So. Had a bit of a rough week last week. Cried a lot. Felt miserable. And we’re here. The beginning of week 4. Almost a whole month that the Kindle Vella program has existed.
Things I need to do do this week: write more back log episodes so I can plan them out. I posted everything at once, and so everything I need to build up my episodes again. I don’t even know if it makes sense.
Nothing much makes sense right now. I so badly want to be a fantasy writer but I’ve not had much luck with it. I’m trying to come up with a contemporary story but switching gears from contemporary to fantasy is like forcing me to do homework. That’s the only way I can explain it.
And I’ve read contemporary books I’ve LOVED. So it’s not like I don’t like the genre. I’m just used to writing fantasy. I LIKE writing fantasy. Big worlds and world building and epic quests.
But sometimes you’ve got to write things you don’t necessarily love to try to make an impact. I think about this a lot. Growing up, one of my favorite authors was Louisa May Alcott. I read pretty much every book by her including her letters collection.
What most people don’t know is that she was a GOTHIC WRITER. There’s a whole chapter in Little Women that talks about this actually. Her and the Professor discuss whether or not she should be writing that type of work because it’s not “important” and its silly but Jo’s got a whole career going with it and she MAKES MONEY which her family needs to live off on so nothing to sneer at.
And Alcott pulled that from her real life. Behind A Mask was one of her more notable ones. Alcott notoriously disliked her most famous work, Little Women, which she herself admitted to writing for profit. The gothic novels were Alcotts true love.
But she was a woman writing in the eighteen hundreds when women weren’t supposed to write and certainly not about scandalous love affairs and tragic heroines or whatever.
Often times with art, its so hard to balance creativity and finance. Passion vs. Profit. We all want to do what we love but at what cost?
I guess writing contemporary isn’t such a hard challenge itself. I’ve done worse things for a job. And I’m sure I can find SOMETHING I’m passionate about that doesn’t involve magic and dragons and put my own spin on it.
I’ve been working on a novel that involves the Russian mafia and a girl that is studying abroad and I’m in the beginning stages. I’ve got to wait until I get at least 25 k to see what I’ll do with it. That’s usually the point where I figure out if I like it or not or I scrap it. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll end up with a completely new idea and abandon the Russian mafia story. Who knows?
I mentioned in my Week 3 wrap up that I watched Ted Lasso when I was having my breakdown. And in the show, he’s got the word BELIEVE in bright yellow paper over his office wall. And right now I guess that’s all I can do. Believe, and work hard, and hopefully this will turn into something.
Come on week 4. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get my first read.
