Weeks 8 & 9 - Dealing with Sinkholes

 

Update – You’ll notice I’m running late this week. So late I’ve decided to combine two weeks’ worth of updates into one, even though it’s only Thursday. Consider it a bonus for Leap Day. Besides, tomorrow starts a new month so it all evens out.

This is what happened. In Week 8, all those ideas my subconscious threw at me did indeed knock me off course. That and the new paid assignment successfully kept me from writing more than a few lines per day. Mostly I did flash. I did do a bit of typing on the side project, and eased myself back into the romance book, but nothing I could write a blog about.

Then Week 8 transitioned into Week 9, and that’s when the fun began. I’ve stated several times I have an ongoing addiction to computer games. As of last week I’d been game-free since before Christmas, for a little over two months. Take notice of the past tense. For some reason over the weekend—I think I got bored with the paid assignment I was working on—I hopped on over to a gaming site for a little break with some Spider Solitaire.

Ever see one of those movies where the guy agrees to have “just one drink”? Then the scene cuts to the next morning and him waking up naked in Vegas with the mother of all hangovers and Wayne Newton snoring in bed beside him. Or something like that. That was me on Saturday, minus Wayne Newton. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d just cussed myself out and gone back to work, but I didn’t do that. I went back to the games instead. Also on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. And I wasn’t even in Vegas.

During these relapses, crucial things tend to get swept aside. TV’s not that critical, but I did skip a lot of my faves. Also meals. And work on the assignment, currently my only source of writing income, which also has a deadline. I managed to whip out some flash scenes before bed, or type a couple of lines on one of the projects before jumping over to the game sites. There was one bright spot: Tuesday morning, instead of heading for the laptop, I stayed in bed and ended up writhing nearly two full longhand pages on the romance book. You’d think that would have broken the spell. No such luck. Something happens to me when I sit down at the keyboard during one of these episodes. I go for the games and just stay there for hours at a stretch. I’ve heard there are kids who get so caught up in playing they don’t even go to the bathroom. They just let loose in their seat. I haven’t hit that humiliating benchmark yet, but the organs are old and starting to give out. It’s only a matter of time.

It’s like falling into a sinkhole. One minute you’re strolling along and life is fine and dandy, then suddenly the ground gives way and you’re falling into the depths and can’t see any way out. It can be anything: gambling, drinking, drugs, social media, the endless timesucks on the internet. For me it was the stupid games that came with my laptop’s hard drive. I was even too cheap to pick an expensive addiction.

Wednesday became my day of reckoning. Of course with all this going on, my insomnia decided to join the party. I woke up around 3 a.m. and couldn’t fall back to sleep. By five I was wide awake and furious at myself. In a fit of self-loathing I decided Screw This. I got up, brewed my morning mug of tea, took it into the office with me, sat down and got to work. Over the next twelve hours or so I slogged my way through the work I’d been putting off for the previous three days, with only a break here and there for things like food, bathroom breaks and a shower. I’ll show you, Mr. Subconscious. You’re not the boss of me.

And it worked, more or less. I didn’t quite finish the bugger, but I only had a few pages to go when I finally shut down for the day/night. If that didn’t cure my insomnia, I’m not sure what would. Well, it didn’t. This morning I woke up around 2 am. At 3 I threw on my robe, went into the office, wrapped up the paid work and went back to bed. Got up around 7:30. I was pretty draggy for most of the day, but the work got done. Better still, I’d proven my point to myself: If I put my mind to it and take serious action, I can do damn near anything. I don’t have to fall into the sinkhole. It will only swallow me if I allow it to.

I still need to whip up some writing for today. I’ll do that while watching TV.

That’s how I’ll be wrapping up this month. No books completed, no income from fiction writing. But I scored a major personal victory over my spineless, procrastinating self. There’s a whole new month ahead of me now, 31 pristine days. The romance is starting to pick up steam; I’ll bet I can get it done. Maybe now I’ll be able to sleep through the night with only the occasional pee break. See you all next week.

