Write Of Passage

It’s time.

Yes, I’m still here. I’m actually doing Nanowrimo at the moment. After spending most of this year in what feels like writer’s block hell but has actually been reasonably productive in terms of getting words into, uh, words, I found a way to unblock myself, and just in time to get some momentum building for the recurring rite of passage that is Nanowrimo. I’m in a good spot creatively.

Life-wise, I’m pretty much backed into a corner. It was an inevitable corner to be backed into – or perhaps just finally comprehend I’ve been backed into for the past 6 years – and I’ve got some things to take care of that I am now, of course, regretting that I didn’t do more to take care of before things got to this point. But even that feels more manageable than the Jason of even, say, a year ago would have found it to be. I’ve come a long way, even though I don’t really feel any different. The only way I can tell how much I’ve grown is when I don’t feel things I used to, like anxiety, or resentment, or cataclysmic despair. I do still feel those things, but much less frequently, with less intensity, and equipped with therapy-borne skills such as “mindfulness” to combat them with.

I’m getting there. I’m getting to where I’ve wanted to be for a long time: out of the sinkhole of ouroboric (oh wow that’s a word sweet) doom predictions and lamentations of my misfortunes, towards a more pro-active, creative, roll-your-sleeves-up-and-muck-in approach to life and its obstacles. I’m not here to say that I’ve learnt to pull myself up by my bootstraps, because bootstrapping is for boomers and bullies who feel entitled to shit on people less fortunate than they are, and isolate people into their predicaments rather than even acknowledge the wider circumstances that led to them in the first place. I don’t ever want to be that, for myself or others. I am here to say that I’m starting to see the difference between the problems I face and the way I approach them, and how that plays out in me being who I am – and how it’s starting to shift in meaningful, helpful ways.

I could write a book about it. Maybe one day I will.

And maybe one day I’ll come back to writing about writing. But for now … well, I don’t know who’s reading this. I don’t know things about social media that it seems everyone else does; I don’t know about “bots” or “engagement” or “networking”, and my god I don’t care. I don’t know how many real people ever read this blog or were interested in what I had to say – though I do know that there were a few, and I enjoyed all of those interactions, few and far between as they were. I definitely could have done more to reach out and seek those interactions, but I didn’t – because that was never what this was about. All I ever wanted out of this blog was a way for me to record and reflect on my own writing journey. At the time, way back at the end of 2012, I felt the need to put this journey online. I dressed it up with a narrative of providing a resource for other writers, and for a while I really did care about that. I tried to keep that in mind every time I wrote another post where I was in the exact same predicament again, feeling stuck, frustrated, sick of myself and my seeming inability to just learn already, to stop these same problems from cropping up again and again. And that experience is what I’m reflecting on now, as I write this post, which I intend to be my final post on this blog.

This reflection comes in two parts. The first is how that repeated cycle of getting stuck for the same reasons over and over again is emblematic of why this blog has served its purpose – in terms of being a writing resource for others. For myself: look, it’s not hard to repurpose a blog for your own personal use. I’ve used this as a book review platform, a public diary, an accountability tool, a WIP progress-tracker, an advice column where I was the only one writing in … I’ve found ways to make this blog relevant to me. But I’ve never felt truly content with that. I’ve felt that, if I have a public platform, I should use it for public engagement. The principle of it stands out strongly to me, for whatever neurotic reason I have yet to identify and unpack. And by that principle, this blog is pointless, because – at least for the moment, and for a while before this moment – I just don’t feel particularly invested in engaging with the blogosphere. It feels like the wrong fit for what I would want to achieve with a public platform. I actually do value the opportunity to share my writing journey with others – but to be real, my journey has stayed the same, because the journey doesn’t end. And the way I’ve kept having to haul myself over the same hurdles time and time again proves that to me. The journey is a circle. I was motivated to share my experiences so that other people trapped in the cycle knew they weren’t alone. Now, though, I realise that running on a wheel can get you fit and healthy, but it won’t get you anywhere else. And I realise that I do want to be somewhere else.

The second is that, if there is any value in what I’ve done with this blog, I hope it’s this: you can get stuck on the same problem over and over again – and keep finding a way to solve it. Just because you’re having the same issue crop up more than once, doesn’t mean you’re “losing” to it. It probably means you’re ignoring something, avoiding something, denying something – or just missing something. And all of those things are okay. They’re their own journeys. But even while you’re going through them, you can keep writing. You can keep forging ahead. You just accept that the struggle is the same as it was last time – and solve it the same way you did last time.

Which, for me, like clockwork, was to just keep writing.

Writing down my problems and facing them as they stand beyond my own imagination, in words I am not holding in the ever-shifting space of my thoughts, has been a way to make my obstacles concrete, finite, and tangible. Transferring inner turmoil to outer text frees me from the effort of maintaining the imaginative relevance of whatever grievance occupies my attention. The problem doesn’t go away; it gets out of my head, the thought of it stops taking up my focus. It frees up my efforts to address it, even if that’s just to acknowledge how much it sucks. Or that, by taking the time to write it down, I’ve used my energy to do something other than just think about it. And when it comes to writing – and other things – the same solution also works, time and time again.

Basically, anything I feel I have of value for others, I’ve already left here. It’s not that I won’t learn new things about myself or writing; it’s that, at the core, the most difficult part of writing is just to do the writing. Every time you find yourself unable to write, finding a way to get writing again. And that part doesn’t really change. Or at least it hasn’t for me, regardless of what I’ve learnt, how things have gotten easier. It’s the same core skill, just applied in new ways.

Write. Write about something else. Write a different project. Write in a diary. Write a tweet. Write a letter. Write in the fog of your breath on the window. Write with your toe in the sand. Write what you’re feeling, what you’re thinking. Then read it, and write about what you read.

I am going to leave the blog up. Never throw away anything you write – what’s the point? Unless it’s incriminating evidence of something; then feel free. But one day, who knows, I might feel motivated to do something with a blog that can only be done with a blog. Until then, I want to keep doing what’s been working for me, and that doesn’t include blogging. And, really just on principle, I want to be upfront and communicate that to anyone who’s still here, for whatever reason that might be.

