“Like acid, the cruel honesty of daylight began to eat into the night, leaving an ugly grey stain around the increasingly less interesting, shadowed bones of the city.”

That aside, I’ve just shitcanned 15k of Breed 6. It wasn’t shit; it just wasn’t the story. It was ‘a’ story, but not ‘the’ story.

The subversive part of me, my dark half (the one we all have but rarely acknowledge) is laughing its arse off right now.
It’s saying, “Nobody cares. The sum of the enjoyment of the novel you finally finish isn’t going to be enhanced one molecule by the weight of effort you put into writing it. F**k you, f**k your whiney bitch ass ‘sacrifice’. Go fish bodies out of the Ganges for twenty bucks a day then come back and tell me how hard your ‘writer’s life’ is. All that matters for you, snowflake, is that people like what you put on the page. Now piss or get off the pot.“

Yes, my subversive self is a bit of a c**t, but it’s right. I can call myself a professional writer because I earn my living writing and I like that. But all jobs have their ups and downs.

My current down is that I’m finishing a series. As much as it makes me sad to say goodbye to an old friend and many cherished enemies. I’ll also be saying goodbye to a bunch of readers and that bites too. I’ll miss my readers; I’ll miss hanging out with people who loved this character or that character (see me avoiding saying the B word). It is the end of the affair.

Ah, but I’m no tragic hero. I’m a cad and a bounder, I’m already cheating, already flirting with new, shiny characters. It feels a little treacherous but as exciting as hell. I’m speed dating, swiping right and left, hunting for my next, great passion.

Unfortunately, rather than sinking a few Campari and sodas in the Cabana Cabaret Bar, my literary assignations take place in an old A4 notebook, (this is rock and roll writer style, baby).  They go from a rough ‘what if?’ concept to a thumbnail sketch. If a character makes it this far they had better have a good story to tell. And that’s the trick. I mean, we all have stories; I have a story, it just happens to be boring. Characters in novels carry the weight of worlds on their shoulders, or to put it another way, at least 85 thousand words.

But I digress.
I’m mostly engaged with writing the long goodbye; the end of a six-book series spanning seven years, many highs, and many lows. My youngest has covid, which means any day now I’ll probably have covid and that prospect does not fill me with anywhere near the sadness and trepidation of not only saying goodbye to an old friend but giving them a worthy send-off, even if they are a bit of a prick.

KT