As Another Year Grinds to a Halt, A Few Quick Words on 2012...

And so another year is over... another year in which I ended up writing considerably less than I was hoping, but did learn some useful things about writing.

Without a shadow of a doubt, my greatest discovery of the year was one I've made very recently, namely that I have a valid excuse for not being as productive as other writers. You see, it's all my evil day job's fault!

Now I hear what you're saying. Other authors have evil day jobs, too, and they still manage to write a few thousand words each day. True. But these authors probably don't have my day job. You see, my day job involves a fair bit of writing. So much writing, in fact, that it completely uses up the part of my brain that deals with words and emotions, leaving me with very little energy to go about my own writing afterwards. Other writers probably don't have this problem because their day jobs don't require them to flex their writers' muscles. Mine does, unfortunately, and it's making me rather less productive than I could wish.

Now this may not come as much of an epiphany to you, but to me, it was. It took me ten years to realise how much the nature of my day job is affecting my writing – ten years during which I hardly made any progress on my magnum opus and frequently thought I was too lazy and undisciplined to be a writer, even though I knew on a rational level that I'm neither lazy nor undisciplined. And then, bang. Suddenly, I made the connection. In retrospect, I'm amazed I didn't make it years ago. But it has had a positive effect, in that I've become a little more forgiving of the glacial speed at which I write. This may not sound like a good thing to some of you, but trust me, to me, it is.

As for the other things I learned in 2012, well, I've mainly become a much better writer on a technical level. When I look now at the stories I produced just half a year ago, when I first began to write smut, I find many cringe-inducing flaws. I'll find myself thinking, Don't use that word! It's unsexy! Or, Don't use so many dialogue tags! It looks amateurish! Or, Don't interrupt the action with observations! It will ruin the flow of the scene! Or the greatest cliché of all: Show, don't tell, for heaven's sake! Don't tell your reader your heroine is aroused; show that she's aroused!

Sadly, many of my early stories – which feature all the above mistakes and more – are only now getting published, putting me in the unenviable position of having to promote work which I know is seriously flawed. As a die-hard perfectionist, I hate that sort of thing. All I want to do is take out my red pen and correct all the mistakes I come across, but I can't...

Oh, well. Live and learn, eh? That's my goal for 2013. Learn to become a better writer, and hopefully become a more productive writer, as well.

I can dream, can't I?

Oh, and best wishes for 2013, everyone. :-)