What Would Dumas Do?

Sometimes I don’t feel like writing for RPGs. This is happening less and less, but it still happens. The other night I went back to a story tentatively titled “Boltcutter” about mercenaries returning to an African country in which they had previously worked and getting dragged into a conspiracy involving one of the military leaders of the country.

I’m getting very close to completing this story, but every time I work on it I hit the same problem. After an hour or so of work and enthusiasm, I have a moment where I wonder what is going to happen to it.

I am a mercenary hack. I have never made any excuses or denials. One of my motivations for writing is money, and I stand in good company in this. Looking at “Boltcutter” – and another African thriller/adventure piece I have evolving tentatively titled “the Detachment” – I wonder what I will do with them when they are done. I have no idea of the markets to which I might submit these. Worse, I have no idea of the state of the genre. I don’t read short thriller/adventure fiction. It’s more than a little presumptuous to try to sell to a market about which you know nothing.

So I am stuck. I will likely continue to putter along with these stories, and maybe I will finish them, but they will be orphans. They are unlikely to find a home. Creating art can certainly be its own purpose and its own goal, but I am someone who has set a different goal, and I have work that I feel has a good prospect for making me money.

It’s not that I don’t love these children of mine, I just don’t think they’ll ever move out of the house.

You can read more about “Boltcutter” here.

You can read more about “the Detachment” here.