New Year, New Start

We had a wonderful holiday. Hope you did, too! But New Years Day is when we started packing up the ornaments and decorations and dismantling the tree, to squirrel all the Christmas adornments away for another year. 

The holidays came and went so quickly for us this year, partly due to some background dramas that unfolded. (I had to have a double root canal on December 23rd, for one, after a specialist discovered a completely painless abscess and infection that had probably been present for months. The dread turned out to be the worst part of it. I slept through most of the procedure.)  

We even got our tree up a couple of weeks early, but there it stood--stark and forlorn--bare of any lights or ornaments for nearly a week. Eventually, it all came together in plenty of time to enjoy it for the holidays.

Seeing the tree come down this year hit me particularly hard. Our pups were quite dismayed because Christmas is a Really Big Deal for them. The sad looks about broke my heart. They don't understand why we can't have Christmas -- and presents and treats and pretty lights and discarded paper to romp through -- every day. 

That made us decide to leave the lights up on the lilac bushes in our courtyard, and the three wreaths on our two courtyard doors and front door so all the magic didn't get banished. We'll take those down when we're ready.

So here I am, holidays over and facing 2022 with a big sigh.

Because of our bout with Covid in late September and early October, and the weeks of trying to recover from lingering brain fog and memory issues, everything writing related got put on hold for the last part of the year. I had two books from past Pets in Space volumes I was working on -- one a quick scan away from going to the editor and another that needed a bit more work but was almost there. In addition, I have five more books in the series and multiple one-off stories that have been floating around in my head for years, or stowed away on my hard drive as completed manuscripts. 

But I just couldn't bring myself to tackle them once I had recovered. 

Mental Jeopardy. Things Authors Deal with for $100, Alex.

But...I have to be honest. Some of my foot-dragging was due to the state of the industry, as well. 

Society in general--and the publishing industry, in particular--is taking a different tack from the  expectations I had when I started publishing my books almost six years ago. The author community used to be welcoming, happy and supportive group for the most part, but lately it seems to have turned a lot less friendly. I blame both social media and the frustrations that the present industry--and Covid--have imposed on writers. Since 2015, one of the big book conventions has all but ceased to exist for authors who aren't big names, and the other has undergone a major identity crisis. Whatever the cause, the"rising tide that floats all boats" seems to have definitely gone out. 

So I recently had to take a deep breath and ask myself if I really wanted to continue to do this. Did I want to publish another book? Did I want to attempt to kickstart my efforts in 2022, or was it time to just wave the white flag (as I've seen so many of my peers do in the last couple of months) and hang it up? Or should I, instead, try to invent some other imaginative method of getting my work out there for people to read that doesn't involve an industry that continues to make things really difficult for authors.

I ultimately decided I'm going to keep working on publishing some of my work in 2022, but with a  different focus. From now on, I'm going to work in my own time, at my own pace, with a focus on sharing some of these stories that have been rampaging around in my head (or lurking in a digital file), and not to stress over sales, numbers and stats. Stress can be a real creativity killer, and I want to start enjoying the writing process again. I want to put the fun back  in it. 

I'm now acknowledging that I don't need to be a commercial success to be a happy author. If a few people read my stories, great. If they care enough to leave a review, fantastic! It's the sharing that's important to me, not the bottom line, not the promotional push, and not the USA Today bestseller tag. Not anymore. 

So...I may be posting some of my work free online to get the stories out to readers. I tried that here on this blog with my short story The Recruit last year, and it was an interesting experiment. But The Recruit was never meant to be more than a bonus companion piece that took a scene from the novel Draxis (working title), turned it inside out and expanded it, relating it from a fresh POV. For this to work, I need to present fully fleshed out books, and the book chapters or sections will need to come a lot faster than every five weeks. I'm still working that out. 

But hey, it's 2022 and I'm still here. Let's see what the year brings.