Practicing patience.

(copyright greg, flickr.com, licensed under CC 2.0)

There's this thing I sometimes do when life gets frustrating (such as now, when I'm fighting with writing my weekly blog post on the iPad). I tell myself that I am practicing patience.

This does two things. First, it reminds me that patience is a good quality -- a virtue, even. And second, it underscores that patience does not spring full-blown and perfect from most of us, most of the time. That's why it's called practicing, right? Because practice is how you get good at it.

For the past several years, I've had plenty of opportunities to practice patience. I talked about one of them last week, when I mentioned that I've been temporarily back in DC for 16 years, waiting for my chance to move back to Denver. Well, I'm here now, and I'm still having to practice patience -- I don't know yet how long this current visit will last, and I don't know for certain whether I'll be able to make the move permanent this year. (Divinatory signs are telling me that this is my year to make the move, but I'm not willing to stake anything on that. I'm well aware that any divination is a snapshot, and things could -- and often do -- change.)

There's another situation that I haven't talked much about in public up to now. It has to do with my mother's estate, and I'm still not comfortable going into many details. But suffice it to say that I've been practicing patience on that for a number of years, as well.

And of course, there's your garden-variety indie-author patience practice: Will the next book be my breakout book? Will I sell any books today? Will I ever sell another book, ever again?

The thing about being patient is that at some point, you have to question whether it's not doing you more harm than good. It's one thing to put off having a cookie until after dinner, and another thing entirely to be so patient that people take advantage of you, or even forget you exist. At some point, you need to set aside your patience practice and do something.

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I have good news for those of you who have been waiting (patiently?) for my next book. I finished the first draft of Firebird's Snare this morning. I need to go back and do some tweaking on Dragon's Web, including making a cover for it. (That kind of took a back seat to writing the second book and, um, practicing patience about whether I was going to get to make this trip to Denver.) But I am confident that we are still on schedule for publication of the first book in the Pipe Woman's Legacy duology in late-ish May. Stay tuned, as they say in broadcasting....

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These patient moments of blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.