It's 1AM and I can't sleep

Prepare for the chain-of-consciousness blither.

I’m on my phone so IDK how to put this through a readmore whatsit. Please forgive what might be a wall of text.

Feel free to skip this post.

It’s my third year of writing at a pro level and I have hit one FUCK of a hump. It’s been one hell of a year, this year. Almost like this book is doomed.

Or I’m cursed.

This year has been dogged with tragedies large and small. Computer problems. Software problems. A death in the family. An injury that put me behind on my novel for nine fucking weeks. My day job can’t afford to pay me, any more… and the work I’m still doing for it is not getting any sign of an audience or an income. But I have to keep going or I’ll NEVER get an audience or an income…

The good things I try to do for people just… evaporate…

I feel like I’m trying to stop a flood by flicking bread crumbs at it. It’s all I have and I know it won’t work but I have to keep trying or drown.

This book… This book is just a few weeks away from being finished. I’m almost DONE. Seven weeks at 3K words a week. I should catch up with my backlog later today.

And after I’m done editing and punching up the comedy in it?

I’m throwing it at agents.

If *anything* I write is going to make it, it’s got to be a book called _Kung Fu Zombies_.

Contrariwise, if that book never makes it, nothing I write will.

This is my make-or-break. And I’m terrified. Because the way things have been going for me? It’s going to be ‘break’.

I have a fandom, but it’s so quiet that it might as well be mute. No fanarts. No fanfics (not that I could read them - ideas are infectious you know). Even when I encourage my followers to spread the good word about my stuff… All they do is reblog the post asking them to spread the good word.

Optimism is hard at 1AM and one’s snuggle-buddy is still absent because their second job is 100% voluntary and suffering the same lapse as my day job. And only sincere and vigorous digging is going to help at all. And I freaking encouraged them to do this in the first place.

I’ve been trying to cheer myself up by joking that a time traveller is sabotaging us. Right now? It feels like they succeeded.

Don’t worry, dear readers. I’ll get back up into my usual, obnoxious optimism in due course. It’s just…

I wish things weren’t so rigged against us. I wish I could see an end to the hard times. I wish the good things I try to do had more of an impact. Or even just… showed up.

It’s only the third year.

I don’t think I’ll make it to the ten years it’s supposed to take before you get Noticed for doing a thing.

Ugh.

I need some loves. Or some decent chocolate. Or just a regular fucking income. Or for that mythical time traveller to fuck off and pick on someone else.

My books aren’t *that* bad… are they?