Insistant Muses

Always falling off the bus. Things are a little chaotic here at the moment – lots that has to be done by currently fairly sickly me. It’s all getting nicely done though, and I’m nearly done with the doing, not to mention being done in. Lots of dones. I’m not going to complain overly much about not being able to get to my computer lately, because I’m enjoying the feel of bum in chair here again far too much. Pardon the cobwebs around here though. Although I wonder sometimes why we all feel the need to apologise so much for things that we have no control over – trying to make excuses for life. It happens the way it should probably, and resistance is generally futile, so you just have to do the best that you can.

My trouble with not writing every day is that when I spend too much time doing physical things my muse gets to run loose in my mind, tossing back Tequila slammers and dropping cigar ash all over the furniture. She’s a wild one, my muse. And a bully too. No point in fighting when she’s on a roll. Thanks to her recent rowdy spree, from right now I’ll be working on three books instead of just the two being published this year. The WIP she hauled forward while I’ve been slaving away is one that I was going to publish as a short-ish story last year, but put on the shelf with quite a lot of other things when time ran away from me.

It’s going to be a full length book instead of a short now, and I’m quite excited that it’s inserted itself into my daily writing pile. I enjoy working on more than one story every day a lot more than I enjoyed writing one at a time. It keeps them all fresh and current for me, and my writing never feels like a chore, because I know that as soon as I slow down on one I have another waiting for me. I’m glad too that I never got around to publishing it as a short. As madam muse kept on bringing it up so much more kept happening, and now I’m excited to be fleshing it out to what it should be. It’s true what Stephen King says – write your book, then toss it in a drawer for a year before getting to editing and publishing. Sometimes these stories stew very nicely, and looking at them with fresh eyes after a while shows you exactly what they need to be.

So – three books for 2014 it is, and I know I’m going to love every minute of the process this time. It’s all about the writing at the end of the day. Still – this is such an amazing time to be an indie writer, with all the things happening in the publishing world right now. Hissy fits and pies thrown in faces all over the place in our world of books, changes and new opportunities popping up. I reckon that I personally will sit back and watch for a month or so to see how things go before I leap into the new toy fray. Who knows where this industry will be in a couple of years, but it’s pretty certain that it won’t be what it is today, and in the meantime, I for one am loving the ride and enjoying the views.