Thanks for reading. Keep on writing.

Be Careful What You Write For

So.

What happens when you have a crossover fanfiction project that you’re really excited about, decide to try and take the general premise and turn it into an original story, and attempt to somehow keep all of the amazing synergy between the crossover stories while not committing plagiarism?

And what happens when it works?

This past week – and last week as well, actually – I’ve been doing a fair bit of writing. On Wednesday, I somehow wrote almost 11k words. After most of this year being an utter slump writing-wise, it felt surprisingly … un-startling. I guess I was just in the zone. And that’s great. It’s good to be back in writing-mode.

This project – Under Contract – has been a problem from the start, even when it was still a fanfiction that I wrote 52k words of in the course of a fortnight. True, the original problem was that I just had too many damn ideas that I wanted to pursue, and then my brain did the irritating thing it’s done all my writing life and made me believe that the only acceptable approach was to try and do all of them at once, and anything less would count as abject failure. Thankfully, I’m starting to get over that. But back in May last year, it was just How Things Are, and I wrote it off as another failed project – but one that I didn’t regret in the slightest. In fact, I un-regretted it so much that I wondered if I could possibly take the general idea and look you read the opening statement of this post, you get where this is going.

Fast-forward to the past couple of weeks, and an undertaking a year and change in the making finally, finally paid off with me completing a chapter that I would actually consider using for this project. It was a pretty gruelling process just getting it written, as I was writing from the POV of one of the two main characters for the first time. I struggled, and overcame; I realised what was going wrong, and also realised that I was capable of coming up with solutions. All in all, it was a very affirming experience, and I’m pretty keen to keep the ball rolling. I was especially happy about being able to find the character’s voice, seeing where I’d made them do or think or say things that didn’t quite add up for me, and then recognising how it needed to change in order to feel right.

And not only that, but it felt like the fanfiction. I’d carried the character’s voice over; I’d taken the things that had inspired me, and through sheer commitment and determination, managed to re-create that atmosphere with original characters. I’d done it, the thing that I’d been struggling with ever since I decided to try making an original story out of this project, the thing I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to accomplish …

And I realised that my original story read exactly like a fanfiction of someone else’s work.

Needless to say, this has given rise to a whole new generation of anxieties and self-doubts and frustrations, which I’m trying to laugh off because me being a neurotic wreck is kind of a running gag between me and, uh, me. I’m a pedantic perfectionist with tunnel-vision, and not seeing this incredibly obvious problem coming is kind of classic me.

It’s making me think that, actually, even if I have spent over a year just trying to get this project started and finally, finally succeeded, maybe all it amounts to is me realising that this isn’t what I should be trying to accomplish.

I’ve been hoping that I’d stumble upon a story that “feels like it comes from me” for a while now, but without any clear plan of how to do this, or even the idea of where to start with such a plan. When I thought I was going to finally write Realm of the Myth this Nanowrimo, I was excited because, in many ways, it felt like the first step in the right direction towards that goal. It didn’t pan out the way I’d envisioned, but what happened instead – starting to work on Under Contract again, after taking months off out of frustration for it not shaping up in a way that felt “right” to me, whatever that might have looked like – was better. And now this latest breakthrough/setback hybrid, which holds the potential for causing great dismay. It’s not yet, though. I can see all the thoughts that have arisen since I completed the chapter and realised it was exactly what I was trying to do, which turned out to be the last thing I actually wanted, and am finding myself able to recognise that I don’t have to engage with them right now. Guess this whole therapy thing really is paying off.

What I’m thinking is that, just maybe, this is how I get to a new story that feels like it’s mine.

There’s a sunk cost fallacy at risk of coming into play here, and I am trying to be very careful about making any big decisions as a result. One thought I’m having about how to resolve the frustration is to actually go back and finish the fanfic. Or at least have some fun writing it for a while, letting the bigger, riskier decisions of how to best spend my time and energy for writing percolate in the meantime. The other plan is to just keep working on Under Contract, and trust that I will continue to keep developing it in ways that make sense to me, that knowing I want my own story and not just a fanfiction with a new coat of paint will steer me true, and that I will continue to find solutions to the problems that come my way like I have this week. That my ability to do this is real, and not just a fluke.

Why did nobody ever tell me that being a writer would be so fucking fraught? Jesus.

Well I guess there are all those stereotypes of tortured artists and stuff, but still, who believes that crap unless they’re actually doing it? There’s got to be a better way of warning people about this.

I guess that’s part of what I’ve hoped this blog would be for anyone who ended up reading it, as well as reminders for myself. But with 701 posts – 702 now, I didn’t even realise I’d passed 700 until today – that’s a hell of a lot of backlog to work through just to find something that might be useful. And I can remember, vaguely, that I once said something about shutting this blog down once I hit 700 posts. I remember I had reasons for it at the time, though I can’t remember them now. Something about the blog’s purpose having run its course. Still, here I am, writing this, and publishing it. Clearly, I still feel there’s a purpose. But I’m worried that I’m clinging to things I no longer value out of principle, or just habit.

Oh well.

I’m at a turning-point right now, either way. And the only thing I feel certain about is that I can’t stand still. I have to pick a direction, and trust that I’ll bring everything I’ve learnt to appreciate about myself and my process with me.

Hope it works out.

Nah, No Wrimo

It’s kind of funny, because this has all happened before.

I’ve tried writing Realm of The Myth numerous times in my life. I’ve made starts that seemed promising that inevitably get abandoned in the onslaught of implications my mind throws in my face until I run out of energy trying to answer them all, like being riddled to death by the sphinxes at the Southern Oracle in The Neverending Story. Every now and then, though, I actually hit some invisible mark that propels me past all of that, and I can feel the story coming together around me as I write. I can see where it’s going, how to get there; it feels right, the way I always hope my writing will feel. And for this project, no less. in these instances, I have the momentum, I have the enthusiasm, and I have the vision. What could possibly go wrong?

How about the fact that the vision sucks?

