.

I’ve been a writer my whole life and I’ve written stories, and poems, and novels, but you might notice, and this is really embarrassing for me to admit, none of them are published. This is because in my mind, no matter how good these works may be, none of them are good enough. None of them are “ready”, whatever that means. So my writing sits in a drawer of my desk or in a file on my computer written but not perfected, and there’s a very good chance that it will be there until the day that I die. However, I am not just a perfectionist with my writing, I’m a perfectionist at everything that I do. When I bake cookies, oh, they better the golden brown. When I organize an event or a trip somewhere, it better be the best event or trip somewhere that anyone has ever experienced. When I lead a meeting or give a talk, it better be freaking awesome. Some people would call that having high standards, and there is nothing wrong with having high standards, it’s just that the difference between a person who has high standards and a perfectionist is that a person with high standards knows when to let go. They know which battles to pick, which to fight, and which to, I hate saying this word, surrender or let go of.

It was my job in online marketing and website creation that really opened my eyes to how much I was sabotaging myself when it came to my perfectionist qualities. So the way that my job works is that for the component of a website that I’m working on, so the content strategy or maybe some copywriting, or some information architecture, what have you, I estimate a certain number of hours that it will take me to complete my tasks. That number of hours, that estimate is then converted into how much it will cost, so X amount of money per hour, and then that’s the budget that I have to work with and that is how we bill the client.

Now, everything is awesome if I can finish my stuff in under budget a little bit, and you know that’s just kind of the company appreciates it, the client appreciates getting their work done quickly, everyone wins. But this is something that I really struggled with when I was new to the position because I said, “No, I can’t send this off to the client yet because it’s not perfect.” And my manager very kindly said, “Sarah, you’re over hours.” Which means if you continue to work on this, what that means is we are going to start losing money, and still I said, “But it’s not perfect.” And that is when I was told the infamous phrase that you may have heard before yourself, and that is done is better than perfect. A piece of work that is very good or even great in the eyes of a perfectionist is more than adequate to hand off to a client.

So today I am able to do my absolute best work in the amount of time that I have to work with, without going over budget, and a lot of that is due to the fact that I have been forced to let go of my perfectionism at work. Whenever I finish a task for a project I have to fight this little internal battle, and maybe I even have to sing that infamous Disney song in my head a little bit, to let it go, to get the project done and to move on to the other billion projects that I have to work on, because the truth is no matter how hard we fight against it, we are not perfect. As much as a perfectionist tries to create things that are perfect or tries to act perfectly in certain situations, it’s simply not possible for us. We are creatives. We are messy, flawed, organic organisms. We’re not perfect, but here’s the good news, nobody expects you to be perfect. Now, I had to be told that many, many times before, and you know what? I don’t even know if I believe it 100%, but I see evidence of it, and it’s slowly chipping away at my obsession to be perfect at everything I do.

My husband tells me this all the time, “Sarah, nobody expects you to be perfect and nobody wants you to be perfect.” And I can say that to you now. Nobody wants you to be perfect. They may want you to be good at something, but nobody wants you to be perfect. Have you ever noticed there is a character trope of the perfect person, the person without any flaws. This person is never the hero or protagonist of the story, it’s always someone that a flawed protagonist or hero is fighting against. In a young adult novel it might be the perfect blonde cheerleader who has everything, money, good looks, the perfect boyfriend, blah, blah, blah. Nobody likes her because she’s perfect, or nobody likes her because she appears to be perfect, above the rest of us humans, crawling and scuttling around beneath her feet like cockroaches. In fact, most people resent her and other seemingly perfect people like her. I think that’s part of the sort of disgusting joy we tend to take when people’s flaws are revealed, when famous people’s flaws are revealed, when seemingly perfect people’s flaws are revealed on television, in a tabloid magazine, what have you.

In fact, I even think there’s a recurring sort of feature in People or In Touch magazine that says, “Stars… they’re just like us.” And it shows like Renée Zellweger tripping and falling, or George Clooney picking his nose. They’re not perfect, you are not perfect, and that is okay. I’m saying this as much to myself right now as I am to you. It’s okay not to be perfect. It’s okay to have flaws, in fact, it’s more than okay. It is beautifully human and interesting to have flaws. Your flaws make you unique, and who is to say that what you perceive as flaws are actually flaws? Because there is one thing that perfect is not, and that is interesting. That’s right, I said it, perfect people are uninteresting. Perfect people are boring. You do not have to be perfect, and I don’t want you to be perfect. You are unique, and interesting, and absolutely marvelous, and because of that you’re able to offer a unique perspective that is purely your own.

