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During the pandemic I started work on a very different book. I had just lost my job of almost ten years and enrolled in an online art school. I purchased myself a laptop with the intent of using it for my online classes and to do a little bit of writing.
Setting up a new computer these days means logging in to every old account you had. This also meant being faced with old projects I'd long since let sit in electronic limbo. One of those old projects I'd had was a 14 page start of a story. It had been a grand world with rules, cities, class structures, the whole nine. I decided I'd jump right in where I had left off and expand it and maybe get a book done within the summer. I had the time, after all.
As it turns out, the me from 7 years ago was an ambitious guy who didn't know a lick about writing. My story was clunky and cliché. There isn't anything wrong with cliché, but this was cheesier than nachos. The bones were there, the ideas were good, but the story was a mess.
I spent an entire week bisecting those 14 pages to find the ideas I wanted to keep, and how I wanted to get there. There was a world in that story I wanted to tell, but I realized I needed to help the reader get there. I can't just drop in after thoughts of how things got the way they were, so I realized I had to strip it all down and build it back up.
Hours were spent on the back porch with the dogs, typing away. YouTube and Spotify were my saving graces as far as music went to help keep my focus. Occasional dog petting breaks were had, as well as lunches in my girlfriends kitchen with the cats meowing at me for some of the sliced turkey I was having. I was making good time. In between all the heavy writing I was doing, I wrote about 50-some drabbles for Black Ink Fiction in various collections, giving myself some change of pace. The pandemic wore on, and inspiration started to go. It's tough writing about a post apocalyptic world when your current world is looking more and more apocalyptic. Travel was cut down to about zero, and aside from the occasional trip to the gas station, a lot of my inspiration floundered.
Safely, with precautions and social distancing in place, I took a camping trip/writing retreat with some friends last October. It was unseasonably warm in the Adirondacks where we stayed, so there was some swimming and outdoor writing. My fellow author (still really weird to say) Jamie Sheffield (after you buy my book, go buy a copy of his books, they're great!) and I were discussing writing. I mentioned how I was starting to hit road blocks in my writing and how I can't get past certain points in the story. Speaking freely, I explained how so many other ideas came easy for me in the short story format and distract me away from the main story sometimes. His solutions he offered were simple. Write past the first problem by coming back to the block and backfilling that section of the story, and maybe if there were some short stories, collect them and publish them myself. This wasn't a bad idea, I just didn't believe in myself enough to get there yet.
I wrote around my road block and went back and filled in the story as I went. I completed a few more drabbles for Black Ink calls, really hitting my stride working on my novel, and occasional short stories I had ideas for here and there. Collections came out one after the other, and while it is always enjoyable promoting I felt my steam running out on my stories. I had hit the incurable writers block I had always feared. Like opening a door and seeing 50 zombies looking right at me. My heart sank.
Giving myself a couple of days away from my writing, something that normally works for me, stepping away, and then I'd jump back in with all the ambition on planet earth only to find I couldn't get past the wall. Sitting in my bedroom staring at my laptop screen my mind went back to what Jamie had suggested, and decided to count up the shorts I had down. I had about 5 stories banged out. Not enough for a full collection of shorts, but a start. It wasn't something I had to slave myself to if the idea for progress in my main novel came forward. I started working on this and climbing past my own mental wall of zombies. 20-some shorts later, I reached out to my best friend to edit them. She's the smartest person I know, and man is she quick. I also learned quickly I struggle with using the correct tense and terminology a lot of the times. Heide helped make everything in this book legible, so if you can read it, thank her if you ever meet her.
Utilizing the KDP publishing through Amazon was way more intuitive than I thought it would be. Canva was a great resource for helping me design and lay out the cover. I watched several YouTube tutorials on how to format and lay out my designs, and a lot of them helped me out in the overall process as I got things ready for publishing. I really like the cover image.
This is a long way for me to go to tell you to buy my collection of short stories, leave a review too if you could, it really helps us authors out. Print and Kindle editions are available here. Thanks for taking the time to check out my work. I got past my first hurdle of zombies this year, and I'm on to the next one. I should probably get going on finishing that novel.
Kevin EC Curdgel
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