Fire in the Belly… It’s Back!
I've been telling everyone that I've been in retirement for the past five and a half years. I just haven't felt like writing. Previously on the blog I talked about how I write fulltime for a digital marketing agency, and that just kinda sapped the creativity out of me. I've described before I how just don't have "the fire in the belly" for writing that I used to have.
Well, I have been writing a LOT recently, and that fire is back.
Here's what I think was going on. I was just tired, and I was depressed. You can read this blog post about how depressed I have been and how new meds and therapy are getting me through it and it's been amazing. But the other big thing is that a whole bunch of my author years were stressful. From the period when I finished Dark Energy till when I cowrote The Warning, there was about four years in there where money was incredibly tight, I was incredibly sick, and writing was incredibly hard. And I just don't look back fondly on writing.
Even now, there's a whole lot about publishing that I don't like. The world is very different from when I published Variant in 2011, and it's VERY different from when I published On Second Thought in 2003.
When Variant came out, Twitter was brand new. Facebook was new. No one really had social media strategies. The closest thing I had was a blog tour, where my publicist at HarperCollins would set up interviews with book blogs. But now blogs aren't a thing at all (he says as he writes this blog...)
But when On Second Thought came out, my publisher wouldn't even let me include my website URL in my bio at the back because they didn't have an internet marketing strategy AT ALL, and were suspicious of me doing self promotion that they, the publisher, couldn't oversee.
It was a totally different world! So when I see authors making Reels and Stories and TikToks, I have no idea what I would ever do in that world. That, above all else, scares me away from publishing more than actually writing a book. I can't be a good writer and also a good TikTok'er. I'm just not built that way. (There are some authors who pull this off amazingly well, and there are some authors who just seem to be flailing in a desperate attempt to get people to buy their books--and I don't want to be the latter. I don't want anyone to watch me badly acting an unfunny skit on Instagram and them thinking "This Rob Wells sure is a shill.")
ANYWAY, the point of ALL of this is to say that I AM writing a book, and it's going really, really well, and the drafting process is going really, really fast. It reminds me a lot of writing Variant, which I drafted in eleven days. I'm not going that fast on this one, but I am three weeks in and at 50k words, which is pretty darn quick.
And I'm loving it, in a way that I didn't think I was capable of loving writing a book ever again.
There's a thing I used to say: "I don't know what I used to think about before I became a writer." And I didn't! Because, when you're a writer, you're always living in your head, thinking about the plot and the characters and the themes. Always. All the time. But when I wasn't writing fulltime I just kinda thought about... my day? Stuff? I've been depressed most of the time so I didn't do a lot of thinking at all.
But I'm living in my head again, and I'm loving it.
Here's the rub: I'm a plotter, but I've been pantsing this whole book. I started with a pretty solid outline, but 20k words into it I threw in a MASSIVE curveball--something that I had been saving for the final chapter as a twist--and it has shaken up the whole manuscript. And ever since then, I've just been makin' stuff up.
And for non-writers, you'll say "well don't writers always just make stuff up?" and yes, we do, but I've always had a plan, and now I don't have a plan. And this is not how I write books, at all, but it's how I'm writing this one--and it's fun!
It's gonna require SO much revision, though, because you can't just make stuff up for 50k words with no plan and have it make sense. I've got this character I love, who is a musician in the future (the book takes place in the 2140s) who is named Beast Fire, and I adore this character, but I also kinda forgot that he existed for about 20k words of the book and have just now brought him back. Where's he been? Who knows? Not me.
The point is that I have that "fire in the belly" back again, and I really love it. Will this book ever be published? I don't know, because 1) I'm out of practice and it might not be good, and 2) publishing is never guaranteed no matter what, and 3) YA science fiction is not a hot genre at the moment. And folks, I may have the fire in the belly for writing again, but I don't think I'll ever have the fire in the belly for self-publishing. I respect the heck out of self-publishers, but I do not have the mental bandwidth for being a microbusiness. I just want to write books and have someone else shepherd them through the editing/cover design/marketing/distribution pipeline.
So we'll see. I want people to read this thing, because I love it and I think that my readers--especially those who loved Dark Energy--will really like this one. But we'll see.
For now I'm just having fun.
