{"id":16143,"date":"2026-04-30T08:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T22:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenashapter.com\/blog\/?p=16143"},"modified":"2026-04-29T20:39:16","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T10:39:16","slug":"the-great-silence-of-authorlife","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/zenashapter.com\/blog\/the-great-silence-of-authorlife\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Silence of #AuthorLife!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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April has been a month of highs for me. Some months go by with little to no news \u2013 just words on the page. Which is heaven, of course. The gentle tap, tap, tapping on my keyboard. The act of imagining and creating something meaningful or resonant. The polishing of initial thoughts into ones that gleam or sparkle. I love it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there’s also a lot of waiting in the book industry. I call it The Great Silence. Sometimes The Great Silence can be a comfortable place to sit and create. Those are the moments when you strongly suspect something is going to happen or shift, and you’re just waiting for confirmation. Those are the best times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But sometimes The Great Silence can be fraught with anxieties about the future. The exact nature of those anxieties varies according to where you are in your author journey. At first, most anxieties circle around the ‘am I any good’ or ‘will I ever get published’ questions. Once you discover you are actually both a good writer and highly publishable, those anxieties morph into questions about book contracts and marketing \u2013 ‘how will readers find me’? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those two questions never go away, but over time another layer of anxiety also comes along to ask ‘how do I want to shape my writing career from here’? Some authors look to the market for inspiration. They analyse what’s selling, what’s popular, or what’s winning awards, and in that they find inspiration. Commercially, this is a very sensible approach!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An alternative approach is to look at society and dig deep into how people today are really living, both near and far, how the wider world is evolving, and where we might all be heading, then create from there. This space may be less commercial, but I love it! I love the inspiration that I find in observing the gradual evolution of humanity, the future that process might predict, and how that might influence the eternality of storytelling. If I listen to the world, it soon tells me what it wants to say through my words. And above all else, those words have to be original.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have always valued original content, even when I was a young reader browsing library shelves, it never mattered to me which books had the shiny award stickers or colourful posters \u2013 I read the back blurbs and sought out stories that offered not only adventure and thrills, but uniqueness of thought or expression, extraordinary characters who I could admire and aspire to emulate, experiences that I hadn’t read about or heard of before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So that’s how I write now. And sometimes that alone can propel me through The Great Silence \u2013 knowing that I am on the right path for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Awards and book contracts do also help of course, and April has given me both, and more! I made some videos to celebrate. \ud83d\ude0a Let me know which video you like the best, and which piece of news you would most like to receive yourself…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I signed a contract for my next book, When Dark Worlds Rise<\/a><\/em>, out this October:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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