So I keep going to a really bad place, mentally and emotionally speaking, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I need an actual, real break for a bit, and then do some ‘light duty’ for awhile after.
An apt metaphor for where I’m at right now is: I’m in a car where something’s wrong and it keeps dying every five miles or so, and I keep having to turn it back on. Technically speaking, I can keep going, just restarting it again and again and again, but the progress I make will be torturously slow.
Or, I can have it towed and take the time to figure out WTF is wrong and fix it, and then drive like a normal person.
The most immediate effect of this is that I won’t be writing Raw V next, or this year. I’ve been attempting to make progress on it for weeks now, over a month, and for some reason it just IS NOT HAPPENING. I’ve made a frighteningly low amount of progress.
I’m positive I’ve made this comparison before, but it feels like that scene in Armageddon where they’ve been drilling the asteroid for hours and they’re supposed to be over 200 feet deep, and they reveal they’ve only managed 58 feet.
At some point, I looked at what I had for Raw V, and thought about how long it’s been since I began ‘working’ on it, and then I thought about how long it’s been since my last release, and then I thought about how long it’s been since the last Raw release, and something sort of just broke?
I think it became too much pressure. This is on top of the normal pressure I already feel from feeling like I’m not writing fast enough, or good enough, and realizing a lot of other authors are pulling WAY far ahead of me apparently with ease.
I’m getting off track. So I’m putting Raw V away for now, and I’m sorry for that. It was a really hard decision, because Raw is, by far, my most popular series. But I have to step away from it or I’m going to lose my mind.
Once I feel like I have both hands back on the wheel again, I’m going to take a shot at writing the final Monster Girl Inn novel, mainly because I’d like to get it wrapped up and just have one series to focus on for the moment.
After that I’ll take another break to reassess where I’m at, and then make another serious go at Raw V. I’d really like to wrap up the Raw series before mid-2023.
At the moment, I’m not sure of anything, though.
I’m going to try and figure stuff out.