A Half-year is gone
I was wondering what I should write about this morning, and I was quite surprised that half the year had gone in a snap of my fingers. Between working on my kidney transplant list (to get on the list), fatigue, and normal chores, I haven't been writing as much as I wanted.
I forget that I'm not that young twenty year old anymore. I edited my short stories of the Green Knight Terraforming Co. and put them up on Amazon as a collection. I've been working on "Xandra Peel," human hybrid troll, and "Eerie Mae," necromancer. The second one will be put up in Kindle Vella as episodes. It will be something new to try.
"Unlicensed Sorceress" is still in the works. I've heard about cursed novels. I don't think it is cursed-- just that I've been writing it through a couple surgeries, dialysis, and deaths. One of the deaths was of my friend and editor, which stopped me cold for months. It's a good book, but I don't seem to be able to get much farther than half-way. I'll keep plugging.
What keeps me plugging is that I need meaning and purpose to the pain. Recently I went to a chiropractor, which has helped with my hip that loves to pop in and out of the joint. Other pain and fatigue seems to fade away when I am writing.
Recently I started reading some WMG Writing Guides written by Dean Wesley Smith and his wife, Kristine Katherine Rusch. They have been writing fiction for decades now and have made a good living at it. What made me do some real thinking was Stages of a Fiction Writer.
So there are four stages of a writer and every good writer goes through each one. I won't explain them here. If you want to know about it, then you can read his book. However, I got to thinking of where I was in the writing stage. I'm probably at early Stage three because I am thinking less about the words and grammar, and thinking more about the story. This is the most dangerous stage for a writer because it takes a long time to go from a storyteller to an entertainer, which is State four. Plus at this stage, writers get discouraged and give up. Most never get past this stage.
I really wanted to give up these last two years. I couldn't do much more than read after the immuno-suppressants and the kidney failure. I couldn't think past three items on a shopping list. Without memory and the ability to pull ideas together, I couldn't write. It's been the last couple of months that I realized that the more I didn't write, the easier it was to sink into a non-life.
Now that I'm writing back on this blog, and doing a small amount of fiction writing, I'm coming back to my more optimistic self. It reminds me that everyone needs a purpose besides just existing. So those times I can't write, I'll study writing.