Alma T. C. Boykin
To my great delight and mild discomfort, I discovered back in June that I had finished everything that I absolutely had to get done for the summer as far as writing. This is … very odd. What now? Read All The Things!
Except— Something pushed me, nudging, almost herding me back to the keyboard. The Elect story that I have been meaning to write for over a year started to gel, and so I set to work. The core idea for the next Familiar Generations novel bubbled up, so it also got started, but will wait on the Elect story. And teh Scottish fantasy piece that has been simmering seems to be locking together, so it is moving up in the queue.
The last time I had this inner push to write so many things back to back was in the spring of 2020. It was partly to escape the drumbeat of crazy outside my door, and partly … I don’t know. As if something outside of me drove my to write, for some reason. I think I know that reason now. This has almost that same sense. The books need to come out, quickly (relatively speaking).
It might just be my subconscious reminding me that I have a lot of medical bills that need to be paid, and the more good things I get out the door, the more income I have to pay said bills. I’m certainly not arguing that one! Or it might be a sense that readers will not just want but need an escape in the near future, stories that uplift and encourage, that show mostly-good examples instead of a grey slog of horrible warnings.
As Amanda, Pam, Cedar, Sarah, and the other more experienced writers will tell you over and over, new releases sell older books. You get your name out there again, you intrigue new readers into exploring your backlist, and refresh interest in older series. Indie-publishing has trained readers to expect books in a faster sequence than was possible with trad-pub, and letting a series sit too long without at least a short story or novella can hurt. Fairly rapid, consistently good-quality releases boost long-tail and new release sales. I’m seeing that with the Merchant books. Interestingly, when I release a new stand-alone story, that boosts other stand-alone stories. I don’t know if this applies to all writers or not, or if it is coincidence.
Today in the US is Independence Day, when we celebrate the Declaration of Independence. The War of Independence had been in progress for over a year (typical. Americans tend to do things out of sequence, then brag about it. We’re Odd). When we publish as indie-writers, we celebrate independence from external deadlines and limits. Something inside might still drive us to write certain things, or to get books out the door as efficiently as possible, but we don’t have editors who say, “No, you had a release nine months ago. You have to wait a year for the next one,” or “Yes, you are tired of the character, but it sells. Send two more Or Else,” or worse, “Yeah, we released your last book just as the Big One hit California and Hurricane Alfonse ate New York and New England, but it’s your fault the book didn’t do well. You’re fired and we’re keeping your IP. Bye.”
We are free to write what we want, to sell it as we can, to write short or long, and to change topics adn series. Readers do have a say, but there are few external limits or deadlines anymore, for those of us who publish independently. It’s not as easy in some ways as the traditional system (traditional from the 1910s-today) but it lets us move fast or slow as we need to/want to.
Image Credit: Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay
Mad Genius Club 
11 responses to “Pushed to Write?”
The primary thing driving me past pesky daily psychology (ooh, shiny!) is the sense that I might not be immortal after all, and had better get moving faster. If I write more, I can’t hear the footsteps in the darkness behind me.
I hate the thought of dying without finishing . . . *frowns at never ending interlocking series* but it’s going to happen.
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
John Keats
Yes, that nice quiet spell, where you can put a dent in your TBR pile, maybe even go do something fun . . . tends to be pretty short, before a story, a person, or a setting just pops up and suddenly there you at the computer tapping away . . .
As a reader of lots of science fiction and fantasy, there are few things more exciting than reading an amazing book by a new to me author and then finding out that she has written three, four, ten, twenty or more books. New worlds to discover and enjoy!
That’s one of the great things about the changes in publishing and writing since 2000. People are now encouraged to be prolific, instead of penalized. Readers and writers both benefit!
Today in the US is Independence Day, when we celebrate the Declaration of Independence. The War of Independence had been in progress for over a year (typical. Americans tend to do things out of sequence, then brag about it. We’re Odd).
As my husband is fond of saying, “We left Great Britain on April 19, 1775. July 4, 1776 is just when we finally got around to filing the paperwork.”
*Grins* He has a point. There’s been a lot of great work published in the past five years or so about the process among ordinary people of shifting from thinking of themselves and Englishmen to being citizens of their colonies/states first. It didn’t happen quickly.
The British military strategy was based on the notion that the malcontents were few, that showing the mass of people that the rebels could not protect them would dissuade them from supporting them.
This foundered on the way the Americans had already set up a de facto shadow government, so the British control always extended no farther than their pickets.
With me, it’s “this needs to get written before I lose interest in it.” A “muse cycle” lasts between two and four years, so any plot bunnies pertaining to a particular muse need to get written down in that cycle, or go into stasis.
It still kills me that Tom Holt had a secret pseudonym for over twenty years, when the pseudonym did not even write in the same genre and also got good sales.