Writing New Stuff

It’s harder to write right now.

It used to be a little bit easier, back when I had this grand plan, when I knew I was building towards something. When One Stone was an idea I had, I wanted to work on it for its own sake. It was going to be a book, a novel, a full size story with characters and adventure and stuff in it and it’d be cool and fun and my friends would like it and all that.

I think part of what makes it hard to write is realising that even if every single friend I have reads my work, I will not be a successful writer. Even if all of their friends read my work, I will not be a successful writer. Maybe, maybe when we get to their friends, I’ll have sold enough stuff to make a year’s worth of work worthwhile, but chances are, not. And that’s even presuming I could sell it – which I pretty much can’t.

There’s this space writers talk about where the time between books, will this one be good enough etcetera which is all lovely whiskey-and-inkstains talks but fails to account for how long, for how long you go, without much in the way of feedback. And I don’t want to sound like some petty whiner, just like, there was something driving me last year to finish each story, to actually put something out there because I’d fooled myself into thinking that an audience was listening and if they read it, some of them would like it, and if they liked it, some of them would love it. I was driven by a desire to reveal later plot twists, to build to a character development, to show off dialogue and scenes I envisioned when I started.

I don’t have that, right now.

This … this is just the normal sadness that permeates the creative, I think. When you’re not riding the wave of hubris that says You, stranger, should care about things I care about and I will make you care about them, it’s mostly just this miserable little feeling of kicking secrets around.

But god it’s hard to write right now.