Much sooner than expected, I have run out of book. It’s a little shy of 89k words, which is awfully short for a genre novel in today’s world, but the story I have in my mind is now in a file, so… gonna stop there rather than add fluff just for the sake of wordcount. It may be that something truly significant is missing that I just can’t see right now, but there is no rushing these things.
Which of course means that I need something else to work on. That particular story-world is my favorite, but it’s also my least potentially sellable one–by which I mean “least likely to find even a handful of readers, let alone make any money”. It is very much a self-indulgent project that way. Charging right on to a potential third book wouldn’t make much sense, even if it would be fun.
So. It is May. I feel like I’m in a decent productivity groove with writing, and I don’t want to take a break, per se. I still have Fairy Hills to rewrite. That needs a lot of structural work, so that’s not a thing where just plunging into a new draft will get me anywhere. Spending a week or two figuring out what needs to be done before I begin would make sense.
There is also my day job situation, which is making me more and more unhappy. If it was something I was putting up with while I worked on a writing career, that might be one thing, but I can’t plan around that; writing fiction is a hobby (an expensive hobby, at that). I have been looking for a new job in my current field for two years without results–a lot of complimentary conversations, a couple of near misses, but no offers. The options seem to be either widening my criteria for my current search by quite a lot, or starting over entirely in a different field. Either way is going to mean a significant pay cut, which is a frustrating and somewhat scary thing to contemplate in your mid-forties while your country and indeed the planet disintegrate around you.
Better get back to studying, I suppose.
R Jean Stevenson 