 

Week 7 - Waste Not, Want Not

 

Week 7 update – slowed down a bit here and there, but now I’m back on track, and back on the romance book. Having paid work and its attendant deadline threw me off for a couple of days, but I fixed it by going back to longhand in the morning. I also got some rewriting/typing done on the detective story before the internet distracted me. Looks like it’ll be the romance for the time being, I can’t say for sure how long. Plans, plots and intentions can change on a dime. Such is the life of a pantser.

$$$$

Speaking of distractions, my subconscious lobbed a doozy at me, probably as a last-ditch effort to knock me off my productive course. When the new story ideas didn’t sway me, Mr. Subconscious decided to go for broke and dump the whole shebang on me. Long story short, a long book of short stories. In other words, an anthology.

For years now I’ve made it a point to write some form of fiction every day. Best case, it would be a specific story aimed at a certain genre or market, hopefully with some kind of payment attached. Since depression and writer’s blocks often interfered with that, I decided flash pieces—everything from brief paragraphs to full stories under a thousand words—would also fill the bill. This way I could honestly say I wrote some form of fiction that day, even if I never returned to it. Writing is writing, after all, and one way or another, no writing ever goes to waste.

Some of them did lead to better things. One night I scribbled a bit of fluff about a reporter interviewing a human who’d been raised by vampires. It wasn’t very serious and ended after a couple hundred words with the reporter meeting the parents, with the (off-camera) expected result. I set it aside but didn’t quite forget about it. Over time the premise morphed in my mind into the tale of an orphaned child (female at first, later male after I discovered the TV show Supernatural) who’s taken in by a flock of vampires and grows up to work in a brothel that caters to paranormal beings. That became my erotic M/M romance Belonging, one of my best sellers. The fantasy/detective story I’m currently working on got its start when I mashed two of these random flash bits together. You can read that background info at the October 8, 2022  entry of this very blog.

I’ve got years—decades, even—of these things, scattered around in notebooks and a couple computer files. Some might someday bloom into full-grown stories or even books. The others…well, quite a few were scribbled down before bed, sometimes right before midnight, in a panicked effort to keep my daily writing habit intact. They’re not often coherent. Or clean. (For example, last week I jotted down how leprechauns come by their pots of gold. It has to do with another meaning for “pot” along with the phrase “shit a brick.” And the source of fairy dust? You don’t even want to know.) My sense of humor was shaped in my early years by Mad magazine, later by National Lampoon and Monty Python. This is the type of thing that comes out of my head when I’m tired, or desperate, or both. Most of them are unfit for human consumption, let alone development into a decent story. Or any kind of story, decent or otherwise.

But, Mr. Subconscious whispered seductively, what if you dusted off some of these piles of crap, polished ’em up a bit and passed them off as a self-published ebook of humorous short-shorts? Like Jokes for the John, but for lit majors. Most people don’t have the attention span to deal with a whole book anyway.

And instead of calling him out as a total nutjob, tired, desperate, writer’s-blocked me replied, Y’know, that’s just crazy enough to work.

So now I’ve got another side-side project. I haven’t stopped work on the detective book or the romance. The series is still in the queue somewhere. But now so is this. Any time I get blocked I’ll haul out a random notebook and see what’s in there. The bulk are going to be on a par with the leprechaun thing I alluded to a couple of paragraphs back. But there still might be some gems among the crap. If I can scrape together a hundred of the best of the worst, whip it up into an ebook and sell it for $1.99—hell, that’s less than two cents per story. If you only find one out of the batch you like, you still come out ahead. You can’t beat a deal like that with a stick.

Besides, I’ve been wanting to improve my formatting skills, and I need to learn how to make my own covers because right now I can’t afford to pay for one. This will give me something to practice on. I might even make a little money from it. No writing, or effort, ever goes to waste.

