Floundering over what I should work on next

For the past few months, I have been struggling to figure out what, exactly, I want to do with myself in terms of writing. While my initial idea was to write a year of standalone fiction in order to potentially break into the traditional publishing scene (at whatever level), my interests have been, shall we say, scattered.

I am, effectively, floundering about.

It isn’t necessarily without reason, though. On one hand, I am trying to pursue stories that interest me and that don’t have too much in the way of “foundational cracks” to stump me. On the other hand, I am really just trying to find something that will stick, especially since the “sticking” part is what is bothering me so much.

In short, I have been bouncing between two projects as of the past two months:

One is my high school horror story, which was driving me so bonkers that I eventually just stopped working on it for fear of writing something inadequate.

And the other is more of a “political intrigue” fantasy novel, which was holding my attention, but I am now at a point where I’m unsure if I want to work on it at present.

My main concern, throughout writing standalone fiction, is the fact that most of the small and/or indie publishers I have been looking to submit to are all… closed to submission. This makes it harder to gauge what to write first, since submission to publishers is wholly dependent on knowing if they are going to be open for submissions.

So… the long story short is that I’m unsure what to think at this point. I technically have no “outstanding” obligations to write and produce anything, since my mainline series are now fully closed (unless we’re talking about the Fortuned Ones, which comes after The Red Wolf Saga, but I’m not really convinced I want to work on that at this moment).

Right now, I am in the process of worldbuilding what I would like to be an “epic fantasy” series, which comes with all the major A/B/C topics (call to action, the hero’s journey, etcetera). I even ordered an Apple pencil knockoff so I can properly sketch out my world without losing the map I create for it. (I still feel awful that I lost the map for The Banished Legend series during a move.)

Either way, I wanted to air these—sort of—frustrations, since they’ve been on my mind a bit lately, and I mostly just want to concentrate on something that is low(er) stress.

— Kody Boye

www.kodyboye.com