Maintaining Snark Ability Amidst Morale-Busting Insanity

Seen on social media recently: Shoutout to libraries for keeping fiction and nonfiction separate, that is not easy to do these days.

Ya think? Try writing snarky sociopolitical speculative fiction that doesn’t make you crazy, even though it’s usually cathartic. Fact is, it’s been difficult to focus while navigating a world run by maniacal maniacs doing everything they can to diminish hope.

Don’t authors already have enough anxiety? Here I am, past the halfway point in drafting my final Other Worldly novel, Alien Origins, while my first novel from early 2020, Alienable Rights, undergoes an overhauled update. It’s currently with my professional editor, who subsequently worked on the six novels that followed it without having read its original version, so I find myself both excited and anxious at the same time.

Mostly because I haven’t yet decided whether to submit the edited revision of Alienable Rights to literary agents for another go at traditional publishing roughly eight years since the first time I tried. Should I instead simply self-publish a second edition and focus on selling Alien Origins—and therefore basically the entire series—once it’s ready?

Meanwhile, I’m not getting any younger and my determination sometimes falters via self-doubt. Maybe I should just finish the series and focus on other works. Perhaps it’s too late for me to be “successful” pursuant to the industry ideal. And do I really want that potentially challenging headache on top of life’s typical aches and pains?

Hence, while I write about flying saucers, the Loch Ness Monster, and Bigfoot, the latter two being something I’d never dreamed I’d be addressing when I first began this series about aliens among us, I continue to seek guidance—and diversions like seeing Disclosure Day twice in the theatre.  It’s not as if extraterrestrial beings and UFOs aren’t a hot topic these days, so my novels really should be ripe for pitching, right?

And yet, the angst. The doubt. The loss of hope in a sexist, ageist world that seems to hate women and “boomers.” Not to mention the cruelty of social media meddlers who will viciously go after anyone trying to make it in the literary world—and everywhere else.

But I keep on writing while still searching for guidance, or little sparks of hope. Enter two Writer’s Digest online articles in past months that had me taking notes. First, Time Anxiety and the Writer’s Clock: Making Peace with Your Pace, by Deanna Martinez-Bey, wherein she noted that, “Publishing tends to spotlight young success stories, but plenty of writers find success later in life.”

“Stories do not care how old the writer is or what is going on in their lives,” said Martinez-Bey. “Life experience often strengthens storytelling. A writer who has lived through challenges, relationships, failure, reinvention, or grief brings emotional depth to the page that cannot be rushed.”

When writers “begin treating creativity like a race instead of a process,” the article explained, they may think they are “too old to start” and therefore ask, “What if I run out of time?” But “anxiety clouds creativity,” said Martinez-Bey. “After all, the only failed writer is one who gives up.”

Boy howdy and pass me my laptop.

The second WD article that captured my attention and my gratitude was Why You Shouldn’t Give Up, by author Ande Pliego, who writes books about finding hope in the dark, so she spoke to the anxiety from the current insanity engulfing us:

“Now more than ever, we need art in all of its forms,” said Pliego. “Art is an escape, sure, but it’s also healing, passion, freedom. It’s rage and peace and beauty and pain, a tangible echo of this puzzling experience of life. But what gives meaning to art isn’t the medium. It’s the creativity behind it. The person who was brave enough to put themselves on the page.”

My OW protagonist Rowan Layne was brave enough to put herself on the page once news broke of aliens among us, so I guess I’ll keep on braving writer’s angst and let my creativity fly a bit longer. After all, It’s not as if I’m not having fun writing the finale to this wackadoodle otherworldly story.

Meanwhile, I got myself two new t-shirts. One has a flyer saucer with Bigfoot and says, Bigfoot Alien Tour; the other proclaims that Nessy is My Spirit Animal (although I spell my Nessie differently).  Apropos, because Rowan’s still in Scotland at the moment, though she’ll soon be making her way once again into outer space…and also to New Mexico. Funny thing, the place where I moved a year ago turns out to not just be an alien hotspot, because the Land of Enchantment also has its own Bigfoot lore. Some might call that uncanny.