Writing books sucks…

‘So’ has become an old friend. It’s one of those old friends that you never really knew you had. It’s the quiet one in the room. The one that begins at the end of some drawn-out episode and pushes you on to start afresh. ‘So’ is that needle pulling thread, followed by ‘la’. But what does ‘la’ do?

If ‘so’ is the galanizing agent, ‘la’ is the stark realisation of the road ahead. It’s coming down that steep hill on a bike, exhilerating in the air rushing past you, careful not to get too confident, not ‘pushing out too far’ because tarmac hurts; and so do trees. And when that final whoosh of descent ends, the wheels beginning to lose their impetus, and it’s just you and the world ahead, a world that frames another climb, much steeper than before, the temptation is to stop, and rest, and wait for a bus.

I’ve just reached the bottom of my incline. My latest novel is on Amazon and it is alone in that digital wilderness without even me to protect it from the harsh indifference of the elements.

I published it myself. Vanity? No, just a need to ‘get it out there’. So, now it’s out there. I thought I had prepared it well for it’s journey. I thought that I had ironed out the creases in the plot, sorted out the character arcs, untyped the typos, and put an end to my poor punctuation. I thought that I had created something new and of value. But when I went on line to view my creation, it offered up imperfections. More work, more work, and for what?

I have been writing for many, many years and I have been improving. My latest book (I shall call it that as it’s less pretentious than ‘novel’) is a great read. Even from my own subjective stand-point, I can see that it reads well. I am a teacher, have been for almost three decades, and have taught kids how to read and write. I know more than most about what makes a book tick with young readers and AWOL not only ticks, it explodes. And now the work begins…

So, the road ahead is unrelenting; the only thing that could possibly give-up is myself.

The next thing that I am going to do is to read more about marketing my work. So far, agents have turned me down with both useful and formatted rejections. Alone on the ride, I am taking in air, preparing for the task of getting up that mountain.