Of the many maxims that are proclaimed as being essential for success as an indie author, few are as commonly accepted as this: You need to write and publish a lot . Of course, that's a general statement, which means it will hold true for the vast majority of self- published writers. Naturally, there will be outliers, but few of us can count on being the next Andy Weir and hitting it out of the park with a debut novel like The Martian . (And it looks like it's going to be a fantastic movie!) So where does that leave the rest of us? Sitting in front of our computer screens, of course, banging away on the keyboard. The thing is, though, none of us write in a vacuum. The world doesn't stop spinning, time doesn't come to a halt, our lives aren't put on pause just because we're working on the Next Great American Novel. That being the case, you have to accept the fact that you may have to miss some things. Or more to the point, give ...