Writing struggles

I’ve not gotten much for the supernatural soap opera written over the last few days. It seems that my Muse is running off in different directions. Again.

She threw yet another idea for a series at me yesterday. It’s a gonzo post-apocalyptic setting, something along the lines of Thundarr the Barbarian or Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

Honestly, I can’t keep up with my Muse. I always feel like I need to be at the same output level as Frederick Faust, aka Western novelist Max Brand. It is said he sat down every day and wrote 14,000 words. If that was just five days a week as a normal work week, that’d come out to three million, six hundred and forty thousand (3,640,000) words a year. Knock that down to three and a half million (3,500,000) if he took a two week vacation during the year. Walter Gibson, who wrote most of The Shadow novels during the pulp era, put out an entire novel every month, sometimes two a month during the height of the character’s popularity. If I could write at that level of productivity, I still don’t think I’d be able to write everything the Muse throws at me.

There are plenty of authors who can produce a large volume of work (and have already done so). No, they aren’t cranking out books written by AI, although there are authors doing that. Can you really say you “wrote” the book if you put a few prompts into a large language model AI generator and had it crank out the book for you? And no, doing a basic editing pass on the AI’s work doesn’t out either. No, these are writers who, using their own imagination and effort, are writing lots of books and stories. Dean Wesley Smith, Craig Martelle, Michael Anderle, Martha Carr, Brandon Saderson, Sarah Nofke, Johnathan Maberry … the list goes on. I sit down to write and have to work to get a flash fiction out, and even then it usually doesn’t come out anything like the story is in my head. Although, other times it just flows out and the story writes itself. I need more of those.

In an effort to get something out of my brain, I made a start on a flash fiction tale today. It is the start of a series of flash fiction tales, sort of like the series of flash fiction tales I started (and wrote the first ten of) around Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game tropes. I’m not quite done with it, and it need a little revision. I’ve got a second and third story already lined up.

I also need to contemplate a flash fiction story or the Blog Hop coming up at the end of the month. I will be continuing the story of Jaxon Eidolon, Space Ranger.

I just need to get the floodgates open wide enough that I can get more stories flowing out and onto the printed page, instead of the little trickle that is coming out now.

Wish me luck, my Hordeling.

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