I accidentally sent the last update as an email to al subscribers. Sorry about that! Or maybe not. Maybe you’d all appreciate having this in your inbox every day, but it feels excessive to me so I’ll keep them here where you can take a look at your leisure.
10 years ago, I wrote a short story that ended up becoming Songs of my Mother. It became a finalist for the Baen Fantasy Adventure Award but remained unpublished. Was rejected by just about every major magazine, but it’s now finally out in Sword and Sorcery Magazine’s newest issue!
Should give you a feel for this world we’re talking about, that I’m still writing about in Twilight of the Wolves.
I’ve pushed pause on the rest of my writing while we all wait for my dad to die. Sometimes I scream in my car when I’m alone driving 70mph down the highway between my house and his. All around me death and dying and here I persist in my writing, in this novel that’s come to dominate my every errant thought and moment.
And today I keep rolling forward.
Writing about simple pleasures, simple deeds, about learning and curiosity, establishing more and more, laying groundwork, planting seeds, tossing a ball into the air that I hope to catch 500 pages later.
This is often a lot of what writing comes down to.
But what it really, truly, honestly comes down to is sitting in the chair and putting in the time. While writing is fun and something I love, the easiest thing in the world to do is to simply not write. To not bother. And I understand this impulse because there are many times I don’t write any fiction for months.
But novels only happen when you sit down and do it. Even when you don’t feel like it. Even when your dad’s dying. Even when the world feels like it’s falling apart all around you.
I could philosophize and wax on about all this but writing is work and you should treat it like work. And the work remains even when everything sucks, when everything’s turning to shit.
Even when you’re screaming in your car on the way home from the hospital.
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