My Lord, I’ve Hit a Wall

A Tale as Old as Time.

I’ve been plugging along faithfully this whole time for the past two years. I’ve had no lack of ideas, or drive to write. It’s the only thing I’ve wanted to do most times. Even editing was coming along. The more I learned, the more I grew. I’ve gone back time and time again from beginning to end of the book, cleaning and tidying my words.

Until yesterday.

For those of you that don’t know (How you don’t know is beyond me), My debut novel, Fall: A Year of Change: A Silver Leaf novel, is slated for release February 1st. The story is written; it’s been written for a while now. The problem lies in the fact that debut novels fall within a certain word count. Mine exceeds that. By a lot. At this point, by double.

Shoring up grammar initially chipped away at the word count. I needed to stop repeating myself, things like that. Soon I began to chip away bigger chunks.There were things unrelated to the plotlines, my proclivity to info dump, all of that. But yesterday, I hit a wall.

Editing as normal, I was on my third read through of the week. At chapter fourteen, I just froze. I couldn’t do it anymore. I had to call time. I reached out to my publisher and fellow writer, Shai August with a crazy half cocked plea. I needed help. I needed new eyes. Though she has a metric shit ton on her own plate (Our sampler, which is three chapters from each of the novels Three Fortnights press is publishing in the first quarter or two of the year, got pulled down by Amazon. She’s currently fighting that), she promised to look at it for me.

The Plan for Now.

Assessing the situation, I’ve decided to take a step back from editing for the rest of the week until she can look at the book. I can’t look at it right now. Instead, I’ll work on cover announcements, Youtube videos (I still need to find a fake beard), other stories I have in queue, and more. This hit hard though. One of my biggest fears is writers block. I’ve said before, I used to write all the time, then one day, the stories, everything in my head just stopped. There was nothing there, until it was again. That is my biggest fear, the silence coming back.

As a result, you may be getting a few more blog posts here from me. I hope you stick around.