Wednesday, February 3, 2016

What happened? (IWSG)


Thank you so much to Alex and his awesome IWSG co-hosts! You guys are wonderful.

To be completely honest, I haven’t felt like myself for a while now. I had hoped that going on holiday would clarify why, but alas, I still don’t feel quite like myself. I’ve particularly noticed it in my writing. I haven’t been able to think clearly about anything writing related at all. In fact, I feel like I have lost some of myself, or identity in some way. I don’t know how!

I simply woke up a few months ago and just didn’t have any original ideas anymore. I might be published, but I don’t feel like a writer anymore. I think I’m a fraud. I haven’t truly written anything in over a year. I have been busy with The Amaranthine for so long that I never thought about the next project. I scraped book 2, to only have the new written chapters take me in a direction I definitely don’t want to go and thus, I scraped that too. What I am hoping to do is go back to the very first draft and see where I had started. To at least somehow try and get a feel for who I was as a writer 5 years ago.

I’m all for growing as a writer and learning new things, especially the do’s and don’ts, but somehow I have ruined myself. I used to think of myself as a storyteller first and now I’m not even that. Even though I have gotten so much great advice in the past, I am going to stick to my initial decision and go at book two alone. No critique partners. No beta readers. No consideration of plot ideas from family and friends. Why? Because I want to write the book I want. I need to write what I want. If it sucks, it sucks. I am and will always be way too much of a people pleaser to be able to work with others on my writing. Hopefully my editor can help me salvage my manuscript if I ever decide on a final version I can redraft and self-edit before passing it on to her.

Hopefully during this painful process of going at things on my own again I will find the person and writer who I’ve somehow managed to loose. I can tell you that the woman looking back at me in the mirror isn’t me. I could always count on my imagination and my weirdness and now . . . somehow I’ve just become generic and a sheep. I have so many notes on my Thelum Series, but I can’t connect to the part of me that wrote those notes. I feel no passion for the project and I don’t know why! Trust me, writing this series has been my dream for so long and now I’m sinking. How the hell did I allow myself to become this sad and pathetic person?


The Insecure Writers Support Group was created by the talented Mr. Alex J. Cavanaugh so that writers can share their insecurities and/or encourage others who need support with their own. You can visit Alex Here, or if you want to join us in discussing our insecurities on the first Wednesday of each month, you are welcome to join by going Here.

Not quite myself

I have no idea why, but I have not been feeling like myself. Even being in my own skin feels alien.  The good news is that I still managed t...