Occasionally, I’ve written about my hatred of passive voice and how hard it gets to remove it. Part of it comes from writing. Once I get words down, I find it hard to change them significantly without a complete rewrite. Minor edits are fine, but I have this literary blind-spot between a couple word changes and rewriting the entire paragraph. Right now, I’m struggling with passive voice in both DG and FOTS.

Naturally, that makes me think I’m a horrible writer because my writing is obviously flawed. Yeah, emo, emo, emo…

This weekend, I finished the short story I’ve been working on for a few weeks. Actually, got a second draft in also. I got into the same funk about passive voice since that was a focus while I wrote. After I got it done, I decided to read some of my old stories to cheer me up.

It may have been my obsession with writing, but I noticed that the half dozen stories I consider my best are completely and utterly free of passive voice. These are the stories, with hindsight, I could have easily sold to various places but ended up posting online (in free forums and such) in an effort to garner some egoboos. But, when I wrote those stories, I didn’t obsess with passive voice. I just… wrote. Passionately wrote, actually. And they ended up being my better writing. Just a fluke where everything worked out perfectly and, years later in two cases, people still love them (I love fan mail so damn much).

A rather annoying reminder that obsessing doesn’t fix anything. And I’m a decent writer already, just need to relax and write the roses. The other thing that ruined a perfectly good emo depression was simple numbers. I have about 90 stories on two websites and bylines. I can say that 3 are great stories and 6 are good ones. So, about 10% of my writing is good and about 15% is horrible (but, I still post them).

I think that is something to be proud of.

Also to improve, but still, I really shouldn’t whine about not being a “real” writer (even though I don’t feel it), because it’s obviously I happen to like writing enough to be doing it steadily to fill a website. And, if I keep doing it, sooner or later, I’ll be sitting at a table at GenCon or in a panel (next step on the ladder, I think).