You may have noticed that this post is coming to you significantly later in the day than normal. This is because I’ve been sitting here staring at a blank page for about seven hours, broken only by an attempt to jog my thoughts into order by going to the shops that didn’t work in the slightest.

This is one of those days where I just feel… empty, creatively, and there’s not a lot that I seem to be able to do about it. There is nothing in me that seems to be worth writing down, and I have to tell you it’s bloody annoying. I want to write. I want to be able to write. I want the motivation to be there today, to write and to throw out some submissions and even maybe an agent query or two. But I’ve got nothing. Hence the sitting here, the staring, and ultimately this rambling, largely for an excuse to put words on paper.

It’s probably because I had a couple of rejections last night/this morning, which is always a recipe for tipping me into a rapidly expanding gloom no matter how much objective good writing news I have also received this week. I finally had a contract for one of my upcoming short stories, for instance, and while it’s by no means a spectacular month for book sales I have at least sold a copy of 4 out of 6 books, plus the someone who read the whole of a fifth book on Kindle Unlimited, which ain’t half bad for me. There are many months when I will sell nothing at all. There are many months when I will hear nothing from anyone about any stories of mine, good or bad. It’s been fine.

This knowledge does not help, of course. A few bits of bad news is pretty much all it takes for a nice spiral into general writing miserableness for me (probably not helped in this instance by quite a lot of Very Serious Life Admin going on in the background). For every story acceptance or contract there are two or three rejections and even more delays; for every book just about sold there is a distinct lack of any feedback coming in for anything; for every piece of marketing I attempt there is a distinct lack of success.

This is not a mood that sparks particular creativity in me, to sum it up. I try not to bring the mood down on this blog if I can help it, but, equally, this is where I talk about my experience of being a writer. And a lot of that experience is… well, days like this. I spend my life trying to get words out into the world and having them largely not get read – or if they are, never hearing what the reader thought about them. Sometimes being a writer feels like shouting into a cave and not even getting an echo.

I’ll be fine tomorrow. I have stories to tell and they will not wait for me for long. Eventually there will be an event in the waiting game that is the writer’s life. It’s just not today.

I have, however, managed to trick myself into at least writing this, which may be a small victory but is at least sufficient to make me feel less guilty about uploading the post and immediately going to sleep on the sofa.