I did, indeed, set upon writing this book/self-fanfic/psychodrama in prose for Nanowrimo with full acceptance, even excitement, at the that that not only was I avoiding trying to “make it good”, but not even worrying about making it a story. I was allowing it to just be, whatever that being ended up, uh, being. I was hype for this shit.

And then the next day I realised that I just didn’t care, because while I could get it out of my system …

It’s literally not worth the effort.

Because, in fact, I don’t think it would get “it” out of my system. Because Realm of the Myth itself is not the “it” I thought I was targeting to eject from my system. The “it” is something elusive, something I sadly have not managed to identify or find a way to articulate at the time of writing this post. But it’s not the “story”.

And that’s because, as I identified at the start of the month, Realm of The Myth isn’t really a story to begin with.

What I did discover, though, is part of what it actually is.

It’s a launching-pad.

Because the day after I made my start, I went back to another struggling project, another fanfiction in fact, the same one I started in 2020 and ever since have been excited about and frustrated with in equal measure as I try to convert it into an original story. A picture-perfect successor to Realm of the Myth, in other words.

I found myself taking the momentum I’d started out with from Realm of the Myth and successfully converting it into momentum for this new project, Under Contract, a thing so rare I can’t actually remember it ever happening before now. I’ll be mindblown by this later, I’m sure. For now, I’m still actually engaged with Under Contract, though this last week I’ve done basically no writing at all due to various household projects that have been getting done. A different, still very important and satisfying undertaking, but this week I’m aiming to get myself back on the writing-horse.

But I have to acknowledge this, record it, because it’s so momentous of a revelation to me that it needs to be turned into a narrative beat in the story of my life.

This non-story I’ve struggled with for decades of my life, which has only been three-and-a-half decades thus far, couldn’t “get the ball rolling” if it was the boulder of Sysiphus.

But apparently, it can get the ball rolling for other stories I want to tell.

At least, it’s done that for this other story I want to tell.

And that, actually, is a huge gift.

Maybe the reason I keep coming back to the shapeless morass of concepts and visions that is Realm of the Myth is because it’s the form that my creative core has taken on to communicate with me through. A lot of my most primal ideas are located in Realm of the Myth, the archetypes and tropes and idiosyncrasies that I find myself coming back to and iterating upon over and over again. Maybe that’s because this is my idea-factory, and what I’ve identified for so long as “coming back to it” is actually me tapping into it – where “it” is just my creativity.

I don’t want to put too much stock in this idea, because I’m aware that it’s very exciting as a concept and I have a habit of going too hard too fast with ideas about myself that seem to make sense, often to my detriment – but hey, it’s an idea. And in this particular case, the narrative fits.

Either way, thanks to trying and “failing” to make Realm of the Myth live, I’ve now got energy for a project that I’m not just excited to work on, but have been struggling to try and make work – until I tried making Realm of the Myth work again first. And when I bounced off it, realising like I did when I was 14 that this “story” just isn’t what I want to make work in the first place, the blockage I’ve been facing with this other project for, like, a year just … went away.

And while I don’t really know the “why” behind it, I do know for certain that I tried something out, and came to a definitive conclusion about it. About what I do and don’t want.

I don’t want to write Realm of the Myth. And after years of trying to make myself write it, that should be a surprising discovery. But instead, it feels so right it’s hilarious. Of course I don’t want to write it. It’s fucking garbage.

Because it’s not a story.

I want to tell stories, and I think I’ve got a good one in Under Contract, if I can make it work. And so far, it’s looking like, actually, maybe I can.

Realm of the Myth isn’t a story. Maybe, one day, it will be. But right now, I’ve realised after twenty years – yikes – what it might actually be, and I’m really grateful for that realisation. I’m grateful that I longer actually have a reason to hate this “project”, to only be able to see it as a sign of my “failure” as a writer and storyteller and person who makes commitments to do things and then actually do them. I’m grateful that I can see it for what it is, and can see myself for who I am in how I’ve treated both it and myself over the years, insisting that it has to be a story that wants telling, labelling it a “passion project”, a “self-fanfic”, a “soul-sucking time-vampire that ruins my life”, all the ways I’ve tried to make it fit a particular shape because my identity and ego depended on it … I am grateful that I can actually see all that insecurity and delusion for what it is, be abl to grieve myself for the time and energy I poured into sustaining it, and be able to start moving on.

It’s not content; it’s a platform. But like a diving-platform, a springboard, made out of the ideas that have settled into my core over the years, the amalgamation of my various inspirations that have ended up sticking with me the most. And that’s worth keeping around for its own sake.

It is so nice to be able to finally make peace with this goddamn thing taking up so much real estate in my mind, now that I have a clearer, broader perspective on what it is that I’m actually dealing with. It’s always good to know more about yourself, even if it’s painful – luckily, it wasn’t painful this time.

And with all that said: I’m still in mid-jump, and have been frozen in mid-air for the past week. Time to resume the flow of time.

Time to tell a story I actually want to tell.

57,206

Another year, another Nano. And yes, I’m still alive and kicking, or at least spasming with some degree of autonomy.

That word-count is not my current Nano total; that’s my total for the year so far, spread across my various creative projects, counting prose I’ve written specifically. I jumped into Nanowrimo around 2:30 AM this morning, and am feeling more optimistic about writing than I have … pretty much all year.

This year has been the hardest for me, writing-wise, since I was an undergrad. I’ve had time, and as the title of this post suggests I have actually done some writing this year, but I’ve also gone months without typing a word. Now, if I were to count non-creative prose then nothing much has changed; I’m still journaling and ranting and note-making as has ever been my wont, that hasn’t slowed down. But I’ve felt incredibly blocked this year, in a way that feels familiar, but has lasted far longer than it usually does. I guess maybe the pandemic finally caught up with me.

Speaking of which, I’m also fully vaccinated now, which feels good. Silver linings.

This blockage, I decided about a month ago now, needed decisive action. I thus declared the week starting after this moment of clarity a writing-free period of time, where I was not allowed to try and push myself to write. If inspiration came naturally, organically, then fantastic! And it did, and I’ve really enjoyed having those ideas lead me on merry chases over these past weeks. But no more pressure. No more goals. No more expectations or judgement for failing to meet them. For one week, I stuck to this, and it felt great, because not only did my “no writing” plan work, but a whole bunch of other benefits came along with it.

