Yesterday I was driving through town, on my way to the gym. I’ve been hitting Crossfit hard recently, trying to regain the strength and conditioning I lost after my (two) broken vertebrae last year. I was a bit sore, not really looking forward to the workout and instead focusing on the chocolate peanut butter protein shake I was going to absolutely destroy after all the clean and jerks.

I drove past the bus station, glanced out the window at the small crowd waiting to board, and my eyes fixed on this one guy. He faced away from me and patched onto the back of his leather jacket was the emblem of the Alliance to Restore the Republic. Or, you know, the Rebel Alliance symbol from Star Wars. There was something about the set of his shoulders, the fine collection of snow in his dark hair, the foggy reflection in the bas station window.

I only saw him for a second, but in that second and the seconds that followed, my mind was flooded with feelings, impressions, faces, words, the untethered strands of a tangled story. A few more moments went by, and pieces fell into place, connections were made, the impressions solidified into images, and by the time I made it to Crossfit, I had the vague, unformed, beginnings of a book.

This is how it works for me. If it hasn’t become obvious before now, I am not one of those authors that can churn out five or six books a year. I don’t write every day. It’s difficult to do so when working two jobs, taking online classes, and being a parent (and Crossfitting. Got to get my lift on.), but I sincerely try to write at least four or five times a week, whether it be on my lunch break, or at midnight after working 14 hours. But I write slow, and it does seem at times that I am making no progress.

Consider: At the moment, I have three novels and one short published. My first book, The Dead, was published in August of 2015. In the two and a half years since then, I’ve published roughly once a year. That can be frustrating when I look around at other authors and see that they’ve published literally five times the titles in the same amount of time. What is wrong with me?

Consider this too: I currently have two titles, one a novella, the other a short, finished, edited, and been reviewed by betas. They need a few minor revisions, and then they are ready to go. But lately, quite a bit of my attention as been on the short story I’ve been working on, that is on the second draft. I’m very eager to finish it, as I love the characters and their relationship, but then I get distracted by the first draft of a novel, which is the third in my Thaumaturge series. Ebron will likely always be my favorite character to write, and I straight up miss him when I’m not working on his story. So I ping pong back and forth between revisions on the novella and the short, finishing the second draft of the short story, and writing the first draft of the novel. I lack the discipline, I suppose, to really be successful at this industry.

But now I return to the guy in the Rebel Alliance jacket. I don’t know how it is for other writers. I don’t know if they come up with character first and then sit down to plot everything out, from first meeting to the conflict to the resolution, or if the situation comes first and then they develop characters to fit the situation, but that’s not how things work for me. For me, I see something, hear something, hell, smell something, and from that I get an impression. Sometimes the impression is the glimpse of a character, sometimes a situation, and some rare times that glimpse fits into an already developed idea. But then I’m left with this feeling, this impression, this ingredient, and I have to come up with who this person is, what their story is, and develop the recipe to tell their story.

For example, this is what I know about the story inspired by that dude in the Rebel Alliance jacket standing in the falling snow at the bus station:

The world burned, not so long ago. Only remnants remain.

All the Gods are dead. There are monsters in the dark, leviathans that have crept out from the corners of the earth. They have already begun to eat.

Humanity, or what is left of it, struggles to restore order. Old religion sects fight for power. Prophets seem to be everywhere. The government still claims authority, but they have no real power, and instead competing vigilante groups fill the need for law and order.

In this setting, we have our main characters:

MC 1 – Recruiter for ?? I don’t know? Something? But his recruits are nothing but cannon fodder, and he’s tired, so tired.

MC 2 – Musician, I think? Lives with a ragtag band of survivors, stealing, busking, pickpocketing.

MC 3 – Escapee from one of the religious cults. Weirdo. Quiet. His main emotion is longing.

MC 4 – Her name is Grace.

That’s what I got from the Dude in the Rebel Alliance jacket.

And you guys? I have 15 other folders on my computer, with scraps of story, just like this one. This is why it takes me so long to write. Because I never run out of ideas. I have nothing but ideas. I currently, at this moment, have 8 works in progress. That’s not counting the competed titles I already mentioned.

And writing is my hobby. It’s not my career. I love writing. There is nothing that is more intrinsically part of me that telling stories, and I just have so many to tell. So I jump around, collecting these ingredients, trying to fit them here and there and make sense of them. I have ghost stories, and dragon stories, and time travel stories, and alien stories, and weird futuristic dystopian stories, and contemporary love stories, and so much more. I live in this world of stories, this word soup, and I’m always trying to give them to you in a way that best resembles the stories that are in my head. As we know, the gulf between concept and execution can be wide, but I’m always trying to translate these stories from my head, as best I can.

Not a lot of people read my books. And that’s just fine. I hope that the people who do read them enjoy them. I’m not going to stop writing. Not as long as a simple drive to the gym gives me a passport into a different world, not as long as a walk down the road shows me the geography of distant lands, not as long as my brain is populated with all these people who are waiting me for to put their stories onto paper.

I have so much work to do. And I look forward to every moment of it.