Over the last week it feels like I’ve hit something of a wall with ‘Winter Wolves’. I wouldn’t call it writer’s block, for all the ideas where there, clanging around in my head, bouncing off each other, but it just seemed a struggle to get the words down.
I think there are two main causes of it. The first is that I seem to want to write it all at once in a finished state, even though I am just doing a first draft, which delays the writing. The second was that that part of the story was a little slow, building up to the action at the end.
In the end I had to force my way through the wall, just battering it down. The work was far from good, but it is at least down and ready for the second stage of the writing, when it gets elaborated on, fleshed out.
It may seem I am in a bit of a rush to get the story finished, and that would be because I am. A bit under four weeks ago I finished up with my job of eight years. It really was time to go – the stress was getting a bit much and my health was starting to suffer.
Since then I have been spending as much time as possible writing. I’ve got to make the most of the time I have as at some stage I shall have to go back and work again and that always gets in the way of writing – you spent all day working and you come home to tired to do a lot of writing.
Of course it would be nice not to have to go back to work, and be able to write full time, but that is but a dream for the most of us. You don’t find jobs for ‘writers’ advertised very often – its one of those ones you have to do in your spare time.
It would be nice if some kind philanthropist came along with a cheque and went ‘I love what I have seen, so spend your time working on the writing and worry not about anything else.’ I’m more likely to be hit by a meteorite though.
Of course some governments do like throwing money at the arts, so the possibility is there to apply for a grant. Problem is that genre isn’t the type they would tend to go for. If I was writing some turgid philosophical piece in which precisely nothing happens and it meanders on to no real end, then I’d be a shoe in. It’d matter not that it wouldn’t sell – the critics would acclaim it, and throw monetary rewards at it, snickering at the ‘little people’ who failed to appreciate it. Then it’d get made into some dreadful ‘art’ movie, acclaimed by more critics but seen by exactly three people before disappearing into the ether never to be seen again.
Given that is unlikely, my only option is to get it finished as soon as I can, before I need to return to work. Maybe in some strange parallel universe it is received well enough that that need no longer exists, but that is a fantasy beyond the imagining.
Mist and Shadows 