Yes, this post is about writing. Well, sort of. 

Many of my regular readers here at tamboblog know I've been struggling with a long, crappy dry spell, writing wise. There are a lot of reasons for this frustrating lack of productivity - I've surely aggravated enough people with the boring-to-everyone-but-me details without going into much here tonight - but I've been working diligently on getting past them, or at least knocking out of the way so they're not so crippling. To be absolutely frank, I had a severe creative breakdown in the Spring of 2005, and for quite a while I doubted that Valley of the Soul would ever get finished. But it did, and while I'm very happy with the book, the act of writing it, forcing it... well, the aftermath wasn't pretty. Some days it's still not.

Authors don't seem to talk about their sales much, maybe it's that money taboo thing, maybe it's embarassment, I dunno. But Ghosts in the Snow sold well. Very well for a first novel in speculative fiction. Threads of Malice tanked sales wise, but that was a gamble I knowingly took. Ghosts was a joy to write (all writing was a joy back in the days before I sold) but with Threads I felt like I had to prove something to the publishing world, and to myself. Contrary to how I've been acting while faced with crippling fear the past couple of years, I came to this game to play, not just sit on the sidelines sucking my thumb and whimpering. With Threads of Malice I swung, and swung hard. Full aware of the distasteful subject matter I stared at in the story, I knew the book would either hit and hit hard, or the violence and depravity would be too much for folks to look at. It was too much. Many people have commented on how disturbing and graphic the novel was - someone even mentioned that they wished they could scour their brain clean again after several nights of nightmares - but, ya know, I wouldn't change a word. It was exactly the book I set out to write. I didn't flinch, didn't pull any punches, and shitty sales and nightmares aside, Threads of Malice stands up and screams. Now, years later, I like Valley's story best, but Threads is the book I am most proud of. I wrote that. Me. Shy Tammy Jones, the housewife from Iowa. I still boggle over that sometimes. Weird, huh?

A shall be forever thankful that Threads was off to my editor before April 2005 when most of the gears in my writing brain disconnected and sprung apart. That spring and summer were hell for me and there is no way, no possible way, I could have faced creating Threads of Malice as broken as I was. Thank God for Bill, our daughter (she's off to college Saturday! Aaack!!), Sam, Josh, and my therapist, Mary. 2005 SUCKED ASS, there's just no other way to state it. Financial disasters, medical disasters, personal and creative disasters... The crap just kept on coming. But, step by step we all pulled through. I turned Valley of the Soul in late - I NEVER turn projects in late, I am an anal retentive hard ass for meeting deadlines, even impossible ones - and even though it was only a couple of days late, that bothered me a lot. It still does. Because of my struggling to keep my personal shit together, the book was in shambles. I knew it, but I turned it in anyway. Any good thing in that book - and there are a lot of wonderful things - are because I have the best damn editor on the planet. She's awesome, amazing, and I don't deserve someone so incredible in my corner. Anyway, Juliet and I ripped out and repaired the multitude of problems in Valley's initial incarnation and it ended up being a wonderful story. 

Many readers who were turned off by Threads took a chance on Valley and the book partially repaired my reader base. I have received many, many assurances that despite the crappy numbers for Threads and rather 'meh' numbers on Valley, all is still okay. Not great, but I've been told time and time again not to worry, that all is well. I trust that's true, at least on the sales aspect, but I haven't completed a book in, well, nearly three years. In publishing, that's just about forever. I know that, and I know that any momentum I had is now gone. My reputation of being a congenial workhorse is tarnished. Even if my sales numbers haven't killed my future as a pro, my long and angst-filled sabbatical likely has. I am sorry for that, but for nearly a year after I finished Valley of the Soul I was rarely able to write a grocery list or a thank you note without bawling. I cried a LOT in 2006. Even writing a check at the grocery store made my hand shake sometimes. There is no way, no possible way, I could have written a book that year. Or last year when I could finally open my laptop without clamping down on hysterics every single time.

But I kept trying to stare the beast down, kept fighting against just giving up and walking away. It's been tough, and there have been many, many times I've said, 'Fuck it. I don't want to do this anymore."

