OMG… I can READ again.

No, you don’t understand.  I can really read again.  For the last two years, I’ve been subsisting on magazines, television and movies, writing on my blog and reading a lot of Facebook, because I couldn’t pick up a novel.  But now, finally, I can open a novel and actually read it again.

Okay, fine, I don’t sound like I’m making sense.  Sooo… explanation follows…

Set the Wayback machine to 2013, when I was a few months after the release of my last novel… and looking at flat-lined sales.  It was mucho frustrating: After over a decade and sixteen books produced, nothing was selling worth a damn, including my latest and greatest novel, of which I’d applied every promotional tool at my disposal (which amounts to not bloody much)… to no avail.

And I was telling myself: Well, if no one’s buying your books… what the hell are you doing writing them?

So I came to the decision that I wouldn’t write any new novels, unless and until I could work out the problems of promotion of the novels I’d already written… a forced moratorium on novel writing, until I figured out how to sell.  I stopped thinking up new premises, outlining, concept development… everything.  And I was good with it.  Not quite jiggy with it… but good.

But I soon discovered that, whenever I picked up a novel to read, I couldn’t actually pay attention to what I was reading.  I found myself over-analyzing every line and every word, comparing them to my books, and continually asking myself: Are there some things about this writer’s characters that are better than mine?  Is it the way this writer turns a phrase, right here?  Or the way that writer builds his story, there?  Just what is it about this guy’s book that makes it so popular, while my books are invisible?

Yes, novels had come to mean nothing to me other than being products to compare my own products to.  Meaningless objects.  And at that point, I had to stop reading them; after all, if I couldn’t enjoy the book, there was little point to reading it.  Literally the only book I’ve managed to slog through and actually get, in the last two years, was Weir’s The Martian.  And even then, just as astronaut Mark Watney was science-ing the shit out of surviving Mars, I was analyzing the crap out of creating a successful book.  (Spoiler: Mark does better with his task than I did with mine.)

Any other attempt to read a book became an exercise in turning pages.  Both ways… because I regularly found myself paging back to figure out what I’d just passed my eyeballs over, while my brain was out to lunch agonizing over the book’s creative use of prepositions or wondering if the author was maybe related to a publisher or somesuch.

So, in the interest of maintaining what little sanity I have, I stopped reading books as well as writing them.  Sure, I kept myself busy on little things… new covers, short stories, blog posts, contributions and conversations on Facebook.  But my oldest and dearest hobby, enjoying a good story, had been taken from me.  My mind wasn’t right.

It’s taken me two years to get my head back on track, to the extent that I was finally able to pick up a book this week.  And after getting through (so far) about a quarter of the book, not only am I not obsessing with the author’s every use of a pronoun, or the relative benefits of writing a first-person narrative… I am recalling great moments from past books in the series, getting emotional with the main character and his plight, and even laughing out loud at the right places.  (Lordy, how I loves me some Harry Dresden.)

So, I have my hobby back.  I also have a backlog of books to get through… y’know, just about 2 years’ worth.  But now that I’m no longer snow-blinded by the crass commercial aspect and marketability of books, I can at least relax and be entertained by them once more.  Does this mean my head is completely mended from its obsession over book structure, placement, marketing and production?  Well, maybe not completely.  But as long as I can enjoy a good book… I won’t lose so much sleep over not creating them.