On Taking Breaks

I've been at this writing thing for a long time now. I've had a certain amount of success. I have two non-fiction books under my belt, a nice number of magazine articles, and a steady (though not entirely as steady as I'd like!) income from my writing. And through it all, I've been moonlighting, writing the kind of stories that take me away, that turn me on, that make me feel like I'm living in another universe. I've never tried publishing them.

They were not good. I knew that while I was writing them. Writing fiction is so different from non-fiction, it seems bizarre to call both things "writing." The confidence I have when writing about the things I write about for my day job just disappears when I'm writing fiction.

But, that's changing. Years of practicing, of reading like an addict, and I'm slowly but surely working my way toward submitting. I've been working on an urban fantasy novel for a while, and it's on its third draft. Each draft makes it feel less like my baby and more like a real book. This is progress.

Revision is hard. Revision makes me want to pull my hair out and scream into the night. But revision turns all of that mess of emotion and sex that is in my brain into an actual story. But it gets to be a bit much by the third time around.

I took a break, and wrote a novella. I like it. I'm not sure anyone will publish it, but I had a blast writing it and I learned a few things about storytelling. This time was not wasted. And it was a much-needed break from revision that stoked my creative fire again. I am ready to go again.

The only problem (if you want to call it that!) is that now I have two pieces in revision. Though, I'll take that problem over having nothing to revise at all.