But I always took a breath, steadied myself the best I could, and resumed trying to fix the broken parts in me. I'm still fighting, still struggling, but a lot of things have gotten a LOT better these past few months. The nightmares have stopped - after a lifetime of them, I haven't had one for months. I laugh quite a lot. I cry at appropriate times, not for no apparent reason. The crappy, self-hating tape that ran a constant stream of insults in my head has finally fallen silent. When it does emit a nasty squawk, I mentally smash it with a hammer. I could never do that before, but I can now. Life isn't perfect, and I'm certainly not perfect either, but I don't feel so... so broken anymore. Not whole, no. But I'm no longer broken. I'm just me.

One unexpected side effect - although to be perfectly honest, my therapist predicted it back in 2005 - is I have lost my stomach for gore. My dear friend Stuart wrote a wonderful, amazing, gutsy book and I couldn't finish it because of its content. I wrote about similar taboos in Ghosts and possibly WORSE in Threads of Malice. I researched them day after day after day, lived with them, dreamt them, and wrote them down (along with numerous edits, revisions, and tweaks) yet I couldn't look when faced with fresh violence and depravity. The book gave ME nightmares over it's content - which actually, was a break from my usual nighttime scream-fests - and I finally had to put it down. I don't watch horror movies anymore - I just don't have the stomach - and although I have a pretty good collection of murderous research materials, I haven't touched them other than to put them on a shelf. This is the woman who used to insist The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers was bedtime reading.

I have been - too slowly, dammit - working on Dubric's fourth novel, Stain of Corruption and it's well, different. For one, it's not bloody. There's only one body - I won't say who, but you've met them many times before - and it doesn't appear for a very long time. The book is very character driven, so many things pulling Dubric and his team in so many directions, and  they're all pretty much fucked before the body finally arrives anyway. Everyone's fucked, bad, and I like that, I like that a lot - I might not want to look at corpses all day every day anymore, but damn I love torturing characters - and some of the team won't survive the book intact. I'm happy with that, almost giddy in fact, but... but... Stain of Corruption isn't shaping up to be a murder mystery. It's not a fantasy novel either, other than happening in Dubric's world - so far there are no mages, no magic, no nothing but a whole heaping pile of trouble falling on my main characters' heads. Yes, someone dies, and yes, Dubric needs to find out who killed them, but that thread is so secondary to the story itself that it's more like a garnish on a platter instead of the main course or even a side dish. Necessary for presentation, definitely, and it makes the vat-o-crap Dubric has to deal with that much deeper and stinkier, but it's not the main focus.

So. If it's not a mystery - especially since the character in question doesn't die until the second act - and it's not a fantasy novel, what is it? Not romance - a couple of smooching teenagers do not a romance novel make. Not horror - not enough fear or gore. There's no big, all mighty villain bent on domination - well, there IS but he's not directly involved with anything, he's more of a shadow in the distance - so it's not a thriller. The guys don't really go anywhere, so it's not an adventure. It's all made up so it's not historical. There are several crimes - like arson, theft, and the aforementioned murder - so maybe it's a crime novel. Maybe. Only it's not.

I don't know what it is, other than a convoluted tangle of jealousy, revenge, lies, screw ups, back stabs, comeuppances, perseverance and pain, just like a Dubric novel should be. But without the string of corpses and drippy, blood-splattered walls. I'm not far enough in to know if it's even going to WORK. And even if it does, I don't think that a hard-to-pinpoint Dubric novel is the best move for my fourth book. 

Shit, I dunno. Right now it's all I have. A completely-different stand alone novel would be the correct move to make, I think, or something so non-TSJ standard that I move into a completely different arena and reader base if it's even possible to sell anything at all. I do NOT want to get a new pseudo-name just to get a sale; I do have some pride. I have no problem with a modification of my name, even to the point of using Tammy Jones should I ever write something light and upbeat. But to do any of that, to write something, anything, besides Dubric I have to come up with a concept, a story that WORKS. So far, I'm coming up short and I just don't know what to do. Do I keep twiddling along with a fourth Dubric novel that will likely be a tough sale for several reasons (let alone a potential career killer), or do I make myself work on something, anything else?

I want to write again, to work again, but I find myself sitting and spinning over those questions. I need to write and it probably shouldn't be Dubric, but if not Dubric, what?