Back At It...(Or Just Thought I Was)

I was trying to remember when I started this post, and saw a date to the right side of the screen with this date: May 7, 2019.

Yikes. That's sad, y'all. Pandemic done got me thinking a year and almost 4 months didn't just fly right by me and all. That totally bites.

But here's my problem: I came up here to my home office (where I actually did my real job for two months this year) to finish my latest "masterpiece" and just ended singing along to the "Rock Opus 2" Spotify Playlist and scrolling through Facebook, after I corrected four typos in the manuscript. Now I'm staring at that marker in the middle of a Word Documents that says "Add RAUCOUS sex scene here" and I got nothing.

You gotta be kidding me. I had a whole quarantine to finish this. What's going on up there in that brain o'mine?? I used to write scenes that would make Jude Devereaux proud. And they were ten times better than those Grey books.

Oops. Did I just write that out loud? #sorrynotsorry

Let's see what was stirring back in May 2019:

I wrote some last week. And it was awesome.

Well, the content may not be overwhelmingly awesome (to some), but it felt good. Feeling that Cersei Lannister moment: "I drink wine because it feels good. I kill people because it feels good." 

(Actually a writer can do that and not get arrested. Kill people, I mean. Isn't that nice? Her creator does it quite often. I wouldn't do all those things she talked about, though. Because some of it is really inappropriate.) And I don't have a brother. Just sayin'.

Anyway, all writers know that anxiety of the blank page. I guess I don't think of it quite like that, because I know at some point I'm going to fill it up. Maybe not right that second, but I know...one day...

I even bought a package of loose-leaf paper Saturday (NOTE: This was 2019's Free Comic Book Day/Star Wars Day/WineFest. Two of which were cancelled in 2020. Those were good times....). Pastel colors. It was only three dollars at Office Depot. I won't go into my spiel about how great office supply/stationery stores are. I think that was another blog I wrote a few years ago. Brand new notebooks or sheets of paper are like a gold mine for me. Always have been. So many possibilities. I have three notebooks in my backpack right now. (This is still true. Always true.)

Writing fiction was a challenge after I finished my dissertation, which involved four years of writing dry, pedantic, academic drivel. Well, I won't say "drivel": it was nominated for Dissertation of the Year, so it must have been pretty good. But it was hard to switch gears and write fun stuff again. I'd sit down with the previously-named "Opus 2" and think, wait a minute...none of these characters would ever use the word "efficacy." I hope I will never use it again.

I think what has affected my writing of recent days is a different kind of fear, and I started to feel it creep in as I finished a rather lengthy sequence last week: The fear of being sucked in to my fictional world and being unable to come back out. Or instilling fear into those who interrupt me while I'm there. That's probably scarier. I don't do well when others break my concentration.

At all. You've been warned. Refer to Cersei Lannister quote.

Back to 2020. Cersei Lannister is "technically" dead now. So's my creativity apparently. Damn you, 'Rona.

From the Author

As I've stated before:

Thirty-five years ago I started writing a book (1985 - I was sixteen years old). I finished it 21 years later (2006 - I was much older). Eleven years after that, I published it myself via Amazon (2018). That's a long time to accomplish something. It wasn't laziness, really, it was just....life.

I've sold 350 copies total. 324 of those were free giveaways. That was my all-time record for freebies. I even charted. On the Erotica chart. It's not even an erotica book. It has sex scenes but it's not erotica. I topped out at #32, in between "My Husband's Boss is Touching My Butt" (#31) and "Campers Swap"(#33). I'm honored, really.

*MASSIVE FACE PALM* Moving on...

Fifteen were purchased Kindle versions, 11 were paperbacks. (I sold two paperbacks in July and didn't even realize it until August.) In almost two years, I've made a whopping $125 roughly.

Woohoo!! I'm inspired to quit my day job!!

No.

I did not expect to become an international best seller, not by any means. I just wanted to put it out there. I didn't want to make gozillions of dollars; I wanted people to read it. That's why people write. Or at least, that's the main reason most writers write. They want to tell stories.

I'm really an entertainer by nature. I did the whole "rock star" thing. Been there, done that. Not quite at the superstar level I dreamed about around the same time I started writing this book, but I was a big fish in a little pond for a while and that was pretty cool. And speaking of what I dreamed about when I started writing this book, that dream was the reason I started writing the book because that was the best I could do the time, in addition to jumping around my room with a tennis racket pretending to be Nikki Sixx screaming "Shout At The Devil" at my closet door. (I didn't have a bass guitar yet so I had to make do until that Christmas.) It was something I always did: if I wanted my life to be a certain way, I'd write a story about it. I did it when I wanted to buy a horse (4th grade). I did it when I wanted to be an Olympic ice skater and a teenage model and a nurse (5th grade). In that order. When I wanted to live in a cooler town besides Mena, Arkansas. When I wanted to travel into space...live on the Western frontier like Laura Ingalls Wilder...travel to Oz...

I could go on and on with this. I have those stories, some of them even finished, in a plastic tub in the garage. I doubt I'll publish any of those - they're kinda dumb.

Anyway, I wrote the rock band story. And finished it. The reason I finished it is because I nagged my friends into reading it and they all wanted to know how it ended. I wanted to know how it ended because even then I didn't really have a clue. And to be clear: Even though a lot of what's in that book is derived from some of my own experiences in the music industry, it is NOT my real life. Not even close. That's why it's called FICTION.

It's not thought-provoking literature and I don't care. But it's not just sex, drugs, and rock and roll either. There's plenty of that in there, but it's about a lot of other things, too. A love story, of course, but there's friendship, humor, ambition, honor, brotherhood. There's also heartbreak, jealousy, addiction, mental illness, family drama, tragedy. There's a somewhat dashing hero, a beautiful heroine, a nasty villain, a goofy sidekick, and a (sort of) band of merry men: a chain-smoker, an intellectual, a dude with major blonde moments. There's a grumpy father figure who throws clipboards. And to add to the mayhem: a really cool soundtrack that you can listen to for free on Spotify. The music drives the whole story, and it's not just "hair metal."

They don't really write books like this anymore, which is a bummer, but big "family sagas" were a thing in the 70s and 80s. Not that I'm anywhere close to on par with Michener or Clavell or Colleen McCullough (you know, the ones who wrote the "mini-series" type books?), but those were long, complicated stories involving people and their ambitions and their relationships. Mine isn't "just a romance", and it certainly didn't start out that way. It ended up that way but not in the same sense something by Kathleen Woodiwiss or Jude Devereaux would write. That's why it's been hard to justify its market. No vampires, no zombies, no aliens. Definitely no 50 Shades (*another face palm*) or any of the other really weird sub-genres I've come across.

My husband told me he was sorry my book "didn't catch on." Well, I wasn't really expecting it to. I just want to be able to write "the rest of the story" because it continues to float around in my head. And it's not just about the music which influenced a lot of my life, but it's about people. 

That don't own tigers, okay? Not those kind of people.

Stay tuned, y'all....