Insert Pretentious Writerly Title Here, or How I Got Where I am
xanthe is starting her journey from just being a fic writer to writing both fic and original work. (Congratulations!, Xanthe!) I was reading a post of hers on LJ and it reminded me of my own journey, which then got me thinking that maybe it would be useful if those of us who've made the jump were to talk about it. If nothing else, it would be fun to see what paths others took. :-)
Getting My Feet Wet
I didn't start writing until I was in my 30s. I'd always done well with creative writing in school, but no one ever said anything special about it, I'd just get my A and move on. It never occurred to me that I might have any talent. I really did think everyone had long plotty daydreams that ran for weeks and months on end.
Once I got online a million years ago, I met some folks who introduced me to the wonderful world of fanfic writers.
Oh. Wow. :-)
I started writing with a coauthor, who was much more experienced than I was and we even tried to do an original novel. Got as far submitting an outline, synopsis and first three chapters to an agent. But, alas, the agent didn't like the genre we were writing in (or didn't think there was a market for it, I suspect), but DID ask us to submit something else. But that pretty much did it for us. We were crushed and that was that.
Things Are Only Impossible If You Never Try Them
Just before the turn of the century, though, I started feeling the pull. A lot had changed in the intervening years. Two pregnancies, one child, betrayal, divorce, promotions, my life was in serious flux and I was still in the post-divorce rebuilding phase. Discovering writing for the hell of it had been a godsend. But it wasn't enough any more. I was chafing at writing with a partner - I could feel the need to develop my own voice. And, cheesy as it sounds, I wanted to walk into a bookstore and see my name on the shelves. :-) Even geekier? Are you ready for this? I wanted to see a short story of mine in some elementary or junior high school literature book. Seriously. Stop laughing. :-) I found some of the most amazing gems when I'd read my lit books in the first couple of weeks of school every year. To be one of the people some other geeky lit kid discovered like that? Oh. Wow. :-)
So, I was faced with the first question anyone who has ever written original work has to ask: What the fuck am I going to do now?
Writing fic had been a great opening for me. It had allowed me to tell stories with training wheels, but now it was time to take the training wheels off. I knew I needed to challenge myself. To try something that would make me stretch the writing muscles that I hadn't been working while I wrote fic. Mostly, though, I needed to prove to myself that I could do it. I wasn't really sure. I had some long ago high school writing assignments and my coauthored fic and that was it.
So, I sat down and started to write. It was a very VERY different story, and one that never did find a home, but I will always love it. It took me *weeks* to write. Looking back, it was the hardest thing I've ever written. Not just because it was first, but because I'd chosen to do something incredibly difficult in terms of character and POV and so forth. I think the second hardest thing I've ever done, in writing terms, at least, in my entire life was sending that out the first time. I'd done market research so I had a list of magazines to submit to (no online stuff then). I'd ordered them by how much they paid per word then by their posted response times. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science fiction was always my first choice because they paid well and Gordon Van Gelder promised, and delivered, about a week's response time. That's warp speed, folks. He also writes the most charming rejection letters. "Alas, I'm afraid I can't purchase [insert story name] at this time..." Never underestimate the power of a charming rejection letter. :-)
I think setting myself an impossible task was the right thing to do. I don't know that anyone else on the planet would ever think that story is worth the paper it's printed on, but when I reread it (yes, I reread my own stuff), I see not only the story but I see the blood, sweat and tears that went into it and I remember how stoked I was that I'd actually accomplished it!
“Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a piece of blank paper until your forehead bleeds” -- Douglas Adams
I was also trying to get myself into a writing habit - as soon as my kid went to bed at night, I'd sit down to write and write for at least 2 hours, if not more. I was lucky if I got 250 words a night to start with.
But then something amazing happened. My word count started going up. In time, I was regularly writing 1000 - 1500 words a night. It was *glorious*. :-)
And then another amazing something happened. I came in from grocery shopping or something and sat down to check email only to find a tip from a friend about a magazine that was now taking electronic submissions. WHOOO-HOOO! The night before, I'd had a marathon writing session (kid was at her dad's) and had finished my latest story. It was the longest thing I'd written to that point - over 10k words. I immediately opened the file and started the edit. All the years of handwriting papers had taught me to be a pretty clean first draft writer, so I didn't have much to do, just a bit of tweaking here and there. Then I sent it out. My first electronic submission.
To this day I couldn't tell you how long I waited to hear back. Sometimes I think it was weeks, other times mere hours but when I did hear back? Oh, hell. I had my first sale. I was so damned shocked! LOL And happy. And damn that was a nice check to get in the mail. Paid my childcare for the month as well as some groceries and I even bought jewelry. Which I still have. :-)
Once the initial excitement wore off, I then had the most horrible realization.
I had to do it again.