Now, a lot can be said about writing what we’ve termed the Great American Novel, and we’re all coached to write in that direction. I’ve spoken about this before. We’re all told what the perfect Great American Novel is and who we need to emulate to write the Great American Novel, or the great Canadian novel, or the great British novel, wherever it is that you live, the great Zanzibarian novel. Your flaws make you unique and interesting, and the flaws in your writing will make your work unique and interesting, and as much as you try to shave off of your novel or your poem, as close to perfection as you try to get it, you’re spending time on an endeavor that might not be worth it. You’re spending time polishing and polishing instead of publishing. Again, I’m not berating you for doing this because I do it too, and it’s absolutely to my own detriment.

Now, we could get into a really interesting conversation and talk about how perfectionism is a flaw, and oh my gosh, and then you enter this metaphysical spiral that I don’t, nope, we’re not going to talk about that. What I want to leave you with here is that done is better than perfect, and your unique perspective will provide the world with a much needed story that is fully your own. So let go of the idea of writing the Great American Novel, or the great British novel, or the great Russian novel. Let it go and concentrate on writing your novel.

So let’s talk about another situation in which it is advisable to let something go but is often difficult for us to do so, and that is when something has changed and you are powerless to change it back to the way it used to be, and yet you are still dedicated to threshing against this machine, to fighting the situation, and potentially figuratively, or maybe literally, bruising all of your limbs quite badly as you fight. I don’t mean to belittle this because this is probably one of the hardest examples of letting things go, but here’s a story about my own experience.

So, when I was in sixth grade, maybe seventh grade, I was writing a science fiction novel and I was writing it on this Apple Classic II computer that had been donated to us, because we weren’t super rich, and back in those days if you wanted a computer, they were pretty pricey. So I was working on this free computer and I had all of these disks, these floppy disks, and I was saving my novel. It was so long, it was like 700 pages, and I was saving it bit by bit onto this series of disks. The equipment that I was using was old. The disks that I was using were old, and believe it or not, back in the day there was not all of this awareness and knowledge of the need to back things up that there is today. You can probably see where this is going. So every day I would come home from school and work on my novel with a capital N and it was so important to me, and it was just where I poured all of my emotions, and all of my creativity that I hadn’t been able to use during the day at school.

So I remember so vividly, it was a Saturday morning, my dad was off somewhere, and it was me and my mom at home. I remember putting in the disk, one of the disks that my novel had been saved on so that I could continue working on it and it gave me some kind of error message about formatting the disk. I tried disk after disk and I continually got the same error. As I realized what had happened this overwhelming feeling of powerlessness and frustration washed over me, followed very quickly by anger. 700 pages, this massive sprawling space opera that I had no chance of recreating from memory was lost. The discs had become corrupted, and I just remember walking. We have this very tall narrow flight of stairs in my house growing up, and I remember walking up about halfway and then just collapsing on the staircase and not being able to move. I remember my mom was like, “Sarah, why are you lying on the stairs?” And I just remember screaming that my novel was gone and there was nothing I could do to get it back.

Now, I was like a 12 or 13-year-old girl, so of course I resorted to punching the stairs, and stomping, and slamming doors, and just being obnoxious and angry, but I think that the worst part was that I stopped writing. I spent so much time grieving over this lost novel and holding on to this memory of something I had written that was now gone and out of my hands and out of my control. I couldn’t let it go, and I couldn’t move on, and I couldn’t write something new. So then every day from school I came home and I sulked and I cursed the world. I mean, it sounds silly now because I was this little angry kid, and little kids being angry are always kind of funny, but in a much broader sense this applies to a lot more than a 12 or 13-year-old girl’s lost science fiction novel. I couldn’t let go of the fact that I had lost something that was important to me and I couldn’t move on from it. So it kept me behind, it trapped me, and I let myself be trapped.

