Sometimes, I feel almost fraudulent when I write, whether it’s here with the superhero fiction or elsewhere with my erotic fiction. I feel like I’m churning something out and not giving the reader proper value (I know, I know, the fiction I’m writing is free, so how can the value be low compared to your cost? Don’t expect it to make sense; I treat every story as if you’ve paid money to read it).
This doesn’t happen often when I write a “one off” story. Typically, if I’m writing a stand-alone story, I have a clear (or relatively clear) idea of what I want to do, and I’m inspired. As such, most or all of the scenes in the story will be ones that resonate strongly with me and will come out with fairly strong artistry.
But when I write ongoing series, such as “The Gathering Storm” here and <titles redacted> at my erotica blogs (yeah, like I’m gonna trip up now and go publicly revealing my erotica identity in a blog under my real name), things get trickier.
You see, with an ongoing series, I feel obliged to keep turning out chapters at something resembling a regular schedule. Not much worse in my mind than to get people interested in a series and then make them wait weeks or months for a new chapter. So, because of this pressure, I’ll launch into a new chapter knowing what the various scenes in it are likely to be, but not necessarily feeling all those scenes. So, it feels to me at times like I’ll write a chapter and one scene (or two…or half of ’em) will feel stilted and dead, as if I didn’t give them my all.
It’s interesting, because a lot of my ongoing series, erotic or non-erotic, are clearly going to be novel-length by the time I finish them. But if I were writing a novel, then I could have the benefit of leaving a scene unwritten if I wasn’t in the right mood to give it shape and life. Then I could come back to it later. But because the series I do online are in serial form, I don’t have that luxury.
And so, I apologize if sometimes a chapter will leave you feeling at times like I didn’t give one or more scenes my all.
Because I probably didn’t, despite my best intentions.
(In case you’re wondering where the impetus for this particular installment of my “Ruminations” posts comes from, I have two new chapters in the queue and scheduled to post this week for “The Gathering Storm,” both of which have scenes I’m not sure I gave my all. I’ll let you decide, though, for yourselves. Peace.)