I’m experiencing that loss of motivation that comes whenever the writing is going really well. It’s such a rare event that I want to slow down and enjoy it. Was just thinking today that right now I’m working on my eleventh novel. That’s definitely something. I wouldn’t say that I have absolutely no idea how to write a book, but I do feel I know very little. It’s a bit astonishing to me, still, that I’ve sold two of them. Actually, I’m more astonished today than I was when I first sold Enter Title Here (almost exactly) four years ago. Back then, it felt like an inevitability. I’d worked hard, served my apprenticeship, gotten better, written a great book, and now, of course, it was getting published.

But I’ve learned that this is far from a normal course of events. The writing world doesn’t reward hard work. And it doesn’t even necessarily reward the writing of a good book. There’s so little upside to publishing any given book that you sometimes wonder why these companies even bother (I think they often wonder the same thing themselves). As a result, the writing world has a genteel aspect, but it also ends up feeling very random. When you sell a book to a publisher, all it means is that an editor decided, for some reason, to use their capital, within the company, to attempt to buy your book.

Hopefully, that also means that they loved it and that the company loved it. But that’s not always the case. Sometimes books get bought simply because this is the sort of book they feel they ought to be buying.

It’s such a strange world.