Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Ever since publishing my last post, in which I stated publicly that I was gearing up to break my four-year-long novel-writing dormancy, I’ve been in a dark blue funk.

It took me a while to figure out why. Well, to be honest, I didn’t figure it out. A fellow writer (Todd Baker: grillmaster, metalhead, and memoirist par excellence) commented on my post, and his reflections shed light on my own internal strife.

I was suffering from “The Dread.”

It’s the feeling of foretold disaster, the slow but inexorable approach of abject failure, creeping toward me like a sickening fog, surrounding me, enfolding me in its poisonous vapors, seeping into my brain where it will dissolve every bit of talent and reduce me to a drooling, gabbling idiot.

That, my friends, is dread.

The Dread comes upon me whenever I even think about starting work on a new novel.

Every. Bloody. Time.

Except for the first time.

The first novel I ever completed, Dreams of the Desert Wind, (Kindle $4.99, used paperback for $1.99, or free on Kindle Unlimited) was a labor of absolute love. I loved the setting (Jerusalem, where I lived for a few years, and the West Bank), the characters (sabras, Bedu, and expat Americans), and the whole mixed bag mash-up of ancient secrets, modern politics, supernatural power, and espionage, all told in a lyrical style.

I was not afflicted by The Dread when beginning that project because I didn’t know what I was getting into. I was a naif, pen in hand, blithely traveling the dreamscape of What May Yet Be. I worked on that book for a long time, took it through workshops, handed it out to friends, edited, rewrote. When I began shopping it around to agents, rather than just wait for responses (a process that would take years) I decided to heed the advice of every writer and editor who’d ever counseled me and get a new project in the pipeline.

That was when The Dread first hit me.

A new project. Another long slog. Months of research, learning, and note-taking. A year’s worth of writing in snatches of time stolen on bus rides, lunch hours, evenings, and weekends. Then more months of editing, workshops, rewrites. And the submissions…

The Dread teamed up with the pile of rejections that had been coming in from Dreams, and the two became a powerhouse of immense strength. It was positively daunting.

Yet, somehow, I pushed through it.

And so, now, I must do the same.

It doesn’t matter that I have nine published novels to my credit. Each one is new. Each one is different. Even returning to old familiar worlds, like the sequels in The Fallen Cloud Saga or the Ploughman Chronicles, was difficult. The project ahead of me now, the concept that has stood strong and nearly complete in my head for years, is a grand departure from my past genre work, and my confidence, unbolstered through this four year hiatus, must be shored up before I can begin the attempt.

Revisiting my notes on this project will help. So will some vignettes that may make it to this blog. We’ll see.

I will overcome The Dread this time, as I have in the past.

Just giving it a name has helped.

k

PS. That big pile of rejections for Dreams got bigger and bigger until, a decade later, I did a massive rewrite on the book, throwing out whole chunks, merging characters, and adding sub-plots. It eventually found a home at Fairwood Press, and is still one of my favorite stories.