Your journey is yours and no one else’s. You can’t really compare yourself to anyone else because you are two different people and you are influenced, educated, and motivated by different things.
When an author complains that she is not doing as well as her author friend, I always point out what is usually obvious. My author suffered from a debilitating illness that shut her down for a while. She lost ground and her book had to be moved (which publishers never want to have to do). How can she possibly compare herself to someone who published with regularity and didn’t miss a beat?
That’s an obvious example. I know someone who lost her husband on 9/11. He worked at Windows on the World at the top of the World Trade Center. It was very hard for her to be in New York after that. She owned a house in another state and went to live there. Then she lost her rent-stabilized apartment in New York because she wasn’t there enough. They actually counted the days she was there, because they wanted to unload a rent-stabilized tenant. This experience affected everything she did. It influenced her expectations of a home, it caused her to meet many new people with differing views in her new place, it changed where she voted. . .I could go on and on. Now people ask her what she thinks of the current mayoral race in New York. What she answers today is not the same as what she would have said years ago. Her circumstances changed her.
Which is why authors should keep their eyes on the prize and look straight ahead. Of course you can and should befriend other authors. Just don’t compete with them. They are not you and you are not them.
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