Cleverly, I’d also bundled into this “no writing” also “no putting on YouTube first thing after I wake up in the morning”, which was my specific plan for a more general goal of “no more distractions”. I wanted to be present, in the moment, deliberate and intentional with my decision-making and how I chose to spend my time. And it worked. For that first week, especially the first few days, I felt more connected, vital, and energised than I have in so long I won’t even bother trying to remember. I discovered things about myself that, while I can’t remember them right now, I wisely wrote down in journal form so that I can refresh myself later, like maybe today.

Because then the following weeks happened and everything went out the window; but at the same time, the change had begun, and there was no stopping it. I fell back into my old self-distracting habits, but with a renewed sense of purpose and intention that I wanted to get out of the experience. I also spent a week researching laptops, because I wanted to replace this one I’m writing on right now, which I’ve had since I started postgrad seven years ago, and eventually decided that it would actually be much cheaper and maybe even more reliable to just upgrade this old brick to be a bit faster and more suited to my needs. That week reignited an old kind of habit for me, the unschooler who has lain dormant for such a time as this, when I can just go HAM on one single project and indulge my every fascination, as well as push myself to comprehend and synthesise new information. I was learning, I was making decisions that mattered to me, and it was really interesting.

Throw in a couple of back-to-back socially-distanced outdoor dinners with family members, because that’s currently allowed at our level of lockdown here in NZ, that stretched my social muscles far beyond what I was ready for and remembering that, actually, I kind of like it, and these past few weeks have been not just the highlight of this year for me, but also the most myself I’ve felt in a long time.

And of course, that got my brain working on a classic question: can I take X good vibes and channel it into … writing?

The answer, until this morning, was no.

And that was fine. That one week off writing was enough to give me a perspective-reset that has been even more helpful than I could have foreseen at the time. I’ve had the chance to really consider why and how I want to write going forward, and came to the realisation that a huge part of the reason this year has felt so hard writing-wise is because none of the projects I’ve set out for myself feel like they’re my stories. They’re all iterations on stories other people have told, over and over again – and there’s nothing wrong with that, obviously. Even when I was passionate about writing in my early teens, and in fits and bursts throughout my adult life, I haven’t been reinventing the wheel or anything. But I was always following my own interests, and my own values. I was doing the thing you’re meant to do as a writer: I was writing what I knew, not as in the trivia or facts I’d collected over time (though there was some of that, of course), but the truths about myself, people and life that I held as self-evident. And yes, obviously it’s not healthy to just cling to your assumptions, or even lessons learnt from lived experiences, as the sum total of all possible truth in the world, and I would hope that I continue to push myself to be open to new information as long as I’m alive.

But we’re talking storytelling here, and I think we probably all have a primal story that we feel compelled to tell over and over again, in different forms. Maybe even more than one, and it might change over time, because we all change over time. But in giving myself permission to not write or be thinking about writing or considering how I can wrangle myself into a mindset where I feel like writing, I also gave myself permission to disconnect from these stories that I cobbled together from trends and tropes I’ve picked up and analysed and come to some intellectual understanding of, and even developed genuine fondness for – but that haven’t come from a place of, for lack of a better word, need. None of the stories I’ve been trying to get myself to tell are stories that I feel I need to tell. And in taking this little one-week break, I gave myself the opportunity to feel my way back to that primal story that drives me.

Which, of course, brought me back to the story that keeps insisting that I try to tell it, even though it’s so muddled and overwrought and internally inconsistent and just plain indecisive that it’s impossible to even know where to start, the story that I realised had absolutely no potential about a month after I originally thought it up at age 14, the story starring a thinly-veiled self-insert author-avatar version of myself and a cast of assorted strawpeople to play out any and all fantasy scenarios that popped into my head. My Fantasy Epic, the one I’ve tried and failed and started and stopped over and over and over again for the past twenty years.

This morning, I sat down and started a journal entry titled: “What Would It Take?” What would it take to make this story finally work?

The answer came swiftly, and it was painfully simple.

It’s never been about “making it work”.

Or rather, it has always been about “making it work” – and that’s always been the problem. I’ve pushed and planned and procrastinated, holding out for the perfect moment when I knew that all the pieces were fixed in place, in exactly the way that was pleasing to me, before getting started. I’ve been focused on the problems with plot, structure, characterisation, worldbuilding, setting – all the things that, when you sit down to analyse a text, “make” a story a story. But I realised this morning that none of those things were the real problem.

The problem was that this was a story I was trying to tell all the way through before I even got started on it. And that’s just not how I tell stories.

So, the simple version of this tale is that I realised I’m a pantser and that planning was the problem. Yeah, that’s definitely true. But it’s not just that I was trying to plan this story that kept getting in my way. It was that this story was actually never about the worldbuilding, the setting, the characterisation, the plot, or the structure. It had those things, because those are all things I’m interested in and just organically fill in space with whenever I take on a new project. But those weren’t the things that were driving me to tell this story, and by focusing on them, I had distracted myself from the place this story had come from. This story was about me, and this morning I finally realised what that really meant. It wasn’t that this story should be about taking my biography and turning it into a semi-fictional narrative. It was always meant to be a way for me to take my feelings, my thoughts, my experiences, and follow them through, with a cast of fictional characters, in a fictional world, with all kinds of other interesting things going on. This was meant to be a playground of the imagination.

This was meant to be self-fanfic on the fly. And if that sounds like the last thing anybody would ever want to read, believe me, you’re not alone.

But this isn’t even about telling a story for other people to read, I’ve realised: it’s about me, and it’s also about non-judgement. This is a concept that I’ve been aware of on an intellectual level, from a distance, for a while now, but recently I finished listening to the audiobook of Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are, which is ostensibly about the science behind the “orgasm gap”, and inevitably ends up being about so much more, and it’s been an illuminating and truly helpful … read? Listen? Whatever; it’s good, go read it if you can. She talks a lot about stress and self-judgement, and when I got to her section on mindfulness and non-judgement, something just clicked.

