That seems to be what happens to artists (not saying I am one, just that this is what happens). Musicians get intrigued by more and more difficult harmonies, by unusual sonorities, by skills at the edges of the performance envelope, which means the better they get at making music, the less accessible the music they make becomes.
My first published novel is a simple adventure. Wrapped in a "becoming the mask" question of identity. Wrapped in a musing on the place of history in the modern world.
Even at the basics of the simple adventure, it isn't as simple as it could be. I'd love to sketch a squalid alley in Hong Kong or a runway show in Paris, throw in whatever stock character London Hoods or international mercenaries or trigger-happy soldiers from some random sub-Saharan nation for excitement. I'd love even more to dip into all the existing pseudo-archaeology or the even vaster group of legitimate historical mysteries, distill it down to a magic dingus found under a pyramid that cures the common cold or keeps razor blades sharp.
Heck, I'd love to just throw a multi-linguist with three degrees from the university and two terms in the Navy SEALS together and send him off globe-trotting after the adventure of the week.
But somehow my interests aren't there. Instead I wanted to talk about real places and real history and get into some of the contradictions and complexities. And that makes it incredibly slow. For one thing, having to actually look up what an alley in Hong Kong looks like instead of just copying out a half-remembered scene from some movie or comic book. Worse, having to figure out how you would realistically get there and get into and out of trouble there.
I envy people writing adventures and straight-forward space opera and YA. Not to say these can't be done well. Not to say, even, that tossed-off schlock sells well. But it can make you a living, and playing jazz standards in a nightclub is better than not playing at all.
But I can't even do that right now. I have three stories on the back-burner right now as I try and see if I can make "Athena Fox" into a series and get a little more attention that way. One is a historical with fantastic elements. Which doesn't make it, unfortunately, less of a historical. I should have taken Robert Howard's lesson to heart.
Another is military SF of the type that I could probably write ninety percent of the pages as fast as I could type. Combat scenes, and military types talking. Yeah. Easy stuff, at least to the level I'd want to do it. Unfortunately it rests on a bed of world-building which is going to be difficult.
The other is worse. I'd like to do a total space-opera. Every cliche in the book. But this gets into two weird tangles. First is elements of cultural appropriation and sexism that I don't know how to write around. The other is that I can't leave a trope well enough alone. I have to wallow in it. And that means a lot of work trying to nail down the reasons behind the simple story.
Which is what I'm dealing with in the front-burner book. The external plot has a few more loops in it than the last one. There are several men with interesting (interestingly flawed) personalities, and a somewhat complicated physical arrangement necessary to make various plot-important things happen in a plot-friendly order.
But below the surface, it is about working with themes about the place of archaeology in modern society, and the choices we make as human beings about our careers and about how we relate to the world. And it is trying to get those to line up that is creating all the work.
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