Is He Telling Me to Give Up, Or Testing Me to See How Badly I Want It?

I have very poor eyesight. There hasn’t been any sight in the left eye since birth. The right, well, that’s cataracts, a matter of aging. So I taught myself to dictate so I could continue to write. Then, I discovered I’d had a pinpoint stroke and some other unpleasant brain-related issues.  Now, I have some intermittent speech problems and the attention span of a flea. So much for dictation. Writing in longhand, as I did way back when is out. Arthritis. I’m lucky I can grip an orange!

 

It’s been said that God never throws more at us than we can handle. He must think stubbornness is strength.

I have all kinds of book ideas that will probably never be written because I’m so much slower than I used to be–and I’m not getting any younger. Back the the ’80s, I wrote The Unicorn’s Daughter in four months and it required very little editing. Ten years ago, I finished Chasing the Wind after working on it for ten years. There are at least five projects on the back burner at the moment. I want to write them. The ideas are there, forming, percolating–but they never seem to get any further.

Am I giving up? No, not yet. In a few weeks, I’ll be publishing a collection of posts from my personal blog, The Three Rs: Rants, Raves and (Occasional) Reflections. I have a memoir almost finished, Sam’s Story in progress, and Collin and I are working on a series that started with Chasing the Wind. With Collin collaborating, I can at least get that far.

I started a novel featuring five secondary characters from Chasing the Wind, but found it had no plot–and a comedy about the quirky residents of a college town, including a booze hound who really is a dog. Just a bunch of episodes. I thought they would have to be scrapped. Then I remembered that my partner in crime, William Kendall, does several serials within his blog, Speak of the Devil–including one featuring a cranky Mountie who hates entertainment reporters.

Maybe these projects aren’t dead, after all. At least not until I am….

 

Sam’s Story: The Life and Times of a Tiny Bird with a Huge Personality

My next digital short story for Amazon and Smashwords will be nonfiction: the story of my parakeet Sam–who was quite a character!

Today is Your Lucky Day! I’m Going to Let You Write My Book for Me….

We’ve all had family and friends ask us, “When are you going to get a real job?” Some writers even hear it after they’ve made their first sale. But some of us also hear this one: “I have a great story to tell and I’m going to let you write it for me.”

Sound familiar? Either we’re not taken seriously at all or we’re taken for granted. Those who realize we are professionals and have real careers as writers will often assume we’re just sitting around waiting to write their story. We don’t have ideas of our own–or if we do, we can just set our own works-in-progress aside to write whatever they bring to us.

About a year ago–I’m not sure exactly how long (this is just a guess, as I’ve been trying to forget)–I got an email from a longtime friend. Her brother had decided to write a novel. Never mind the fact that this guy would be reaching to write a grocery list, he was going to write a novel. Let me rephrase that: he had an idea and I was going to write his novel. If it sold (and let me say here that this project had worse odds of success than being struck by lightning), we would split the profits. 

Riiiiiigggghhhhht!

I told her, as politely as I could, that I was not interested. I had projects of my own in the works and did not have time to write his too. That didn’t work. I discovered that he had contacted a family friend, asking for my phone number. He’d had his nephew contact the same friend, also asking for my number. When she didn’t give it to either of them, he turned up at my MySpace page (one of the reasons I ditched MySpace). Then he showed up at Facebook. Finally, I got enough.

I sent him a message. He could leave his manuscript and $100 in cash with Collin at the restaurant and I would read it, critique it and tell him what he needed. I never heard from him again. Thankfully.

He’s not the only one who’s brought ideas to me, but the other two were well-meaning friends who wanted me to put worthwhile true stories into words for people who couldn’t write them themselves. It’s not easy to say no in such cases–but I’m a novelist, not a nonfiction writer. This may surprise some people, but most writers are one or the other. Rarely can we do both. I’m strictly a fiction writer. I’m no good at coloring inside the lines–bios and memoirs are not my thing. And I already have a full plate. Make that an overflowing plate. I have one ebook edition of  a backlist book about to be released and three more to be scanned and reformatted (not an easy job, believe me) and three more waiting to be done, plus four original works in progress. Add to that the fact that my eyesight is so bad that I have to compose on my phone or by dictation because when I look at my computer screen, all the words seem to run together. No fun!

I’d have to be cloned in order to have time for anything else….