This project – Realm of the Myth, because I came up with it when I was 14 – isn’t actually a story. It’s a narrative exercise in self-expression. It’s not something that’s meant to thrive on plot and structure and all the other things conventional (and commercial) writing wisdom suggests are the places you must look to if you’re struggling with a story. Those are all good and useful things, and if this was, for lack of better phrasing, a “real story”, it’d probably have helped me. But this has never been a “real story”, and this morning I finally found the language to embrace it for what it is.

It is, as Emily Nagoski has taught me, a stress cycle. This project is a stress cycle that I’ve been preventing from completing. That’s why it’s kept coming back to me for the past two decades – and also why my attempts to “make it work” have all failed. It’s not a story to be planned and plotted out, where attention to characterisation and careful worldbuilding choices are the foundation upon which it’s built. It’s an emotional process that needs working through. Again, two decades. Even after I actually completed a zero draft of a version of this story, with planning and everything, it actually went really well on that front, I’ve kept coming back to it, iterating on it, trying to find a way to tell the “real story” I thought was here. And now that I’ve finally found it, I’ve realised that it’s not a story I’ve been waiting for; it’s letting go of the expectation of having a story at all, and instead embracing the way that I want to use prose as a tool for fantasising and imagining, just as much as (if not more than) I want to use it to tell “real stories”.

And so, this is my Nanowrimo project. It’s going to be narrativised, sure, but not planned. It’s going to have a lot of random shit in there, most likely, because this project has, since I decided to give it another shot at age 15, been about addressing the sticking-points in my life, good and bad, through the medium of fantasy. It’s an exercise in therapeutic imagination, recorded and expressed in the form of prose. And maybe verse; we’ll see how I’m feeling. Fuck it, maybe I’ll even do some drawings. Damn, that feels like a right idea for this project.

I’m so excited. And I’m excited for the project in its own right, even though one of the things that really pushed me to try and “make it work” this morning was the longing I suddenly felt for the weird and wonderful new fucking ideas that could be given space once this project has finally worked its way out of me the way it needs to be worked out. Just because I want to express it in prose (and potentially other media), doesn’t mean it’s a “real story”.

It’s not a destination; it’s a journey.

It’s also probably going to be objectively fucking awful, if taken as a “real story”, once it’s done.

That probably – hopefully – means that I’ll have done it right. I kind of can’t wait.

By The Numbers

132,024

That is how many words I wrote last year (probably slightly more, actually). I thought I had already made a post declaring this, but apparently I never published it. Probably for the best, after looking it over while ctrl+C-ing that large number.

I bring this up partly because I was feeling pretty down on myself around the end of last year – so unrelatable to anyone else who was around last year, I know – and snapped myself out of it by actually looking at what I’d accomplished (which I could do thanks to keeping track of it) in terms of writing, ending a downward emotional spiral through the power of forethought as self-care.

It’s also partly because I have recently gotten back into the swing of writing and thought, hey, maybe this blog can become relevant to my writing process again – though I’ll be real, while the idea of using this blog as my writer’s journal is very appealing to me, I’m not sure that I wouldn’t be happier now if I just … used a writer’s journal.

But, that’s a decision I can put off for far longer yet. For now – let’s add another number to the list.

2.8

This is the number of years it has taken me, on average, to complete each of my 5 zero draft manuscripts between 2005 and 2019. If I include the one pass of revision I did on Tallulah, that number becomes 2.333 (repeating). That made me feel pretty good about myself, I gotta say – and another example of how feelings, particularly feelings of inadequacy or failure, can be so incredibly misleading. I felt like I was taking about 4 years between each zero draft, but not only is that mathematically impossible given the fact that I started the first one in 2005 and finished the last one in 2019, I’m also pretty sure that this average number is actually pretty close to the actual time between each manuscript. This also isn’t including my Masters, nor the part of the screenplay I spent most of 2018 co-writing, which would push that number up to 2, or 1.75 including that Tallulah revision.

It’s definitely healthy, not to mention refreshing, to have this evidence available in the face of my habitual bouts of self-degradation. All things considered, I’ve been pretty goddamn productive just in terms of taking writing projects through to completion, or some form of completion. That’s pretty sick.

And yet, while this is a useful tool in and of itself for countering the negative effects of feeling like shit, I still want to get to a place where – well, maybe not feeling like shit isn’t a realistic goal, because I’m only human, but at the very least eliminating one particular source of shit-like-feeling.

Which leads to this year’s fun new thing: a writing course! For free! On YouTube! Taught by bestselling fantasy author Brandon Sanderson! For free!

Did I mention it was for free because that’s really the main draw for me.

Well, that and the fact that, last year, I actually watched the entire lecture series and found it really interesting, and even helpful. This year, B and I are taking that lecture series and watching one video a week, just like a real university course, setting ourselves some homework and having a “tutorial” over lunch. It’s been fun – and it’s been productive.

I’ve gotten back into my writing headspace, and not only that, but I’ve gotten back into deep writing headspace – at least for one day last week. I, like many writers, have Spotify playlists made for (some of) my writing projects. I’m not sure about other writers, but when I listen to my playlists I’m either in the process of writing, or I’m fantasising about what I might want to happen in my stories that I haven’t written yet. This has actually not been super helpful, as all that speculation and focus on the hypothetical takes me farther and farther away from the project as it is.

However, Week 2’s lecture focused on the concept of promise, progress and payoff, and how you can evaluate a story’s “success” based on these criteria. The concept of “promise” is definitely one I’ve thought of and ranted about on this blog before, but having a systemic explanation of the concept really helped me focus on what to do with it. I took it, applied it to a couple of my projects, and immediately found myself solving problems that had been stumping me for ages, coming up with exciting new ideas, and most importantly engaging again with those projects. And this culminated in one of my almost-daily walks last week, where I was listening to a writing project playlist and, instead of thinking about what could happen, I focused on what was happening. The playlist suddenly became a soundtrack, and it got me into that special mindset that happens when you’re deep in the process of writing a book, and you’re working with it not as a cloud of hazy possibilities, but as a tangible, present experience that you are directing while also being carried along by it. It was exciting. It’s gone now, but as with all feelings it’s not meant to last, and the whole point of doing this “course” is so that I can build a writing habit that isn’t totally dependent on my feelings. And so far, it’s working …

Well, relatively well at least. There’s more work to do, but the framework for putting that into action is there, and that’s exciting in and of itself. I’ve never been this invested in learning the “craft” of writing before, the technical discourse and shared knowledge, and while there’s some stuff I’m finding either misses the point or overstates the facts or is just plain useless, most of it is so helpful in a practical sense that, were this course available when I was at university, I hope I would have gotten to take it.