That's another feeling I'll never forget. Sorta like that split second when the roller coaster car drops before you do and you're hanging in mid air at the top of a rickety wooden coaster wondering what the fuck possessed you to step into this death trap in the first place.
But I had my first professional sale and I was so damned proud of that. I'd had "old pros" tell me that just finishing an original story put me ahead of 90% of people who call themselves "authors". Submitting one to a magazine then put me ahead of 90% of that 10% and actually selling? Rarefied territory.
Of course, I was at the lowest level of that rarefied territory, but I didn't give a flying fuck about that.
I was a professional author. Definitely one of the highest points in my life.
Submit, Reject, Resubmit, Rinse and Repeat
So I kept writing. At the time I was writing fantasy and science fiction, my first loves. I eventually had several stories out making the rounds at any given time, though most came home to eventually languish in my files. A few sales here and there, some interest in some remarkable, at least to me, places that kept me from wallowing in the rejections for a long time. :-)
I have never been so organized in my life.
I had a system. I'd print out two copies of a story. One would go in the files and one would go in an envelope. In the story's file, I'd put the mailing labels for all the markets I thought it had a shot in. I'd also put a copy of the cover letter, which would then have the rejection letter attached to it (unless it sold - a rare event :-). When a story was rejected, I'd file the rejection letter, trash the copy of the story (assuming they sent it back), print a new one and have it out in the mail that day, or the next at the latest.
This went on for several years. During the time I was sending out short stories, I was also teaching myself to write novels. Not an easy task, I might add. I had several failures that not only never saw the light of day but their corpses have been salted and staked at the crossroads to keep them from ever rising again.
Much as I wanted to have that story in the public school lit book, what I really wanted was to write novels. I had these incredible places and ideas in my head but telling their stories was proving to be damn near impossible.
This is when despair started to creep in.
Beware the Writer's Block, My Son, the Jaws That Bite, the Claws That Catch
My daughter was growing up, and while she was never a difficult kid, just having a young teen around can be a trial in and of itself. She was involved in theater at school, Girl Scouts (whatever possessed me to volunteer to be COOKIE MOM that year? ARGH!) and that doesn't even touch on her homework load in her gifted/talented program. My job wasn't doing well - oh, it was secure enough but I hated the direction the department was going. Hated management and was bored out of my ever-lovin' mind. I was also starting to have some hormonal spikes, so to speak. (Knock wood that's done.) All in all, my carefully structured writing environment came crashing down around me.
My daughter was staying up later and later doing homework, and often needed me to help explain things. The time I used to spend writing at lunch at work vanished as more and more "lunch breaks" were spent at my desk trying to deal with whatever new WTFery the idiots upstairs had come up with. I hadn't made any sales in a long time and I was really beginning to think it had all been a fluke. My latest novel died aborning as I couldn't get past the first couple of chapters at all. I was dealing with my first bout of the dreaded "Writer's Block".
Friends could tell me all they wanted that I was talented and so on, but if no one was buying what I wrote what the fuck difference did it make how much talent I might or might not have. It was getting harder and harder to keep plugging away.
One weekend when my daughter was at her dad's it came to a head. What I didn't realize at the time was that more than just writer's block, I was also struggling with a massive depressive episode. I had pulled out my story file to see if there was anything in it I might want to try revising or that might inspire me. I had one novel idea based on the same universe as my first sale and while that one had stalled, I thought there might be other gold to mine. I sat in my living room, looking through my work and suddenly I hated it. I hated it all. I hated every bastard who'd rejected my work. I hated me for thinking I had any chance to be a writer in the first place.
I remember picking up that file, it was one of those accordion files with the string you tie to keep it closed. It held all my short stories and their "histories", contracts, everything. I was in such a rage, I'm glad I didn't think of burning them because I probably would have burned down the apartment for the hell of it. Instead, I stormed out to the dumpster and threw the whole thing in. Came home and proceeded to polish off the bottle of whatever it was I had in the cabinet over the fridge. I don't recall what it was now, but I drank it all. So far as I was concerned, I was done with it. Sometime during that night, I deleted all the electronic files from my hard drive, too.
My writing career, such as it was, was over.
Long Dark Nights...
At this point, I not only withdrew from writing, but also from most of the friends I'd made in the field. It hurt too much and to this day I regret this more than anything else. I started drinking way too much. And before anyone asks, even now, looking back, I can't say I had a drinking problem, but if I hadn't finally sought help, I might have in time. I confined my drinking to my home and only when my daughter was at her dad's and only when I had no responsibilities the next day. The cold-bloodedness of my planning is one of the things that tells me I was starting down a dark road. I will still plan "nights of too much alcohol" but they are few and far between and never, ever when I'm on a downward spiral. Now, it's just for fun (and it helps that I don't get hangovers LOL). "Too much" has taken on a new meaning, too. It's a much smaller amount than it used to be.
