Shutting it down (for now)

Since I’ve completed my novel ‘Blood: A Pirates Tale’, I am going to put this blog into sleep mode. I am now working on the blog’s I mentioned in the last post and don’t expect to announce them here until I get them well established with a couple dozen pages of content. If the noveling urge does return (as it always does), I’ll be back on this blog by October 1st, once again manic about NaNoWriMo starting up.

Decisions…decisions

Sometimes I don’t think I’m cut out to be a novelist. I was thoroughly enjoying myself during NaNo in November and continuing on in December. However, as I got closer to the end and finishing the novel – it was deeply anti-climatic. I thought I was sick of the first novel I wrote, about a road trip, because it was not written well, but I now feel it is something far different.

Over the past month, I did a lot of soul searching about my writing and came to a surprising conclusion that is at once both sad and liberating: I have broken with my artistic side.

When I was younger, I wrote stories because I enjoyed creating and writing them. I didn’t expect anything for them or from them other than the gratification I received from writing them. I’ve lost that yearning. As the years passed, I began reading fewer novels and more and more non-fiction books.

Somehow, some way, that part of me that enjoyed making up characters, situations and worlds became quieter and quieter, until it became a whisper. More and more – history, true-life adventures, people changing their lives and self-development subjects came to the forefront, taking over my attention and writing interests.

I really struggled with this for a long time. In the end, I had to admit to myself that my writing interests have changed. The thing that hasn’t changed from then to now is that I still enjoy writing, and would like nothing more than to make a living as a writer.

I am not a patient person and have the attention span of a kid in a toy store. I get bored easily and hop from one thing to another. I don’t have the patience to take a year to write and revise one novel and then farm it out to agents and publisher “in hopes” that it will get picked up for publication. Then take another year going through the edits and revisions before the book finally sees shelf space. I am just not interested in maintaining focus on one subject for that length of time.

In addition, I value my time and want a good return on the amount of work I put into a writing project. Taking the time that it does to write a novel, (hopefully) get it published, beat the odds and successfully get it marketed doesn’t make good economic sense to me. If I hope to make a living as a writer, I need to take a different path to satisfy my attention, interests and income needs.

Done

I think the last post I made helped me break out of the block. The day after that post I began writing again, but with considerably less enthusiasm. The reason I was blocked wasn’t because I didn’t know what or where I wanted to go with the story. It was that I lost much of my interest in it.

I gutted it out and finished the story – ending up with 102,533 words. It is more than I have ever written for any one project – my journals notwithstanding. It comes out to 359 double-spaced typed pages. I worry that those final pages are not nearly as good as the rest of the novel is though. I think my lack of interest will show through. I’m putting the novel away for a while and let it age a bit and get on with other writing. I’ll set a date of April 16th to go back and begin revising it.

My hope is that by that time I am looking forward to re-reading and revising the manuscript.