Now that I want to write again

The desire to write is returning. I’m not sure I’m ready to pick up the problems with Avatar of the Maker yet; I may actually go toward Walk through Green Fire, a romantic fantasy of the quest variety and an older woman’s love story. Or I can write something new, although I haven’t had that inspiration yet.

My perverse mind (No, not that kind of perverse!)

What is leading me to write? Not an awakening inspiration, as I am still struggling with the muse in my life. No, it’s something that happens to me whenever important work comes my way — I want to write again. If I have all the time in the world, my brain goes torpid and luxuriates in bed. If I have deadlines or appointments, my brain suddenly explodes with the desire to write.

I think it has to be the type of work where I’m involved with my 9-5. When I spent the first couple of weeks this summer working in the garden, I didn’t feel compelled to write. But now that I have internship visits this week, now I want to write.

How this works

There’s a lot of pressure to write when one’s a writer. If one’s a self-published and self-paced writer like myself, there seems like there would be less pressure to write, but the desire to soar is always there, and it plays against the rejections and setbacks of being a writer.

When all one has is the drive to write, unchecked by the rest of reality, the setbacks can loom big, and failure taunts in the silence. As part of a more complete, even a more pressured life, I think about writing the way others think about vacations. I daydream, and then I write.

Off to write.

This morning, I said to my husband, “I think I liked it better when grocery stores looked a little bit beat up.” Richard didn’t know what I was talking about, not unusual when talking to me. But I explained.

When I was young, grocery stores weren’t shiny. They had been renovated in the optimistic late 50s, weathered bravely through the Bay of Pigs invasion and Kennedy’s assassination, and visited by mothers with Green Stamp books at hand…

I stop here, and realize I’ve gotten old enough to reminisce.

The stores of my childhood seem foreign even to me now. The genteel and struggling drug store with its soda fountain, sitting across the street from a corporate store that would itself later struggle to survive. The cluttered dime store, where my sister and I spent too much money on fragrances in child-friendly lemon and lilac. The department store we meandered through, its subdued light stealing the color from the merchandise.

I reminisce, and maybe I didn’t like the world of my childhood after all, the one reflected by those stores. It was as if my community had given up when the post-war bounty faded. Maybe we hadn’t learned our lessons in small towns, nor were we immune to the edict that rules the world: “Change or Die”. We did not open our eyes to the world or touch the hands of people who came from different places than we did. We stayed uninfluenced by new ideas. Our stores reflected us.

I will look at that shiny store differently now, as I try the cafeteria’s latest concept (which may fail, as new things sometimes do) and walk down the aisles where people say hello and not everyone comes from the same place I do.

Postscript — My home still has problems despite this metaphor. Although we have a university with an appreciable international student population, Black peoples still face discrimination and harassment here. Things are not shiny, but there is a glimmer of hope.

The advice about understanding one’s writing market seems to be what’s screwing up m y identity as a writer.

My identity crisis started when a developmental editor told me I was writing romance. ‘Ok,’ I thought, ‘I guess that’s what I’m writing.’ But I wasn’t writing the same type of storylines as the romance writers around me wrote. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but my writing wasn’t as outrageous as theirs. No ultra-rich bosses, no reverse-harems, no bad boys saved from a lonely, incorrigible future, and no alpha wolf shapeshifters redeemed by the love of the pack’s reject. No space aliens of exceptional prowess. I will not disparage these, as these genres make buckets of money, and I do not.

The thing, though, is that those topics don’t speak to me. I write fantasy grounded in the real world, with a few variables tweaked. Sometimes there is a romantic subtext; in one case (Gaia’s Hands) the main story line is a relationship framed by unusual happenings and a personal vendetta against the protagonists. There is one commonality in my writing: The fantasy world hides in plain sight among the familiar. I don’t write escapist fantasy or romance.

Today I heard the phrase ‘literary romance’ as a contrast to ‘escapist romance’, and suddenly I felt like I had found a home. Literary romance, literary fantasy. Something to hold on to, something to be, after feeling totally out of place in (escapist) romance.

I have a writing market, and I have to learn the rules of the market, once I figure out if I actually belong there. Literary romance, literary fantasy. Now there’s the problem — I don’t know if my work truly fits there. I’m not sure it matters as much to me as it does to the writing markets. At least I hope not.

I guess I haven’t resolved my identity issues yet.