Writing update…

You’d think with this month being my birthday that I’d be in better shape. But right after the warmer weather of March, this has been a cold and grey month in Milan, and I’m having to bundle up and deal with all kinds of joint pain and mood problems.

Despite this, I did get some writing done…and then Word erased what I’d written. I don’t get it. I’ve got the system doing backups, and I make regular USB key backups. Yet, sometimes Word hiccups, and I lose a few chapters in the process.

I’ve gone back and rewritten two of those chapters, and I’ll get back to where I was, I’m sure. Once I finish Thicker Than Blood, I can get back into All Maid Up and finish another season or two before I take another break. With the series, I always post the rough draft online, and I save the chapters as individual files. So I shouldn’t lose any of those, at least.

And then, after I finish the serial…I dunno. I’m finishing these projects for a literal handful of four or five people, but after this I don’t have any other stories that I want to work on. Maybe after I finish the serial and have a month or two off, the muse will come up with something. But it’s been a while since I’ve had any new ideas, and the few old ideas I had, I’m passing on because they’re not likely to sell, even if I first gave them away for free as another serial.

Maybe some of it is just the continued wacky weather driving me nuts, but I’m not getting anything out of writing like I used to. It used to charge me up, and now it just grinds at me. When I don’t feel like writing, I game all day. But I’m running out of games, and money to buy more. And at the end of a day of gaming, I feel like I’ve wasted my time. I feel like I should have written something. And the muse is like, “Well yeah, and I’d love to help. But every idea I pitch, you shoot down on the grounds that no one wants to read this crap.” And, the thing is, I know I’m right in turning down these pitches, because no one wants to read that crap. I got history providing the burden of proof. Readers want escapism, and my muse apparently hates escapism. So, we’re at an impasse, and in the meantime, I try to finish what’s on tap.

I dunno, maybe someday I’ll come up with an idea that doesn’t suck. But it’s probably not gonna be today.