Life has a way of delivering answers. My writing has been severely curtailed due to circumstances, and I don't know when or if I'll get a chance to continue adding to my current novel. Maybe that's not a bad thing.
I admit, the thought makes me sad. I've come so far on it, it hurts to leave it dangling, not knowing how it will end. But as far as I've come, there is still so much further to go, and I can't foresee a time when I'll be able to finish it.
Does it even have promise, though? None of my other books did. I can live with the fact that only two of my published books rank higher than the two millions (just barely). But for two of them to have no ranking at all? Wow, how many authors can manage that feat?
What I would like to do is complete it, publish it, then download it to my Kindle, so there would be a record of it somewhere. I don't even care that it won't sell. I just want a copy for myself.
I can't believe I published my first book all the way back in 2016. I guess it makes sense that it no longer even registers on Amazon's sales rankings. In between Once in a Blue Moon and The Apple in 2021, I did write another novel, so I wasn't completely dormant. Those first three novels took a long, long time to write, since I could only work on them on the weekends. (That novel, Radio Crazy, no longer exists. It's now just another worthless novella, retitled.)
After The Apple couldn't find an agent, I decided to quit. I'd queried all three novels, receiving nothing but rejections, so I quit for about five months before I just started typing again out of boredom. Since then, I've written continuously. (Second Chance falls in there somewhere, too, but I unpublished it, and that's the one I've been trying to turn from a novella to a novel.)
For a while I was feeling pretty pumped. I liked the idea of novellas, and while they were relatively quick to write, they weren't throwaways by any means. I worked hard on them; just not as long on them. I have too much self-respect to publish something I'm not proud of.
But maybe I should just appreciate what I've accomplished, not from a sales standpoint, but from doing it. You know, I could view myself as a failure, but since only a person here and there has even sampled my writing, I'm not a failure; my sales are.
When one has been writing pretty steadily for eight or nine years, it's hard to give it up. I have no replacement for writing. I could go back and blog about music again, but I'm not into music anymore, and writing about old standards from thirty years ago just won't cut it. Maybe I could look for freelance work writing articles, but that's not me. And what would I write about? Who would hire me? I'm not an expert on anything. I enjoy writing things that interest me, even if they don't interest anyone else. How would I sell myself? I have a book that's currently ranked 1,846,698 on the Amazon charts?
Potentially I could tap out a paragraph here and there in my free time, but I can't immerse myself in a story that way. I need time to figure things out. Give me an hour and I'll give you probably one paragraph. Less than an hour? Not even worth it.
Finishing Second Chance was going to be a monumental task to begin with, and now it looks impossible. I guess Leah will be stuck in her temp waitress job forever.
The End.
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