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| Sitting at that desk all day long. |
Louis Shalako
Lately there’s this sense of boredom, a bit of
depression and what sure seems like burnout.
I’ve worked pretty hard over the last six years, since
publishing my first two novels. Now I have five pen-names, twenty novels and
something like a hundred thirty-five ebook titles, with another slew of titles
available in paperback.
At some point I just quit blogging for five pen names
in rotation. In order to write a bunch of novels, the short stories and
submissions sort of fell by the wayside. Every morning, I get up and check the
emails. I check the sales account numbers. Then I go on a bunch of websites and
read, sometimes for an hour and a half, sometimes two or more hours. I call it
‘the morning repost,’ and I post those stories as many places as I can in order
for other people to get the benefit of them.
In the last six years, I worked pretty hard to educate
myself as a writer, to build up a platform and to learn at least the basics of
everything a person can learn in order to write and publish their own works.
Since January 2015, I wrote six novels of over 60,000
words each. That alone was a ton of work.
It’s difficult to take a day off once you get bitten
by the bug, and yet, inevitably, I seem to be slacking off. Finding ideas is
not that easy, and lately I haven’t been working at it. I have couple of blank
files on the desktop and I haven’t even really thought about them. Publishing #
99 Easy Street as a serial sort of gives me a little something to do, a
nice easy job that doesn’t take up too much time.
I have chores left undone, including taxes, price
changes, edit and format Easy St.,
make a cover, all kinds of things really, and it’s like I just don’t care.
Bear in mind, it’s been a long winter if not a
particularly harsh one. I’m lucky to get out of here for an hour or two a day.
Three or four hours away from the house would be a real good day for me.
I am at this desk pretty much all day, every day, and
this has been going on for some time.
At some point, I need to do something different once
in a while. This is just what we can’t afford to do after twenty-three years on
a very small pension, and after all this time, book sales are not all that
impressive.
As somebody once said, if you can quit, then do it—
The trouble is, that if I just gave up on writing, there
wouldn’t be much left, and I’d be even more bored than I am now.
END
