From Failure to Flow: My Writing Revival Story

Writers are emotional creatures. Some of us have hot tempers, fragile egos, narcissism, and a host of other issues. These often come with unhealthy coping mechanisms such as drug and alcohol addiction. I’m lucky in that I don’t have the temper, the narcissism (I think) or the addictions. But, yeah, sometimes my ego takes a bruising.

When I released my most recent literary novel Sycamore Souls last year, I was excited. I felt it was the best work I’d ever done. I thought it had broad appeal, particularly for female readers. It flopped like a catfish in a sudden drought. And that came right after my memoir/self-help book How to Fail as an Author suffered the same fate. Depression set in.

I worked on a new literary novel with a merry-go-round of working titles. However, I never made it past a few tentative chapters. I also only had an outline of 2/3 of the novel. Then Carrie and I released Sleeper early this year. It was a follow-up to our Tor Books release In the Woods. Unfortunately, it also died in the market. Suddenly, I couldn’t write a grocery list. E-mails went unanswered. Text messages may or may not get a response the day I received them. Obviously, there were no blog posts. I faced the longest writer’s block I’ve had since my teaching job turmoil began in 2018.

Then I saw a Facebook post where a friend was looking for 13 horror authors to release and cross promote 13 books on Friday, March 13, 2026. I refused to let myself overthink it. I signed up and forced myself to work. It was slow going at first, but eventually I found my rhythm and the words were finally flowing freely again. And, I was back in my original element — horror — but with a strong literary bent.

There are rules to this project. One of them is that we’re supposed to keep the book to novella length, specifically between 13,000 and 30,000 words. We also have to use a particular subtitle to tie all the books together. Yeah, well, I went over the word limit. The story also incorporated a lot of very personal stuff interwoven with the fiction and I didn’t want to put the Friday the 13th subtitle on it.

So I did what anybody would do and wrote a second novella. Duh. The first chapter of this one, along with some notes, sat in my Google drive for a couple of years, at least. I fleshed it out. Created multiple viewpoints. I did some interesting research. Now, I have a second novella that is just under 20,000 words without any editing yet.

I’m not going to say much about either book right now. I did reveal the cover to one of them on my Facebook page yesterday, if you care to find it. I plan to release one of them before Halloween this year and the other on March 13, 2026.

I enjoyed writing both of these short horror books and I hope you’ll enjoy reading them.

The message here is pretty simple: Never, ever give up on your dreams. I’m not a best-selling author yet, but I’m also not dead, so I’m not done trying.