Slowing Down to stoke the fire
Hey everyone. It’s been a while. At least, only three weeks or so, but that’s felt like a long time for me with the pace that I’ve set myself to. It’s something that I haven’t been able to accept the accomplishment of, even when people reply with sounds of amazement when I tell them that I’ve released five books in the span of a year and a half.
I thought that was because I was being humble. That I could keep up this pace forever. Other writers do it. In fact, there’s writers out there pumping out a novel a month at a full-time schedule, so in the face of these aforementioned compliments, I only felt inadequate.
I’d left my career to tackle this full-time, to churn out as many words as I could and to build a following that would mean I’d “make it” as an author and could rely on that to make a living. But it turns out “making it” is more complicated than it sounds, and I’m not quite sure if that’s what I want, anymore.
Before I get into what I mean by this, I want to clarify that I don’t say “making it” in the terms of becoming a superstar author that’s fending off lucrative contracts with a hastily constructed polearm. But I wouldn’t look that gift horse in the mouth, mind you.
When looking at being an author as a business, it seems relatively straightforward. Your main duty is to write words, get them edited and bound up into books, then to market them. Easier said than done, obviously, but that’s beside the point I’d like to make.
Going into this phase of life, and for the past two years, that’s just how I’ve been viewing my efforts. To be successful, all I needed to do was to churn out my three thousand words a day when drafting, to edit them into something people would read and like, and then to keep the social media machine spinning and oiled so people could find these books.
To a degree, I was successful in that, and I’ll give myself a pat on the back for it.
- I’ve released a new book every four or five months, which was pretty close to my original goal as it was.
- Any time I got to a convention to sell, I’ve had a great time, moving at least twenty or more paperbacks in a day.
- Reviewers have said extremely complimentary things about my works that I still struggle to believe are true.
- For a time, I was even managing to break even with complicated things like Facebook Ads, a hard task for most businesses.
The most important part is that I’ve found community. A special mention goes to the other authors of The BreakIns, who’ve been the key thing in getting me through this crazy year with how much collective knowledge I’ve picked up from them.
And this is all wonderful, and I wish I could keep going at this pace, but I’ve been neglecting the most important thing about my writing, the thing that makes each novel as good as it actually is.
These books are not just business. They are art.
Art is a funny, ephemeral thing. It both can and can’t be forced. It can appear in an apparent vacuum of inspiration and influence or simply vanish in those exact circumstances. It can happen at the speed of lightning or at a pace that feel glacial. It warps all the time and energy put into it until it’s inconceivable that anything exists beyond it.
I went on a road trip with my wonderful wife the other week up to Port Stephens. It was my first time camping, just us in a little swag tent looking up at the stars with the thin layer of foam under my back barely concealing the bumps and dips of the ground beneath. Each morning when I woke up, I almost felt surprised to just be outside. There was no routine, no regularity, no inclination to go and be “productive” and “busy.” We just got up and went about with the adventure because there was nothing else to do.
A few days after our return, my wife pointed out to me that it was the first time they’d seen me go for more than a day without thinking about or mentioning something to do with my books in more than a year. I agreed, and I feel it’s a good thing. Art often requires distance. New perspectives unswayed by the old.
An empty mind.
As a digression, it wasn’t just the camping trip that enabled this clearing of my head. I’ve been in the process of interviewing for a very ideal full-time job that, at the time of writing this, I’m on tenterhooks awaiting the news of whether I’ve been successful after the final interview. I also burned out on social media right on the day of The Hytharo Origin’s release, leaving me feeling a bit guilty for not promoting it properly, but at least I made it to the day of, right? Anyway, more about those things later.
The point I want to get around to here is that I feel, at this point in my writing career, at this stage of The Droughtlands’ tale, I need to slow down. I’ve realised that the ethos of vomiting out a chapter a day is something that only works when there’s ten years of idle ideations knocking about in my head to draw from, because these books are so complicated to write.
