EP08: Shelving Projects - TRANSCRIPT

 Hi! You're listening to Hyba is Writing, and I am your host, Hyba. Today I felt like talking a bit about something that I've had to do a few times in the past year, and that is putting certain books and other projects on hold for an indefinite amount of time.

Recently, I made the decision to put one of my books away - a book I had been extremely excited about and had focused on almost exclusively for the better part of half a year in order to prep it for publication and launch in October 2020. I finished the manuscript and was right on schedule, but then began to think about the content of the book and decided that maybe this wasn't a book I wanted to get out there, and definitely probably not the book I wanted to get out there first.

If you've been following me on Tumblr or Twitter for any amount of time, you probably know that the book I am talking about is Apartment. For those who haven't heard of it yet, Apartment was my eerie literary suspense novella about suspicious neighbours and an apartment building coming under siege. I had it plastered everywhere - my blog, my website, my mailing list, pinned to the top of my Twitter timeline - everywhere. I was certain that that was the book I wanted to publish first at the time.

But the more I worked on it, the more I came closer to making that a reality, the more I started to think about what I was creating. I wanted to know if what I was creating was going to be received well by readers. I wanted to understand my responsibility as an author and whether or not that extended to readers possibly getting the wrong idea from the book. Long story short, I decided to put Apartment away.

It's not the first book I've shelved, and I doubt it will be the last. Earlier this summer, I officially put my murder mystery novel, Marie/Elise, on indefinite hold. Last year, I introduced and shortly after shelved my supernatural time-loop thriller, RE/CONSTRUCT. The same thing happened with my futuristic sci-fi, Mind Wars.

There are many reasons why you'd want to put a book project on hold, I think.
    1. As I mentioned earlier, when it came to Apartment, it was all about author responsibility and the realization that I didn't want to put something like that out there into the world, at least not until I can think of a way to make sure it doesn't get misunderstood and end up influencing readers in an unintended negative way.
    2. With Marie/Elise and RE/CONSTRUCT, it was about me feeling that the stories were just not ready to be written. Even after the dozens of drafts I'd tried with Marie/Elise and after struggling with it for over four years now, I still felt that the whole thing was juvenile and not yet ready.
    3. With most of my other works, it's really more about how many projects I'm able to work on at any one time. I actually counted all my WIPs once, and I realized I've got over 35 that I'm working on, and that's crazy! I decided to focus my efforts and energy into the ones that I was most interested in at the time and that I was actually confident I could finish, while the rest were put on hold until my current active projects are completed.
    4. Finally, there were a lot of stories that I started writing way back in high school that I shelved and still have saved on a hard drive somewhere. This was before I knew how to write a book, so I'd have these great ideas and I'd be really excited for them, but I'd only ever manage a handful of lines, or paragraphs, or pages before crashing into a wall and having to give up. It's actually weird how you can struggle with something for so long, but then, almost overnight, it can suddenly just click into place and you understand what you just couldn't grasp before! That was what happened with writing for me. I couldn't understand how to write a book - it was a very long and frustrating period for me - but one fateful summer something just clicked and I wrote a 60K draft of a book and that was that! Anyway, I'll probably get back to those stories at some later point, but for now, I really want to focus on my fantasy stories and other active projects.

My general plan is to finish my high fantasy series before moving on to my other projects, like Marie/Elise and RE/CONSTRUCT, if I end up being able to continue them at that later time. If not, I've got a whole list of WIPs I'd love to get to, like, for example, an Ancient Egyptian crime thriller and a realistic fiction story that follows the lives of two Moroccan brothers. But those will have to wait until I'm finished with what's on my plate right now, and that might take a while!

I don't believe that putting a book on hold is a bad thing. I don't see it as a loss or a failure, but this might just be the result of my general approach to writing. I know that writing is pretty high up there on my list of priorities, but at the end of the day, there are things that I value much more than writing, and I'm not really willing to compromise with those things. I think it's normal to put something aside if it's not working out for whatever reason. If anything, I think it's usually a wise step that we take as authors when we realize that we need to focus our energy elsewhere, or when we realize that we're just not ready to write that particular story, or if we just need some space from the story to get some fresh perspective on it.

What are your thoughts on putting stories on hold? If you're a writer, have you ever shelved one of your WIPs? How did that make you feel? Did you ever get back to them?

Let me know via my Tumblr, Twitter, or by leaving my a voice message. You can find all the links in the episode description! Thank you very much for tuning in today, and I hope to hear from you soon!

Until next time!