It's been a funny few days, battling with low energy levels, low confidence levels and low enthusiasm levels due to being a bit fibro at the moment, I think.
Not too much progress in the last two or three days, either, on
Ill Met By Moonlight... I love my little novella in some ways, and I love my characters, especially pretty, but big and butch Robin, but sometimes it's tough to motivate oneself sometimes when you're writing into the wind like this.
I'm in that mood where just the tiniest fragment of good news would kick start me into high gear again, and high enthusiasm, but I feel like a weak ninny that I need this kind of incentive. Some writers work hard, work good, and work focused for years on end when they're carving their way bravely towards publication. They pay their dues, they keep on going, learning, improving all the time, and they don't whinge like babies, the way I do, just for 'rewards'. They just hang in there and keep working. Of course some writers just seem to stroll into success... they happen on an editor who gets them fairly quickly, and they don't have to suffer the agonies and indignities of those years of rejections and striving...
I think I sort of steered a middle path on my way to publication. I
did have several years of rejections when I first started, and when I was trying to write category romance. And, I did manage to stay motivated and keep trying and trying and sending in manuscripts... so in that way, I paid my dues and worked into the wind. However, when I started writing more erotic stuff, I didn't have to wait
too long for publication... Those were the early days of Black Lace when the books were often very lushly romantic, and I fitted in quite well, having come from romance in the first place. But fashions change, and markets change, and editors change, as is normal in publishing, and my style of writing wasn't wanted for a while... until, by accident, I realised that it was wanted again, if I played to my strengths and wrote erotic, pervy, a tiny bit dark, but also still romantic and a bit on the wry side...
But the problem is, despite this, I'm still basically old school, and in writing, as in other things, that which is 'new and fresh' is often what's preferred.... and those of us who've been around a bit have to work ten times as hard just to keep pace! Especially when you're in a genre that's in the middle of a boom, and there are dozens, nay hundreds, nay, possibly, thousands of hungry and talented authors all striving to win those prized publication slots.
Gosh, it's no wonder an old bird like me feels tired, innit?
