All I Want for Christmas

All I want for Christmas ... are my words back.

I used to have lots of words. Thousands and thousands of them. I would sit down at the keyboard and weave tales and create worlds and imagine characters that weren’t just characters to me. They were living breathing people.

But, to be perfectly honest, I haven’t been writing. I’ve lost all my words. I’ve tried, but I can’t find them.

Help!

I have multiple projects in progress. Projects I’m excited about and ones that should be relatively easy to finish. The characters, locations and plot points are right there, waiting to be fleshed out and realized. I see them. I feel them. I just can’t write them.

Instead, I spent most of the summer having every single one of my titles reedited. There were a bunch of nagging issues and my known weakness is that I never, ever catch all of my editing errors. Never. So, I always hire the work out, but still, I’ve known there were issues with books already out there. I decided to have every book reedited. It wasn’t cheap and it took a long time.

Then, I was having all kinds of issues with my website. I had never been able to get it to look the way I wanted. So damn frustrating. I hired a web designer to finally have the kind of website I wanted and the look I was after.

Prior to this summer, my books were all exclusive to Amazon. I wanted to change that, so I went through the business of researching and deciding the best way to get them published to a wider market. I even considered issuing them in hardcover. When I finally made a choice, I went through the business of reissuing all of my books on multiple platforms, which also takes a great deal of time.

And as the political animal that I am, I can’t ignore that all of what is going on in Washington is a distraction that has virtually paralyzed me. Every time RGB sneezes, my heart stops. Each new revelation and public testimony restricts my airways. I know one day this nightmare will be over, but right now, I don’t recognize my country. In light of that it’s difficult to follow Hester, Quincy, and Rashid into sewers to battle trolls.  

I know it may sound like I’m making excuses, but all of these things drain the sand from the clock, sap your energy, and frankly squeeze every single bit of fun out of the business of writing.

Finding and hiring an editor, building a relationship, trusting them to work through each manuscript, making the changes and adjustments, all went as I expected. But then, just last week, I received a new review. She loved the story, but I was absolutely crushed when she withheld one star because she’d become frustrated with the errors she found in one of my books. ERRORS? STILL?

Then, imagine my frustration when I realized the web designer I hired had built fatal flaws into the site, breaking things that weren’t broken and leaving me with plugins and themes that couldn’t be updated. I had to hire yet another person to redo what I’d spent a great deal of money to have done. The website is back up and running now, but my trust in hiring freelancers is trounced. Not that I won’t do it again. I just don’t know what I could have done differently to improve the outcome I’d had with the first one.  

Unfortunately, much of this happened just before and during the publication of The Bonding Blade. I’d worked diligently on the book and I absolutely love the story. From Subaru, to Clark, to Erika and Sarah, the characters and situations are some of the favorites I’ve ever written. It’s a damn good book and continues The Desert Goddess series -- both books, The Bonding Spell and The Bonding Blade could use some review love by the way -- with the kind of twisting mystery, dark and serious situations and wry sense of humor the series embodies. The release was … not a letdown exactly. It just didn’t bring me the kind of joy I usually feel when sending one of my babies out into the world.

I owe readers of the series a next book and I WILL fulfill that promise. The problem is, I’m a bit lost. I’ve lost my words. I’m searching for them, but so far, they have remained elusive.

I’m going on a trip soon and hope I’ll find some words under some rocks there, maybe buried in the ashes of a fireplace. I really am looking for them everywhere. I wish my mom would send some word from Heaven that I’ve left them in my sock drawer. I can’t hire Master Sergeant Lauren Harper to figure out where they’ve gone. I’m sure she and Harry are on Holiday leave.

So, if you have a good lead on where I can find some words, please let me know. I will take them in the form of inspiration gift cards, or writing prompt packages, a word download infusion, a sage cleansing, or magical talisman like the Muse Touch I purchased from a witches shop in Occoquan, Virginia. I bought it a few years ago, so it probably needs a refresher spell. I wish I had Quincy’s grimoire database. But I don’t. So, I guess I’ll just keep looking.

Happy Holidays! Here’s hoping you get everything you’re wishing for.