Hours and Hours and Hours of Words

I write books.

I don’t know if you knew that. You see, I don’t talk about it a whole lot here. I do so over on my author page (though, not very well), but I tend to reserve this blog for the more personal, more introspective stuff.

But today I’d like to tell you that I write books.

I’ve published six novels, and my seventh comes out on December 1st. It’s the first in a nine book series, and I’ve put the final edits to the second book today. That comes out in April of next year, and the third book, which I’ll start writing in January, will come out in December, 2022.

Now for the introspective bit.

Writing is time consuming. If you’re going to get a book done, you have to carve the time out of your everyday life. You have to ringfence that time, guarding it like a starving dog with a piece of steak in front of it. You have to really want it, because not only do you have to write the book in the first place, you then have to redraft, and re-edit, and redraft again. Hours upon hours go into a book’s ultimate final form. Hours you could have spent doing any number of other things.

And then you send it out into the hands of readers, this world you’ve painstakingly created.

Don’t read the reviews.

It’s a rule of thumb most of us know and few of us abide by. It’s natural to want to know how it’s being received. You may get a bunch of great reviews, but you’ll focus on the one that says your book was ‘eh’, that your characters weren’t interesting, etc. It will stick like a splinter in your little writer brain, festering until you end up wondering why in the world you’re wasting your life being ‘eh’.

But then more stories rise, begging to be let out. Because you’re a writer, and that’s what happens. And so, onward you plunge into the alphabet soup, creating a world out of wet pasta.

After all that, if you’re interested in seeing any of the books I write, you can find them over at Bold Strokes Books and on Amazon. I write fantasy and sci-fi featuring lesbian main characters. Most of my books have to do with social issues of some kind, which I try to treat with humor.