The books of The First Hytharo series are the prime example of this. The refrain of “ruins within ruins, worlds upon worlds,” that appears in those stories is a direct result of the many interwoven layers that make up the narrative. Not only am I telling the story of Spiric in the present, but I am also hinting at his past within The Hytharo Empire, at the time of those-of-glass and what came before them. At the creation of the helixics, the purpose they once had and now carry out. At the future that lies ahead of Spiric, in this world and then next.
With so many moving parts, there ends up being so much ground to cover, literally. Lands, cities, characters, motivations, happenings and consequences must all be invented around all these events for the story to grind forwards. The Hytharo Redux benefited from having the better part of a decade to coalesce into the story it became, and even then, the only definite piece of The Droughtlands that was established was the city of Basarod.
Many other things in that story either hid behind the veil of ambiguity, such as the ruins or the small stops made by the characters along the way, or could afford not to have consequences at the time of writing, such as the town of Kurkress. The geography of where that story was set even allowed me to avoid most of the consequences of The Flux Catastrophe, set thirty years before this, because Revance and the plague of molten flux, never reached into the eastern sands of The Droughtlands.
When it came time to write The Hytharo Origin, I realised I had a much bigger challenge on my hands. With the story mostly being set in Breggesa, the largest city of The Droughtlands, I had to bring together everything I knew of this world in order to create what lay within its walls, always being mindful of the influence that previous books had on its image and how it could affect the course of future books, too.
Complicated, yes, but at least I had prior knowledge and the logical conclusions that could be drawn from it to call upon. While it isn’t my favourite method of world building, logistics is often an easy way to flesh out the world around a story without having to cut new set dressing from whole cloth, which is why I didn’t have this same problem with The Flux Catastrophe.
As an aside, The Flux Catastrophe’s problem is that it’s too much a battle of logic, and the efforts to write the third and final book in the series has been a brain-aching battle between the influences of both technology and magic. More on that later.
I wanted to spend some time talking about this because it all comes back to books being art. With The Flux Catastrophe almost finished, I’ve been forced to look ahead (or back) at what my next tale will be. After writing the brain-twisting plot of The Hytharo Origin, I know I still need more time to work up to its sequel, so I’ve been day-dreaming about writing something I thought would be simpler.
I’ve already teased that the series would come under the title of “Cartographers of Ruin,” so I’m happy to share that as I talk about it, but there’s little else I know about it at this time. Yes, even I’m in the dark as to what I’m about to do!
Scary, ain’t it? I sure feel it is.
Cartographers was invented and named as such for two reasons. First was that I wanted to write a book series set in The Droughtlands that had an eye-catching, “on-trend” title, that would serve as yet another entry point into this world. Second is that I wanted to write something shorter, maybe eighty thousand words or so in length, that was less complicated. It’s only as I’ve been ruminating on my direction as an author that I’ve realised the latter may be impossible if I don’t tackle it correctly.
This series is to be set hundreds of years before the events of The First Hytharo and The Flux Catastrophe, in a time of The Droughtlands where the mood is more magical in nature, where the ruins of those-of-glass are regarded as both sacred and taboo, rather than radioactive derelicts. The point would be to explore and exhibit the original wonder and awe I had when I first ventured into The Droughtlands myself, all those years ago.
The point of Cartographers of Ruin was that I could explore The Droughtlands again for the first time along with my readers.
But this isn’t a series that’s been knocking around in my head for years. Sure, I have a basic idea of what it might be, but to really explore the full potential of what it could be, I’m going to need time to plan. To daydream. To ideate and fantasise.
Which means I need to slow down.
I mentioned earlier that I’ve been out on the job hunt. It’s been an odd experience, like I’ve been taping my resume to a spear and hurling it up at passing storks as they migrate for the winter. It feels more clumsy than accurate half the time, and what I do hit might not be brought down, instead surviving long enough to confuse some poor Klütz. (Person from the village of Klütz, that is. Read more here to find out how funny this joke is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfeilstorch)
Anyway, I’ve been looking because I need to get a bit more regularity back into my life. An external schedule, an outside motivation, a place where I can go somewhere else and be someone else. Something I didn’t appreciate up until a few months ago was how doing this is another way to gain “distance” from the process of writing. Sure, it gets in the way of pounding words into a keyboard, but it means I get to go out and experience a life outside of my own, and I’m not going to turn my nose up at the extra income of it, either.
