The Writer In Waiting

 I see a lot memes about how we're writing even as we sit and stare out the window, or shop at the grocery, and that's not far off.  My characters are never far from my mind even when I hit a rough patch creatively.  Right now, I have two projects that are dead in the water:  Something In The Water and First In The Dance.  If you haven't read my books, this post is about to get confusing for you.  (They are available on Amazon.  Search PJ Schmidt Stillwater Farm.) 

SITW takes place roughly 10 years after Ghosts and 45 after Seventh Son.  FITD takes place between them, roughly in the center of that timeline.  SITW hit a dead calm when I tried to tie up the story in a way that wasn't trite or totally bizarre.  My readers know I dip my toes in the supernatural, but SITW wants me to dive in head first or trot out something trite.  FITD, I think, is a casualty of real-world politics and my own mental illness.  

FITD is about AIDS in the late 1980s.  Two of my characters are slapped in the face with the realization that their promiscuity might be killing them.  The male lead is an optimistic guy and I am finding it difficult to shine a light on the good that came from that epidemic - the eventual greater acceptance of gays, primarily - when in the real world I see those in power trying to spin us back to the time when we thought everyone of variant sexuality was actively a threat. 

There are also all the loose threads that are scattered throughout the published works.  Betsy and Tonya in particular.  I'm not going to flatter myself by pretending I'm talking about hoards of readers here.  I'm pretty sure I'm not even talking double digits. But there has been curiosity about those stories. 

Tonya is a throwback to my early writings.  In High School, I teamed up with another teenage writer and we planned an entire series in which Danny Fish was a secondary, maybe even tertiary, character.  Tonya's story was tied into that - and when I wrote Ghosts I simply could not simplify things by giving Cherry a different mother.  Too much of who Danny was, who Cherry was, was tied up in that backstory.  

I pulled some stand-alone story characters out of the mothballs of my brain to populate the Fish and Stillwater family trees. Betsy is one of those. 

And then we get into the whole AI thing.  I have little doubt that the two I've published have been used to train AI - I probably agreed to that in the terms of my agreement with kdp.  I wouldn't be surprised if the bits I've shared with my Facebook groups have also been used.  That's probably part of my Facebook agreement.  

Even my silly Barbie stories on my Barbie blog are stagnating.  I hate when my muse skips town.  Waiting for the return of said muse is wearing on me.  But here I am.