I love to wait…said no one, ever. And yet it is one of those times. PS Publishing has an artist lined up for the cover of To Break the Demon Gate, but even preliminary sketches take time and I won’t have any idea what the cover is going to look like until much later in the process. I’ve got contracts and royalty payments hanging fire, but again nothing is ready now and won’t be for weeks, likely. I’ll send out the manuscript for The War God’s Son probably later this month, and there’s another long wait in the making.

Everyone has to “wait for it” at one time or another, in cases where it can’t be avoided, like the DMV or the dentist’s office. Relatively brief times, but they seem longer because there’s nothing else to do but anticipate the joy to come. But for what I call the real waiting, on matters that may take weeks, or months, even years? I sometimes think writers do more than their share. We’re always waiting, if we allow it.

Whaddya mean, “if we allow it”? It isn’t up to us! Oh, but it is. The key to bearing up to all the waiting, of course, is that you’re not waiting. Or to be more accurate, you’re not just waiting. There are things to do, stories to write, books to read, guitars to play, tires to patch and gutters to muck out. You don’t keep yourself busy as a distraction, you keep yourself busy because you’re alive and you’ve got better things to do than wait. Then one day a check and/or contract arrives in the mail, an email arrives with a decision made for good or ill, or maybe a preliminary/final cover jpeg arrives, and you go “What? Already?”

Or you can simply “wait for it” and focus on what isn’t happening and stew away your stomach lining and your last good nerve all the while, and waste one hell of a lot of precious, non-retrievable time in the process. That’s always an option. Not a good idea, but an option.

No one likes to wait. The trick, if there is one, is to simply refuse to do it.