I’ll need to come up with yet another pen name, though. Variations on my real name have already been used, and I want to keep my other pen names for actual serious stuff. Damn you, Mr. Subconscious. You’ll pay for this. See y’all next week.

Week 6 - Inspiration Overload

 

                (Image copyright Walt Disney productions. I'm too small a fish to take chances.)

Week 6 Update – doing well, although things tailed off towards the end of the week. I found another library close to home that has printouts for ten cents a page (the standard these days is 25 cents). I’m still having issues with procrastination; that’s something I’ll need to work on. Even with that, I only had to write flash one day this week. I got the first of two assignments this morning, so I’m now booked for work through the first week of March. The part of me that has to pay expenses is thrilled at the thought of substantial income. The writer is sighing and mentally working out schedules. Fortunately I typed a bit early this morning before the assignment came in, so I can write and post this blog with a clear conscience. And now, on to the blog in question…

$$$$

This isn’t the blog I was going to write. It exists thanks to this past weekend, when I had time to write but kept fiddling around. I still got some work done on Saturday; Sunday was the day I wrote flash. In between Saturday evening and Sunday morning something unexpected happened.

Lately my war with insomnia seems to have reached a cease-fire. I only had one instance this week, and it was self-inflicted. After I went to bed Saturday night, I slept okay but had weird dreams. I woke up with an idea for a short story. I looked at the clock—3:17 a.m. Normally I’d just go back to sleep and jot it all down in the morning, but this was a goodie, or at least felt like one. You can’t always trust ideas that hit in the middle of the night.  This time, though, just to play it safe, I went ahead and turned on the bedside lamp, got my glasses and one of the umpteen notebooks I keep by the bedside and scribbled down the basics. Then I shut down and tried to fall back to sleep, knowing it would be difficult.

I certainly got that right. That dream reminded me of another story I’d started and abandoned a while ago. That story reminded me of a flash I’d written that might just serve as the opening to another novel. So much for falling asleep. Which I did, towards morning, and this time had a disturbing dream that threw off both my sleep schedule and my attitude. No wonder I didn’t work on anything worthwhile on Sunday. But that’s a whole other therapy session.

Now, I haven’t written a short story in literally decades. Short stories used to be how SFF writers honed their chops before they tackled a novel. I was reading, and writing, SFF back then. There were plenty of markets back then too—magazines, paperback anthologies, printed fanzines. That’s how Stephen King got started. I’ll be dropping his name again shortly. I got maybe a dozen or so stories published throughout the 1980s and ’90s but couldn’t crack the book market in spite of two attempts. Just as well; those books massively sucked. Meanwhile, I had to support myself, so my output dwindled while I dealt with finding and keeping a job that paid a living wage in a rapidly-shifting economy. Also dwindling were the magazine and paperback short-story markets, most of which weren’t paying much better than they had in the ’60s and ’70s. The money was in novels, and breaking in had gotten even tougher.

Then the Internet happened and digital erotic romance came on the scene (if you’ll pardon the pun) and took the world by spicy, sexy, sizzling storm. And that’s how I found myself writing paranormal erotica, and eventually editing same.

Even that went bust eventually, as everybody hopped on the bandwagon and the market soon became saturated. But the door was open now. If the regular markets—those still around—don’t want your work, you can put it up on Amazon or other venues at whatever length you prefer and for however much you want to charge. Just keep in mind that your success may be long in coming, or may never arrive. There are tens of thousands of writers out there, releasing millions of words into the wild with no publisher’s editorial staff to stop them. That’s some tough competition. However, there’s still Sturgeon’s Law: “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” Don’t write crap and you’ll be fine.

For me, though, this isn’t really about publishing. It’s about my subconscious getting scared I might start making actual progress on my current chosen projects, so it’s throwing bright and shiny new ideas in my path to trip me up. I’ve had this problem before. I end up piling too much on my plate, then get discouraged and end up not doing any of them. That could be how the weekend happened.

