Sunday, December 27, 2015

Reflections on a Year of Writing

Well, December has arrived once again so it is time to prepare my works for the archive once again.  Each year I amass all the papers surrounding my writing together with a CD of my writing files containing all the drafts and stories, regardless of whether they've sold or not.  There's a LOT of unpublished stories in those files, some good, most bad, although to be honest some of the latter category eventually moved into the sold column - go figure.

Engaging in this preparation forces me to review the past year and assess my progress.  The statistics get messy because a story sold this year might not appear until next, just as those sold in 2014 didn't get published until this year.  Also, how do I account for those Schrodinger drafts in circulation, who might be sold or not, but are as yet undetermined?

Here are the statistics as I count them.  I wrote about a jillion words, counting revisions, and sold just ten short stories, only four of which have been published so far.  At the same time, two stories and an article that were sold in 2014 finally saw print.  Still on my workbench are four novels; two at the 90% point (I hope), one languishing in first-draft, another completed and looking for reviewers, and six short stories varying from three to twenty thousand words, or I should say planned to be that length or maybe they'll turn out that way despite my best intentions. Like the Schrodinger cats in circulation the rest of my workbench is in a perpetual state of disordered foam from which (p)articles appear from time to time. Such as my recently published novel: DISTANT SEAS.

So why do I feel so dissatisfied with my writing? Is all of this effort merely to salve my ego? I certainly don't think I continually hit on some social theme or pound on a political message, but that's up to the critics to remark upon after I am long gone.  It surely isn't the money or acclimation for I get damned little of either in return for the effort.

So, at the end of the year I am at the same place as last - frustrated at my failures and deathly afraid that someone will realize how great an imposter I've become.



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1 comment:

  1. Gosh, that last paragraph makes you sound like a real writer. No, it made the rest of us sound like real writers because you are one!

    Don't worry Bud, I loved Distant Seas and it's made me track you down to ask a favour of you.... it's on your world-building blog post!

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