I have a bad habit. It used to be a great habit, but these days it’s as useful as smoking or a second cup of coffee or five-hours playing computer games.
That bad habit is writing.
Quite some time ago, I came to the realization that I was no longer enjoying the whole writing thing. No coincidence, it came as I was on the elevator at my old apartment with my first royalty statement from HarperCollins in hand. I wasn’t so much demoralized as I was pissed at myself for not seeing this coming, and I promptly locked myself in my apartment and sat down to write something new.
After ten years of writing erotica, a short story a week and promptly dropped into the inboxes of my favourite editors, it’s now like getting blood from a stone. I still successfully dabble in smut under another name, albeit in a different sub-genre, but the whole contemporary boy-meets-girl thing eludes me now. I know this, yet I still give it a go. All I really need to do is pick up my phone and check out what Alison Tyler has published on Patreon and I’m sucked in, determined to finish this story or that story, finally sink my teeth into something wicked, but it never works out. I’ve deleted more than I’ve written when those moods strike me.
One of these days I’m going to learn to just go do something else and stop torturing myself.
But I still hope that one day I can actually get some of those stories finished. Mind over matter, ass in the chair and all that. In the meantime, I have a trove of stuff from the past decade that I can put out there to be read. I’ve been loading this stuff on on Tablo, and I’m rediscovering stories I had completely forgotten I’d written. Nothing Important Happened Today, for example. I’d completely forgotten that story and I’d forgotten how much I loved writing that story. Then there’s Six Sides of Steel, which was the most surprising thing I’d written to date, and I still have a friend who asks if I’m ever going to turn that into a novella.
For now, you can find my A.M. Hartnett stuff on Tablo. Maybe one day there’ll be something new.
Annemarie Hartnett 