Well, suck it up, Mr. Subconscious. I know just how I can turn all those ideas to my advantage.

Remember Stephen King? I mentioned him a little bit ago. At one point in time I considered taking a stab at becoming a horror writer. I had ideas and everything, including a pen name to keep the horror writer separate from the romance and SFF writers. The theory was that, as he aged, Mr. King was no longer writing the type of horror stories that had made him famous. Well, he was older now, and sober. Styles and interests change. Good writers do mature. This left a gaping, King-sized hole (if you’ll pardon another pun) in the horror market, just  waiting for a new writer to come in and fill the void.

I did try. I started a couple of books using my own weird ideas. Nothing ever came of them. Mostly I learned that I am not and will not ever be Stephen King. But I hung on to the pen name, and I finally found a use for it. This particular alter ego is currently second-drafting my fantasy/detective novel, when Other Me isn’t working on the romance book, or doing the dishes or something.

And those short stories? If you’ll remember, last week I bemoaned my lack of presence on the internet, and how that could hinder me when I went to market my books. This could be the answer. I can sub those stories to online markets, under the pen name’s byline. If that doesn’t work, I’ll self-publish. Those stories might get my pen name noticed—in a positive way, I would hope—and smooth the way when I start looking to publish the fantasy detective novel. Also, I did some checking around and Humorous Horror is a legitimate sub-genre. It’s small and niche but that just means less competition. If I can make some cash with this side hustle, so much the better.

On to this week now. I’m going to try for the basic work schedule: work on the romance in the morning (that’s got a publisher lined up already), the paid work in the afternoon, and the other novel in the evening if I have any gas left in the tank. That one’s on second draft right now, and will require a trip to Philadelphia in the spring for some hands-on research anyway, so I’m not that concerned about it. If/when I get either of those two done, I’ll head back to the series. I’ll leave the stories for my experiment of writing in libraries and elsewhere away from the house. Those will be longhand in a five-subject notebook. I’ve got a ton of those lying around.

And once again the schedule leaves no time for doing housework. Oh darn. Well, something’s gotta give somewhere. See you next week.

Week 5 - Antisocial Media

 

Week 5 update: Did much better. I’m over whatever illness I had, got all bills covered, wrapped up and returned a paid assignment, and made some progress on both my current projects. I’d gotten stuck on the detective story, so I switched over to the romance, which prompted Mr. Subconscious to blast some inspiration my way and got the detective story going again. Type one, do the other longhand, I can handle that. Except when I took both drafts to the library to type and get printouts of the detective story (for better editing), Mr. Subconscious suddenly decided he wanted me to type up and print out the romance draft instead. So now my focus is back on that. With the paid work done and nothing else in the queue right now, I should be able to ease myself back into doing both. As long as I’m writing something that may eventually see publication. That’s the important thing.

Now that I’ve got more time and the weather’s cleared up, I’ve started an experiment of writing in public. My goal is to take at least one day a week and write in each of the county’s public libraries. Even if I don’t get much work done, it still gets me out of the house and moving around. And I get to run the car, which is also finally working again. I’m keeping to the libraries closest to home for the time being. The ones on the fringes I’ll save for spring and summer, when the weather’s better and there’s more daylight to drive in.

I’ve made another significant change which should help increase my productivity. That’s the subject of this week’s blog.

$$$$

I had to think about how I wanted to present this. It involves a business owner I’ve been following on YouTube. I’ve mentioned his name before on this blog, admittedly as clickbait to hopefully get views. However, this particular story is about me and my own personal journey, and I don’t want to distract from that. So no names this time around. If I decide to write a blog specifically about the overall situation from an observer’s viewpoint, then I’ll name names and include a label for “clickbait.” Blogs of that nature should be left for closer to a book’s release date so I can take advantage of the borrowed attention. That’s how we roll in the 2000s.

