Like many people, I have a habit of giving up on my creative projects. A project I'm head-over-heels in love with one week could be thrown aside the next. I'm actually surprised every time. I never saw it coming.
But here's the thing. I don't give up so I can sit around doing nothing. (Not that there's anything wrong with that). Nine times out of ten if I give up on a project it's because I've found something I'm even more passionate about. And no one should ever feel guilty about that.
Do what excites you. Do what you love. And maybe one day you'll find your way back to those projects that excited you so much before.
Life has a way of making you feel like you're wandering. Never walking or running, always wandering. As a storyteller it's ingrained into me that every story should have a satisfying arc - a clear beginning, middle and end. But life isn't like that. I am a man writing things that no one will ever read, forever and ever until I'm dead.
This sounds depressing, but I'm not depressed. It's more of an emptiness.
It's not like the work itself is empty - I'm proud of what I write. I put everything into it. Maybe this all just sounds like a teenager moaning on his blog.
Maybe all that matters is the work itself, and even when it fades away, leaving no trace it ever existed, that's okay.
It's a sunset that only I saw.
My main project at the moment is writing a novel about a magic box. I can't go into much more detail than that, but I think it could be a really great book, and it's coming along nicely. I've written maybe a quarter of it.
But recently I hit a roadblock that I've never really hit before. It wasn't writer's block. It was a what's the point? block.
You spend months and months writing a book, send it out to agents, and they say no. If you're lucky, your closest friends might read it. You could self-publish it, but it'll just rot away on Amazon, and then you could never really get it traditionally published even if your writing career took off with a different book.
You've got very little to show for those months of blood, sweat and tears. Just another book to gather dust on the shelf of books no one will ever read. Even if you're proud of what you wrote.
At least with a painting or a piece of music, you can post it on social media for people to maybe see. I toyed with the idea of posting my writing on various writing platforms. But they're all very genre-based. Almost no one seemed to be looking for "literary fiction".
Here's where things changed though. I was desperately searching for any way to "get my writing out there". And I stumbled upon a piece of advice I've seen many times but have always kind of glazed over.
Literary journals and magazines. You can submit short stories, flash fiction, extracts, and poems - and maybe they'll publish it.
So I gathered a list of about 100, then whittled them down to about 50 I liked the look of - all based in the UK. And now I'm submitting my work to them. I've done six so far.
They might all say no, but still, it's revitalised me. I already have dozens and dozens of bits of writing that I think would be great for magazines and journals. If they say no, I'll try another piece, and another. Even if I only submit 10 different pieces to 10 different magazines (and I'll be submitting a lot more than that), that's 100 chances to get published.
That's much better than spending the best part of a year writing a whole novel, sending it to about 20 agents, all of them saying no, and starting all over again. (I will still do that as well, of course).
I've heard stats like the chances of having a novel traditionally published these days (if you're not already famous) are about 1 in 10,000 - and even then, you're expected to do a lot of the marketing yourself.
With the magazines and journals thing, I feel like it's given me more of a reason to write. More of a shot. More of a goal.
Above all, I need to remember that I should write because I love to write.
But why do I want to be traditionally published?
Well, that's a post for another time.
There are a few things occupying my headspace at the moment. Those things are (in order of importance, top being most important)...
I'll speak about some of these in separate posts.
Alright. It's time to do a blog.
I've toyed with the idea of doing a blog in the past but have never seen the point, because who's going to see it? Literally no one. It won't show up on Google, and there's nowhere I could publish it where people would care.
But I will care. It'll be nice to have a little record of what I'm doing and what I've done. Especially if I keep doing it for the rest of my life.
So here it is. The first post.
These are my messages in bottles.
If you find them, you've found me.