It’ll take time for the world to feel normal again. Yet, knowing the day that the last part of my title above disappears again has an aura of agency about it. Day one-hundred-and-twenty-four is the last one, though I should stress it’s not me counting down the days until I’m ‘free’. For one thing none of us are; life won’t be the same or even close for months. It might never go back. We’re lucky that the seismic changes aren’t the result of global conflict, and, well it maybe should give us some idea what it’s like to live in a more turbulent part of the world. Imagine all this, but turned up to eleven and with sentient enemies, or worse, no one on your side. It’s a reminder we could all stand to be better to one another. Lord knows I could.
On that note, I am starting to get a little hope writing WAN. The more I delve into the mind of the Wanderer, the less I feel that it’s me. We are our worst critics, and its rare for a person to be the demon they view themselves as if gripped in that way. Of course, it’s possible I am trying to distance myself from the repulsive freak the character is on paper, but there’s no real need: I’ve decided to make WAN ‘read on request’. By that, I mean I will have a book on WattPad, with one chapter, and it will say I will DM instructions to access the book if messaged. It’ll live on this site behind a password. That way, I hold myself accountable – in the sense I didn’t make up writing it – but don’t have to parade it as if I have any pride in the book.
I will release the Wanderer when I release The Whispering Rail, which brings me onto my next point: I am not messing with my upload schedule, at least for now. Instead of uploading several books, I am instead going to polish the heck out of TUS and VOL, and to an extent WHT if there’s any hope of uploading it all in time without being penalised by the algorithm. My one response on WattPad agreed with my gut feeling on this, and to be frank, two gleaming books is better than 5 ok-ish ones. This way I also keep my buffer, which is less crucial from my output as it is for preserving my mental health whilst writing as an unpaid second job. When I have an income, I will start pushing for 2K a day and eventually 3K – a new novel every month.
Plans are good. Moving has a plan. Uploads are keeping their original one. My exercise routine has, some structure, but could do better. My mental health is a wreck, but I have ideas to fix it. This year proved to me once again that you can never predict where life will take you. All you can do is power through, and reflect where you can. I have a lot of the latter to do whist I continue the former.
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