Now, I’m not saying that it’s not okay to grieve after a loss. It was probably healthy that I didn’t try to write again for a few days or a few weeks, but I let it stick with me and I didn’t let it go, and I didn’t let go of the anger and the resentment I felt at the universe or whatever corrupts discs. I know it’s so hard, but sometimes the only way to move forward is to let go, mourn the loss and grieve. Give yourself some breathing room, give yourself some freedom and let it go.

On perhaps a lighter note there is of course the problem of needing to change other people. This ties in a little bit more directly with what my friend and I had been talking about over lunch, and sometimes you can change people for the better, and sometimes they’ll be grateful to you for it, but sometimes it’s better to let it go. I have a story here to kind of illustrate what I mean. So I was a fairly recent college graduate, fully indoctrinated in the ways of the Modern Language Association, the MLA Handbook, and how to write correctly, and appropriately, and academically. I had been a copy editor for two years for a newspaper, and so I knew how to use a semicolon, and when to use a comma, and when to use the Oxford comma, and how to abbreviate certain things, and when to capitalize certain things. Oh, I was obsessed, and I was not only obsessed with making my own work grammatically perfect, I was obsessed with making other people write perfectly as well. I remember getting very upset.

So, well, let me back up a second. I was working for a marketing department, and a lot of the internal and external communications of the company I worked for went directly through me for proofreading, or printing, or whatever. I remember becoming livid when there was a space on either side of an em dash, or commas around the word however instead of a semicolon, then the word however and then a comma. I remember being married to the notion that it was inherently evil to end a sentence with a preposition. I could go on and on and on. Looking back I think that as a new college grad trying to find my way in the world, and especially a world where the economy was tanking and jobs were very scarce. I felt like I had to be an expert at something, like I had something to prove. I had to show that I was smart with a capital S and that I could find errors in these letters and documents created by people twice my age, three times my age. Really it was all about by ego.

I spent a lot of my time angry and frustrated and I would send, I can’t believe I did this, but I would send emails to the people who had written the correspondences that I was supposed to be sending out, and I would say, “Hey, great letter, but just remember there’s always a comma, blah, blah, blah.” Or, “You have to do two spaces after a period per MLA style guidelines.” Or whatever. I’m so exasperated with myself now because I know that I spent so much time and energy fighting these little battles that at the end of the day were only there to serve my own ego. I spent so much time being frustrated and angry for no reason. I spent so much time trying to change of my coworkers wrote, when in reality I was in my early 20s and nobody cared about what I had to say, especially about their writing. Now is when you expect me to say, “Oh, and then I learned to let it go.” But I didn’t.

It carried over into the next job that I got, where I was expected to write for the web. So I had to take a quick crash course in writing for the web, and my textbook in this arena was the perhaps ironically, perhaps very appropriately entitled Letting Go of the Words by Ginny Redish. It is the absolute, in my opinion, best textbook about learning to write with brevity, learning to write for the sake of clear communication rather than learning to write artfully to stroke one’s own ego. I read this book and when I finished I remember being a little bit shell-shocked, and I saw that a lot of the ivory tower academic writing flourishes that I had learned in college were actually a hindrance to the understanding of the people who were going to be reading what I was writing on the web. I realized that the way I had been writing was unnecessarily complicated. The way I had been writing, nobody really talked like that in real life. I was complicating what could’ve been clear, and the point of writing is to communicate, right? So what are you doing hindering communication for the sake of sounding smart or looking smart? You’re not doing anyone any favors.

With Ms. Redish’s book, this is where I learned that some of the most tricky and complicated writing I would ever do would be taking extremely complex and difficult concepts and boiling them down into plain language that the average reader could understand. I finally, in my mid 20s, I finally understood what made Hemingway such a master. So somewhat embarrassed and ashamed I let go. I stopped trying to make everyone in my path an academic writer, and instead I let go and I changed, and my work became a lot better for it.

So if you’re looking to … If that is a particular thing that you struggle with, I recommend once again, that book is Letting Go of the Words by Ginny Redish, and it’s kind of textbooky and it’s at a textbooky price, but you might be able to get it from a library or interlibrary loan, or Amazon if you’re feeling like you want to splurge on a book about web writing, but highly recommend it. So letting go of my own ego, letting go of trying to change others actually helped me to become better at my job and better at communicating.

