Another Whiny Post About Writers Block

This is the time of day when I’m supposed to be writing something.

It doesn’t matter what; poetry about garden gnome babies would do. Unfortunately for me, I don’t write poetry and I can’t stand garden gnomes. In the last five or so years I’ve written five books and I don’t think I have a chance in hell of getting any of them published. Well, except for No Accounting for Reality, which I self-pubbed on Lulu and sold maybe fourteen copies to raise some money for Children’s Hospital. Yay. And that may have killed my chances of getting anything published in the Real World, if I had chances, a point on which I am far from certain.

I wrote this trilogy, see. Mindbender, Spellbinder, Soulmender. Nifty titles, huh? And they’re good. I just don’t know if they’re good enough to be published. The third one probably is, but it doesn’t exactly stand alone; you gotta read the first two or you’ll have no clue what’s going on. And someone I trust told me that Mindbender comes off the rails in the third act, which is basically true. And yes, I’m still sending out query letters, somewhat, but with less and less optimism as the months roll on.

Meanwhile I wrote a little YA novel, Taken by Storm, that was loosely based on the first three. And it did stand alone, and it might be good enough to be published, maybe. (My mother liked it. That’s a great literary hurdle around here.) And yes, I’m querying on that one, too. But again I’m not optimistic. I don’t know if it’s really in the category of Good Enough. In short, after all these years and all this drama I still don’t know if I’ve yet written something good enough to be published. And I may not have anything left in me to write about.

In short, I may have dried up. I heard the song “No New Tale to Tell” on the radio and thought it described me perfectly. Yep, that’s me. If it’s not set in San Sebastian and something vaguely supernatural isn’t happening. I have no new tale to tell. I mean, what do I do now? I’ve sort of got this thing going about a musician who disappears and an old friend who’s trying to find him, but it’s turned out to be more about the old friend than it is about the musician, which is, I guess, okay. And it’s not bad, it just doesn’t have that pop and sizzle that it would if it were set in San Sebastian and things were exploding nearby. Maybe because I set it in Dallas. Things tend not to explode in Dallas.

When you’re down it’s a long way up. When you’re up it’s a long way down.