Being An Indie Novelist is Tough, But Rewarding

It’s time to rant.

I haven’t had serious time to work on the second book in my science-fiction series because I have been swamped with the day job, and swamped with my side jobs.

I’m a high school English teacher by trade, and at the start of the year I had things under control.  However, the state department has decided to cut funding yet again and we are all scrambling to figure out what to do about it.  I have two honors classes to teach, a few sections of 11th grade English and a Film class as well (the film class actually does work), and I’ve taken on an editing project that I’m under the gun to finish.

But I will finish on time.

Once that is out of the way I suppose I’ll have time to work on the novel, and with NaNoWriMo coming up I suppose I have even more impetus to get started.  There is light at the end of the tunnel, I suppose, to use a tired metaphor.  A tired metaphor is needed because I am indeed tired.

Rant over.

I can’t wait to get going on the new novel, because I’ve devised a villain that is so much like Boba Fett without being Boba Fett that he is truly a thing to behold…but right now he only exists in my mind and on a notepad on the laptop I use to write this blog.  What if Boba Fett was a humanoid bat that was surgically and genetically altered to not feel pain and to be more enhanced, wears Boba Fett-like armor, has some really cool gravity age guns, and a steel-in-an-ice-plant determination to catch my hero after (according to the villain who hired him) “make him suffer first”.

You can see why I can’t wait to get going on that.

The rewards may not be best-selling novels, it may not be people reading your books and giving you great reviews…or even reading your books.  What is rewarding for this indie novelist is that I still get goose-bumps thinking about the character I dreamed up and can’t wait to sit down and write that first scene where that character is introduced.  I can’t wait to watch the words form on the page and especially can’t wait to see that first fight scene happen.

Call me mad.  Call me obsessed.  Call me what you will.  I will write this novel.  It will launch on time according to the deadline I have set (late March 2016).

And it’s going to be a wild ride.