Kyle Kerr

Two Thousand And Eight

12/24/08 | General, On Writing | 6 Comments

Okay.  So, I know I suck.  I have been a very, very naughty blogger this year.  That sounds dirty, but I was talking about naughty in the Santa Clause sense, not in the Mistress Paulie sense.  Right.

It’s December 24th, almost 2009, and I’ve been thinking about the past year a lot lately.  What have I accomplished?  Personally, I feel like nothing… but that’s not really true, is it?  I mean, I did manage to graduate college with respectable marks.  Not summa cum laude or anything, but with a B average (slightly over a 3.0), which is nothing to shake a stick at.  It was always hard for me to commit fully to classes in which the subject or the professor were less than desirable, so all of the really good grades I got were equaled out by some, erm, really bad ones.  Ah well, hakuna matata.

I also went to two writers conferences: ThrillerFest in NYC in July, and the Maui Writers Conference and Retreat in Honolulu in August/September.  In Maui, I even managed to get some really great compliments from a huge bestselling author about my work.  Again, not too shabby.

Other than that?  The year’s basically been a dud.  Yeah, I graduated, but then I was unemployed for a few months, got a job that I was forced to quit after 5 weeks, unemployed for a few MORE months (racking up some nice credit card bills in the process… eating is EXPENSIVE, ya’ll!), and then finally landed my current, low paying job in October.  I owe almost everybody under the sun some money, and it doesn’t look like it is going to get better anytime soon.

On top of all of that, I’ve hardly written anything this year.  I wrote one short story back in March, two chapters of my novel since I’ve been back from Hawaii, and I’ve recently started a new short story.  That’s pretty much it.  I haven’t had the urge to write and, despite my proclamation of a few months ago to say fuck-all to inspiration, you still need a little.  It feels like I’ve got some form of writer’s mono.  Like, I know that there’s this thing I want to do, need to do, but I just can’t seem to get myself to do it.  Oh yes, it does come in spurts, which is why I’ve managed to write what I have, but they usually don’t last for very long.

I’m being oddly frank here, internet.  But I figure, why lie?  Why paint a rosy picture on what I have been feeling?  Surely some of you have felt the same at some point or another.  I feel pressured to write for some reason, like I SHOULD be doing it, and that thought is very paralyzing.  I’ve tended to do relaxing things as of late, to keep my mind off of bills and writing… which means avoiding the blog, other writers’ blogs, email, and often the internet/computer altogether.  Honestly, if I didn’t use iTunes on a nightly basis, I probably wouldn’t have used my computer these past couple of months.

It would be all well and good to make some kind of New Year’s resolution, to stand up, pump my fist in the air, and say I WILL WRITE THIS YEAR!  I WILL FINISH MY NOVEL AND SUBMIT IT TO AGENTS!  I WILL NOT LET MY DEPRESSION GET THE BETTER OF MY WRITING!  (It’s not really depression… glumness?  Is that a word?  It is now.) But what good would it do?  I can’t lie to myself, so why make the resolution if I can’t make myself do it?

At this point, all I can really hope is that my finances level out, that I can start paying back all of the money I owe to creditors and my friends/family, and that some of the stresses of my life lift so that I may once again concentrate on my love, my writing.

The passion is still there, the love I so fondly speak about… I can feel it in me.  I keep getting ideas for novels and series’ and movies and stories.  My mind is always working through plot holes and other points, creating dialogue and scenes and conflict.  But how to get it out?

That, my friends, is the question of the year.

I hope everyone has a brilliant Christmas and that the New Year brings joy and success for us all.

Until next…

Kyle W. Kerr