This weeks writing

This week has been a tough week. Everything I have written, I have not been happy with. Whether it’s refining Of Ash and Prayer, working on Book 2: Roses and Ruin, or working on an anniversary story for my wife, nothing has sounded good. Nothing has sounded like it wanted to live on the page.

What’s the reason behind this? Could it be the first genuinely bad review that I had?

Possibly. In fact, not probably. Definitely.

Why did it affect me so much?

Growing up, I was always told that I would never be able to write anything because my grammar was bad, my punctuation was nonexistent, and I lacked imagination.

Fast forward to this week, and the reviewer wrote that my writing was a sorry attempt at mimicking Stephen King’s The Mist, that it wasn’t fit to be written, never mind published, and that it read like a high school student writing badly.

It cut me deeper than I wanted it to, but for one bad review, I have had four good reviews. Helpful reviews. Constructive feedback that I can actually use.

So, with that being said, why were there no posts this week?

I was in my head, living there, living in the negativity.

What it does mean moving forward is this: when I initially talked about making two posts per week, I had a lot of confidence and a lot of ideas, and that review knocked it out of me. So, going forward, I will be resuming the two posts per week, just a little differently. Rather than two individual posts, I will follow through with writing more like Tharian’s episodes, where they are continuations of the same story arc.

Of Ash and Prayer is almost ready to enter the second draft phase, which will entail formatting the paragraphs, implementing the feedback I have received, and preparing it for publication.

I am hoping to have it published this fall, if not sooner.