The open book: what writers don’t tell writers about writing (part 2)

Caren Gussoff Sumption
6 min readDec 14, 2020
Photo by Ángel López on Unsplash

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) on professional envy.

I made two embarrassing errors:
~ I called it jealousy, when I should have called it envy. Jealousy is when you fear someone covets what you already have. Envy is when you covet what others have.
~ I was trying, still, to be a bit cutesy about the whole thing. I’d never had a straight conversation with anyone about envy, and I was, frankly, nervous. I held back a bit.

Revisiting it, though, the gist of it holds true. Envy is a big, ugly secret. But it’s a normal part of a writing career. I encourage you to take a look at where I started the conversation, then come back to these addenda — the subtext and the even bigger, uglier, normal bits I’m going to blab.

Bleed? Blab.

Anyway, here’s the original post:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Publishing is a zero sum game, sorta.

Writing is infinite. But the business is…mostly…not.

I know. I’m contradicting what I said in Part Two of my SFWA post. But I am positing…

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Caren Gussoff Sumption
Caren Gussoff Sumption

Written by Caren Gussoff Sumption

Writer, dabbler, bon vivant. Nerdy words for nerdy people.

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