Something’s Wrong with Sissy: Prelude

So I gave up writing.

It wasn’t intentional. It honestly just happened. A confluence of rejection, exhaustion, and anxiety wore me down and I stopped writing.

Outside of the day job, that is.

Time passed. Writing became something I didn’t do. I didn’t even think about it.

It was freeing. I stopped worrying about a lot of things and allowed myself to be okay with where I was in my career, in my life.

Then things started nagging at me. Unconsciously. I started to feel that anxiety when walking through a book store. I felt an aversion to reading. I got The Guilt over not having an agent and not having some big publishing contract. The tells.

The desire to write showed up soon after.

I dreaded things going back to how they had been. Back to being stuck in this constant cycle of unfulfilled ambition and unending self-defeat.

Then something else happened. I broke through a barrier, pierced some emotional membrane. I felt the need to write, the drive to create, but all those other anxieties melted away. I had the desire to go and make—and that was it. Nothing weighing me down, making me feel less-than. I fell back in love with both writing and reading without all this other baggage.

I wasn’t used to that. Depression, fear, anger had always been part of the package. Without those feelings, that creative fever I felt wasn’t a burden. It was exciting.

Admittedly, that made me nervous. I waited for the other shoe to drop and it didn’t.

Certain I wouldn’t be ambushed, I wandered into the writing fields again. I dusted off an old story of mine and started revising it. Free and clear and without. Without all those other, horrible things.

Which leads us to now and the name of this blog post. The story I’m revising, the story I’m finishing, is a Middle Grade horror novel called Something’s Wrong with Sissy. It’s a dark fable about a young girl named Margaret whose twin comes down with a strange affliction that only she can solve—or at least try to.

It’s about 20-25% of the way done now. I’ve posted some bits of it on my Twitter but will post longer excerpts here as I’m comfortable.

It appears I’m back writing. And for the first time in a while, I’m happy about that.

Stay tuned.