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Sometimes writing is a struggle

Posted in A writer's life, am wrinting, Creative passion, revision, Trying to focus, tagged , , , , on March 18, 2026| 3 Comments »

I wrestle with feelings of inadequacy a lot of the time. I doubt myself and I definitely have imposter syndrome. When I studied for my PhD I had these feelings. But my supervisor told me he had imposter syndrome too and that most of the academics at my faculty did.

Thoughts like: Why am I bothering? No one cares! You aren’t good enough? Stop kidding yourself. You can’t write good stories.

Naturally, I don’t like this negative self talk. Just like I don’t like telling myself I look bad or old or fat. I’ve been doing that for years. My youngest daughter says it’s body dysmorphia. I look at photos and think, hell I looked good back then, but I thought I was fat, ugly, old. Hahaha!

I had very low self esteem growing up and I have fought long and hard to get where I am. You know the drill, one of many siblings, dysfunctional home life, child abuse and so on.

You think at aged 65 I’d know better. Sorry to disappoint. However, I try very hard not to let these negative thoughts win. I focus on what makes me happy and I write stories because I like to do that, I enjoy it. Well most of the time. It is not always easy to sit down and write. Inspiration doesn’t always come when you want it, even when you know the story you want to write. I think that’s where the negative talk comes in, when it is not easy. The evil part of my brain starts telling me to just go watch some screen, or go shopping, or do other things like craft. Believe me I feel negative feelings about my craft too. I can pick holes in anything I make and I know where I could have done better.

I just have a weird brain.

Yesterday, I was thinking about how long I’ve been writing. I started around 2000 so nearly 26 years. I didn’t get published until 2013 with Rayessa and the Space Pirates, but I had written a lot in that time. The funny thing is that Rayessa and the Space Pirates had been sitting in my hard drive for years. It originally started as a short story for a CSFG anthology called Elsewhere. I was working at the audit office and I thought it would be cool to have a space auditor and the story was going along very well, but when space pirates turned up, well I couldn’t finish it. So I wrote another story for Elsewhere called ‘Other’ and continued on with Rayessa and the Space Pirates as a short novel. Now, I did submit it to places but didn’t get anywhere so it lingered in the darkness until I went to my first Romance Writers of Australia Conference where several publishers were seeking submissions for ebooks. It was then I realised that my SF story also had a romance arc. So Escape took it and published it and the sequel Rae and Essa’s Space Adventures. I don’t know if I’d call it a success. I did earn royalties and it is my most pirated book judging by the Google alerts.

So, one lesson, don’t throw stuff away. Just because the stars don’t align, they might again in different circumstances. Anyway, time has moved on, the rights came back to me and now I have self-published my previously published books and my new stuff. This doesn’t mean I’ve given up on traditional publishing. I dabble but my life isn’t going to stop. A lot of things need to align with traditional publishing. It’s great when they do but they don’t always. If you try an agent, then they need to like what you are writing, have an idea of where to market it etc. Then, publishers need to like it too…but then there’s the acquisitions meeting where other people weigh in, the marketers, for example. I have had a few turn downs after acquisitions that said the Australian market was too small. With Ruby Heart a senior editor told me how much the liked it but then it didn’t get picked up.

Moral of the story is don’t give up. Haha! But also don’t listen to your negative talk. Write because that is what you live for. Sure, I’m going to give up one day. But right now I have ideas, I have drafted manuscripts that I’m tinkering with or trying to get an agent for. I have been writing for a very long time so I have a backlog. I hope to move some of these this year.

So I’m working on Gentleman Magician – a Cry Havoc novella and I have another novella planned and Book Five to write. Hopefully this year. I’m a bit behind on my plans (yes I made plans) but I hope to get there this year on these.

I have a Regency Romance The Tainted Lady I drafted before 2016. Sadly the market has changed and where I was going to submit that is a dead end. However, I did get some valuable feedback on it from a RWA competition and I’ve started revising it and I know what I need to do to get that dusted. Don’t be surprised if that gets published this year.

I drafted a young adult portal fantasy called Into the Dark Glass, that too is in a state of redraft. My then agent didn’t like it and couldn’t tell me why so in the intervening ten years I’ve been mulling it over and I have a restructure in mind. I tinker but haven’t got far. There is always a new project calling me away.

My Phd novel is currently been shopped around. I finished a revision of that in January.

I have a middle grade fantasy, Grandma Neebs: Through the Pantry Door, which I’ve shopped to Australian publishers and got nowhere. I really like this one because at its core its about family and love. Apparently there is a glut of middle grade fantasy at the moment but this has some horror elements. This will need an illustrator so that will depend on $ if I am to self publish it. Decision postponed.

Also in my hard drive is a feminist SF novella, which I want to revisit and maybe publish. And I have some Blood Crowd short stories that could be a collection if I wrote one or two more stories for it. Picture Vampires in Chicago with werewolves and gangsters. If there is more then I have forgotten.

I don’t write to trends or to the market. Some people do and it works for them. I don’t make a lot of money and recently even reviews are hard to come by. I’m writing what I love and I hope that readers like what I do. That’s what feeds my soul.

Sometimes what gets published has been years in the making. I hope to improve my productivity because I have more stories to write.

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New book project

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 26, 2025| 1 Comment »

I’m currently in Perth, visiting a writer buddy (Hi Cat). We have been talking all day, mostly about writing, our process, indie publishing, traditional publishing, ideas, editing, book production. All the things.

We have also been writing.

