Writing on the Edge

 

The edge in the title is end of writing for me. I have no idea how close it is. I can’t see very far into the future. With any luck at all, I’ll die before I reach it. But you never know. It's one of the reasons why I make it a point to sit down at my desk almost every morning and write for several hours. I’m afraid that if I stop for too long, I’ll find it hard to get back into that habit again.

This fear is not unfounded. I’ve drawn and painted my whole life – and I have a couple thousand paintings in a closet to prove it. But, after struggling for six years to come up with subjects to paint that interest me, I’ve finally given up painting. Indeed, I almost hate painting today. These days I only do it, gruelingly, for my book covers. Most of my paintings came from my imagination, the same place my stories come from. And if that wellspring of painting ideas could dry up, so could the wellspring for my stories. Indeed, it is far more likely, since I’ve not one of those writers who have so many story ideas that they don’t have time to tell them all. I have to work to come up with every story, and don’t finish all of the ones I do come up with. So it’s a real possibility that the next story I write will be my last. If that happens, I’ll have to find a new creative outlet – planning ahead, I think it’ll be game design.

At present I’m finishing up the second draft of Shadows of an Iron Kingdom. Its still on track for a July 2021 release. I’m more than halfway through the first draft of A Starfaring Life, a novella that I am writing for an upcoming Amazon iOS app dedicated to serial stories. I’m looking to write 20 episodes of around 1,000-1,500 words each. This will be my starship space opera. I’m writing it mostly as an exercise in free advertising. So I've got stuff coming up for the next six months  or so. But after that, nothing.

Well, not quite nothing. I have an idea of the type of story I’d like to write. I’m currently working on the setting -- a minute here, 30 seconds there.... But as yet, I don’t actually have a story. Moreover, I want to write a longer novel than my last five books -- something in the 100-120K words range. And even if I come up with a story, I don’t expect to start putting it into words until sometime in the fall. So there is going to be a break of several months when I’ll not be writing. Well, it’s summer and I never want to be inside in our all too brief summers, so it’s not unusual for me to take some sort of break during the summer. Still, and idea is not a story, and not writing is not writing, so we’ll see how close to the edge I am.