A Time to Write

So it's been a little while since I sat down at my computer and started typing things into this webpage so that other people could read what I'd written. In the time since my last post and this one I went ahead and published that book I'd been working on, I got it out on the internet, and the day I hit the publish button was one of the most exciting of my life. Going to the actual Amazon website and seeing something I'd made (with a lot of help of course) right there for people to purchase was a thrilling experience. I plotted out more books to release and stories to tell and felt all tingly.

But a strange thing happened after my book (I feel weird calling it a book. I've never liked calling anything I write a book. People would ask me what I was writing and I'd just say it was a story. Even now when the stuff I've written is literally collected in a physical, actual book, I hesitate to call it that) got out. A week or so after I'd hit that Publish button I began to feel bummed out. Depressed, even. At first I couldn't figure out why. It's taken me a very long time to understand why and I'm going to try to explain it without sounding whiny or ungrateful--so I'm sure I'll sound exactly like those two things.

To date I've sold 26 copies of my book, some physical, some electronic. That made me enough money to cover the price I paid the artist to draw the cover and a little bit extra. Honestly I'd been realistically expecting to sell maybe ten copies of the book so that part made me happy.

I realized as time went on, though, that even though the book was selling (a little) it didn't seem people were actually reading it. The people buying it were just friends and family of mine, not people interested in the story. Of course I am forever grateful for those friends and family who bought the book, it is awesome to think of people buying something I wrote and I can't say thank you enough to everyone who did. But while everyone was letting me know they bought the book, very few were telling me about what they thought of it. And I realized that, more than money, I wanted people to like what I was writing. The lack of feedback on the stories themselves started a subtle but powerful wave of doubt in my mind about the shit quality of my writing that resonated with destructive harmonics through the circuits of my brain and made me doubt, more and more, my writing.

After the book was out I planned to write more, obviously. I had a whole slate of Christopher Prometheus stories lined up to write as a sequel, an old story of mine I'd planned to clean up and publish for cheap and a whole new story with swords and dragons and everything.

I wrote one, really bad, Christopher story and nothing else.

I would stare at the computer screen and let the white blankness of the word processor burn into my eyes and write nothing. I'd pull up my old stories and read over them and see how ugly and bad they were. That undertow of doubt, which at the time I wasn't even really aware of, pulling away the foundation of my confidence. I wrote nothing, and felt bad about writing nothing, which made it ever harder to try writing again.

All of this was really my own fault. For awhile I wanted to blame the people who'd bought the book, I didn't want to admit that I needed to shake off the malaise that had overtaken me, but it can be hard to face the fact of your own fear. The fear, I've now come to understand, isn't that people didn't like the book so much as (like I said awhile back) that my stories just wouldn't be noticed at all.

The fact was that, deep down inside my most secret of hearts, I had been convinced that this was it. I'd worked so hard on these stories and I was finally going to bust out. I'd put them on Amazon and people would notice and word would spread and I'd finally be able to be a real, honest to god Writer. But the reality is that there's a whole lot more work to be done. I see now that it's not just a single perfect shot into the darkness, but a long and hard construction of a whole goddamn bonfire to light up that dark. Coming to grips with my own foolish expectations and disappointment has been hard and taken too long, but I think I've done it now. This blog is the first thing of any consequence I've written since the fateful Pushing of Publish and it should not be the last.

I want to reiterate how grateful I am for everyone who did buy my silly little book. You are not the reason I fell into despair, rather you are how I am able to find my way back to confidence. Without you reading what I write (and I suspect the readers of this blog and the purchasers of my book are two groups who's Venn diagrams overlap very closely) I would just spend all of my free time playing Dota 2 instead of only too much of it.

So. Going forward. Work on stories will recommence. Stories about Chris and Cat and the Council will begin to be churned out. The Cthulhu Mythos love story will be edited and published. Anwynn and the Dark Knights of Mab will be written about and I'll get to narrate sword fights again.

And I'll write more here, it breaks off the rust, it gives me the numbing tingle in my fingertips that feels like work well done. And I'll write and I'll work and I'll try to make this dream a little something more.