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Doubt

Burned Out

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I am burned out.

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I have been burning the candle at both ends, and as so many have said before, you can’t do that forever.

I’m a mom, corporate employee, spouse, writer, and person who exercises.

I just can’t be all of it the way I want all the time, and I’m paying the price.

 

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And here I gave up coffee…

I am no longer finding joy in writing.

I’m finding less happiness in blogging.

All of the branding and social media is exhausting. A more extroverted person might not find it so, but that’s not me. Few writers seem to be natural extroverts, though they do exist, and this whole use of personality to connect with readers is starting to seem spurious at best.

So, I unplugged. I took several days off of all social media, and no one missed me. Makes me think social media is a lot less social than its name implies.

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I haven’t exercised in over a week.

Rather than feeling tired and run down, I’m actually feeling better. Maybe the break was needed.

I haven’t written in 5 days. Not even over the weekend. It felt good.

No guilt at sneaking in a few words while the kids were playing or while I was doing housework. No race to the computer once the kids were in bed.

I don’t know what this means for me long term. Perhaps it’s the wake-up call I need to get my priorities straight and realize I can’t do everything I want and need to do.

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I’ve spent the last 2.5 years working on my writing. The last 1.5 years adding a blog and other social branding to the mix. I have yet to publish a book. I don’t even have an agent.

A growing part of me says to self-publish and be done. Put the work I’ve already done out there and walk away. But I can’t do that without feeling disingenuous.

If my self-published work fails, which it most likely will, I won’t know how it could have done if I pushed forward and kept up the branding. If I had a back list. Or if I’d tried, really tried, and succeeded in landing a publisher like Avon that know the Romance market.

I’ve walked away from writing before. Many times before. It demands so much, and there are so many other things in life that need me.

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Is this the doubt-demon making an appearance? Again…

Perhaps I just need a break. A chance to catch my breath. To ignore my muse for a while so she’ll want to come back (she can be fickle like that).

Or maybe I need to take a long break and ease back. I already know I will never be a full time writer. We depend on my corporate America income.

 

Have you ever come to a point where you know something has to give? Where you’re feeling frazzled, burned out, and like you aren’t always present in the moment? What did you do about it? What choices did you make? How did you deal with it?

I Clearly Misplaced It

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Looking for my motivation. Yes, I’ve clearly misplaced it, but I’m not sure where.

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That’s not entirely true.

We’ve had a run of nasty sicknesses in my house. From ear infections, to stomach flu, to five-day fevers, we haven’t had more than a couple weeks all year where someone in the house isn’t sick. Work has also been really busy, and my lunch hour has been usurped so that I can still make it home in time for the kids. We snuck in a mini-vacation as well.

Yet, that’s only part of it. I was super busy going into the new year, but I still found time to write. Even as we faced the holidays, which are my peak time at work, and potential unemployment and loss of benefits, I still made time to write.

But that isn’t happening now.

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You and me both!

I examined my work-in-progress. Perhaps the story is weak or the characters are flat, but I don’t think that’s it. The hero has been teasing around in my thoughts for a couple of years. The heroine is newer, but I feel like she’s well flushed out. I really get her personality, her background, and her desires. The plot dancing around the romance isn’t as robust as it could be. I’ve spent some time thinking it through, and I’m closer to having all of it nailed down without pigeon-holing my characters.

Remember, the moment I write an outline, the story is dead. But I do know where it’s going. Mostly.

Yet, I still haven’t been applying bottom to chair and making the first draft words happen. Why is that?

Honestly, I’m not sure.

I did recently get a new laptop so I don’t have to be cut-off from the family while writing. Perhaps that’s my issue. I’m less inclined to isolate myself to put words on the page. Apparently, being around other humans, even small ones, steals away my ability to write.

Maybe it’s something else. Something a little deeper.

After two years and three novels, I still have nothing published. Nothing ready to publish. My plan had been to finish the book I’m currently working on and then go back and make the final(?) round of revisions to Crowned Prince before trying to get an agent for it.

Perhaps I should contemplate working on a revision for either of the other two novels I have completed instead. I just don’t want to forget how to write fresh words. It’s a skill, like any other, and must be practiced. And it’s easy for me to get sucked into editing, letting the more analytical side of me take over.

Maybe it’s something else entirely.

Not the doubt demon, not exactly, but sometimes I feel like I’m spinning my wheels.

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I haven’t forgotten you.

