The Tattered Page

I have to say this: writing books is hard. The process is every bit as challenging as it is enjoyable, especially for indie authors, where we have to do everything ourselves. Is the effort worth it? Yes! It’s hard work, but fun. It’s what I do. Compared to trad publishing, there is total flexibility and creative freedom from setting your own deadlines, to working with an artist on cover design and controlling the editing and proofing process.

But therein lies a dark side for ADHD me.

I’ve joked (okay, not really joking) that I don’t go back and read what I wrote previously because I don’t want to deal with the three things that are guaranteed to happen:

1. I will find unnumbered typos, plot holes, and continuity errors that will make me scratch my head at how obvious they are now.
2. I will instantly see ways to write it infinitely better.
3. I will feel embarrassed and pissed off (this is where I am today.)

Recently, I went back and took parts of two previous books to create updated short stories. A couple were for online contests, and a couple just to noodle around and explore ideas for future stories. Boy, was I in for a nightmare. Frankly, I can’t believe I put such crap out into the world. If you have either Beyond Silence and Light or The Mournful Threads, I’m sorry. It appears I’ve been asking readers to ignore the myriad problems and forgive the author, which is simply not fair. Taking a closer look…

Beyond Silence and Light
I give this one a tiny bit of grace because it was a debut. A mid-pandemic debut, no less, and many of the stories in this collection even predated that by many years. But it should’ve stayed in the drawer.

The stories are not very compelling. I had a strange obsession with page count at the time, and thus opted for wide line spacing, which frankly looks fucking stupid and amateurish. It’s supposed to be a book not a junior high essay. And that ugly format is separate from the drab writing which, upon reflection, is cringeworthy. But I try not to mind too much, because it’s an old benchmark indicating how much better I’ve gotten since. It was my first foray, so cut myself some slack, right? I wish, My standards for myself are higher than that.

I’ll be undertaking a project to clean up and re-release this soon. So if you have an OG copy, congrats. It won’t exist much longer.

The Mournful Threads
Ugh. This project was cursed from the start. I was indecisive on what to do with it. Initially, it was going to be another collection. Then a novel. Then a linked collection. In the end, it became a weird Frankenstein of all three. It was difficult to write, and I was completely scatterbrained. I was drafting while working three jobs and under severe burnout, and it shows.. The writing isn’t great; it’s frantic and confusing. Then there were printing problems galore: missing quotation marks, missing periods, typos that weren’t caught, cover art kept printing too dark…it’s sloppy. The whole project dragged, and then everything leading up to release was rushed and I didn’t take the time to do it right. I just wanted the project finished so badly, so that I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. Oops. Lesson learned.

This book will be fixed and re-released as well.

Now, that doesn’t mean there aren’t things I’m content with, even proud of, in each book. There are! But overall, they feel more like a band that put out an average album rather than a good one. It might be listenable, but not enjoyable.

If you made it through all that self-deprecating drivel, thank you! I just had to get it off my chest before I gear up to release my next book, which fortunately isn’t born under the bad signs these other two were.