Finally, I want to talk about letting go in the context of something a little more complex, and that is self-deception or self-deceit. This ties in a little bit with what I was just talking about, about how I had been deceiving myself and sort of placing myself in that ivory tower and refusing to look out of any of the tower’s windows of what was actually going on in the real world around me. What I want to talk about here is what happens when we get in our own way, without meaning to, of course, but when we deceive ourselves as I had been deceiving myself, and how to let go of that. Essentially I’m saying that sometimes we cling to good ideas in a way that prevents us from exploring great ideas, or in other words, sometimes we cling to good writing in a way that prevents us from creating truly great writing.

So in, let’s see, 2006 maybe I started writing a new novel. I was just kind of desperate to write something, anything, and so I started and I committed, and I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote. I worked on this novel for four years, and in 2010, and I was working a full-time job and everything, so it wasn’t like a billion pages long. It was probably the first third of a novel once you edited out all the garbage. But my point is I worked on it for four years, and in 2010 I read through this novel, this portion of this novel that I had spent so much time working on, and I have to tell you it was not good.

It wasn’t not good by my perfectionist standards, I sent it away to several friends and they were like, “Oh, I read your novel… It was okay.” And they were trying to tell me that it was terrible and not hurt my feelings, bless their hearts. But as I read it, I recognized for myself that it was bad. The plot didn’t really go anywhere and the writing was all convoluted and overly complicated and syrupy. It just, mm-mm (negative). You can hear how much I dislike it in my voice right now, and it actually feels really good to admit this to you. I wrote a really terrible novel. It was really bad, and I thought it was so good at the time, but it was bad and I spent four years of my life writing a really bad novel that went nowhere.

So then I was like, “Okay, what do I do?” And then I made a really bad decision. From the theme of today’s podcast you can probably guess that the right answer here, the right thing to do would have been to let it go, to set it aside, to move on, to start something new. Oh, but I was stubborn. I was stubborn and I said, “This is a good idea.” There was a good idea that went behind this, and I didn’t spend four years working on this just to shove it in a drawer. No, I’m going to salvage it. So then I spent another three years laboring on this novel. I spent a total of seven years working on something, and probably making it worse than it had been before. I should’ve let it go, but it was clinging to what I saw as a good idea when I was capable of doing something great. If I was just willing to let this go I could move on to a great idea. I had other ideas, but I was just so doggedly, oh my gosh, I was just so stubborn. I wasted seven years clinging to something that I knew wasn’t good but just refusing to let go.

It reminds me in the book On Writing, Stephen King talks about how hard it is to kill your darlings. This thing that you’ve created, all these sentences that you’ve created, they’re your babies, but sometimes you have to get a little ruthless. Sometimes, as Stephen King says, you have to kill your darlings, and it hurts, and it sucks, but you know what? Your writing is going to be all the better for it. I should’ve killed my darling seven year novel. Eventually I told myself I was just going to set it aside for a little while, and so I put it in a drawer. Well, I printed it first and then I put it in a drawer, and this seven year pile of paper is still in that drawer. It’s been there since 2013 and it’s only now, seven years later, that I have finally let myself begin another project. Don’t do that. Not every idea is a great idea. A lot of ideas are good ideas, but if you’re working on a good idea and preventing yourself from working on a great idea, sometimes it’s a good idea not necessarily to kill your darlings, but maybe put them in a drawer somewhere and just let them hang out for a while while your devote your time to a better idea.

So here are some things that you may want to remember. First of all, done is better than perfect. Number two, there are some things in this world that you can’t change and it’s okay. You can fight against it, but watch how much effort you’re putting into fighting against it and ask yourself if it’s really worth the anger and figurative or literal bruises that you’re causing yourself. Third, pick your battles. Remember that you are a finite resource. You only have so much time and so much energy. You cannot fight every battle, so pick the battles that matter to you. Fight them and let go of the others. Finally, sometimes clinging to a good idea can prevent you from working on a great idea. Remember that it’s okay to kill your darlings, as Stephen King said. Sometimes it’s okay to let the good idea go in favor of the great idea.

