I’m not an anxious person. I don’t suffer from anxiety. At least I didn’t think so before COVID-19. I didn’t think so before I lost the day job. I still don’t think I do in the clinical sense. A former coworker of mine, when he texted to wish me well after learning we weren’t coworkers anymore, joked that I probably had written a raft of books during stay-at-home orders. My response was, “You’d think.” But it made me think instead. I had started the fourth novel in my Dark Passage series, I did have a short story burning a hole in my brain. Well, between COVID, the day job, and then the election, I realized I was living with a crippling base level of anxiety.
I have always prided myself on being self-aware, and that was one helluva realization. Since then I have put some serious work in on The Dark Dawn (working title), and I crushed that short story, although it was rejected by two science fiction magazines. So, I think I’ll build an anthology around it.
As I was figuring out why I hadn’t written more with nothing but time on my hands, I took a long, hard look at the traffic on my personal blog and I came to another realization. The more I’ve blogged over the past eight years, the more traffic I’ve gotten. Now, you may be thinking, “Well, Jerry, duh.” A fellow author has been trying to tell me the same thing when it comes to my fiction. It’s not like I don’t have ideas. My excuse used to be that I had a day job to worry about. Writing was a hobby. It was an evening and a weekend thing. Then COVID hit and that crippling anxiety started to set in.
So, what have I done to combat this? I turned to the personal blog and have been posting quite frequently since September. The week before Christmas I wrote more than 3,000 words in The Dark Dawn, so I like to think the blogging helped.
The bottom line is this: I need to write more. That’s all there is to it. I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions, I set goals. So, I have set the goal to write more and produce more content. Hopefully, this will be met with enthusiasm. I have big plans for 2021 and the overarching goal will be to entertain you with this twisted tales that have been rattling around in my head.
More to come,
Jerry
Jerry Knaak.com 