But it’s up to me, and B, to make it work for us. Being present with my projects has been fantastic; now it’s time to find a way to be present with my process as well. It would be too easy, and a little too predictable to not be embarrassing, for me to fall into the same old pattern of hanging out for a good feeling and letting the process that led to that feeling fall to the wayside. I want to be more responsible than that. My writing deserves it, and so do I.

And on top of that – as I’ve said, and learnt, and gotten distracted from, and re-remembered, over and over and over again, writing cannot be the only thing that I do with myself anymore. It doesn’t work. It makes my writing worse when all the pressure is on for it to carry me through whatever is getting me down, and everything else in my life suffers from lack of variety. 2020 was a big year for me in terms of self-discovery. Maybe the most important thing I discovered about myself is that I can cope with things that other people find catastrophic – and that a big part of the reason for this is that my day-to-day life looks like somebody else’s rock bottom. This isn’t me trying to shame myself into action, it’s just a fact. I’m extremely vulnerable, in a highly precarious and dependent situation that I honestly can’t see a realistic way out of. That’s partly because the world sucks, and partly because I have a ton of bad habits that are limiting what I think is possible, what I am even aware of being an option. Writing is one, but it can’t be the only one.

But, it’s as good a place as any to start. And if I can start making it really work for me, then at least I’ll have a blueprint for whatever comes next.

I Like Big Books

I cannot lie.

I haven’t been able to stand big books since, I dunno, sometime around 2013 I think. When my YA kick started, and anything over 350 pages long really had to earn my time and attention. Through YA to UF and, around the start of this year, Romance, that trend has held true and been satisfying.

But I just finished Words of Radiance, book 2 in The Stormlight Archives, an ongoing (read: unfinished) epic fantasy series planned to be told in 10 parts, the 4th of which came out, like, a month ago. The first was published in 2010. What am I doing to myself?

Having a pretty good time, honestly. And man, did it require getting over a hump to have it. Earlier this year – was it this year? I think it was this year – I read The Way of Kings as part of my cautious High Fantasy half-kick, and that book was about 1000 pages long (this one is a little longer). I really liked it. I liked it a lot more than this one, to be perfectly honest; it was big and mythic and very human, while this one … I dunno. It’s got a lot of the stuff that I hate about the genre, particularly surrounding gender, race, and perhaps most importantly privilege. But that being said it’s also critical of these things; it’s frustrating in that, on the one hand, it has this very open, exploratory approach to the intersection of systemic social forces, such as injustice and abuse of power, and individual agency and accountability, through a moral, but rarely moralistic, lens. On the other hand, there’s some preachy stuff in here and, especially when it comes to handling mental illness … or at least what seems like mental illness … it’s less than great in a lot of places. It’s frustrating.

But there is something about the sheer volume of a story told through the medium of a thousand-page-long book that transforms the feel of it. Despite the length, I’m pretty confident that both of these novels could be condensed into a 2-hour-long film adaptation each and remain faithful to the core essence of the story, and not have to lose a ton of material. That’s not to say that these books feel like they’re full of filler, just that a lot of the word-count is devoted to internal and expositional detail, rather than what’s, like, happening. Not that introspection isn’t something happening, just that there are ways to do it in a film that okay what was I talking about again okay volume. There is something about these books and the story they tell that works for a book in a way that I don’t think it would work in, say, a television adaptation (what is “television” anymore these days anyway). The quality of the size, I think, would be lost in translation. I would not actually want to sit through 10-12 hours of the Stormlight Archive TV show. But I have thoroughly enjoyed spending probably twice as long reading each book.

I think it’s the sense of intimacy that comes from reading a truly immersive story in a book, and that intimacy multiplied by the length of time you get to spend in it. It’s just not the same with a more “visual” media. At least I find it to be that way. If it’s just writing, then you have your imagination doing the visualisation for you, and the longer the book – assuming you have the free time to devote to building and keeping momentum and interest in a 1000-page-long book – the longer you spend imagining. It’s private, and it’s engaging, and it’s something you can do all on your own, and that is something I didn’t realise I’d missed until I got to about the halfway point in this book.

And if there’s ever been a year for rediscovering the joys of stupidly long books, it’s definitely been this year.

Although, in saying that, I have to acknowledge what an utter privilege it is to have had this experience. It comes at a steep cost – I’m still seeing my therapist and am terrified of the real world to an alarming degree – but still, many people enjoy books, and I can only imagine how many people, already pressed for time before the pandemic, haven’t been able to enjoy this kind of experience. It’s not fair. I’m not saying everyone should enjoy long books, because some people just aren’t about that and that’s fine, but goddammit we should all have the option. This year of all years, whoever’s in charge of how much free time people get need to wake up to humanity.

But I digress. I feel guilty about it, that’s all. I can talk to my therapist about that, I’m sure. My guilt isn’t going to help anyone out of a bad situation. But I’m starting to return to these older, younger feelings of mine, feelings I had during a really turbulent part of my life, which was also one of the absolute hands-down best parts of my life. For a lot of reasons, which I’ve gone over a bit before in this blog. But salient to this post is the stories I came up with during that time. Not even the stories themselves, but just how I came up with them, the way I thought and felt and, okay, I don’t really have the right words for describing it. But they’re coming back, as a result of reading this, let’s be real, agonisingly long book. It doesn’t feel that way now, but being objective about it, 1000 pages is fucking stupid. Not to mention it makes the book itself all … floppy.

And for the first time in so long, at least 12 years, I want one of those books of my own.

