Frustration with the Genre Pt 3: Resolution


I'm taking a long sojourn away from fantasy.
I'm leaving to find myself amidst the flowered fields I once so highly prized.

I'll come right out and say it: I am giving up on writing fantasy for the time being.
And all it took was one more free Kindle chapter of another novel that was too much like mine to set me off.

I've been writing and pondering and thinking and scribbling, but I have to face the writing on the wall. As well as I can do with writing fantasy, I have a bugger of a time selling the books. Yes, people love them and my friends were all ecstatic, but that doesn't give me that satisfying *jingle-jingle* or the success I so desire. (Jingle-jingle is a stretch because I rarely use actual cash.)
This leads back to my last two blog posts. They were full of struggle and, often times sadly, shame. I felt weird saying that I would walk away from a genre that I'd essentially built my life around. I mean, yeah, I've read other genres here and there whether or not I could help it. (Sometime I'll tell the story of night school and how I made the teacher there mad because she had us read her prized novel and I figured out the ending without reading it.) My wife says to move on, one of my best friends nearly beat me to death over reading the first chapter of a thriller I worked on, and my parents both are salivating over the historical fiction I want to try my hand at.
You might say to yourself as you read this, "Self, I understand his frustration, but what does he want?"
Simple. I want to be noticed and gain traction and tell stories that people are actually reading. And I don't think that is going to happen writing fantasy right now.
It comes at a point when I've been feeling down on myself for writing and what it's come around as; but then, as always, I end up finding the exactly right advice from the right persons.
This time three different authors gave direct and indirect advice to me. One directly critiqued Glass, Thread, Fabric, and gave me a thumbs up but said to reword it, to cut to the chase. I'll admit, there was a lot of force feeding, but that's what I (Poorly) assumed historical fiction needed first and foremost: vivid detail.
The second was from a Goodreads question I'd asked months ago of a publish author about his motivations for writing what he did and how he chose some of the components. "I wrote what I wanted to write, I used the dinosaurs I wanted to use."
Third was indirect advice on how to write, how to get started, and, most crucially, eased a fear I've been struggling with lately. The biggest part was saying that it's alright to have multiple projects going at one time to avoid writer's block and keep mobile. That helped a lot.

So I'm moving forward. Yes, I know that both the current setting of The Storyteller War and Dragonsbane both end in a weird spot, but that's were they'll stay until I'm good and ready.

Good and ready to return to fantasy after I try everything I want to try.

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