Having had a few holiday slowdown type events, this has been delayed. So, let me belatedly wish you all a very happy end of/start of year. For a lot of people, it’s shaping up to be another tough one.
On my end it’s been a series of struggles, with some slippage tied to that burnout, some clear recovery, a couple of panic attacks and some surprisingly lucid inspirations.
Right now I’m planning out the next work season in my idiosyncratic calendar, a ‘spring’ that runs January through May, and I think I need to be both realistic and less ambitious… but still ambitious.
The thing about ambitions is that sometimes we’re prepared for them, sometimes we’re not. I spent a lot of last year spinning my wheels on Quicker than Blood (appropriate given the driving theme to a lot of it), and I think rather than let the wheels keep digging in, I need to take a break and try my hand at writing one or two novellas over the next few months.
Something to help me get slightly out of my head and give me a little more perspective, maybe help me see the problems I’ve been having getting Quicker than Blood to happen from a new light. I still love the concept for the book, but it’s more of a struggle than it should be.
Worst case (which isn’t that bad), working on something shorter will help me figure out what the problem is. Best case, there’s some shorter material I can either post online as a sort of mini-serial story or publish in ‘zine or pamphlet form… something a little different, pretty much.
We’ll see what happens, but I will say that it’s been much, much too long since I’ve put my sights on smaller projects, and that’s a little sad, since shorter projects were how I got started in the craft in the first place.
Also, I think huge chunky novels are… perhaps not quite the best way to introduce people to my work. Saying, ‘hey, sit down and read what I have to offer for a double digit number of hours’ is a little intimidating, you know?
We’ll see how it all turns out, but, for now, and as ever, thank you for your support and interest. The kindness of others is one of the key reasons I can keep going onward with resilience.
