Coffee with Characters

Words. I love words. I love the way they form on my tongue and fall onto a page. I love shaping sentences and painting a moment into an experience other people can live. I miss writing stories. I miss building characters. So why did I stop? Why did the words abandon me? I tell people it is because I took a day job and life became busy, but it’s more than that.

I stopped writing because I felt I had to market my work to justify writing it. I couldn’t simply create compelling stories and let them be enjoyed; I also had to learn how to sell them. I had to navigate the complicated maze of advertising. That was what killed the joy.

It all felt like self-promotion, which I don’t love. The open-air events, which I loved attending, felt awkward when people would stop at my booth and I’d give my pitch:

Allison Hayes on a journey to not follow in her mother’s footsteps.

Stacey Linde – Who are you when everything you thought you knew was a lie?

Delilah Stone Reddick – Will she find her voice before he silences her forever?

And, finally, Brittany Adams who had seven distracted seconds that changed everything.

That was all well and good. I could talk about my books and characters as if they were friends who came for coffee every week. But then came the moment when I had to ask, “Do you want to buy one?” I would stall. I have never been very good at asking somebody to do something, and suddenly sharing my stories felt less like connection and more like a sales pitch.

I tried social media marketing, but it felt like screaming into a void—fruitless and disconnected. I blogged until I felt I had nothing left to say. Eventually, I stopped trying to make the two worlds fit. I refocused and put my heart into my day job.

The words went silent. They stopped forming in my head, and the characters stopped coming to visit. Without those fellow travelers, I became solitary in my soul. Life remained busy, but some core part of me had deflated. I still don’t know the answer. Maybe I need to write for myself so I can have coffee with my characters again. Maybe I have published my last book, aptly named Those We Do Not See. Brittany became invisible in society; I feel invisible in the publishing industry, overwhelmed by the glut of novels churned out every day on self-publishing platforms. She learned from being unseen. Is that what I am meant to do as well? Must I learn to navigate marketing, even though what I truly love is the words, the characters, and the stories?