IWSG: Writer's Exhaustion, Writer's Regret

It's the first Wednesday of the month, and so it’s time for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) monthly blog hop! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. The last few days have been exhausting for me. I've been trying to keep everyone updated here at my blog on the progress of my upcoming book, "Bad Apps", preparing the manuscript for upload to Kindle Direct, and working with the illustrator on the book's cover. Plus it's been in the triple digits here in Sacramento, California which I've had to walk through and wait in for the public transportation that I take to and from my day job of library tech. So, the last couple of days have been so exhausting to the point where I've nearly fallen asleep over the computer and so would end up conking out on the couch for the rest of the night. 

Yet I've been working around all that. Even though I was late on getting out the July post of my own monthly series of  posts, including the Book-To-Movie review, only yesterday evening and so into August! I'm just barely writing this IWSG installment on the evening that it's due! But I'm glad to post it because it feels so great to talk about our writing challenges to each other.

'Bad Apps' Synopsis (From the My Books page)

"Bad Apps" is a collection of techno-horror short stories. They explore mobile device apps that are strange, sinister, and deadly. Many of these stories encounter the weirdly scientific while others go right to the brink of the supernatural. Some of the stories blur the lines between reality and virtual reality, others feature handheld devices that connect to parallel universes and alternative timelines. One story involves a young woman who discovers that her computer’s search engine is reading her mind. In another story, a teenager downloads to his phone a voodoo doll app to use against his enemies. There’s also a story about a streaming music video that conjures up a demon. All of these techno-terror tales show the nightmarish consequences of when technology goes too far on both the programmer's end and the user's.

I'm going to limit the rest of this post to the optional IWSG question of the month which is  As a writer/author, what is something you regret? Or something that you wish you'd done differently in your writing process?

One thing as a writer that I regret is having spent too much time pursuing a post graduate degree and not enough time pursuing my passion for fiction-writing. I feel like I fooled myself into thinking I wanted a Master's in English and to teach at the community college level, when my BA in the subject was plenty. Not that I regret taking the courses, since I was glad to learn the subject of each. However, I was always twisting my own arm to get the papers done and turned in by their deadlines. I didn't receive my degree which I was pissed at the time, but relatively soon after I didn't care. I didn't care because that's when I realized that was not my passion or my job to teach literature but to write it. So, that's what I now do. Maybe it's not the best literature, or even the best writing, but it's the storytelling that I was meant to do and I'm thankful for that. 

What do you do when you feel too exhausted to write? Have you ever had a revelation, so to say, that you were meant to write as a career or even just as a side career?  Today’s IWSG is brought to you by these super co-hosts:   Shannon Lawrence, Diedre Knight, Liza, and Pat Garcia! IWSG was founded by awesome author Alex Cavanaugh, writer of the Cassa Series  of novels!  

Until next time . . .