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I stopped writing for a while. All sorts of reasons: I was depressed; I had a health scare; I felt my writing was not very good ....
A big part of the problem as that I felt I had to write stuff which other people liked, and then that I had to promote it on Twitter and Google+, and blahty blah. And somewhere in that process I lost interest. My guys stopped talking to me -- and they had always talked to me, always; they came alive to me. In fact, whereas I had once really loved writing, I started to find it a chore.
I've had several chats with my daughter who is an artist, and it seems to me that creating--writing, art, gardens, food, it doesn't matter--is essential to our happiness, to our well-being. But what you create is you. It comes from your heart and your soul. If you alter it to please others you will lose that pleasure and satisfaction. And for me, at any rate, writing because I have to, as opposed to because I want to, leads to bad writing. Thin, uninspired, dreary. I'd been admiring Lois McMaster Bujold, such a clever and humane and satisfying author, and I wished I could write like her. And then, I suddenly thought to myself that I can write like me, that I also have good things in my writing, and that it was silly to try and write like someone else no matter how good (or how well-off!) they be.
I also worried that I was writing about bisexual characters, and that my 'market' was gay men who might not like that. And once again, I've decided to ignore this. I write to please myself. That way, I hope also to please you, but if I don't ....
So I'm writing again, with pleasure. For me. Creating worlds that I want to visit and people I want to see and meet and listen to.
And I've started reposting my Majorca Flats episodes (first of the new series here), eager to find out what will happen to these ppl. I certainly don't know. But they seem to have an inkling.
