Week 19 - Frozen

 

Update – Not much went on last week. I had a boring assignment—simple typos and punctuation errors on almost every other line made it drag on and on—to the point I finally just quit working and went back to computer games. Yes, I had a relapse. I got the assignment done before deadline, but my own writing, not to mention the yard work, suffered as a result. It doesn’t help that my area has been stuck in a bad weather pattern of primarily clouds and drizzle with only glimpses of sun. I think the sun is getting back at us for being eclipsed last month. It’s just warm enough and wet enough that the grass grows like mad but you barely get the chance to mow it. Supposedly this should be prime writing time for me, but…

$$$$

I might as well come right out and say it. I’m caught in yet another writer’s block. I’m not sure what brought it on. I’d blame the tooth extraction, which restricted my diet to soft, mainly healthy foods for almost a week (and cost me almost $700 I don’t have), but this has been going on since before my dental work. Ditto for the eye exam and the new glasses—which are working fine, by the way, so I can’t blame that either. I’m also able to eat junk food again, which I proved by devouring an entire bag of potato chips (sour cream and onion ripple chips, yay!) in lieu of a regular meal. I’ve been moving around more and sleeping relatively well on a regular basis, so that can’t be it.

The last time I worked on the detective book was when I sent out the sub package. That was late April. Haven’t touched it since. I thought about going back to the romance but didn’t. I have a notebook of flash scenes to comb through in search of inspiration but haven’t looked at it. A couple of ideas surfaced briefly and then sank again. For nearly an entire month all I’ve written is nightly flash, and even that feels lifeless.

And then I gave up over the weekend and got back into the computer games. This time it was Sudoku. Spent an entire work day on that one. That’s what I did instead of wrapping up the paid assignment. It almost went to two days, except I got so furious at myself I shut down the computer, went outside and mowed a section of lawn I’d meant to tackle over the weekend. Then I went grocery shopping and bought that bag of chips I talked about. The adrenaline surge got me back on track and I easily finished the paid assignment before deadline. I’m feeling better now. But I still can’t write.

I think I’m having a crisis of self-confidence. It’s only recently that I’ve come to realize how derivative a lot of my ideas are. And that I may be neuro-divergent, so my characters don’t necessarily act like normal people. It doesn’t help that the publishing world has changed drastically since my childhood, when SF and comic books ignited a desire in me to tell stories for a living. Back in those simpler, non-corporate days, even mediocre writers could earn a living wage just by churning out books. It’s not that easy now. Not to mention you can find yourself abruptly cancelled by internet trolls for, well, pretty much anything, or nothing at all. This is why I’m not on social media.

Maybe I’m putting too much pressure on myself. There are a lot of writers worse than me out there who are selling well and making a living. Maybe that’s what I need—hit the libraries, find a really hideously-written best seller and boost my self-esteem by figuring out how I would have done it better. I’ve already got one in mind: a recent YA book by a former romance writer that, to judge by the reviews, borrows heavily from the work of one of my favorite SF authors. It even has a plucky girl protag who speaks in current American slang even though the story takes place on an alien world with no connection to Earth. Sounds like just the thing to make me feel like writing again. That’s how a lot of us got started: we read a bad book and threw it against the wall while yelling, “I could write better than that!” And proceeded to do so, either via fan fiction or diving straight into submitting to publishers. Because you don’t need to be a good writer to sell a book. You just need to tell a good story. If the reader’s entertained, they won’t care if the book is bad. The only time you fail is when you fail to be entertaining. Or fail to write anything at all.

You can’t give the people what they want. The people don’t know what they want until they see or read it. Or, as someone once responded on an internet discussion about what editors were looking for: “Nobody was looking for Harry Potter.”

I can write. I can sell what I’ve written. I’ve done both before. Just stop worrying about being perfect and sit down and tell the story. If people like it, they’ll let me know. If not…what the hell. I’ve got plenty of others waiting in line. I just have to get myself to write them.

But not today. Today I’m going to get out of the house and see if I can find a copy of that book so I can see how bad it really is. I also want to get a copy of Last Action Hero, another story about a fictional character finding himself in the real world, with the added bonus of starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. I’m going to need another bag of chips. See y’all next week.