To this day, I have no idea what caused me to realize I was having a depressive episode. I'd had trouble with depression before, right after my divorce. I was seeing my GP regularly for my hypertension, it may be that she noticed something and suggested it. At any rate, I finally asked her for a prescription and we talked about things I could do to help myself. I wasn't interested in counseling, though I think it probably would have been a good idea. I have a feeling I may end up in therapy at some point, but that's a hurdle too high for me to manage just yet.
So, I started to take my meds again and in time the darkness lightened. That's when I started to regret having thrown out all my work...and when I discovered some "secret" electronic stashes of it. :-) I started hunting down all the files I could find from various accounts, comparing them, finding the latest versions and so on. I managed to recreate most of my work, but some are gone forever. It wasn't until a couple of years ago, when I moved, that I found a copy of that very first story. I confess. I wept when I found it.
...and Welcome Dawns
I remember when I was first writing, I'd watch Stargate SG1, but then I lost Showtime and didn't have SciFi and that was that. Then, when I did get access to it again, I wasn't writing, but it was season 6, which I had no interest in because OMG THEY KILLED DANIEL! Then I heard they were bringing the character back (gotta love science fiction) and I was back with a vengeance. Plus, it was the first real interest I had felt in much of anything in a while. I bought the DVDs to get caught up and oh, wow, it was wonderful. It caught my imagination like nothing had in a long time.
I remember I kept thinking I could write this. I could do this. But no, if I was going to write again, I was going to write original work, not fic. I fought that for a long time, until an idea came to me. Once the idea wiggled its way into my skull, I was toast. But now I had another problem.
By the time I decided that not writing SG1 fic was a lost cause, I was already realizing that I had to keep writing original fiction, too. But by that time, I was also gun shy...and I didn't want to broadcast that I was writing fanfic. Believe it or not, it wasn't that long ago when editors and agents would turn up their noses at anyone who had the slightest whiff of fic about them. And so tejas was born.
I had been, as I saw it, a spectacular failure. My initial gung-ho enthusiasm had died and been buried that night in the dumpster. So part of my reason for giving in to the siren call of SG1 fic was to get back on the horse. Prove myself.
And once again, I had to do it the hard way.
I decided that if I was going to do this, I'd do it with something novel-length -- put the training wheels back on for a bit and see if the problem was experience, skill or simply not being able to think in novel sized chunks. So, what did I do? I sat down and churned out the first 5k or so of In the Company of Men and posted it on The Cartouche. Over the next several months, I'd post a chapter, sometimes, two, a week. Some of you remember that, I suspect. What was hard about that? An AU with no women, mpreg, meeting up with the folks from this universe, one J/D pair long time married with kids, one having their attraction slapped in their faces in the most intimate way. Oh, and it was 160kish long, posted as I went (never ever again) and my first slash piece.
What could go wrong?
It took about four months to write. And this was the good part. I had proven to myself that, at least with training wheels, I could write novel length stories. I could handle some subplots and multiple character arcs and so forth. And world building. Oh, fuck, I fell in love with world building. I'd done it before, of course, but there was something about designing the AU in ITCOM that flicked a switch inside. I could spend my life world building and die happy. I feel like a frustrated terraformer. In any event, it went a LONG way toward restoring my confidence in my ability.
Only one problem.
I got so caught up in it, I found myself focusing on fic and ignoring my original work.
Oh, I pulled out some things that had been languishing and I played with them, but that's pretty much all I was doing. I was still uncertain with my original work. So, instead, I decided to commit myself to fic for a while. See if I could get through the rough spots. I had fun with SG1, I even have some ideas I'd still love to play with, but eventually I moved on to NCIS fic. Which is where I tried my next major challenge. Shapeshifting, genderbending (but still slash - that was a hoot!) world within a world, "Worthy".
It's not nearly as long as ITCOM, but it was so much fun to write and to build and I still have a lot of stories I want to tell in that universe. But that's about when my pro career started to take a new turn.
She Writes Romance, You Write Erotica, I Write Porn
A friend of mine pointed out something very, very interesting to me last summer. There were people doing self published stuff and making a fucking fortune. Now, since my health had resulted in me having to leave my job, a fucking fortune sounded right up my alley. On the one hand, I didn't expect to make too much, but on the other hand, after looking into it, it was very much a case of "What have I got to lose?"
My friend had already done a ton of market research and as I went through what she'd learned, some things started to click into place. We talked about it, tried to figure out the best way to do this, discussed the cost/benefit and both of us decided to go for it. There were several others we'd met along the way and we all helped cheer lead each other on.
You see, one of the things the market research confirmed for us is that, well, sex sells. And not just sex, but kinky sex. The kinkier the better. The more we walked the line of what New York would buy, the better our sales were. The first month I made less than $100. By...mmm... January? February? I was paying my rent from the proceeds. Maybe that was March I'd have to look it up.