I’ve devoted a lot of time to writing for the past two years. I even worked on Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving. At the end of that time, I have some pixels on a screen, but little else. No agent. No book deal. Not even a manuscript that’s truly ready for an agent.

I’ve worked hard at it, and it feels like I’ve accomplished nothing.

I know me. I know making things happen motivates me. To have spent so much time on something and feel like I have nothing to show for it makes me rethink how I’m spending my time. Makes me question if I should be spending time on this.

I have to remind myself I haven’t really failed yet. I’ve barely tried. A handful of query letters a year ago barely counts as a full effort. And yet…giveup

 

Have you ever found yourself lacking motivation? What did you do to get your motivation back? Did it work?

Shutting Up the Doubt-Demon

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I’ve been struggling through this revision, and after over 6 weeks, I am approximately 40% done with it.

Yeah, I know, I’ve written most of a book in that time. This isn’t the first time I’ve rewritten this story. What is taking so long?

Other than the personal challenges we’ve been facing, the rewrite itself has been very challenging. Changing the point-of-view has been much harder than I thought, especially in the steamy scenes. These are some of the hardest for me to write, so having to tear them all apart and redo them from the ground up is extremely difficult.

Worse than that, however, is the crippling self-doubt.

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The doubt struck me out of nowhere, sucker punching me when I wasn’t expecting it. As I was reading through a chapter the other night, it dawned on me how absolutely awful this story is. How there’s no market for it, and even if there were, there’s nothing special about what I’ve written.

Not sure if that’s true, or if it’s the crippling self-doubt phase of writing. This phase seems to be quite common among writers, but it also seems to bleed into other endeavors.

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I follow a blogger who is working toward completing her first ironman. She struggles with doubt after most of her workouts. Yet, I’ve watched her make amazing progress. She admits her times are improving even if the workouts still suck.

But that’s something as a writer I don’t have: the ability to measure progress against an impartial metric. Did I run 3 miles in an hour? Thirty minutes? Fifteen minutes? Sure, I can tell you how many words I have on the page, but it’s not the same. 85,000 awesome words looks the same as 85,000 words that are more like brain vomit than storytelling.

I am trying to keep perspective. I don’t want this guy coming back and sabotaging the progress I have made.

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I started writing in earnest my freshman year of college. After six years of writing and getting nowhere with it, I put writing aside for several years, came back to it briefly, and shelved it again. My doubt-demon kept winning.

Granted, this work was really awful. Or, maybe it wasn’t. I don’t know because my doubt-demon devoured it, and it’s gone forever.

So, no, this isn’t my last rewrite on this novel. Yes, it’s going to take at least one or two  more solid rewrites before this thing is ready for me to query.

That’s okay.

Plenty of crummy novels have been published, some have gone on to be bestsellers. Maybe mine will be crummy, too, but I can’t let the doubt-demon win again. Writing is something I’ve been working on over half my life. It’s time the doubt-demon shuts up, sits down, and lets me get this done.

Now, if only I can make him listen.

 

What Do I Want Out of Writing

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I plan on thinking through the heroes I like and dislike and giving them a bit of a write-up, but first, I wanted to take some time to explore a question Mariah Avix asked me a little while ago.

What do I want out of my writing?

As I think through this, there’s the dream you have much like when I was a kid playing tennis and dreaming I’d be the next Billie Jean King. So, sure, I dream about being the next Stephen King or J.K. Rowling. It’s the pinnacle of the profession.

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But what do I want?

I wish I could say: to be a good writer and recognized as such. But that’s not entirely true. I want more than that. I want people I don’t know to read what I’ve written, enjoy it, and want to read another story written by me.

I don’t ever expect writing to pay the bills like my day job does. After all, I picked my profession partially because I was good at it and partially because it keeps a roof over our heads. But I want my writing to pay the bills and more. I want to get to spend my days dreaming up characters, worlds, and stories.

But that’s only a half-truth, too.

I like the analytical aspect of my day job. I enjoy being handed a problem and digging into it, scraping together the numbers and making them dance. Finding a solution in the data, or at least an answer.

The truth is somewhere in between.

I want writing to be profitable enough that maybe I could go part-time on the day job and part-time on writing and still keep a roof over my family’s head.

But in the world of writing, that seems an almost impossible feat.

And I hate failure.

So perhaps that’s why I set my goal lower. One I thought possible to achieve. Write well enough that it pays for itself. If I need to take a class, or if I need a website etc. that the writing pays for it rather than my day job.

Reach for the stars, but don’t quit your day job.

