Not going to lie, this feels anticlimactic.
I look forward to nanowrimo all year long, and this year was no different. I’ve been planning to work on the second White Rose Railroad book for ages, but it’s just not coming together. I’ve lost Mrs. Andrews’ voice, and her story just isn’t working no matter what I do. For me, her story is very firmly set in the Civil War. The next step in her journey is 5 years later and deals with Westward Expansion, which is…not a thing I’m a fan of, for reasons I won’t go into here.
It fundamentally changes the feel of her books, so they no longer work for me, as a writer. I don’t know how to fix it, and it’s something I’ve been struggling with since 2020.
I’m now wondering if I should scrap the book altogether and leave Off the Rails as a stand alone novel. What do you think?
With my plans suddenly turning sideways and so much up in the air right now–new job, how much time will I have? There’s personal stuff happening in November that might impact my writing, not sure yet in what way–I didn’t want to commit to writing a full novel from scratch. In the end, I have a list of projects that have been on my “To Do–Eventually” list that I’m going to peck at and see how things end up. I’m trying not to stress out about it, so you might notice I’m not on the Nanowrimo forums much this year. The forums typically energize me and make me want to take on more and more, and right now I just can’t commit to “more.” So I’m doing a very casual Nano and I’m going to use my time off between Thanksgiving and Christmas to re-evaluate my production schedule. Things have been so weird the last couple of years that I haven’t been able to have much of a routine, or much energy for creating. I’ve worked through the bulk of my backlist–the “low hanging fruit” in terms of publication. So now I need to figure out what’s next. I’m finally in a place where mentally I can draft again, but will my schedule and my physical health allow it?
Anyway, that’s been on my mind a lot lately as I try to figure out where I, and KnotMagick Studios, goes from here and what does the future hold? The mess with Twitter isn’t helping, since that’s where I do the bulk of my networking and promoting, and I don’t have a good alternative. I need to re-evaluate my business model as a whole. It’s a thing I have to do regularly anyway, but it seems like things have changed so much lately that it’s made it really hard. I have, many times in the past year, considered quitting altogether, just because I put in so much work and get so little in return. But at the same time, I don’t know how to quit. Even if I closed KMS, I would still be a writer, writing daily, so I might as well try to earn some money at it, right? This is what it’s like when you’ve spent a good chunk of your life at or below the poverty line. Side hustles aren’t just a hustle; they can make the difference between paying rent and eviction, keeping the lights on and the phones connected.
This has been a very long way of saying that I’m undecided about a lot of things, and will be taking time to contemplate them.
KnotMagick Studios 