One of the things that several of us had going for us in this new venture is that we'd already been professionally published. What difference, you might ask, would that make? I don't know that it's a requirement for success at all, but one thing we all already had was the professional writer's mind set. We approached it as a business venture. Don't get me wrong. That doesn't mean the stories are the stereotypical thrown together, badly edited tripe that erotica/porn has a reputation for.That isn't professional. A professional takes pride in her work. Even if it's jack off stories, they were going to be the best written damned jack off stories the world had ever seen. :-)
We all sought professional artists for our covers, there are always some who are willing to give a decent price, especially if they know it'll be steady work. And as most folks like to "brand" their covers, it means once your artist develops a template, then each cover doesn't take all that long. I think the least I've paid for a cover is $23 and the most is close to $40 (or was it $30). I love my cover artist, she does great work and is patient with me when I get scatter brained and forget to pay her on time. :-(
Things have been going well, for the most part, until late spring.
Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
My personal life had been up and down for a while. My health was a struggle, nothing life threatening (well, as long as I took my hypertension meds :-), but insomnia, chronic anemia (stop the bleeding, I want to get off -- what a great title to a TMI self-help book!), hormonal swings like you would not believe, my father's death, my daughter's college hunt, the graduation. Oh, yeah, her four years in an all G/T public school. We are probably the only group of parents on the planet who demanded our children be kept in a crumbling tumble down old school rather than be moved to a new one - you don't put Nerd High kids in with the "Oh, hey, is the gang war scheduled for Tuesday or Wednesday?" kids. Just no.
A lot of things took a backseat during that time. My writing included. Oh, but there was one incredible surprise. Something I didn't expect to ever happen to me again.
I met someone.
And fell in love.
And he's in love with me.
And that is probably the the biggest shock of anything in my life! He's an amazing man with a wonderful family. I think I'm in love with both his kids (if his daughter is reading this, you know what I mean, hon LOL) and his dad. :-) He and I have both been burned, though and neither of us is eager to take this any faster than it needs to go. For now, we have each other, even though we don't live close together and for now, that's fine. The future will do what the future will do. I cherish every moment we have and I thank him daily for bringing me into his beautiful family.
But on the writing front, things got squirrely again.
One thing that started happening around last Christmas, I think it was, is that I started getting blocked again. It was driving me insane. I'd sit down to write and where I had been churning out at least one story a week, if not more, it would start well, then nothing. Just nothing. By late spring of this year I was lucky if I could get any words at all down on the page. I tried, as some of you have likely noticed, to do some fic prompts to try to jump start me, but that hasn't worked. (I still want to do those - they look like fun. :-) I do have one story I hope to get out soon. It's been a hard row to hoe on this one. Partly, and this is so incredibly stupid, I intimidated myself. I'm not saying this is Pulitzer material or anything like that, but I fell in love with the first pages I wrote and then I got paranoid that I couldn't carry that level of quality through the story.
sigh
Man, that looks stupid when I see it written out like that.
I am my own worst enemy.
And I was sliding back into a depressive episode. (Yes, taking care of that. :-)
But sitting here, writing this post and looking at the whole scope of my writing "career" (including the fic years) I'm learning, or maybe just seeing in sharper contrast, things that I hadn't ever realized before.
Primarily? I bore easily.
What pisses me off is that I already knew that. One of the reasons I did well in IT for so long was that the landscape was constantly changing. I never had any one thing going on long enough to get bored with it. Now, I'm the person who can sit and watch the same episode of a tv show, or a movie, or read the same book dozens of times and not get bored. What bores me is when there's something I have to do that's the same old thing.
That first story I wrote fascinated me. The first one I sold? Also, one that fascinated me because I did something different with it. ITCOM? Worthy? Both things that turned some tried and true ideas on their heads. At least for me. So now? With my current output? I think the problem is that I'm getting bored with it.
Now the good news is that now that I know it, I can do something about it. There are many, many ways I can shake it up to keep it fresh enough to hopefully keep me writing.
The Road Goes Ever Onward
So that's where I am now. I'm building up my catalog of self-published stuff and trying to get through this block. My kid's off at college as of the end of August and I've got to move again at the end of the year. But mostly? Mostly things are going well. I'm dealing with my depression. As anyone who's suffers knows, there are good days and bad days and you just have to ride them out. I've got a irons in the fire for a couple of my pen names and an old novel idea has been nagging at me to resurrect it again. (Not one of the undead-novels, one of the "oh, yeah, still gonna do this one" novels.)
I hope you enjoyed this, if you got this far. Maybe you learned something, other than the fact that I'm weird. :-) Maybe you didn't. I know I learned something from the writing of it. I've learned that one of the problems I'm having lately is I'm not challenging myself enough. Also, something I learned a long time ago, I don't respond well to external challenges. I have to find that place inside myself that says "I shouldn't be able to do this, but oh, hell, if I did, I'd do it like this!"