I’m currently working on Gentleman Magician, which I started in the Hunter Valley. I had a lovely writerly time there hanging with Keri Arthur and Jenny Kew after attending the Next New Book Boyfriend event at the Mecure Hunter Valley.

I’m now just over 4000 words in.

Firstly I had a plot glitch. A character I was going to include could not feature in this story so I had to rethink that and did manage to sort it.

I’m not rushing this project, but aiming for 1000 words a day and I’m getting a feel for the narrative. As this story will be in Edward’s point of view I’m going to have to once again get used to not writing in Jemima’s. She will return to the pages in Cry Havoc book five though so don’t worry. I love Jemima and have so much fun writing her.

The challenge with Gentleman Magician is to work out Edward’s journey in becoming a magician. He has inherent talent but it must be developed and his meeting with Fulton, healing him etc, which are two interesting plots entwined.

As I’m a pantser I have no idea how long this book will be. I have no idea if other plot bits will show up. It’s early days in the words on a page.

However, it is good to be writing, good to be enjoying it and I’m waiting eagerly for The Prudential Light proofreading changes to come back so I can upload the book to retailers.

Like my sewing and craft projects, I have way to many book ideas and projects on the boil that I don’t know whether I will get them all done. However, Cry Havoc is likely to be my focus for at least the first six months of 2026. Then I’ll need to work on a Dani Kristoff novel. Who knows priorities shift.

Meanwhile I’m enjoying being in Perth for nine days and seeing friends.

Work in progress

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Vale Kaaren Sutcliffe

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on September 6, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Kaaren at RWA conference in Sydney 2023

Kaaren’s website here.

When I first met Kaaren in the early 2000s she was vibrant, focussed and enthusiastic. And she never ceased being so, even when she knew her days were numbered. She was determined to live every day to the full, feeling as well as she could for as long as she could.

After meeting Kaaren at an editing workshop where she as a presenter, we got talking about auditing and said come and work at the Australian National Audit Ofice. I did apply and got in and we worked together on audit projects. Partners! She approached her work in a focussed and organised way and she had a really ordered way of looking at things. She made audits fun, even though she was very competitive. You’ll never be as old as me, she said once. I replied, “Not much I can do about that.” She was also a writer and a horsewoman at that time, as well as a runner and cyclist. She was as focussed about those things as she was everything else. Her earlier books featured flying horses. She was quirky I suppose, she would tell me about the conversations she had with her characters. Her Kered’s Cry series was about recovery from trauma and it was researched and planned.

We were working together when she got her first breast cancer diagnosis. I cried. She told me to stop it. That was Kaaren. Tackling breast cancer was a huge challenge, one which Kaaren attacked like everything else. The only casualty was writing. Her publisher turned out to be dodgy and the stress became too much. I published the last book in her trilogy when I had my publishing imprint. I remember talking to her after her mastectomy and she had been outside in the cul de sac (she lived rural) trying to get her fitness back up. She went into remission and made the five year and the ten year mark. She worked as a contract editor at the Australian National Audit Office and worked back at Immigration, her other home. She moved to the coast and then moved again, once she found a tumour on her spine. She wanted to lessen the chores so her husband didn’t have to worry. Always planning ahead, always organising. She gave her her horses, her mini ponies but kept her cats. There are many more adventures of Kaaren, coming off horses and so on…

From memory, she’d started writing again when there was a lump on her neck. Dragon Boating and kayaking had become her new athletic thing as well. Up in Canberra, she had a very gruelling 7 hour operation to remove the tumour on her vertebrae just below her neck. I remember her telling me that it could affect her eyesight as she had to be on her face the whole time. They put a little cage in there to replace the vertebrae. I visited her in hospital afterwards and the worst thing was a sore neck. She’d hurt her neck a few years before getting thrown off her horse and nearly lost the use of her arms. At this time I didn’t know it was a recurence of the breast cancer. Maybe Kaaren suspected. When they sequenced it, they found it matched her breast cancer. She was officially terminal. She refused chemo at first but had some radiation. The doctor talked her into a drug that slowed bone metabilising. She was fit and well for maybe a year, nothing to see on the scans. She wrote the first book in her trilogy, Undercover Mage, featuring Everand from her first series. She started on the second. I remember her telling me. The doctors want me to to X and I can’t because I need to be well enough to launch this book and write the next one. She donated money from the sale of the books to breast cancer charity. She finished the trilogy, did in person launches for all the books and wrote a romance novel, which she finished just a couple of weeks before she died. When others would curl up and die, Kaaren refused to.

In the photo above she was at the RWA conference in Sydney in 2023. She had started entering competitions for anthologies and placing. It really lit up her world to get the validation and the encouragement. This year she placed second in the spicy bites.

Her funeral was beautiful and everything so many people said was true. She was many things and it is really hard to think of her gone. I’m crying now, because i’m writing about it. But after the funeral I had to think of her somewhere else, not gone as that was the only way I can cope. She had a positive influence on me always. She had me riding horses and writing and laughing. One of the things I learned about Kaaren’s life from her brother was that she had a really good childhood. I think that’s why she could walk around with a little dragon on her shoulder and wear it with pride. She had a solid beginning.

Kaaren leaves behind her husband, two daughters, son-in-law and a grandson. I remember one of her goals was to live to him born and she made it to his first birthday. She touched many lives and so many people. I can never be as brave as she was, as forward thinking and as caring of others, particularly her family. If she knew I was crying now, she’d say. Stop! Stop that.

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