I learned the term “resting b*tch face” (RBF) from a friend who showed me a photo of herself with said expression. Much laughter.
RBF is a facial expression that unintentionally makes you look angry or contemptuous, even when you are relaxed or resting. Above is the RBF of Louis XIV, depicted by painter Hyacinthe Rigaud (a bloke surprisingly) from the Wikipedia entry (yep, really!) about RBF.
With 43 different muscles, our faces can make more than 10,000 expressions, the scientists tell us.
I mention RBF to brighten your morning, yes. And also to remind you how to overcome one of the toughest challenges of becoming an author: procrastination.
Procrastination has many faces (possibly 10,000) and is also a b*tch.
The path to authorship has two tipping points:
- the commitment to start, and
- the commitment to finish.
📚You may overcome the first, and still not become an author because procrastination gets you at the second hurdle: you fail to publish your book EVEN AFTER you have written it.
Here are the three most common faces of procrastination:
- I’ve had a lot of new ideas and I need to rewrite the entire book to get them in there.
- I must do something massive – get married, start a new job, launch a new program, etc – before I can finish and publish this book.
- I don’t really mind if it takes a long time to finish and publish, I want to get it right.
Here’s the thing. You are just procrastinating.
- If you have a lot of new ideas, write a new book. Get the one you have written out there into the market.
- If you MUST do something massive, make sure you can do it without putting your book on hold (for too long). I’ve known authors to write, finish and publish their books through horrible divorces, wonderful marriages, and ridiculous amounts of work.
- Books have a moment. If you wait too long to publish, the moment will be gone. And you cannot tell when the time limit is up.
Don’t let the many faces of procrastination fool you. Publish your book. Do it now.