The year in writing

Weeks have gone by since I have finished a story, or even seriously worked at one. Here it is, I openly admit it, and in writing too: My name is Paolo and I'm a non-writer. True, I have an increasingly demanding day job (currently a night job to be technically accurate). And in addition to that, the last month or so has been pretty much taken by moving to a new house, starting to fix up the new place, and dreaming of what it could be like some day soon. Still, at some level, these feel like lame excuses. Time is fluid, shapeless, I try to hold it and it percolates through my fingers, evaporates when it touches the ground in twirling silver clouds. And the more time evaporates this way, the more one feels something is "broken," the harder is to restart the good writing habits.

So I'll use this space to warm up my fingertips, and reminisce the past for the customary declaration war on the future so many of us seem to post in the month of January. 2009 was not bad. I finished up the first mystery novel in the Two Dead Guys series, and went through a first round of rewriting. However I did not submit it, and honestly I feel that it's not quite ready for submission yet.

I have also written a short, urban fantasy novel, Randagio (also in Italian) for which I see no possible commercial outlet. It was fun to write, though, I kept plugging away at it, revising pieces that didn't work, rewriting and adding to it, finding assonances and links with the weird interconnected universe in my head.

For what concern the English speaking (or should I say reading?) world, a couple of stories have been around on the web, one placed in the first 10 or so in the Anthology Builder Contest, another was recommended in the Spec the Halls annual Christmas story review, and even translated into Italian. I received some interesting critiques to one of the stories and have been lucky enough to win a free story critique from an author I admire. And finally, I started it, the big project, the novel I had been planning and collecting scraps for years and years. That's the project I got stuck on, and in retrospective, for good reason: it's daunting, I have been collecting materials for years (a sure symptom of World Builder Disease). And I'm still not comfortable with the storyline. I am almost wondering if it wouldn't be better to restart from scratch. And I have been wondering that for too long now.

In conclusion, while quantity-wise the work done was not bad, I think I missed the spark, the motivation to go out of my way to produce work to be proud of. Or, sometimes, the will to publish and distribute it. Changing all that should be part of my resolutions for 2010:

• Send my word around the interwebs, submit it to who might like it, publish it, or just read it for fun. Don't let is sit in some virtual drawer.
  
• Revise and rewrite: there might be a destination for the first Two Dead Guys chapter, if I look hard enough for it and if I have something decent to show for my work.
• Write (at least) one new story I'm proud of, submit it for the free critique I won.
• Seriously think about scraping the Big Project and restarting on something I feel I can tackle.

Above all, my number one resolution is to have fun.  Writing will never be my career, but in a way it's so much more. It's a refuge, and  a ticket to live multiple lives and to reflect on the world with unrestrained (and unrestrainable) freedom.

I'll try to remember this every single day.