NO, not THAT kind, but it got your attention, didn’t it? 😁 I’m trying to keep my sense of humor despite all the nonsense and drama.
Anyhoo, yes I *am* still alive. It is LONG past due I checked in here also. Where’s the frustration, you ask? Primarily from the ongoing drama with our upstairs neighbors. It’s about a month and a half now with no end to the running the dogs back and forth around the apartment at all hours. The racket went on till 5am yesterday. It stopped about 12:30am today, so far (night’s not over after all).
No end to the noise, but we have made enough “noise” of our own that we’ve been given permission to break our lease, and we fully intend to do so. I also fully expect they’ll be ungodly noisy up to the day we’re gone, and beyond.
Enough said there however. I’ve ranted about it all enough lately in the other blog.
There’s more to it all though; a general frustration with life, lack of progress, and a strong dissatisfaction with my writing, and blogs.
Life, general frustrations and lack of progress could turn into a long one, so I’ll save that for another post… perhaps. Writing however…
Let’s start with the blogs. LOTS of frustration there. I work my butt off to network, publish content, etc… While it’s gotten me over 600 followers on the “safe” blog, less that 20 of them are real, active followers who ever read what I publish. It’s frustrating given some of the blogs out there I *do* see getting attention. The networking not paying off is possibly the worst part.
I sort through THOUSANDS of email notifications a month:
Post notifications I legitimately read, like, post replies to… Almost nothing to show for it also. Some changes need to be made there. I spend more time chasing emails than I do posting.
THIS blog, on the other hand; a completely different set of problems. Here, I’m actually grateful I’ve got the followers I do. Non-stop real life drama has kept me from doing anything meaningful with my erotica work and I still have 38 followers. Most everyone seems to read posts here sooner or later also.
HERE, the frustration is that life seems to keep screwing with my attempts at a writing career. Every time I start to get traction, I have something like the prick neighbors upstairs completely derail things for me.
There’s also a growing frustration with the quality of my writing also. My “Boobgasms” post I feel was 5 levels beneath where it should have been in all regards. The same is true with all my stories here really; rough draft quality material that I should have polished out much more before posting.
With posts like this, I don’t mind that the writing quality is a hair sloppy and casual. The posts are written with the mindset of talking casually with (or venting to) a friend.
I keep having doubts about the whole “Witchfire” project also. Part of me wants to show that even the worst of the metahuman genre could be much better. A growing part of me is thinking “why am I even giving this misogynist crap the free publicity of good (well, better anyway) storytelling with a new character?”.
Am I just being lazy and depending upon an established world to avoid white room syndrome? My initial justification was not burning through my own characters and ideas, or risking having them stolen. Maybe putting out content that is 100% my own is what I need to grow more as a writer though. “Fan Fiction” (and I’m using an exceedingly broad definition here) can become a crutch for storytelling after all.
The flip side to all of this is that I know I’m exceedingly frustrated on many levels now, and I’m much more prone to rushing into poor choices in that situation. I’m ALSO looking at the existing eleven chapters like a craftsman or artist who turned out something really bad and feels they NEED to re-do it to redeem themselves and prove they could do it right.
Maybe it’s all just part of the normal writing process and I need to just quit getting hung up at that “Dark Night” stage:
Lots to think about moving forward…
Silk's Erotica 