IWSG: I Want to Quit.

This is not an entry I wanted to write, but I have to go with what's on my mind.  And if you're expecting this to be one of those times where I figure things out along the way and end on a hopeful note, that's not happening today.

But nothing is happening for me lately, so that fits.

I am so sick of all of this.  Of watching ideas crash and burn because I can't figure out what the hell's supposed to happen.  Of throwing myself into something and losing interest in it after a month or a week or a few days.  Of trying to get my work out there (on the rare occasions when I think it's worth sharing) and getting nothing but reinforcement for my feeling that nobody wants it.

I want to quit.  But I don't know what else I'd do with myself.  There's nothing else I've ever wanted out of life; I've wanted to be a writer since I was a kid.  Any other job I considered was just another way to tell stories, and I eventually shunned them all for the real thing.  And now here I am, at thirty-seven years and fifteen books and easily over two million words over the course of my life, nowhere closer to my dream and without a damned thing to show for it.

I feel like the querying process has finally broken me this time.  I knew STARWIND wasn't going to be an easy sell.  It's a weird book, but it's exactly what I want it to be.  And while I felt lucky to find a few agents who sounded like it would suit them, the search since then has been a real struggle.  If I was writing YA, or romance, or contemporary or just about goddamn anything else but what I want to write, I'd have an easier time.

And it really doesn't help when I fuck things up before someone can even say no.

To make things worse, out of the book's beta readers, one quit after ten or eleven chapters, one gave very little feedback that was mostly negative, and one hasn't said a single word to me about it after more than two months.  (The other two beta readers were very helpful; you know who you are.)  It's one thing to write books that no one reads, I'm used to that.  It's another thing when people who ask to read it either don't read it or have almost nothing good to say.

Also, the book itself has started to feel stupid to me, like something I would have come up with back in high school.  I read my first pages when putting them after query letters and roll my eyes.  This could be my usual self-deprecation, but I don't even know anymore.

So now I'm sitting here with a book I'm losing faith in, no idea what to write next because not a damn thing is working, and wondering if there's a point to bothering with this shit anymore.  Ideas keep coming whether I want them or not, but everything I think of seems stupid.  And everything I do ends the same way: abandoned or trunked.

I want to quit.  But that's probably the only way to make everything worse.