What am I supposed to do now?
When hiatus and opportunity blur. It's a mindset thing...
If there’s an air of desperation in the question, please forgive me. And in a way it’s also a largely rhetorical one i.e. I think I know the answer.
Let me explain.
Two months ago we moved house, which has meant that for the last nine weeks I have been ‘settling in’ to our new environment and the way my days are starting to pan out - our daughter has now gone off to university and my wife has just started a new job…
Prior to moving - and not wanting to have writing projects left unfinished or ‘in limbo’ during a period of geographical disruption - I spent much of my time tying-off loose ends. The consequence of all of this is that, now I finally have time to get my head up, I find my writing plate relatively empty. Yes, I have an embryonic new poetry/photography collection on the go (see the work-in-progress section here), the draft of a new poetic performance monologue in the style of Crash, my poetry/writing groups, plus two new anthologies I am curating under my Coverstory books imprint and for which the submission windows are open. But there is no prose.
In addition, in the last few days I have been the recipient of some good advice.
Start a Substack to build a new audience / give my writing the chance to pay its way.
And here it is!
You need to think about treating your writing as a job.
And although I am in the enviable position of being able to do so, I’m struggling to join the dots.
You need to be passionate about - and dedicated to - your major work-in-progress.
And for me that inevitably means prose, and thus the void looms large.
There are three fiction projects I’ve started in the last year: an occasional suite of short stories now collectively running to 24,500 words; a contemporary ‘literary fiction’ novel at 31,000 words (and about 25% through the first draft); and an embryonic, slightly dystopian novel set in the near future (only 2,500 words, but lots of ideas).
That may sound like I have a choice, but right now it doesn’t feel like one; churning the handle to produce words is one thing, being inspired to tell the associated story is something else entirely. Actually, it feels a little empty…
What complicates matters further is a desire to try something stylistically different - probably like Crash but in prose. This nebulous ambition has been kicking around for a long while, as has my lack of courage in exploring it!
I’ve been here before of course. Show me a writer who hasn’t! And what I normally do is plug away at the things I have on the go - building my Substack profile, working on the poetry collection, drafting the odd short story - while I wait for the magic to happen. And it usually does.
But that’s not how one goes about ‘a job’ is it?
I attended some sessions from the Alliance of Independent Authors annual conference yesterday with the overarching theme of ‘mindset’. And that, I think I’ve decided, is what I need to get straight. Indeed, the new environment - physical and temporal - demands as much. Perhaps my dilemma can be resolved by giving myself a good talking too; that has worked in the past!
So this coming week is important in that context; not in writing so much, but in putting myself in the best place to be productive fiction-wise.
And I’m grateful for having this new Substack project to occupy some of my time; it provides me with some of the goals and structure I need. And some feedback from like-minded souls would be great too!
As for the rest..? Stay tuned.