Hello friends and welcome to another well-rested week of writing.
Readers, I’ll be straightforward with you. I took the last ten or so days off from blogging/being perpetually online because, frankly, I was feeling pretty overwhelmed with the new freelancing work I picked up. Its a new kind of writing that I have never really dabbled in before, and because of that it has been taking me longer than expected to complete my assignments. It piled up pretty quickly on me and I very nearly quit altogether.
I got it worked out eventually by paring back the amount of assignments I was willing to take on, so that I had time and space to adjust to the additional workload. Still, it’s not my favorite kind of work and it pays pennies. I’ve been wondering almost since the first few days I started if its worth the effort. I thought I would give it until my first paycheck before I made a final decision about whether or not I would stay on with this client long term, but the way things feel right now… my mind is already made up.
But all is not lost. I finally got an optimistic update on my novella pitches and I’m hoping to have contracts soon. And after a half dozen false starts on my urban fantasy series Seekers of Empyrean, I’m finally starting to get into the flow of that project as well.
Yet, despite my time being monopolized by all these different things, I still find myself… creatively unsatisfied. Even with my mouth full of things to chew on, I’m still looking for something else to cram in there.
I wonder if this is all part of the process of Growing as a Writer. Ever since I took those five days back in March to write two thirds of a novella due the following week, I have been itching to make writing my living. I want to create content, I want to engage with other writers, and I want to make friends in the community. I want the joy of seeing my earnings. I even want the sorrow of falling short of my certainly far too lofty expectations.
And that brings me full circle back to this marketing writing I’ve been doing. I’m not enjoying it and so far it hasn’t felt worth my time, at least not in terms of the money-to-stress ratio. But that doesn’t mean I should abandon it. I’m learning a lot about myself through this process, including the range of my talents and my limits. It might not be a long term job I want to pursue, but its valuable in its own right for what it is teaching me now.
So, until I’ve squeezed every last lesson I can from it, I’ll stick with it. And, in the meantime, I’ll be searching for other ways to expand my creative repertoire. I hope you all continue to follow along on my journey.
Kerry Share
Just Another Struggling Writer 
Leave a Reply