Yowza. What the hell just happened? What a way to start the year – month after month of increasing agitation and a crisis of confidence that comes to a head in April. That’s like 1/3 of the year already done, and I’m left reeling and confused. But things are finally settling down, and I’m getting back into a rhythm.
I hate second-guessing my decisions and my work, but I guess those moments are important. They force me to sit back and think seriously about my goals – if I have any, that is – and to reassess the direction I’ve taken. I mean, I continue to be haunted by dozens of “what ifs” regarding my market. Having one of my co-workers retire recently in order to pursue his true passion in art really ate away at me and made me question so many things.
I was actually tempted to take May off from writing LGBT YA fiction in order to focus on producing a fantasy novella that has a more mainstream appeal, but I tried that before, and it fell flat. Sad to think that I was ready to sell out just so I could quit my day job and just focus on my writing. In the end I just had to let that feeling work its way out of my system, and today, I was able to sit down and hammer out 5,000 words for Helleville.
The doubts are still there, though, but they’re not as harsh as before. I haven’t thought about historical fantasy fiction in a long time now, and for that I’m glad. Letting go of that genre indefinitely was a bitter pill to swallow, but I got over it, and now I’m just focused on contemporary stuff and am enjoying my new work-in-progress.
I guess the doubts that linger now touch on my chosen subject matter for Helleville, which revolves around a single mom and her gay kid who’re both tossed into an alternate world by the Soul Warriors as a way of rehabilitating them back into “virtuous” living as defined by the grandparents, who’re both social conservatives. In previous books, I tried to avoid being preachy or outrightly critical of certain people, but this book is different, and it’s necessary for me to make a point regarding the nature of the alternate world in order to establish the conflict arising from the choices that the trapped residents ultimately have to make.
It’ll be a tricky balancing act, and I’ll be going over the pedantic elements during the revision process and will be making them more subtle. Hopefully, anyway, the dark humor of the whole thing will help, but I won’t shy away from my purpose. Too many kids are getting hurt, and having grown up in a conservative Catholic household, I feel pretty confident in my criticisms.
Here’s short story number seven from me! :) “Clouds’ Illusions” is a modern fairy tale-y thing that, frankly, I really can’t describe more accurately as it’s a story that you shouldn’t read literally. Yeah, it’s an extended metaphor about a gay kid’s process of maturation. 
I may be writing series novellas, but that’ll depend on how well the stories do with readers, i.e., if there’s enough of an audience to justify sequels. By and large, though, the shorter stories will all be linked thematically. Original fairy tales, ghost stories, and boarding school fantasy stories are lined up so far. More themes will pop up as I go along, but the beauty of writing these shorter pieces is the fact that I can also alternate between them and not get bogged down so much from writing in the same genre for too long, the same way I get burned out on marathon writing that’s required by novels. 
