A Drought Breaks

Well, a drought that has lasted over two months finally broke a little yesterday. For the first time since mid-March I actually wrote a new piece of fiction. It was short, a prose poem I'm calling "The Hiss of Angels," and it came with a lot of effort, but it was new and it went down officially on a page. It's not that I haven't had ideas. In fact, the idea for this poem came to me several weeks ago. I've had lots of ideas, have tossed them around in my head, but in the end I just didn't have the drive to get them down. Sometimes it's impossible to escape the thought of, "What's the use?" In the end, of course, there is no "use," other than that I want to do it.

 I also finally got up the energy to check my amazon sales for April and May. One rather strange thing is that "Killing Trail" had been selling a few copies every month since it was published almost two years ago now. But in May that has come to a stop and only "Harvest of War" is still selling anything. I would have thought the audiences for those two books were different. I can understand why "Days of Beer" dropped to zero, since folks buying that would have been only buying something 'from me' essentially. I was hoping "Killing Trail" would continue to have legs. Alas, it looks like not. Of course, I've been doing no promoting for the past couple of months either so that probably had an impact. For some reason, I don't seem to get many word of mouth sales. I could try to figure out why bu the answer might just depress me so I'll leave it be for now.

One thing I have done a lot of is play my Skyrim video game. It's a fantasy quest type game, and I like it a whole lot. It has some interesting writing in it. All throughout the game world you find "books" of various kinds that can be read or used. That's cool. The thing about a video game like this is that it consumes your whole mind while you're playing it, and that keeps you from thinking about other, less pleasant, kinds of things. Writing requires thought, and as soon as you start thinking, the scary stuff can start to creep in. Well enough rambling. Time to visit blogs.