Rants of a crazed author

So today’s post is coming live to you from….my house. It’s just before work and I am both excited and frustrated and both feelings derive from writing so I thought it appropriate to post about them here.

Let’s get started, shall we. The excited part should come first I think, if I write about it first then when I get to the frustrated part I might not be so mad and I should be able to write coherently. So why am I excited you ask? Well thank you for asking, but I am excited because there is a lot going on in my writing community and it’s amazing to see it grow. The Broken Scale is still selling well on Amazon.com, which is exciting all on its own, and my second novel in the series is coming up on the end. My friend has opened up her own used book store in my town, so happy for her, and they opened a Books a Million just a few miles away from me. I have been getting a lot of reading done, and I will be doing some book reviews later on this week, and all in all writing is going good for me. So with all that goodness how can I still be frustrated? Let’s all take a deep breath and jump into this part.

                I am frustrated for two main reasons. The number one reason would be that I there are some aspects of my writing career that I have been really focusing on and putting extra time and effort into and it seems that it is not helping those areas. Nothing is more frustrating than feeling like a failure and that’s kind of how I am feeling. I don’t know if I am over reaching or what it is but I don’t like doing a bad job at something and when I put forth a lot of effort into a job and it still does no better by me working harder I feel like I have failed. The second part is that I have recently I have had some people in writing community have given up on writing and they blame me for it.

                Now I have no problem admitting when I messed up and have failed but if I didn’t do it, you better not blame me for it. They are upset because years ago when I started writing they started at the same time. We used to help each other out and they would critique my work and I, in turn, would do the same for their work. Well then we discovered wattpad and we all started posting on the website to mixed results. The Broken Scale began doing well and one of my friend’s novel did a little less so but was still getting reads and feedback while the third friend’s novel sadly did not really go anywhere.

                We were not competing and I tried to motivate them both and for a while everything was ok, then they both stopped writing their books and left the writing group. I felt bad for them and tried to reach out to them but to no avail. After a few months The Broken Scale was finished and went out into the world for sale. I ran into the two people who had left my writing group, at separate times, and asked them about what had happened. One said he was just done with chapter of his life and he was not enjoying it anymore, he said he had found a new hobby and was happy. I am more than happy for him and wish him the best of luck.

                The other friend was not met with the same response. As it turned out she had “finished” her novel, she stopped writing in the middle of a chapter and called it a cliff hanger. I am still happy for her but I made the mistake of asking how the writing career was going and what were her plans were.

                She tore me a new one, not literally but you get the idea. She said it was my fault that her book had not been published yet because I did not take her with me when mine did and that is was my fault she had not even started her second novel because I had not thought of any good ideas for it. Seriously that is what I was told and it ticked me off. How can you blame someone for not giving you the ideas for your own book? It’s yours and you should be the one who writes it and comes up with the ideas. Well I need to log off because I am getting mad and its getting hard to type words that make sense. Thank you all for listening to me rant.