Fiery Pen

It has been a LONG TIME! I have been distracted by many things, most of which reside inside my mind. My life lately has been a bit like a slow-sinking ship. I stop leaks to have new ones spring. In order to stay afloat, all nonessential things have been tossed overboard.

But I am still above the surface. Some days more than others. I am patching leaks and bailing water.

As I have been juggling my life to remain functional, I have relented to compromising. Which is not something I do well. With circumstances. With my life. With myself. And, for the purposes of this blog, with my art.

As a writer, I have waves of inspiration and motivation and also of frustration and struggle. All are phases and usually correlated to what is happening to the rest of my life. But off balance and shuffling around the pieces of my life, I mused on my writing.

I have been grinding hard on writing since working on my first novel (Savages). Yet that story tore itself out of me, so I had little choice, and it took little effort. However, once it went under contract, it became all work, and it has not stopped.

After Savages, that publisher (now defunct) wanted another novella right away. So I cranked out The Waning. The Waning began as flash fiction. I wrote the short piece and was going to just set it aside, but instead, I worked to tease it out into a longer work.

Yet this (and the publisher’s author training) set a pace. Write a certain number of words a night. Always have something in work. Always have something releasing. Keep producing. Keep publishing. It created the necessity to always get something out then start something new.

And it worked. In those nine years, I have published five books and 20 shorts.

I have no complaints about being prolific. Honestly, I am quite proud of what have I have been able to produce while holding down a day job and raising a family and entertaining an unhealthy amount of hobbies. I am even more proud to produce enough to be accepted and published by various publishers.

Yet, the grind of writing is never the writing. The writing is the easy part.

The labor is the editing, submitting/querying, and promoting. It is A LOT of work and necessary to keep producing and publishing. It is daunting and lacks the joy of creation. It can also be disheartening. Rewrites, rejections, low sales, unsuccessful events. When it is successful (read: sales), it is exhausting. When it is not, it is exhausting and heartbreaking.

So when life turned upside down and left me piecing myself back together, I realized, I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to always have a WIP. I don’t have to always be releasing something. I don’t have to grind.

It seems simple, obvious. Yet I had to realize it.

I had this epiphany when I had to set all things aside for a moment. When I returned, it allowed me to approach the craft how I used to. I wrote what I wanted. I wrote when I was inspired. I followed the art.

And I did. I just wrote. It flowed out easily. I had plenty of emotion to fuel it.

So, now, I am building a library of unpolished content. I have 2.5 novels written. One is going through critique group, but the others are just hanging out. It gives me a touch of overachiever anxiety, yet it is also liberating to not need to do anything with it. I can write to heal myself. I can write to make myself happy.

And I can worry about what to do with it later.

I don’t want to quit authoring or striving or grinding even. But I did need this breath and this reset. I have repurposed my art back to its original purpose. For me.

It can be about more later.

Though even as I write about taking this step back, I have just had three shorts picked up in the past couple months.

I contributed an essay to Inside the Indie Horror World. I wrote about how my experience being published is not all I expected and how much of it is double-edged.

Coming soon, I have a short prequel to my unpublished novel about Viking monsters and a deeply personal bit of body horror about hair loss.

So maybe I can do both.

Christina Bergling

https://linktr.ee/chrstnabergling

Like my writing? Check out my books!

• Followers – You never know who is on the other side of the screen. Followers is a mystery and thriller that blends women’s fiction with horror.
• The Rest Will Come – Online dating would drive anyone to murder, especially Emma.
• Savages – Two survivors search the ruins for the last strain of humanity. Until the discovery of a baby changes everything.
• The Waning – Locked in a cage, Beatrix must survive to escape or be broken completely.
• Screechers – Mutant monsters and humans collide in the apocalyptic fallout of a burned world. Co-authored with Kevin J. Kennedy.
• Horror Anthologies