It’s been quite the spell, hasn’t it?
I never intended to step away from here for so long, but many unexpected things happen in life that derail the mundanity of everything else.
To keep a continuously long and convoluted story short, I lost my mother early in 2017 due to very violent ends, and it’s pretty much blown up the entirety of my life ever since.
So, needless to say, I don’t think I really worked on anything original the entire year. I honestly can’t remember.
But, I’ve been working on things this year. I’ve got short stories that need retuning and polishing. I’ve been working on the story I started in the summer of 2015, that was supposed to be a short story, then a novella, which has long since turned into a novel in its own right. It’s coming along fairly well–it’s going to be a three-part book, and I’ve finished the first part already. Hopefully, it will take me somewhat less than another three years to finish Part II.
Overall, I’m still quite pleased with how it’s been going. The story itself, I still love it. It’s a fine mix of having a “broad strokes” idea of what I want to happen, and figuring out more things and details as I go. It lets me not get too bogged down in details, allows the story itself room to grow organically, while still providing a loose framework to follow and refer back to when I need.
It’s difficult to carve out time to write, sometimes. Sometimes I can get myself to do it. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like carving out time at all. Sometimes, I have absolutely no energy left after the day job is done and I am completely drained. But. I’m still writing.
One of my goals is still to get short stories finished and polished up, and then send them to magazine venues until they get accepted and published. I’ve got more ideas for short stories that I haven’t started writing yet, that will eventually get put down and sent out as well. Little projects to come to between larger ones like the novels. It’s all just a matter of writing, and that’s sometimes the hardest part.
No matter how hard it gets, or how discouraged or exhausted I feel, I just remember, I have stories to tell, and I’m the only one that can tell them. Sure, there are other stories, and many of them are very good, but none of them are mine. That’s not to be egotistical, or to say my stories are the best ones out there, but no one will tell the ones I have in my head but me, or the way that I will write them. I want to share them, and I just need to keep all that in mind, keep it in perspective.