Hello friends and welcome to another woeful week of writing.
As regular readers may have noticed, I’ve been a tad absent of late, and as regular readers might surmise, that absence is due in large part to the first depressive episode since starting my anti-depressant showing it’s ugly face.
I won’t harp on it too long since there is no new ground to tread, but I continue to be so, so grateful to those who have and still stick by me even when I am at my lowest. If that includes you, dear reader, your energy is not missed and is deeply felt and appreciated.
The good news is I’m starting to come around again, and not a moment too soon because after a three month hiatus, I finally have a freelance contract and accompanying manuscript to work on again. Though I still have to fight off all the normal gremlins that come with starting a new project (why are beginnings so haaaard), my mood noticeably improved the other day when I opened my laptop and started a new Scrivener doc. Which is odd because historically writing when I’m depressed doesn’t go very well and tends to bring me down even lower.
And yet despite having an incredibly stressful year in 2021 with difficulties in my day job and as a parent, I still managed to turn in six novellas last year. Wilder still is that every single one of them was on time. While I can easily say I was depressed the majority of the year, I still got my work done.
It makes me wonder sometimes if my path to being published is not meant to take the “bang my head against an idea or three until a good enough manuscript falls out to edit and query and get rejected and try again until the right one lands an agent” route.
I like to think I write really well to spec, and while I wouldn’t say I thrive on a deadline, I’m certainly very comfortable writing with a due date in mind (and actually meeting it). While my personal projects languish in first draft — or even worse, worldbuilding — hell because I have no outside pressure to stimulate me, my freelancing projects have never been late nor been so bad as to be unpublishable.
Is there a place for someone like me in the writing world? Well, duh, of course there is. That’s why I have this freelancing gig in the first place. But beyond that there are ghost writers and those who write for IP. It’s not really a matter if the kind of writer I apparently am has a space in publishing and literature, the real question is am I comfortable occupying it? Do I have the fortitude to accept that perhaps that writing my original ideas is not the path I was meant to take?
I don’t know. Obviously, this isn’t an either/or situation. There’s nothing stopping me from doing both, except, well, me. And the confines of time stubbornly refusing to accommodate how much work is physically and mentally possible during the day. But I digress.
It’s just something else to think about. In the short term, I’m going to keep freelancing and squeezing in the personal work where I can. At least that way I can be sure I’m always moving forward.
And that’s my motivation this week.
Kerry Share
Just Another Struggling Writer 
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