Quiet, Too Quiet
I’ll fess up. I haven’t been around here much lately. I could parade a litany of excuses out and make them pirouette about in pretty patterns for you, but let’s just skip all that and go straight to brutal honesty.
I’ve been too damned busy. I know. It’s only one little bit of writing once a month. Surely that’s the kind of commitment that any writer could keep. True, but maybe it’s not always one a writer should keep.
Poke around the site here, and you’ll see that I’m not alone. Skimming back through the past month, only seventeen of our thirty listed authors here managed to chip in a column between today and the last time I blew this. Do we all suck? Have we given up on writing? Are we huddled in corners, sucking on shotguns and praying for our muses to return?
Nah. It’s nothing so dramatic. I wouldn’t presume to speak for any of the other slackers, but I’ve been writing — a lot. In the past year, I revised The Marvel Encyclopedia for DK Publishing, wrote a tie-in novel for Guild Wars 2 called Ghosts of Ascalon, and cracked out my first original (non-tie-in) novels for Angry Robot (Amortals and Vegas Knights). Toss in some miscellaneous writing for tabletop games, video games, and columns for The Escapist, and it’s been crazy busy.
Worse yet, I fell behind my deadlines. That’s never a pleasant situation to be in, but the internet has exacerbated that problem. I’m not talking about how easy it is to get drawn into the shiny distractions the web brings to your desktop. I mean that it’s hard to justify writing something for free and posting it on the internet when you’re struggling to catch up with your paying work. The fact that your patient editors can see what you’re doing makes it nearly impossible.
In good conscience, I can’t spend much time on a post for Storytellers Unplugged or even on my own website when I’m worried that one of my editors might rightfully resent it. Once someone’s given you a deadline extension, it’s poor form to spend that borrowed time on something other than for what it’s been budgeted.
Fortunately, I’ve caught up this month, just in time to be able to chip in for my monthly portion of Storytellers Unplugged. I’m blowing off sleep to bring this too you right now, but that’s worth it. It’s my time to spend, and I’m free to spend it with you.
Let’s hope that continues. I’ll be working as hard as ever to make it so.
