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It’s been an iffy year as far as my writing goes

• I managed to finish 2 volumes of Tales of the Slumberlord or whatever I’m calling that series.  Right now, I think I’ll just give it ‘Darwin &’ titles and leave the series title off.  Use it only for the ‘Other Works’ sections I put in my books.  What was I talking about?
• I published Do I Need to Use a Dragon? this summer.  Sales weren’t . . . They really just weren’t since I can’t afford promos.  Considering the last book I published was War of Nytefall: Eulogy in December of 2021, I shouldn’t be surprised.
• Minimal tinkering with other ideas.  Mostly, staring at the notebook that holds information on ‘Phi Beta Files’.

That doesn’t sound like a lot.  Sure, the first two are fairly big, but it ends up reminding me of the days I was writing 4-5 books and publishing 3-4 a year.  I was cranking them out since I was a stay-at-home father.  Not that I rushed them, but I had the time to really put some work in.  Without the same level of freedom, I’ve been reduced to a frustratingly slow crawl. Health problems and the ‘life event’ aren’t helping.

Internally, I think this was a tough year for me as well.  Putting a work out there brought on some old anxieties, which most authors can understand.  You never really know what’s going to happen.  Yet, it came with a dollop of imposter syndrome, which I’ve been struggling with since January.  This could be due to the exhaustion brought on by my sleep apnea being worse and causing me to have trouble focusing.  Still, I can’t stop myself from wondering if I’m on the wrong path.

Well, maybe not the wrong path.  It’s more that I missed my shot and now I’m toiling away in a dead end.  Not entirely my fault.  Over the last 5 years, I’ve learned of various people who went behind my back to sabotage my attempt at writing for a career.  That’s a fact that I’m still trying to reconcile because it comes with the possibility that these people managed to defeat me.  Won’t go into any more detail here since I don’t want anyone to make contact with these people.  All I can say is that knives were certainly plunged into my back and I mistook it for bad posture while writing.

This reflection is getting odd and maybe deeper than I intended.  This is probably because the only difference between 2022 and 2023 is that I published a book.  A single book that didn’t really sell.  That’s another issue I have with my current author life.  I lack the money, time, and energy to do the promoting.  So, all I can do is publish my book, announce it here, and hope for the best.  A few people have suggested joining an author group, but those always require that I read/review other books.  Again, we’re looking at a severe time and energy limitation.  It takes me over a week to get through a single manga volume, so a novel will take months unless I sacrifice my writing time.  In other words, I’ve pretty much been forced to isolate myself, which is a bad thing for an author.

Overall, I don’t think this was a great year.  It wasn’t terrible, but there were too many let downs in terms of writing.  Do I Need to Use a Dragon? not selling more than 20 copies hurt a bit.  Me barely being able to write more than 3 pages on some weekends due to health issues.  The revelations I vaguely mentioned.  Realizing that I’m forgetting my unpublished ideas and have barely touched my notebooks.  All of this kind of combined to make this a ‘meh’ year.  2022 was nothing more than writing and I thought that was rough, but I still made progress with no emotional letdowns.  2023 saw me attempting to get back in the game and not getting very far.  Not sure how to entirely process that, but it could be that I have so much on my mind lately.

Will I keep writing and publish again?  Yes because I have more than half of Darwin’s adventures written.  I plan on releasing him into the world next summer or fall.  Maybe things will improve now that I have the CPAP machine.  My health was a major factor here, so getting that under control makes me not want to give up.  I mean, if I get back into healthy order and still don’t write then I’m an idiot.  I really need to take some time and get back to my notebooks too.  Guess I’m still toiling away in the shadows here, so the reflection isn’t leading to a surrender.  More like a tentative retreat into my hovel where I feel somewhat safe.