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When I was a kid, I discovered reading through my mum, who had a great collection of Agatha Christie books. When those ran out, she took me to the library to get a card, and a whole new world of books and authors were laid out before me. I veered toward horror stories. most notably by James Herbert, and started to write my own little tales. the one that I really remember was a story about a group of sailors washing up on a dinosaur inhabited island after their vessel was torpedoed by a submarine. Of course, wackiness ensued and blood was shed. Yes, I was a dark little lad, even at the tender age of 12 or 13.
In the years that followed, I would go through writing spurts, followed by long periods of nothing, although the ideas never stopped popping into my head. After meeting my wife, I began to write regularly again, reactivating the muscle that had lain dormant for far too long. During that phase, I rediscovered the love of writing, and was lucky enough to have Karaoke Night published. That led to a crazy period of roughly 15 books in a 3-4 year period.
Burnout was inevitable.
Over the last year or so, I have come to something of a crossroads. I have a novella half finished, and have been delivering shorts to the Terror Monthly group for their anthologies, which has been fun. At this point, though, it feels like a chore to write. Perhaps it's because I have found real joy in making ambient music for YouTube and learning photography. The reality, though, might well be that I have taken my writing career as far as it can go. Karaoke Night, my first book, did really well and continues to sell, but it has been diminishing returns ever since, even though I believe that my better work came after KN.
Does this mean that I am walking away from writing? Absolutely not. I have been in these funks before and have always pulled out and rediscovered the love of putting words to paper. I will continue to write shorts for Terror Monthly, but I need to figure out of there is an audience for my novels and novellas before committing the amount of time required to complete those projects.
In truth, I look at the banner sitting atop my Facebook page and frequently berate myself for not having anything new out there for a while now. The ideas are there, and I actually have 3 major ideas that are fully fleshed out in my head. Maybe I need to stop overthinking things and just start writing, but the thought of releasing another book and seeing no real return is never easy. When all is said and done, the ideas and desire will probably win out, as they always seem to do.
Hopefully I'll see you all between the pages a few more times before those ideas all dry up or I keel over on my laptop.
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