I ended last year resolving to tell a good story. I think I’m still committed to that, but over this year I’ve come, slowly, to realise that, while I intend to end up there, there is sooo much shit I need to make things right with along the way. I’m not even at the start of this journey; I’m barely starting the prologue of this writing metaphor about my mental health and general wellbeing progress. There are too many things, still, after how many years of knowing and acknowledging this, that I’m holding onto that are holding me down. Getting in the way of writing. But more importantly – far more importantly – are things that I can’t dismiss as just “getting in the way” if I ever want to walk a clear path. Or clear of my own shit, at least. Clear-ish. Nobody’s perfect, and trying to be is one of the things I need to deal with.

So, for my 2021 resolution, I’m going to just work to identify one thing, one tangible thing about my life that I wish was different, and make it different. There are too many to pick right now, and besides it’s still 2020, sadly. But come 2021 – one thing at a time. Until enough things have been, if not laid to rest, at least given the option to rest, that I feel able to really let loose and see what I am starting to believe I can still do. Because I’m really starting to want to do it again.

All thanks to this obnoxiously long, not even that amazing fantasy novel that I am now committed to reading the entirety of the full series of, even though it’s probably not going to be finished before I’m 50. Oh well. Maybe I’ll start A Song of Ice and Fire next.

Lol no.

Lockdown But Not Out

I mean technically we’re not under lockdown right now but whatever.

I’m going to try doing Nanowrimo again this year.

My goal is not a word-count goal; it is a decision-making goal. Specifically, deciding 1) which version of one of my writing projects I’m going to commit to, or 2) whether or not I’m even going to continue with it, at least in the immediate future. I’ve got some other things I want to achieve with Nanowrimo, like taking that huge burst of fanfiction writing I did back in the first half of the year and experimenting with making it into its own thing, but this decision is my priority. It’s been two long years with this project – the zero draft of which I completed during Camp Nano and the following month last year – and I’m no closer to feeling certain about it than this time last year.

Honestly I’m not feeling it, but I’m also sick of getting stuck on writing when I know that if I just start writing again that feeling of being stuck will go away. Not “feeling it” has less to do with the writing itself and more to do with not writing. I’ve found this whole pandemic thing so easy to deal with that it probably shouldn’t be possible, and it’s made me start to take stock of how many resources I have available that I could be making better, more fulfilling use of.

So, I’m going to try and do that.

Mind-Bloglling

I have, in fact, been writing.

Blog posts. A few of them, over the past few weeks; starting, getting quite a way through them, and then stopping upon reflection as I go back to make sure I’m being coherent, finding that I’m not, and realising that what I started out trying to say is no longer important to me at all. I think back to all those times where I’ve promised, ever-so sincerely, that I’ll “never publish another blog post without proof-reading it first”, and given that Weekly Words was the main purpose of this blog for two years …

Quick question on that point.

Who actually reads this fucking thing?

This has never really been a question I’ve felt compelled to ask before now, but I’ve been in a slump for the past month or so, and trying to figure out why hasn’t brought me any closer to clarity. I did become cognizant today of the fact that my recent trend of spending my days “doomscrolling” goes hand-in-hand with my current feeling of just … nothing. It’s not a bad nothing; it’s not misery or dismay or resignation. It’s “nothing” in the way I imagine it feels to be a starfish, or a tree, or any other living organism that lacks a central brain or any kind of recognisable consciousness. I respond to basic stimuli, do almost-daily exercise (which I’m happy about), and then deposit my hard-earned free time diligently into the social media slot machine for the rest of the day. I’m not upset about anything in particular, but this behaviour does seem awfully avoidant, which suggests that I’m avoiding something that, if I were unable to, might make me upset.

In an attempt to find something, anything else to do – and in a half-hearted attempt to find an alternative to presuring myself to Do Writing as my go-to coping strategy – I dug up some of my old Tumblr posts. I didn’t ever use Tumblr like you’re supposed to; I didn’t make and share gifsets of my favourite ships with lyrics to Taylor Swift songs as captions; I didn’t distribute pornographic images; and when I blogged, it was anything but “micro”. I wrote a 20k-word trilogy of essay-rants about Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight films. I was so proud of that accomplishment, for so long. I thought today that maybe going back to it would rekindle something of the spark I seem to have lost lately. And it kind of did.

It’s trash.

Like, it’s so trash, and so recent, that I still feel embarrassed now, hours after reading it. It’s also trash in a really specific way: that of some heteronormative man with an online platform spewing pseudo-intellectual vitriol about some fictional woman. Catwoman, in this case. I haven’t seen those films in years so I don’t know if my opinion of Catwoman, as played by Anne Hathaway, would stand the test of time – but the really distressing thing is not just proof of my being the exact kind of smarmy, arrogant, twenty-something-year-old straight male on the internet that I loathe so much (and even loathed at the time), dressing up what boils down to some unexamined misogyny in the pretence of “irony” and “critical analysis”. And the really distressing thing is being able to remember some snippets of my thought process as I wrote those essay-rants.

Specifically the part where I was aware that this was what I was doing, and that I didn’t want to do it.

Yet, I did, and the reason that I did was … there wasn’t one? In fact, I can distinctly remember myself coming to the point of recognition that the things I was writing at least came off as pretty sexist, and that I ought to really have a think about what I wanted to say and, more importantly, why. I thought that fucking thought. And then … my wifi disconnected? My brain wifi that is; obviously my real wifi was fine because I dumped all three installments of what I considered at the time to be my magnum opus as a blogger onto the internet without a hitch.

Seriously, I have no rational explanation of how I just didn’t get it. Especially because I did get it. I fucking understood that I was writing words and constructing sentences to produce and argument that really did make it seem like I might just have some problems with women in general (which I protest against in said essay-rant), and then I guess I just … worked it out in my head and my brain was like “okay cool it’s fixed now” and just, I dunno, conflated my train of thought with the words I was writing? I guess it was one of those moments you have as a writer sometimes where you understand your point so well (or think you do) that it doesn’t even occur to you that you haven’t actually made that point in what you’re writing. Which happens a lot throughout this trio of essay-rants; I make a lot of statements about the films being good for X reason, but without going into any level of detail about it. No examples, no analysis, not even some not-backed-up-with-sources model of thought. Just pure declarative rhetoric, point after point. But the part where I let myself off the hook for making an argument in favour of what looks suspiciously like sexism wasn’t that. I think it was really just that I thought the point I (thought I) was making about Catwoman being a Mary Sue was just true, and therefore beyond criticism, even if it did sound a bit suspiciously like I was a raging misogynist looking for a way to push my agenda without making it unpalatable to the liberal illuminati overlords whose opinion I thirsted for most greedily.

