Sucker Punching

April 1, 2012 by Cassidy Frazee | 3 Comments

Here we are, 1 April, and the first quarter of the year is already behind us.  I was seriously considering giving this post the title, The Killing Joke, but if I did that, I was gonna be forced to go out and shoot some girl in the stomach and paralyze her, after which she’d become a genius hacker.  Can’t be doing that; it’s way too early in the morning for mayhem.  At least let me have one cup of coffee.

I didn’t go out last night, which was a shame because I needed to do something.  I was suppose to do a few things yesterday, but didn’t, because when I’m back at The Real Home, I feel like a bum and not in the mood to do much of anything save work on my stories.

But, I can do all those things this upcoming Friday, because I have the day off–yay being a state employee!–so I’ll put that day to good use.  I also have to do my taxes this week, which is going to suck, because I know I owe a lot–

Enough of that.  Let’s talk writing.

In 91 days of writing, I’ve created two long stories–twenty two and thirty six thousand plus respective–and knocked off another forty three thousand finishing an old novel.  If you add up the numbers, you’ll see that once you add in the little “overs” for each piece, we’re talking around one hundred and two thousand words have popped out of these fingers.

But let look at something else:  this blog.  I always made an effort to get in at least five hundred words a day, never less, but sometimes more.  The average is probably around five hundred fifty words a day, so doing some quick math . . . I’ve written about fifty thousand words within this medium alone.

And to believe that, at this point last year, writing was one of the last things on my mind.

Yes, I’d taken some writing courses at the end of 2010, and the beginning of 2011, but I wasn’t feeling like writing.  Take that back: I didn’t feel like I could write.  Big difference.  Anyone can put words on a screen–or paper, if you still roll that way–but having it make sense is the mark of someone who wants to write.

The thing was, I didn’t want to take anymore courses because I knew I could write, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.  It was a horrible time in my life, what with depression and a very bleak future laying ahead of me.

The only thing that was really saving me was someone I knew, someone I like to call Annie, who pulled me into a world of online roll playing, and who, through very subtle–and sometimes not-so-subtle–encouragement, got me to come out of that depression, little by little, and not only had me write some pretty good scenes between us, but helped her develop our own little role playing world.

It was only a matter of time before I got an idea for writing, but not before I did my damnedest to toss myself back into the pit of despair and not think about writing–again.

That’s always been my biggest problem.  Its not the people around me who have very often not given even a single shit about my stories, or me as a writer.  It’s always been me kicking my own ass, or coming up from behind and sucker punching myself in the back of the head, trying my best to deliver that one blow that’s going to put me down and knock me out of the writing game for a while.

It is said we are all our worst enemies, and in my case that’s very true, though I’ve called a cease fire to all this bullshit.  I can pinpoint when it happened, because it was during NaNoWriMo.  It was at that point, when I was streaming through my novel, that I realized I’d promised to do a blog post for someone, and I also owed someone an article for another blog.  Not to mention I was doing this blog . . . on top of all that, I was blogging here, and with all this insanity going on, I decided to write about it, and was in such a hurry to get the post out and jacked up the title in a very humorous way, and left it wrong to this day.

It was at this point that I knew I was not only writing, but I could write.

So, 91 days down, another 91 to go for this quarter.  I’m editing Couples Dance, with the hopes of getting out for sale very soon–which is going to happen because I’m going to be researching places to send it over the next couple of weeks.  I’ve got another 400,000 thousand words to edit beyond that, and I’m certain I’ll get the urge–very soon–to create something new.

And next month the erotic story I sold in December will finally see the light of day, and I’ll step into another role:  that of the author being interviewed.  Oh, joy.  I have no idea what that’s going to be like, to be very honest.

But we will see, won’t we?