March 8, 2023
Emotional State: The Messy Middle
Writing
I’ve been in a dither recently (okay, more than just recently). On the one hand, I want to write the books that interest me. On the other, I want to earn enough from my books to support my family and not stress about bills, vacations, or other expenditures.
Popular conventional wisdom is stay in your lane. Focus on finishing up your current series, stick to one genre, gather your fans that way, and then make the jump to another. But I didn’t do that. I didn’t do it because I had another series in mind, one that is easier in many respects to write than my urban fantasy series. So, I wrote my cozy mystery series, or at least the first two books.
And then I saw posts from other people in UF who published the same time as me but did a fast release of all three books in the series and they did really well from those books. I’m not going to compare my series to theirs, because it’s different. And because theirs is much closer to the standard tropes of the genre than mine. I can’t fast release my UF series in the same way and I don’t want to, either.
That being said, I thought, “Hey! I can do that. Pump out three books in a new UF series, fast release them, hit all the tropes, and see some financial success.” When I laid out the new series and characters, however, I felt that while my idea is different, there is a lot to the pattern that is derivative of that other author’s work.
And I don’t want that.
I want to be original. I want to write the books I want to write, regardless of conventional wisdom. All my plans for this year were upended by that decision. I’d laid out an aggressive schedule to fit in my current two series of books, plus write three books in another one, and now I wasn’t doing that.
Which brings me to March. Book 2 of my current UF series is out in a week. Book 2 of my cozy series is in the middle of edits and getting posted on Vella. I was supposed to write a book this month while editing the cozy book, but I entered March a bit exhausted. So, I’ve not started writing.
But the question remains, what am I doing next? New series? Fast release the cozy series? Work on book 3 of my current UF series? None of the above? The choices are overwhelming because I just can’t decide where to go and why I want to do that.
So, this morning, I did a tarot reading, following a spread in The Creative Tarot guide (highly recommend if you’re creative and pull tarot cards). What came up was interesting and it was all about balance.
Don’t think, dream.
Follow my muse.
Learn the craft.
Heal the wound.
Be consistent.
Show up.
Find the balance between the ego and the work.
There is a balance I need to find between getting the work done and following my muse. If I only followed my muse, I’d not write or edit every day. The longer the gaps, the more likely I wouldn’t finish anything good enough to publish. I have a tendency to slide in to lazy like a second skin. In order to fight that, I need consistency and a schedule of some sort (with wiggle room to be, well, lazy).
But if I allow my mind to tell me what to do, it’s going to be logical and practical – make money, write the new series, worry about the cozy mysteries and my other series later. Show me the money, in other words (keeping in mind there is no guarantee I’d see the same success as any other author). And that wouldn’t fulfill me, either.
So, I’m going to follow the reading and find that balance. Follow the muse when it comes to writing something new but follow my mind to set a consistent schedule to edit and do some prompted writing sprints. And in between I’m going to continue reading and learning about craft to keep improving my writing (and my current focus, my newsletter).
In a way, I think I’m so caught up in indecision that I can’t see my way forward. Instead of following one path or the other, I’m going to find the balance between them. The path in the middle. The path that will still move me forward, but maybe not as aggressively as I’d planned or as I thought (think?) I should be moving.
After all, I want to enjoy the process. I can’t do that if I lean too far one way or the other.