It's also amazing to me what pops out when I'm writing in a white heat with no filter and not second guessing myself. My fav character pops off page in last 120 pages, and she did not even exist before my 5 day write-o-thon in the woods. I need to live in the woods, basically. For economic reasons. - ThreadSky

kameronhurley.com • 144 days ago

It's also amazing to me what pops out when I'm writing in a white heat with no filter and not second guessing myself. My fav character pops off page in last 120 pages, and she did not even exist before my 5 day write-o-thon in the woods. I need to live in the woods, basically. For economic reasons.

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kameronhurley.com•144 days ago

I spent a couple of hard years second guessing everything I wrote. Kept hearing the cacophony of voices; this sucks, that sucks, it's not marketable, you have to level up, gotta break out, no one cares, it's lazy, nothing matters. Just murdered me. I stopped writing for fun, stopped writing for ME.

annaguirre.bsky.social•144 days ago

I feel this so hard.

kameronhurley.com•144 days ago

It's insidious

kameronhurley.com•144 days ago

There were many personal, global reasons for that (ha ha plague years), but it was also burnout and exhaustion with publishing. Publishing will murder you if it gets under your skin. Had to remind myself why the fuck I was writing books. Writing web copy pays more. Why subject myself to PUBLISHING?

kameronhurley.com•144 days ago

Getting deeper in the corporate word mine slurry helped, actually. Because I'd spend my days writing more and more shit that I didn't own and that came out the other end of the sausage factory completely differently than I put it in, and usually not better. What a tragic waste of time and talent.

kameronhurley.com•144 days ago

And I gotta eat, so I do it but let me tell you: go deep enough in corp marketing and blowing up spaceships and cutting off heads at the end of the day becomes a much needed vacation. It became a JOY to retreat back into a gooey world of brutal women and bone knives and do exactly what I wanted

kameronhurley.com•144 days ago

I got far enough away from publishing and THAT machine that I was able to get same escapism and joy in writing as I used to get before it became this crushing hustle to sell more, do more, perform more, break out, etc. My day job gave me break from publishing. Fiction gives me a break from day job

kameronhurley.com•144 days ago

But most of all what I needed to get back was FOCUS. I never realized what intense and unwavering FOCUS I needed to keep a whole book in my head. When I had fewer worries, fewer job responsibilities, and lived in a pre-2020 social media world, it was easy. But shit has changed. Whew, has it.

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