Find your own path. Don't let anyone tell you you have to walk theirs.
Getting My Feet Wet
I didn't start writing until I was in my 30s. I'd always done well with creative writing in school, but no one ever said anything special about it, I'd just get my A and move on. It never occurred to me that I might have any talent. I really did think everyone had long plotty daydreams that ran for weeks and months on end.
Once I got online a million years ago, I met some folks who introduced me to the wonderful world of fanfic writers.
Oh. Wow. :-)
I started writing with a coauthor, who was much more experienced than I was and we even tried to do an original novel. Got as far submitting an outline, synopsis and first three chapters to an agent. But, alas, the agent didn't like the genre we were writing in (or didn't think there was a market for it, I suspect), but DID ask us to submit something else. But that pretty much did it for us. We were crushed and that was that.
Things Are Only Impossible If You Never Try Them
Just before the turn of the century, though, I started feeling the pull. A lot had changed in the intervening years. Two pregnancies, one child, betrayal, divorce, promotions, my life was in serious flux and I was still in the post-divorce rebuilding phase. Discovering writing for the hell of it had been a godsend. But it wasn't enough any more. I was chafing at writing with a partner - I could feel the need to develop my own voice. And, cheesy as it sounds, I wanted to walk into a bookstore and see my name on the shelves. :-) Even geekier? Are you ready for this? I wanted to see a short story of mine in some elementary or junior high school literature book. Seriously. Stop laughing. :-) I found some of the most amazing gems when I'd read my lit books in the first couple of weeks of school every year. To be one of the people some other geeky lit kid discovered like that? Oh. Wow. :-)
So, I was faced with the first question anyone who has ever written original work has to ask: What the fuck am I going to do now?
Writing fic had been a great opening for me. It had allowed me to tell stories with training wheels, but now it was time to take the training wheels off. I knew I needed to challenge myself. To try something that would make me stretch the writing muscles that I hadn't been working while I wrote fic. Mostly, though, I needed to prove to myself that I could do it. I wasn't really sure. I had some long ago high school writing assignments and my coauthored fic and that was it.
So, I sat down and started to write. It was a very VERY different story, and one that never did find a home, but I will always love it. It took me *weeks* to write. Looking back, it was the hardest thing I've ever written. Not just because it was first, but because I'd chosen to do something incredibly difficult in terms of character and POV and so forth. I think the second hardest thing I've ever done, in writing terms, at least, in my entire life was sending that out the first time. I'd done market research so I had a list of magazines to submit to (no online stuff then). I'd ordered them by how much they paid per word then by their posted response times. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science fiction was always my first choice because they paid well and Gordon Van Gelder promised, and delivered, about a week's response time. That's warp speed, folks. He also writes the most charming rejection letters. "Alas, I'm afraid I can't purchase [insert story name] at this time..." Never underestimate the power of a charming rejection letter. :-)
I think setting myself an impossible task was the right thing to do. I don't know that anyone else on the planet would ever think that story is worth the paper it's printed on, but when I reread it (yes, I reread my own stuff), I see not only the story but I see the blood, sweat and tears that went into it and I remember how stoked I was that I'd actually accomplished it!
“Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a piece of blank paper until your forehead bleeds” -- Douglas Adams
I was also trying to get myself into a writing habit - as soon as my kid went to bed at night, I'd sit down to write and write for at least 2 hours, if not more. I was lucky if I got 250 words a night to start with.
But then something amazing happened. My word count started going up. In time, I was regularly writing 1000 - 1500 words a night. It was *glorious*. :-)
And then another amazing something happened. I came in from grocery shopping or something and sat down to check email only to find a tip from a friend about a magazine that was now taking electronic submissions. WHOOO-HOOO! The night before, I'd had a marathon writing session (kid was at her dad's) and had finished my latest story. It was the longest thing I'd written to that point - over 10k words. I immediately opened the file and started the edit. All the years of handwriting papers had taught me to be a pretty clean first draft writer, so I didn't have much to do, just a bit of tweaking here and there. Then I sent it out. My first electronic submission.
To this day I couldn't tell you how long I waited to hear back. Sometimes I think it was weeks, other times mere hours but when I did hear back? Oh, hell. I had my first sale. I was so damned shocked! LOL And happy. And damn that was a nice check to get in the mail. Paid my childcare for the month as well as some groceries and I even bought jewelry. Which I still have. :-)
Once the initial excitement wore off, I then had the most horrible realization.
I had to do it again.
That's another feeling I'll never forget. Sorta like that split second when the roller coaster car drops before you do and you're hanging in mid air at the top of a rickety wooden coaster wondering what the fuck possessed you to step into this death trap in the first place.
