Guest Post from Laura M. Kolar, author of Canvas Bound

*steps into Big Al’s blog*

*looks around*

Hmm… my critique partner, Erica Luke Dean told me there would be flowers here. She did get a whole bouquet, didn’t she? I mean, I don’t need much. A carnation or two would do.

All right, I’ll forgive the no flower thing, it’s not like I get them any other time. My hubby thinks flowers serve only two purposes. 1) To apologize for something you did wrong, and 2) for decorating caskets. According to him, he rarely does anything wrong enough to warrant flowers, and I’m not dead yet so I guess I’ll have to wait for those. (Hopefully it will be a long wait.)

What my darling husband doesn’t understand is that it’s not about the actual flowers. A guy could pick them from a field and he would probably get extra brownie points for exerting the effort of doing the picking. The point is that he thought of her and made a public display of it. This is especially true in an office setting where many other women will see the flowers. Women are jealous by nature. They won’t admit it and some definitely have more tendencies than others, but deep down, we all have a little green monster of envy in us.

In writing, I battle my green monster almost daily. When I first started, I was jealous of people who were finishing their manuscripts before me and moving on to querying. Then I was jealous of those who were querying and gaining agents or publishers before me. And now I’m dealing with competing against all those other great books out there to read and authors I know who are hitting best seller lists.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy for the success of my fellow writers. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I love the literary world so much. For the most part, everyone is very supportive of each other, especially other authors. But I personally have to work at tamping down my green monster and being confident I’ve written a great story that people will love and share with others.

So I may not get flowers as often as I’d like and I probably never will, but at least the ones I’ve gotten haven’t been ‘laid to rest’ with me.

If you’d like to know more about me, what I’m working on, or maybe what my favorite flower is, you can find me on Twitter, Facebook and the web.

Thanks so much to Big Al for having me here today!

Thanks for being here, Laura. I wish Erica would have warned me in advance, but I was able to run out and pick this from my neighbor's backyard. I'd forgotten how mean their dog is, but I escaped with only minor injuries.

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