Monday musings
By Elyse Salpeter
Two Marches ago when the world shut down, I pushed myself to finish my novel, The Journey Back. This was book #6 in my Kelsey Porter series, but I felt very selfish to publish a new novel while the world was in a pandemic.
It took all my will to get this book done, but I released it in May. I did the promos for it, blogs, social media, ads… and I sold maybe ten to fifteen copies and have just one review.
I felt so defeated by this lacklustre response to a series that I loved, that I mentally shut down. Fourteen years of trying to make a go of this “career,” and people were only getting my books when I did a free promotion. Even asking for a review felt like I was asking someone to cut off their arm. It was exhausting and I simply had enough.
So, in May, after the last ad ran, I ceased writing. I used to write daily, for hours, but I simply stopped. Stories and far-off lands filling my brain were replaced with worry about the health of my family, the fear of me getting sick, my changing job, working from home and all the trepidation of what was happening in the world.
It’s taken another year to finally breathe again. Slowly, that desire to write is coming back. For the very first time in a year, I started blogging again. I started doing videos on TikTok. I joined a writing group.
And I opened two old works-in-progress and looked at them again. I have this tentative goal to publish one of the books by December.
I hope my muse reads this and comes back to me so I don’t have to keep searching for her, but I’ll gently keep checking if she’s around and try to push her now and again to join me once again.
Elyse Salpeter
loves mixing “the real with the fantastic” in her books. She likes nothing better than taking different scenarios and creating worlds where things just aren’t what they appear to be.
When she’s not writing, she’s training for sprint triathlons, eating shock food with her Gastronaut Club and delving into all the newest and greatest social media apps. Needless to say, her kids can’t believe she’s on TikTok!
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