Sorry for the long radio silence. To say that real life (vs. this dream of a life we share online) has had to take precedence the last few months is to sell it short. Too much of life lately has been in dealing with the very tangible, leaving little room for thoughts and musings idylically shared online.
For long time readers of this blog, and I know I must have alienated most of you but surely there are a handful left, I _am_ still writing. I think Ramsey Campbell expressed it best in Where Nightmares Come From, a smaller press book on writing with a lot of hidden gems.
I once waited to continue work on a story until I felt inspired, only to burden myself with writer’s block that lasted six months.
Ramsey Campbell, The Process of a Tale, pg 100
I don’t want to be overly dramatic about it, but real life aside, writer’s block has been a huge factor. I’ve been struggling with understanding where my voice as a writer lives. For too long, I think, I’ve been trying to affect a type of writing because it’s what I enjoy reading. But when I break it down, I don’t enjoy writing it. I have beside my desk the first draft of The Mermaid’s Tears. It’s a beast, it’s rough, and there’s a lot about it I loved writing. There’s also bits that stick in my craw.
A month or so ago, I started a new short story. I’ve stumbled a bit the last few weeks on finishing it, though I intend to buckle down and get it out this weekend because I already have starter notes for a few more stories I want to write. It’s a change in direction for my writing, or rather a reversal back to how I used to write before I got it in my head I had to be a great fantasy or science fiction author (I will be neither). I’m writing this one largely by hand, because by hand is how I first started writing before I had laptops and portable technology that made digitizing everything easy. But I can share the first few lines of the first draft:
In a house by the Sea, there lived a boy. It wasn’t the boy’s house, but it was empty, and it was dry, and for a time, it was safe.
The boy had nothing in this world but the clothes on his back and a grey metal box. The box had eight sides – the six you can see, and the two you forget. It was covered in carving of ornate vines, cut from the surface of the box.
All of that is likely to change, but it’s the seed that started a story, and that felt good to accomplish. I don’t know how many words I’ve written – my handwriting shifts from tight and neat to sprawling and messy and back again over the course of the pages, making a rough per page count hard. I’ll know it’s done when I finish writing it, I suppose. It’s a gothic, I think, or maybe not. I’ll find out when I get closer to the end.
Hopefully, I’ll have more to share soon. Just don’t be alarmed by long silences