In writing, it is so easy to find people who'll tell you the hard and fast rules, what you're doing wrong, things you should never do.Usually, the people who talk the loudest accomplish the least.
I enjoyed President Obama's commencement address at Arizona State University. His main message was that people should always consider their body of work incomplete. I guess I could be fairly criticized for being a bit overly-prolific. Ghost Medicine, my debut novel, just came out last September, and I have four more novels that are ready to go (see yesterday's post).
I've written enough about those next three releases (2009, 2010, and 2011) for a while, but I hope one thing that is evident by my first four works is that I am definitely not a writer who has "branded" himself by always writing about the same situations, genres, characters that are the same, but with different names, etc.
Finishing a book brings a tremendous psychological crash for me. It will inevitably hit the day after I complete my last pass through the book. That means it's going to happen to me some time in the next couple of days when I finish my final search-and-destroy sweep of things requiring expurgation from my overly-long The Marbury Lens.
Oh yeah, that's one of the things some loudmouths will tell you: don't write YA that's 100,000 words long.
I'm interested in finding out if other writers experience similar psychological crashes -- and, if so, do they manifest themselves in self-destructive or depressive behaviors?
Oh... note to loudmouths: Don't give me the as-soon-as-I-finish-a-book-I-immediately-start-working-on-my-next bullshit, because that's like asking a world-class marathoner to turn around and run the course again after he's just posted a two-hour time.
At the risk of sounding loudmouthy, if you can do that, then you haven't been running like an athlete.