But I had my first professional sale and I was so damned proud of that. I'd had "old pros" tell me that just finishing an original story put me ahead of 90% of people who call themselves "authors". Submitting one to a magazine then put me ahead of 90% of that 10% and actually selling? Rarefied territory.
Of course, I was at the lowest level of that rarefied territory, but I didn't give a flying fuck about that.
I was a professional author. Definitely one of the highest points in my life.
Submit, Reject, Resubmit, Rinse and Repeat
So I kept writing. At the time I was writing fantasy and science fiction, my first loves. I eventually had several stories out making the rounds at any given time, though most came home to eventually languish in my files. A few sales here and there, some interest in some remarkable, at least to me, places that kept me from wallowing in the rejections for a long time. :-)
I have never been so organized in my life.
I had a system. I'd print out two copies of a story. One would go in the files and one would go in an envelope. In the story's file, I'd put the mailing labels for all the markets I thought it had a shot in. I'd also put a copy of the cover letter, which would then have the rejection letter attached to it (unless it sold - a rare event :-). When a story was rejected, I'd file the rejection letter, trash the copy of the story (assuming they sent it back), print a new one and have it out in the mail that day, or the next at the latest.
This went on for several years. During the time I was sending out short stories, I was also teaching myself to write novels. Not an easy task, I might add. I had several failures that not only never saw the light of day but their corpses have been salted and staked at the crossroads to keep them from ever rising again.
Much as I wanted to have that story in the public school lit book, what I really wanted was to write novels. I had these incredible places and ideas in my head but telling their stories was proving to be damn near impossible.
This is when despair started to creep in.
Beware the Writer's Block, My Son, the Jaws That Bite, the Claws That Catch
My daughter was growing up, and while she was never a difficult kid, just having a young teen around can be a trial in and of itself. She was involved in theater at school, Girl Scouts (whatever possessed me to volunteer to be COOKIE MOM that year? ARGH!) and that doesn't even touch on her homework load in her gifted/talented program. My job wasn't doing well - oh, it was secure enough but I hated the direction the department was going. Hated management and was bored out of my ever-lovin' mind. I was also starting to have some hormonal spikes, so to speak. (Knock wood that's done.) All in all, my carefully structured writing environment came crashing down around me.
My daughter was staying up later and later doing homework, and often needed me to help explain things. The time I used to spend writing at lunch at work vanished as more and more "lunch breaks" were spent at my desk trying to deal with whatever new WTFery the idiots upstairs had come up with. I hadn't made any sales in a long time and I was really beginning to think it had all been a fluke. My latest novel died aborning as I couldn't get past the first couple of chapters at all. I was dealing with my first bout of the dreaded "Writer's Block".
Friends could tell me all they wanted that I was talented and so on, but if no one was buying what I wrote what the fuck difference did it make how much talent I might or might not have. It was getting harder and harder to keep plugging away.
One weekend when my daughter was at her dad's it came to a head. What I didn't realize at the time was that more than just writer's block, I was also struggling with a massive depressive episode. I had pulled out my story file to see if there was anything in it I might want to try revising or that might inspire me. I had one novel idea based on the same universe as my first sale and while that one had stalled, I thought there might be other gold to mine. I sat in my living room, looking through my work and suddenly I hated it. I hated it all. I hated every bastard who'd rejected my work. I hated me for thinking I had any chance to be a writer in the first place.
I remember picking up that file, it was one of those accordion files with the string you tie to keep it closed. It held all my short stories and their "histories", contracts, everything. I was in such a rage, I'm glad I didn't think of burning them because I probably would have burned down the apartment for the hell of it. Instead, I stormed out to the dumpster and threw the whole thing in. Came home and proceeded to polish off the bottle of whatever it was I had in the cabinet over the fridge. I don't recall what it was now, but I drank it all. So far as I was concerned, I was done with it. Sometime during that night, I deleted all the electronic files from my hard drive, too.
My writing career, such as it was, was over.
Long Dark Nights...
At this point, I not only withdrew from writing, but also from most of the friends I'd made in the field. It hurt too much and to this day I regret this more than anything else. I started drinking way too much. And before anyone asks, even now, looking back, I can't say I had a drinking problem, but if I hadn't finally sought help, I might have in time. I confined my drinking to my home and only when my daughter was at her dad's and only when I had no responsibilities the next day. The cold-bloodedness of my planning is one of the things that tells me I was starting down a dark road. I will still plan "nights of too much alcohol" but they are few and far between and never, ever when I'm on a downward spiral. Now, it's just for fun (and it helps that I don't get hangovers LOL). "Too much" has taken on a new meaning, too. It's a much smaller amount than it used to be.