Not exactly inspirational. But the truth seldom is.

 

Struggling

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I have really been struggling with my writing lately. I thought I had it beaten, but its back again in all its glory. I keep struggling through the revision I’m working on, and I did absolutely no writing this past weekend. First time in ages that’s happened. Nothing. Not a sentence. Not a word.

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I am struggling with several things at the moment, and I just can’t seem to get my writing past them.

I love lists, so here are the top 4 things pushing aside my writing:

  1. DD2  is struggling with some health issues. Not the kind that go away with a round or two of amoxicillin. We’re looking at 3-6 months to deal with them, if we’re lucky. Add to that our insurance doesn’t want to pay for treatments, and I am trying to find a way to get her to her treatments which only occur during my work hours. We’re fighting insurance, I’m working with my boss, and we’re looking at alternative treatment options, but this isn’t easy. So worry has been eating a lot of my brain space.
  2. Summer is finally here. For those of you that don’t live in the far north of the US, well, you might get more than 2-3 months of the year where it’s nice enough that you want to be outside. I mean, we had sleet last weekend that killed a bunch of plants, and we pulled out the heavy coats you never really put away. A birthday party DD1 was attending had to be moved indoors because it was so cold. Nice weather begs you to be outside, not hunched over a computer.
  3. Growing project list – there are a lot of things that need doing when you have a house and two children. I think my open project list hit 40 this weekend.
  4. Doubt – I have poured so many hours and so much of myself into my writing, and for what? I deleted the e-mail rejection letters, but that’s about all I have to show for it. Great, I have a book written that I’ve spent months revising. So, it seems, does half of America. I don’t know if I have the skill, or if I ever will, to write well. Perhaps I should put it aside and pick it up again later in my life (as I did 10 years ago when I quit writing the last time). Maybe writing is what you do when you’re retired if you hate traveling. I feel like there’s very little chance of getting my work published, and I’m not sure it’s worth the effort to keep at it. I regularly feel like more money is made off of people trying to become published authors (see the constant bombardment since I joined Writer’s Digest) than there are people making a living as a writer. I don’t have to write to enjoy these characters and their stories in my imagination. Sure, I’ll want to write again later. And I might again regret the years I gave up. I don’t know. But doubt isn’t helping get words on a page.

"Aspiring" Writer

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One topic I’ve seen a lot lately is the discussion wrapped around calling yourself a writer. Not an aspiring writer, but a writer.

I think I understand where this advice is coming from. This is a really hard field to get into, and it’s easy to get disappointed. I am experiencing my own doubts about my work and if I should continue to write.

I do not like the process of trying to find an agent or publisher. It really puts me out of my comfort zone, and the constant rejection is disheartening.

So calling yourself a writer is supposed to be an affirmation.  A way to keep yourself going when you’re thinking of quitting.

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But I feel like this is somewhat disingenuous. In my experience, most people who say they want to be a writer or are aspiring to be a writer mean they want to write full time. Most are already slugging away in their basement, spare bedroom, or if they’re really lucky, home office. But what they want is for their writing to support them and their family. They don’t want to have to hold down a day job so they can make ends meet.

So I get it. If you write, you’re a writer. You are doing the act of writing, and it doesn’t matter if you ever publish your work or not, if you never earn a dime from your work. And the publishing aspect is the part I like the least. I hate spending my few writing hours a week looking up agents, rewriting queries, etc.

I suppose if you’re an actor, you act. Even if it’s only at your community theater.

A co-worker of mine wanted to be a baseball player. He made it the minor leagues but got hurt. It ended his baseball career. He still plays baseball for fun, but he never says he’s a baseball player. To him, calling himself a baseball player means something very different than playing in his weekly rec league.

I suspect the same is true for writers.So, this affirmation feels a bit…I hesitate to say it…patronizing.

J.K.Rowling posting her rejection letters, (harsh, scathing rejection letters), did far more to motivate me than all of the “you are a writer” posts combined.

I write. I write almost every day. I wrote on my birthday, Valentine’s Day and Easter. I wrote when I had a cold. I wrote when I had bronchitis. I wrote when I didn’t want to write anymore.

So I am a writer, but I’m also an aspiring writer.

I am aspiring to find an agent. Aspiring to publish my first novel. Aspiring to make my writing profitable enough that it can pay for a laptop dedicated to it. Maybe even the latest version of Word.

I may not be good enough, lucky enough, or connected enough for any of this to happen. But I’m working for it. Aspiring towards it.