Has this ever happened to you?
You hear the phrase “You’re ready” multiple times in a few weeks. In therapy, at a massage, from friends.
You know very well what this is in reference to. Getting out of the day job. Pursuing that mad dream of getting the latest book done and getting it out into the world and getting to the next one. Advertising. Getting back out to local fairs. Getting that podcast off the ground. Actually becoming the full-time author you’ve always wanted to be, or at least only have to work part-time to make ends meet.
You don’t feel especially ready. Excited, maybe. Not ready.
So you raise your hands up to the sky and say, “If I’m so fuckin’ ready, show me what to do next.”
And then your boss lays you off with only a thin hope of being brought back to work if things pick up in spring.
Don’t tell me the gods don’t have a sense of humor.
So! I am out of work. I will be collecting unemployment and working on books, at least for a little while. I’m hoping to bash through the final edits of Night Falls, and then I want to see how fast I can write the next book on my mind.
What’s on my mind, you might ask? I’ll tell you. In the course of therapy, I met a piece of myself that had been pushed out, about eight years old and very sad. I wanted to show her that I didn’t mean to push her out, and to welcome her back in as part of the whole me. So I asked her what she would like to write a book about. She said a book about unicorns, kind of cute and maybe a little sad, like Morgan Morning, but also sort of epic and more grown-up, like The Last Unicorn. I brainstormed up an idea of a lonely herbwife in a fantasy world who rescues what she thinks is an albino fawn abandoned in the forest. As it grows, she realizes it’s a unicorn.
Okay, cute, but what’s the story?
Why would a mom unicorn abandon a baby? While I was pondering that, I wondered if the mom was very sick and left the baby hoping not to get her sick, too, and then died and couldn’t come back. I liked that, so I followed the thread. The baby does get terribly sick, and the herbwife figures out how to treat her, and also figures out that more unicorns are getting terribly sick and it’s up to her to do something. Hm, sounds like I might be working out some pandemic trauma, huh? Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing. And it’s something I don’t think we, as a society, have really done. We’ve mostly just tried to pretend it didn’t happen. (Which is actually super common for trauma victims.) This new story is in the idea-dump stage at the moment, and I want to speed-write that sucker while I’m stuck with no work.
If you want to help support me in this effort, you can join my Patreon or my Buy Me a Coffee. (Patreon is a monthly subscription to my weirdness, you choose how much you pay monthly, as little as $2 a month; Buy Me a Coffee is a one-time tip, you can also choose how much to leave for me!) I will be posting lots of updates in both places in the hopes that people will be jazzed about what I’m doing and want to be part of it.