To this day, I have no idea what caused me to realize I was having a depressive episode. I'd had trouble with depression before, right after my divorce. I was seeing my GP regularly for my hypertension, it may be that she noticed something and suggested it. At any rate, I finally asked her for a prescription and we talked about things I could do to help myself. I wasn't interested in counseling, though I think it probably would have been a good idea. I have a feeling I may end up in therapy at some point, but that's a hurdle too high for me to manage just yet.
So, I started to take my meds again and in time the darkness lightened. That's when I started to regret having thrown out all my work...and when I discovered some "secret" electronic stashes of it. :-) I started hunting down all the files I could find from various accounts, comparing them, finding the latest versions and so on. I managed to recreate most of my work, but some are gone forever. It wasn't until a couple of years ago, when I moved, that I found a copy of that very first story. I confess. I wept when I found it.
...and Welcome Dawns
I remember when I was first writing, I'd watch Stargate SG1, but then I lost Showtime and didn't have SciFi and that was that. Then, when I did get access to it again, I wasn't writing, but it was season 6, which I had no interest in because OMG THEY KILLED DANIEL! Then I heard they were bringing the character back (gotta love science fiction) and I was back with a vengeance. Plus, it was the first real interest I had felt in much of anything in a while. I bought the DVDs to get caught up and oh, wow, it was wonderful. It caught my imagination like nothing had in a long time.
I remember I kept thinking I could write this. I could do this. But no, if I was going to write again, I was going to write original work, not fic. I fought that for a long time, until an idea came to me. Once the idea wiggled its way into my skull, I was toast. But now I had another problem.
By the time I decided that not writing SG1 fic was a lost cause, I was already realizing that I had to keep writing original fiction, too. But by that time, I was also gun shy...and I didn't want to broadcast that I was writing fanfic. Believe it or not, it wasn't that long ago when editors and agents would turn up their noses at anyone who had the slightest whiff of fic about them. And so tejas was born.
I had been, as I saw it, a spectacular failure. My initial gung-ho enthusiasm had died and been buried that night in the dumpster. So part of my reason for giving in to the siren call of SG1 fic was to get back on the horse. Prove myself.
And once again, I had to do it the hard way.
I decided that if I was going to do this, I'd do it with something novel-length -- put the training wheels back on for a bit and see if the problem was experience, skill or simply not being able to think in novel sized chunks. So, what did I do? I sat down and churned out the first 5k or so of In the Company of Men and posted it on The Cartouche. Over the next several months, I'd post a chapter, sometimes, two, a week. Some of you remember that, I suspect. What was hard about that? An AU with no women, mpreg, meeting up with the folks from this universe, one J/D pair long time married with kids, one having their attraction slapped in their faces in the most intimate way. Oh, and it was 160kish long, posted as I went (never ever again) and my first slash piece.
What could go wrong?
It took about four months to write. And this was the good part. I had proven to myself that, at least with training wheels, I could write novel length stories. I could handle some subplots and multiple character arcs and so forth. And world building. Oh, fuck, I fell in love with world building. I'd done it before, of course, but there was something about designing the AU in ITCOM that flicked a switch inside. I could spend my life world building and die happy. I feel like a frustrated terraformer. In any event, it went a LONG way toward restoring my confidence in my ability.
Only one problem.
I got so caught up in it, I found myself focusing on fic and ignoring my original work.
Oh, I pulled out some things that had been languishing and I played with them, but that's pretty much all I was doing. I was still uncertain with my original work. So, instead, I decided to commit myself to fic for a while. See if I could get through the rough spots. I had fun with SG1, I even have some ideas I'd still love to play with, but eventually I moved on to NCIS fic. Which is where I tried my next major challenge. Shapeshifting, genderbending (but still slash - that was a hoot!) world within a world, "Worthy".
It's not nearly as long as ITCOM, but it was so much fun to write and to build and I still have a lot of stories I want to tell in that universe. But that's about when my pro career started to take a new turn.
She Writes Romance, You Write Erotica, I Write Porn
A friend of mine pointed out something very, very interesting to me last summer. There were people doing self published stuff and making a fucking fortune. Now, since my health had resulted in me having to leave my job, a fucking fortune sounded right up my alley. On the one hand, I didn't expect to make too much, but on the other hand, after looking into it, it was very much a case of "What have I got to lose?"
My friend had already done a ton of market research and as I went through what she'd learned, some things started to click into place. We talked about it, tried to figure out the best way to do this, discussed the cost/benefit and both of us decided to go for it. There were several others we'd met along the way and we all helped cheer lead each other on.
You see, one of the things the market research confirmed for us is that, well, sex sells. And not just sex, but kinky sex. The kinkier the better. The more we walked the line of what New York would buy, the better our sales were. The first month I made less than $100. By...mmm... January? February? I was paying my rent from the proceeds. Maybe that was March I'd have to look it up.
