For all of you who are emailing me and not getting a reply, my internet at home is continuously breaking down. And I'm one of those lucky fuckers who lives in an area with exactly one ISP, so good luck getting them to fucking fix it. :(
As for the story... I've never made much of a secret that most of Conflicted was written at my previous place of employment. I had a lot of downtime there which allowed me to devote solid chunks of time to writing.
My new job has been nowhere near as generous with downtime, unfortunately. I kept hoping it would change, and it just stayed busy and busy and busy.
So last week, my boss calls me into his office and congratulates me on the awesome work I've been doing, says he knows I've been looking for other work, says he doesn't want me to leave, and he gives me a $10,000 raise on the spot, plus two extra weeks of vacation.
Damn. Talk about giving a guy some incentives to stay, right?
The next day, he comes into my office and says he has a new project for me to oversee, the biggest one yet... Sigh.
At least I've got help now in the management part of it, so I shouldn't have to keep doing 55-60 hour weeks, but at the same time, it still means very little downtime.
Which, of course, means that I have no time to write.
Before you ask, let me answer a few questions:
1) No, I don't really have a chance to write at home. Most of that is because I have a family and I would like to spend some time with them, and second it's because by the time I finally GET home, I'm usually too tired to write.
2) I suck at writing piecemeal. I did the initial draft of chapter one that way, and it just sucked. Horribly. In order to make things flow well, I need chunks of 3-4 hours that I can devote to writing. That's just how I write. I wish I could do it in stretches of five minutes at a time, but I can't.
So what does this mean for the story? Well, unfortunately for the time being it means that it's not going to come out. I've got a very nice plot worked out and I HAVE been able to thread most of my ideas together in a solid storyline and timeframe, it's just the actual writing itself that I don't have time for.
Do I still want to write it? Yes, absolutely. I love my characters just as much as you do, and their stories are absolutely not finished yet.
But I also have to be realistic and accept that my current work situation just doesn't allow me to write. I could slack off and write at my previous job, and despite looking like this one would let me too, it's just not working out that way. I love my job, it's a great challenge and interesting work, it's just very time-consuming.
And it makes me realize that even if I somehow scrape the time together to get chapter one done, I'd just wind up with the same lack of time for chapter two, and three, etc. And releasing a chapter every six months just seems stupid to me. I know there's many authors here on SOL who started a story in like 2003 and are still writing it, but I won't do that. To me, that's just ridiculous.
So I'm going to put the release of the next Conflicted story on hold (If that's even the right word, since it's never even had a single chapter released,) until I get to a point where I will actually have the free time necessary to devote to it.
And yes, the project I just got assigned will take easily take me into 2012, unfortunately...
I'm sorry for the disappointment, but this is sadly just the reality of life. I love to write, but it doesn't put food on my table, nor pay for my internet access. I hope some day in the future it will, but until that point, writing takes a back seat to the doldrums of work.
I appreciate all your support and emails, and I will continue to respond to emails (though it may take me like a week to respond from time to time, since I'll be traveling more as well).
I don't know how often I'll update this blog. I really don't like updates that say "Yeah, I still haven't done anything," and I've already written like half a dozen of those.
I WILL write another story about Kelsey and her friends. I just don't know when...
Take care,
Eldridge.