Now, that brings to mind a final question. How do I know when to let it go? How do I know what battles to pick? Well, there’s a couple ways. First, listen to and trust your gut. I knew that my seven year novel was bad, and yet I just pushed that feeling to the side. I pushed that knowledge to the side in willful ignorance and blindness and I truly wasted my time. I think that writers have a tendency to be a little bit more self-aware than a lot of other people, and so use that self-awareness to your advantage. If you have a nagging feeling that something about your work isn’t right, or an argument that you’re having is maybe not worth the energy, trust that feeling and let it go.

Another great way to gauge is by talking with some that you trust, whether that’s a friend, a spouse, a writing mentor, an editor, someone whom you can trust not to steer you the wrong way, in which case maybe this person is not your best friend, but someone that you trust, someone that you know has been there before and can guide you. If your mentor reads something that you wrote and says, “Yeah, this is just not good.” Or advises you to let go of an argument that you’ve been having at work or with a coworker, then that’s a good sign that maybe you should let it go.

Finally, sometimes life itself just takes care of these things. Whether that’s through fate or other people around you or what have you, sometimes you are just forced to let things go. I’m thinking of Little Women, when Jo’s book gets burned. She was forced to let something go. I was forced to let go of the space opera that I had written in sixth grade. Sometimes the letting go is done for you, and then you need to let go of any anger and resentment you have at that. So let it go. Let it go, back away. Give yourself some time to breathe and think, and I think that you’ll find that sometimes letting go can be very freeing.

Okay, this is very not intentional, but this week’s book of the week is actually three books that I started and did not finish/could not finish, and that I ended up letting go of. So that worked out really well. So, I’m one of those people, and there’s huge debates about this in book nerd communities. There’s people who no matter how good or bad a book is they have to read it all the way through from cover to cover, and then there’s people who if they’re not really engaged by a book or not really a huge fan of the writing style are okay closing the book and just kind of setting it aside indefinitely and moving on to something else. I used to be in the first camp. So I used to be one of the people who was like, “No, you have to give every book a fair chance.” Even a mediocre book could have an amazing ending that will blow your mind, and it’s worth seeing the whole thing through, or I can’t just not see how it ends, that kind of thing. Then as I read, and read, and read and tried to keep up with reading every interesting book that I came across, I started to realize that I had a problem, and that problem was there were simply too many books that I wanted to read to possibly within the amount of time I had to read finish them all.

So I’ve sort of developed this philosophy that there are too many wonderful and amazing books in the world to justify spending my time on a book that just is not super great or not super interesting to me. Again, people feel very, very strongly about this, and you probably do too, so I hope that it doesn’t make you hate me. But I got through this string of three books in a row earlier this week that I started and then I was like, “This is just not for me.” And so I picked up a fourth book, which I’m reading right now and will probably review for next week. But the three books that I started and could not finish were Orchid Beach by Stuart Woods, Cry Wolf by Patricia Briggs, and the Killing Floor by Lee Child. You might have read these books. There’s a really good chance that you’ve read at least one of these books and that you’ve liked them. So I don’t intend for this to be like oh, I didn’t like the book therefore it is terrible, because it’s not. It just wasn’t what I needed to read at that time maybe.

So to kind of work my way backwards, I know that there is a Jack Reacher movie out, at least I think there is, and I felt really bad because I was like, “Oh, man.” Everybody was asking me like, “Sarah, you love books, and this is a movie about a book character, so obviously you’ve read it.” And I would always have to be like, “No, I’ve never read a Jack Reacher novel.” And I’ve read some of Lee Child’s works before and I remember liking them back when I was in high school. So I was like, “Oh man, I have this whole new series of books to dive into.” And I started reading the Killing Floor, which is the first book in the Jack Reacher series.

I read through, whatever edition I had had this author’s note by Lee Child, and I really liked it. I loved his author’s note, and he talks about his writing process and how he came up with Jack Reacher as a character. By the time I finished this preface I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is going to be amazeballs. This is going to be the best book ever.” And I couldn’t get past the sentence structure. It makes me feel like a really bad person, like this elitist snob to say that, but it was very choppy and maybe just not what I needed to read at the time.

So here’s a brief passage just so you can kind of get a feel for what I’m talking about. From chapter one of the Killing Floor by Lee Child. I saw the police cruisers pull into the gravel lot. They were moving fast and crunched to a stop, light bars flashing and popping. Red and blue light in the raindrops on my window. Doors burst open, policemen jumped out. Two from each car, weapons ready, two revolvers, two shotguns. This was heavy stuff. One revolver and one shotgun ran to the back. One of each rushed to the door.

Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that writing. It’s punchy, it’s descriptive, it’s tense. You can feel the tension in the shorter sentences, but it was also for me page after page after page of that exact same sentence length, and after a while it just started driving me a little bit crazy. I guess one of the things that I appreciate is varied sentence structure. It keeps my brain interested. It keeps me figuring out how the words are working together. So the Killing Floor was just for me not the right novel to read at this time.

The second one that I attempted reading was Cry Wolf by Patricia Briggs, and I read it because I really enjoyed the Mercedes Thompson series. It’s got great characters and just some really interesting mysteries and it’s just … I think that she’s a really talented paranormal romance/urban fantasy writer. So I was really excited to pick up Cry Wolf, which is the first book in a spin off series from the Mercy Thompson series, and I don’t know, I couldn’t connect with it. It wasn’t because the writing wasn’t good, because Patricia Briggs she’s a very good writer, but I just found myself kind of at arm’s length from the story and I could never figure out why, and I made it through about a third of the way through the book. Then I did some checking, and I realized that there was a short story that I had not read that sort of bridged the gap between the Mercedes Thompson series and this series. So I found myself less immersed in the story and more trying to figure out what I was missing, what keys I was missing and what I was unable to reference in order to really sink my teeth, ha ha ha, into the story.

Finally, Orchid Beach by Stuart Woods. It is the first novel in his best-selling Holly Barker series. Unlike the other two that I read where I’m sure they told super good stories, I just I couldn’t get into this one because I hated the main character. I only read probably about 10% of the novel, so maybe I didn’t give it a fair enough chance, but I just could not stand reading about Holly Barker for one minute longer. She is just flat and uninteresting and dull, and she kind of just moves from place to place like a little pinball in a machine. There was just nothing interesting or engaging about her in any way. I feel really bad saying it because I know that a lot of work has gone into these books and they’re very popular, but there was just really nothing likable. There is nothing endearing about the main character.

If you disagree with me, if these are your favorite books ever, I would actually love to hear why. Sometimes a good argument can get me right back into a book and it can help take the scales from my eyes and let me appreciate it in a new way. So I would actually really appreciate that because I want to love these books. I want to love them. In any case, whether or not you want to talk to me about your love for Jack Reacher or your love for Patricia Briggs, or anything else that we’ve talked about today, whether it’s a tough situation that you’ve had where you just simply couldn’t let go, or a situation where you did let go and then you experienced either terrible consequences or it ended up being a good experience for you, I would love to hear from you. Please do. You can email me at hello@sarahwerner.com. That’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com, or you can visit my website and navigate to the contact page. There is a little form there, and when you fill it out it goes directly to my email. So either way, I will hear from you.

This week I urge you to give letting go a try. You can start small. If there is just this little battle that you’ve been picking that maybe is not worth the effort that you’re putting into it, let it go. Take a step back, find that breathing room, and enjoy the freedom of being able to let something go. I’m not going to break into song right now because well, first of all, I can’t sing, and second of all, Disney’s lawyers would be all up in here. So I don’t think I can face that right now. You’ve got the song stuck in your head though now, don’t you? I’m so evil.

There is a simple fact, and that fact is that I could not make the Write Now podcast without support from people exactly like you. So I would like to say thank you first and foremost to my Patreon sponsors, notably official cool cat Sean Lock, official rad dude Andrew Koons, and official book worm Rebecca Werner. Thank you all so much for your continued financial contributions. I truly appreciate it. I would also like to thank my good friend who I will not name here, but having lunch with her sparked the idea for this podcast episode, and I’m very grateful to her for that. So thank you my very good friend for suggesting today’s podcast topic.

Finally, thank you for listening. I recently learned that there are over 300,000 podcasts out there to listen to, and I am so honored and humbled that you have decided to listen to mine, so thank you so much for listening. If you haven’t already, please do feel free to go out to iTunes and subscribe to the Write Now podcast. It goes a long way in helping me to reach a wider and broader audience. And with that, this has been episode 30 of the Write Now podcast. The podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m Sarah Werner, and if there is something in your life that you need to let go, let it go.