The Hop

I gripped my mug of cappuccino in the kitchen, staring at the open laptop and notebook. Telling myself this time it’ll stick.

I wrote cyberpunk or techno thrillers first. Proper gritty. Murder and digital mayhem in the rain. No heroes, poor buggers with digital enhancements and worse luck. Sold a few. Not many, but enough to make me think I was on to something. Then I got a notion. Comedy. Daft buggers inventing things that didn’t work. Yet somehow ruining the bad guy’s plan. I wrote three chapters in a weekend, all excited, like I’d found the secret.

—This is it, I said. —This is the one they’ll all read.

I put the cyberpunk books aside. Left ‘em sitting there like an old dog waiting for its walk. Kept working the comedy. Wandered back to 1715 and wrote about pirates or some shite. Uploaded it. Waited. Nothing. The cyberpunk readers had moved on. The comedy crowd took one look and said:

—Who’s this fella? He doesn’t know a bloody elf from a hole in the ground.

So I hopped again. Horror this time. Ghosts in council houses, not the posh kind with the turrets. Proper hauntings. The kind where the dead want a cup of tea and a chat about the old days. I thought that’d be easier. Less world-building, more screaming. But the horror lot, they’re a funny crowd. They want their scares consistent. They want the same voice every time, the same dread. They don’t want some lad who wrote about pirates last month. Not when he’s suddenly telling them the attic ghost is after the remote control.

I dropped eight books that way. Eight. Published. Floating about on KDP. The readers, the few I had, must have been confused. “Is he the cyberpunk fella or the ghost fella or the one with the swords?” They stopped clicking. The algorithm, that cold bastard, stopped showing me to anyone. I was everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Now I sit there, another book on the way. The one I’ve been wrestling with for a while. The one about the ordinary fella. The arguments, the pints. The way the wife looks at him when he comes home late. No dragons. No ghosts. Just the kitchen table and the tea gone cold. I reckon it’s the only one that feels like me. The others were costumes I kept trying on, hoping one would fit. But costumes get heavy after a while. They start to itch.

Funny how trying on different costumes teaches you who you are. The danger, I reckon, isn’t that you fail. It’s that you succeed enough in each new thing to think you’re onto something. Then the something moves. And you’re left with a hard drive full of half-books and a name that means nothing to nobody. 

—Stick to the one voice, I said. —Even if it’s hard. 

I look out the kitchen window at the garden. Looks great this time of year. I take a sip of my cappuccino. Nice. I flex my fingers, looking at the laptop. 

The thing is, boredom pays the bills. Hopping leaves me standing in the middle of the road with my thumb out, wondering why no one’s stopping.