One of the things that several of us had going for us in this new venture is that we'd already been professionally published. What difference, you might ask, would that make? I don't know that it's a requirement for success at all, but one thing we all already had was the professional writer's mind set. We approached it as a business venture. Don't get me wrong. That doesn't mean the stories are the stereotypical thrown together, badly edited tripe that erotica/porn has a reputation for.That isn't professional. A professional takes pride in her work. Even if it's jack off stories, they were going to be the best written damned jack off stories the world had ever seen. :-)
We all sought professional artists for our covers, there are always some who are willing to give a decent price, especially if they know it'll be steady work. And as most folks like to "brand" their covers, it means once your artist develops a template, then each cover doesn't take all that long. I think the least I've paid for a cover is $23 and the most is close to $40 (or was it $30). I love my cover artist, she does great work and is patient with me when I get scatter brained and forget to pay her on time. :-(
Things have been going well, for the most part, until late spring.
Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
My personal life had been up and down for a while. My health was a struggle, nothing life threatening (well, as long as I took my hypertension meds :-), but insomnia, chronic anemia (stop the bleeding, I want to get off -- what a great title to a TMI self-help book!), hormonal swings like you would not believe, my father's death, my daughter's college hunt, the graduation. Oh, yeah, her four years in an all G/T public school. We are probably the only group of parents on the planet who demanded our children be kept in a crumbling tumble down old school rather than be moved to a new one - you don't put Nerd High kids in with the "Oh, hey, is the gang war scheduled for Tuesday or Wednesday?" kids. Just no.
A lot of things took a backseat during that time. My writing included. Oh, but there was one incredible surprise. Something I didn't expect to ever happen to me again.
I met someone.
And fell in love.
And he's in love with me.
And that is probably the the biggest shock of anything in my life! He's an amazing man with a wonderful family. I think I'm in love with both his kids (if his daughter is reading this, you know what I mean, hon LOL) and his dad. :-) He and I have both been burned, though and neither of us is eager to take this any faster than it needs to go. For now, we have each other, even though we don't live close together and for now, that's fine. The future will do what the future will do. I cherish every moment we have and I thank him daily for bringing me into his beautiful family.
But on the writing front, things got squirrely again.
One thing that started happening around last Christmas, I think it was, is that I started getting blocked again. It was driving me insane. I'd sit down to write and where I had been churning out at least one story a week, if not more, it would start well, then nothing. Just nothing. By late spring of this year I was lucky if I could get any words at all down on the page. I tried, as some of you have likely noticed, to do some fic prompts to try to jump start me, but that hasn't worked. (I still want to do those - they look like fun. :-) I do have one story I hope to get out soon. It's been a hard row to hoe on this one. Partly, and this is so incredibly stupid, I intimidated myself. I'm not saying this is Pulitzer material or anything like that, but I fell in love with the first pages I wrote and then I got paranoid that I couldn't carry that level of quality through the story.
sigh
Man, that looks stupid when I see it written out like that.
I am my own worst enemy.
And I was sliding back into a depressive episode. (Yes, taking care of that. :-)
But sitting here, writing this post and looking at the whole scope of my writing "career" (including the fic years) I'm learning, or maybe just seeing in sharper contrast, things that I hadn't ever realized before.
Primarily? I bore easily.
What pisses me off is that I already knew that. One of the reasons I did well in IT for so long was that the landscape was constantly changing. I never had any one thing going on long enough to get bored with it. Now, I'm the person who can sit and watch the same episode of a tv show, or a movie, or read the same book dozens of times and not get bored. What bores me is when there's something I have to do that's the same old thing.
That first story I wrote fascinated me. The first one I sold? Also, one that fascinated me because I did something different with it. ITCOM? Worthy? Both things that turned some tried and true ideas on their heads. At least for me. So now? With my current output? I think the problem is that I'm getting bored with it.
Now the good news is that now that I know it, I can do something about it. There are many, many ways I can shake it up to keep it fresh enough to hopefully keep me writing.
The Road Goes Ever Onward
So that's where I am now. I'm building up my catalog of self-published stuff and trying to get through this block. My kid's off at college as of the end of August and I've got to move again at the end of the year. But mostly? Mostly things are going well. I'm dealing with my depression. As anyone who's suffers knows, there are good days and bad days and you just have to ride them out. I've got a irons in the fire for a couple of my pen names and an old novel idea has been nagging at me to resurrect it again. (Not one of the undead-novels, one of the "oh, yeah, still gonna do this one" novels.)
I hope you enjoyed this, if you got this far. Maybe you learned something, other than the fact that I'm weird. :-) Maybe you didn't. I know I learned something from the writing of it. I've learned that one of the problems I'm having lately is I'm not challenging myself enough. Also, something I learned a long time ago, I don't respond well to external challenges. I have to find that place inside myself that says "I shouldn't be able to do this, but oh, hell, if I did, I'd do it like this!"
Find your own path. Don't let anyone tell you you have to walk theirs.