Welcome!
After nearly a month of furiously scurrying about to get this place put together, I can finally sit back, take a deep breath, and enjoy the ambience.
Breathe in the warm, papery aroma of books. Breathe out the chattering, clicking keyboard of writing.
It’s nice.
…Okay, enough daydreaming. There’s still work to be done. There’s always work to be done when you’re a writer and the Next Book is looming over you, staring at the calendar and tapping its foot in unconcealed impatience. Finish me, it thinks sourly at you. Finish me, god damn it.
And you whine at it that you don’t feel like it right now, and maybe roll around on the floor a little. But in the end you get yourself up, brush all the cat hair you picked up from the carpet from your clothes, and sit at the writing desk. You pout at your manuscript.
I should vacuum the carpet, you think. in fact, you suddenly know you can’t possibly finish the Next Book whilst having such a dirty carpet.
The Next Book’s mouth becomes a hard, thin line of disapproval. You sigh, and abort your attempt to stand and reach for the cleaning supplies. The writing chair welcomes you back in a smug, cushionless kind of way.
You pout at your manuscript harder. You engage in some Visualizing the Future and picture how it will be when the Next Book is done.
Words do not appear on the manuscript, despite this.
You think wistfully about all the twitter threads you could be mindlessly scrolling through right now. Your fingers even twitch towards your phone. But the Next Book makes a disdainful sound in the back of its throat, and you hunch your shoulders and pretend you’d never thought about the Bird Site. You hate that place, after all. The Next Book is right, even if all the more successful writers seem to be there, working it, getting followers, making sweet cash money.
You think about how you’re never going to reach that level, and then you have a nice little sniffle about it, right there in your writing chair. Yes, this is my Writing Chair. You can tell, because it’s where I get all my Crying done.
But eventually, just about the time when your sinuses are getting nicely clogged and your breathing is doing this charming guttering-engine hiccup thing, the impatience of the Next Book makes itself known once more. And you know you have nothing left to throw in the way, to keep yourself from having to put your fingers to the keyboard.
“Fine, Jesus. I’ll write 10 words today, just get off my back!”
You tentatively type out three words. They’re okay. You type another.
All four transform into the rankest of garbage. You delete them.
But another sentence comes to mind, and you put it down. Then another, and another.
You blink.
You’ve been writing for an hour. It was painless. Fun, even! You feel accomplished. The Next Book is your best friend in the world. You love it so much. Tomorrow, you’ll get right to work, and so much will get done!
The Next Book rolls its eyes, but discreetly, where you can’t see it. It ruffles your hair. It loves you, despite your breakdowns and petulant episodes.
Because you’re its writer, and it is your Next Book.
So anyway, I’m working on A Protector over Winter, the fourth and final book of my fantasy romance series, Winter’s Consort. While the first three books kind of poured out of me in a “oh my god I’m horking everywhere, but in like a pleasant and delightful way” kind of wave, this one is being more… stubborn. Less user-friendly. It’s happening, but slower. That’s okay. I’m not bitter about it.
This is just what it is to be a writer, sometimes. Okay, a lot of the time.
Sometimes a writer writes blog posts to work through her complicated feelings regarding this issue.
But at least I’ve got a shiny new website to look at when I’m feeling low on the writing side! And a new newsletter. Consider signing up for it and being my book friend! We can talk about books!
It’s nice to have a home on the internet, isn’t it?