At the end of this week, I’m meant to hear back with how that round of job interviews went. I’ve got my fingers crossed, as it seems like a role made just for me, but I’m trying to stave off the anticipation of it before it turns back into anxiety again.
Hopefully I hear good news, but if not, I think my path forwards will still be largely the same. I plan to slow down my life of being an author and pick up more of a life of being everything else. It doesn’t mean I’ll be gone entirely. I’ll still be aiming to put out at least one book a year, but it will mean I’ll be less present on social media.
And social media is my last piece of rumination for today. As I said before, I found myself burned out on the constant grind of marketing and posting on the day of The Hytharo Origin’s release, and I involuntarily instated a social media blackout on myself because I couldn’t bare to look at it any more.
It’s a fickle, fickle thing. You end up following so many other authors to the point that all the algorithm’s feed will throw at you is the examples of rip-roaring success to stoke a sense of envy and FOMO, while you sit back and compare it to your own quiet and unseen moments and wonder why you aren’t getting all those clicks. Of course I know that it’s not real, that all other authors, even everyone in the world, likely feels the same, but it still doesn’t remove the sting of it, does it?
I’ve always found the social media part of being an author the hardest thing. I’m not one to take pictures of myself often. I stutter and sputter when I’m attempting to record something, despite being a confident and rambunctious public speaker when in person or broadcasting live. I don’t read at a pace that allows me to keep up with the latest and greatest trending hits, and I don’t often feel an inclination to participate in those discussions about them even if I knew how to.
I know I’m likely overthinking it, that it’s okay to be a little bit fake on social media, just for the purpose of getting the message across, even that followers likely only see about one in seven posts that you share, so I’m not worried about them thinking that I’m spamming them. But it still feels hollow to undertake. To wheel out the same words, the same posts, the same pictures, or all that with only slight variations.
It’s something I feel steals away the “art” of writing. The passion I have for the stories when I talk about them, because it’s so hard to get that across in a post or a video that needs to be specifically concocted to grab the kind of fragmented attention spam that social media forces upon us.
This is the last reason why I want to slow down and better distribute the focus of my life. I want my writing to be my passion, and not something I’ve compromised for the sake of optimising how many clicks it gets. I want to go back to when I wrote with only a concern for the story itself, because that’s when I feel I write best. It’s why I decided to go down the route of being an independent author in the first place. I’m well aware that this approach is the opposite of a guarantee of success, but I want to shift the definition of success back to what it needs to be for this to be an act of art, not business.
Even though they’re affirming, it’s not about the sales, the rankings, or the algorithms.
It’s about getting to write the books.
And I want to write books.
And I can. But it doesn’t happen unless I fully engage in the art of it.
I’ve been focusing on how brightly a flame I can burn that I’ve neglected to chop wood and gather kindling.
It’s time to nurture the fire.
Anyway, if you’ve read this far, thank you, and you’ll have to excuse me if there’s any typos or inconsistencies along the way. These stream-of-consciousness type of blog posts don’t really warrant the same type of fastidious proofreading that a book does, because you get the overall idea, right?
If you want to continue supporting me, kind words and conversation are always appreciated. I might not get back to you quickly, because life you read above, I’m still slowly dipping my toes back into social media, but I’ll get there eventually.
You can also read the books, by getting them through Amazon or directly from me through my webstore, and leave reviews, both on the Amazon page and Goodreads.
To thank you for reading this far, here’s a sneak peek at the cover of the third and final book in The Flux Catastrophe. It’s been quite an experience writing what will be Ryza’s last adventure, but I think that’s a manifesto I’ll save for another day, because my fingers are starting to get sore.