Anyway, the business owner in question was doing a livestream, with a chat for us viewers to comment. He’s currently under attack from others in his industry, apparently for having too much initial success. Hey, it’s the Internet. Anyway, he announced for the New Year that he’s not going to participate in any online feuds or drama, but focus instead on his business and serving his customers. Which is one of my reasons for tuning in. I need to learn how to market my writing, and this guy is one hell of a marketer. And yeah, I like his product, and his vision, and his obvious enthusiasm.

His followers, not so much.

I’ve left comments on his posts before, and made comments on the live chat. This most recent time, I posted a remark. It was meant as a joke. I even added a smiley face to indicate that. I forgot that humor and having a sense thereof were among the first casualties of the online culture wars.

I got two reactions from my fellow fans. One of them laughed along with me. The other…got triggered. Violently. He Internet-screamed at me in all caps: “WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT EVEN MEAN???? DO YOU PEOPLE EVEN THINK BEFORE YOU SAY SOMETHING????” Seriously. Full meltdown mode. I shrugged him off as a nutjob and didn’t respond.

Others did. The overall gist was to soothe poor Mr. McTriggered and his offended sensibilities. “Don’t worry about them, they’re just a troll using buzzwords and looking for attention.” The poster who’d laughed along with me was also labeled a troll.

Are you kidding me? I made a joke and this wackadoo was ready to lynch me, and others in the chat were backing him up. I stopped commenting, hung back and observed. Mr. McTriggered later picked a fight with another commentator who made the mistake of criticizing someone Mr. McTriggered supported. They both got mild warnings from the mods.

And I let all this upset me. I don’t even remember what the business owner talked about. I’d just been virtually punched in the face for making a joke and the general consensus from the other participants was that my assailant was justified.

I brooded over this for at least a day, and finally had a breakthrough: How is any of this helping me get my work done? I’ve got books to write so I can deal with the bills I’ve got to pay. I don’t need this shit.

Especially not from people like Mr. McTriggered. If I knew he was a teenager or even college age I could handle it. But in this particular industry and its fandom there’s a better than average chance he’s a white male over 30. Or 40. Or older. Screaming at a total stranger for (in his estimation) attacking the business owner. Who, I also realized, doesn’t give a rat’s ass about either of us personally, just the money in our wallets. Which is as it should be. He’s got his own bills to pay, including salaries for the crew he’s employing. His focus needs to be on himself and how to keep his business going, otherwise he’s up the creek.

Which is where I could be soon if I don’t get off my ass and focus on my own chosen goals, and stop wasting time getting butthurt over loonies hiding behind a screen.

I’ve never been on Facebook or Twitter. I won’t be joining either. I’m still signed up with a writers’ forum, though I stepped away for a while for personal reasons. I had a troll on there too at one point. I have no idea why they targeted me. I ignored them and eventually they left, both me and the site in general. I was on a group fiction blog for about five years, which was great until one of the other members started bullying others and wrecked it. My only presence online is currently this blog, which has no followers. That’s okay. I have no books to market…yet. Besides, it’s cheaper than therapy.

Also, as of this week, I’m done following the business owner. I’m not withdrawing my financial support, because I do like what he puts out. But I don’t need to watch a two-hour livestream about his personal opinions or commercials for his upcoming products. That’s time I can better put to use fulfilling my own goals. He does occasional videos with business advice and interviews with professional writers and other creative people. Those I’ll tune in for because I can learn from them. I won’t be participating in any more chats. I learned that lesson too.

As I said earlier, the business owner started this year by removing himself from Internet drama. I’m going to follow his example and concentrate on more important things, like being successful. Then I can attract my own following of fanatics and trolls. That’s fine; I don’t mind if they fight among themselves. I’ll just go on working, telling the stories I want to tell and trying to grow as a writer and a person. Though I will need to figure out how to market my books without any Internet presence. Eh. Cross that bridge when I get there. See you next week.