Dear Reader,
After writing Agony (even after several drafts), I still didn’t feel that I scratched that itch; I don’t feel I got to say everything I wanted. Which is true— because my interests wouldn’t all fit into that book, and it would have been terrible. That said: I want to go deeper, I want to go harder, really reach into that gut-wrenching misery and pull out something far worse than what I wrote… However, that’s much easier said than done. Recently, I’ve been hit with an incredible writer’s block, one that has actually blocked every book I planned on writing. The other books in the pipeline are straightforward to produce, but this one comes first, and I can’t figure it out.
There are so many things I want to do… a plethora of characters I want to share with everyone in hopes that readers can find someone new to look up to or be inspired by. The problem is that sometimes those same characters are the ones stopping all progress. Currently, I have three little bastards that I feel might as well be my own kids with how in-depth I’ve been making them… and they are nagging me, incessantly begging for attention— I want to give it to them, but (like with all my friends and family) I don’t know how to do that. So every day, I fire my brain into the cosmos, trying to connect with the god of creativity. Trying to find some way to get these kids to the arcade so I can get on with being miserable!
Anyway, the convoluted point I’m trying to make (that probably doesn’t make sense with everything I just said) is that finding ways to evolve your creativity is important. This book I’m stuck on is due to my lack of creativity. I’ve come up with almost a dozen solutions, and then my editor slapped another on me that I hadn’t thought of. The freshness of that idea was astounding; it blew me away. The oldest question in the book (ha!) suddenly roused itself out of the sand: “Why didn’t I think of that?” That was a teaching moment, as it means I still have more to learn, and that means I need to read more and experience new things. The more I add to my repertoire, the more creativity I’ll have… and then I can get those kids to their concert, and then I can pour out the misery into another book of horror!
Into the Future We Go,
Clay Tarlton-Hensley