Trusting the Process

I have been trying to lose the last twenty pounds of weight for over a year.

I've lost 65 pounds so far, doing it responsibly with well-balanced eating. No go; I'm still 20 pounds heavier than I want to be. After a year of eating a well-balanced 1350 calories a day and seeing no progress, I talked to my doctor, who sent me to a healthy lifestyles educator. I met with her last week, and she hooked me up to a machine that measured my metabolism.

The conclusion: I wasn't eating enough calories. She put me on a well-balanced 1633-calorie diet. In a week, I lost three pounds -- and gained it right back again.

I could, at this point, give up because of the lack of quick results, or I could trust the process and keep going. It's early days yet, and I haven't truly lost any ground, so I'll trust the process.

I face a similar thing in my writing. I have learned to use dynamic words when writing, lessen my dependence on is/was/were/has/had, read my draft out loud while editing, found beta readers and developmental editors, learned to write a better query letter, organized my queries using Query Tracker, sent more queries than I can count, and I haven't found an agent to latch onto me. For now, I'm trusting the process of writing well and marketing well through queries. This might change -- I've set my date to self-publish at January 2, six months after I sent that first three chapters to Tor in a fit of bravado.

Trusting the process is hard. I want instant results. I want my reward for working hard and utilizing new skills. I want this twenty pounds gone and I want to be published. But sometimes, I have to sit back and trust that the process is working its magic behind the scenes.