I haven’t written very much recently about my writing, and I like using this blog as an outlet to talk about this aspect of my life. I’ve been introspecting a lot (not on the blog, thank god) about the future, about what things are important to me at the moment, and I realized how ironic and strange it is that I consider writing to be so important, and am willing to dedicate so much effort, and mindspace to it.
More than anything, this post is an exploration of my goals and progress rather than a discussion of the issues that I’m dealing with.
I’ve been writing a lot recently, of course. I’m working on getting content ready for the new site. My interest is more in getting a ritual/habit established rather than developing a backlog of content that can serve as a cushion when I begin to post content. At the moment, I’m writing this new series of vignettes (I have a dozen or so of them, by now, probably), I’m working on station keeping episodes (including the old ones, I have 16 written), and I have thirty-thousand words of the Mars novella written that just needs tweaking before it gets posted.
(Just for context, I expect to be posting about 2000-3000 words of fiction a week on this site.)
I think, particularly in the beginning I’m going to be posting every week day, though I think I might eventually move to Monday-Wednesday-Friday posting down the road if that seems to make more sense, particularly if I have ongoing serials because I think I’d rather have a new installment of each story every week, rather than a new week of each story every month. If that makes sense. I suppose it needn’t yet.
I’m not going to lie, that I’ve begun to have some doubt in my world about my writing. I went to a concert the other day--traditional irish music--and the performers (who are quite well known) invited their children on stage for a few tunes, and it was adorable and kind of amazing to see these kids who clearly got music in a really important way and as I was watching (and enjoying the tunes) I couldn’t help but draw a connection between what these folks were doing and the kinds of thing I do. There were resonances between what I saw and what I felt I was doing, but I think I’m mostly responding to two factors: writings, as an endeavor is incredibly ephemeral, and while I’ve been writing for a while, and I’m not a complete neophyte, I still have a rather lengthy period of floundering about that I have to go through. Most “new/young writers” in science fiction have almost ten years on me. While neither of these factors are seriously (or acutely) discouraging, they do lurk and give pause from time to time.
Given that writing is slow and hard, and what’s more there are few markers by which to judge success. So is it still worth it? I’ve heard the following writer’s advice a bunch the past couple of weeks: “you don’t have to write.” And it makes a lot of sense, there’s no reason to suffer through writing unless you’re getting something out of it. You have to enjoy it, you have to get some pleasure out of some phase of the project. Something, anything. Because, after all there’s nothing in Maslow’s hierarchy that talks about writing.
And I’m still here, and I’m still writing. I don’t have to, but by g-d I want to. So I am.
Onward and Upward!