Or whatever it was 2013 and I thought I was more woke than I was, but also felt that I was juuust woke enough to “get away with” a few problematic-sounding opinions here and there, because I knew that I thought that sexism was wrong, so it could never be real sexism coming from me …

Anyway, it was some useful soul-searching going back over those posts for that reason alone, and recognising in myself so much of the same behaviour and self-excusing mentality that I feel such acute revulsion for when I recognise or at least perceive it in others. But it also led me to remembering that, in the midst of basking in the creation of this epic blog saga, I was kind of offended that not more people had liked or shared them. (To be fair, they were some of my most popular posts; the first one hit, like, double-digit numbers of algorithmic evidence that other human beings or at least bots had come across and had reactions to my writing.) Looking back at it and considering my own response to what I wrote about seven years ago, I’m no longer surprised; I’m kind of bothered that anybody liked them – at least the first one, which is where the Catwoman hate lives. Yet instead of lingering over what could have been the catalyst for a day full of angst and self-loathing, I realised that this actually related to, well, this blog. And my entire blogging career, though ‘career’ is a strong word.

Which brings me back, finally, to asking who still reads this blog – because honestly, I don’t know if I would. Reading back over my old blog posts, I was reading not just some problematic shit that I can now look back at and cringe about for the rest of my life; I was revisiting my early attempts to explicitly “get views”. I was writing about something I thought people would be interested in, something that I knew I was interested in – storytelling + Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy – and while it wasn’t just some mercenary decision made by me to get as much attention as possible, my yearning for said attention was absolutely part of it.

This blog, by contrast, has been all about me and … not even my interests, really; it’s been about whatever I’ve decided this blog is “for” at any given time, which always comes back to facilitating the construction and maintenance of my identity as a writer, and the process of writing. It’s all about me-as-a-writer, where snippets of my lived experience and creative process are the subject matter. Part of why I stopped writing book reviews on this blog was because that style of blogging just felt so … old. I could feel the familiar cravings for attention every time I set out to write one, and I felt distinctly uncomfortably – unhappy, even – every time I became aware of how much that neediness was driving what I was writing. Weekly Words helped me to shift my focus from trying to become, I dunno, “popular”, to what I could use this blog for that would most directly benefit and even improve my writing process. And, to be fair, I am very proud of myself for making that decision, and even if I don’t need it right now, I did need it then, and may again in the future – so it’s just as well I know how to do it and that it works.

But, then again, I could maybe have done that in a private Word document – there is something very empowering about publicising what is, for most writers, a very private (and not very exciting for outside observers) process, and I think that’s why ultimately I chose to blog about it instead; but in terms of what you, the reader, got out of that experience? Well, I have absolutely no fucking clue. Mostly because this isn’t some huge commercially-viable blog with hundreds or thousands of followers; I don’t have a “community” around this blog and never have. Whether trying to or not, I just don’t produce the kind of “content” that attracts masses of readers. Which is not a problem, per se. I have to be honest, it actually feels like I kind of deserve the lack of “engagement” around this blog, because I don’t fucking “engage” with other blogs, either. There’s a part of me that’s glad I don’t have a big follower count, because it would feel kind of hypocritical to benefit from it when I don’t offer that same benefit to other bloggers.

But it has got me to thinking: what am I still using this blog for anyway? Weekly Words is on hiatus because my writing is on hiatus, and in the interim there’s just nothing going on here. It’s fine for me, true – but I can’t help but feel like I’m sort of missing out on something. And that something is engagement. I’m very engaged with myself, at least on a certain level. I’m maybe not engaged enough with myself on others, and too much in some areas – but I digress.

I have never felt capable of “capturing” readers with my writing; I write what I feel like, and if people like it – or don’t – that’s fine with me. This isn’t a huge ambition of mine, being a celebrity blogger or something. Part of that is fear of trying only to fail at something I care about, but most of it is because I don’t care – for the most part. And yet all of today’s introspection and soul-searching has led me to a question that now seems obvious, but that I’ve never asked of myself before with reference to this blog, or any blog I’ve ever maintained. Which is funny, considering how often I’ve asked it of myself regarding my creative writing.

What would I be doing with this blog if I was trying to make it the kind of blog I would want to read?

Because, as I hinted at and will make explicit now: I don’t really read blogs. If you don’t count Twitter, at least. Otherwise, well, the pandemic made returning to Twitter after a years-long absence seem appealing for some reason, and now I’m back in the habit again and it ain’t going anywhere anytime soon, or so it seems. I do check in with Jenny Trout’s blog every now and then; I used to read Neil Gaiman’s blog quite frequently, and do read my updates from Amanda Palmer’s mailing list. But that’s about it. I’m more of a podcast kind of guy; I like being able to listen to people talk about interesting things, leaving my eyeballs free to do other shit, like hate myself for still playing WOW after years of hating myself for still playing WOW. I haven’t ever really considered what blogging is, the medium itself, and what it asks of those who “engage” with it. I think that, actually, I’d be way better at making a podcast than I have been at blogging, at least in terms of “engagement” – if that’s a factor.

That being said …

I don’t know if I’d make a podcast about writing.

And that does, I think, come back to the question of what I would do with this blog if I was trying to make it the kind of blog I would enjoy reading. Given what I have to work with – being an aspiring author who doesn’t go to writing conventions or workshops, isn’t studying creative writing, has never so much as entered a writing competition in his life and has absolutely no material prospects of – or working knowledge about – getting a publishing deal (or even self-publishing) – I feel that the scope of my appeal as a writing blogger is, shall we say, limited. If this was a premise that I was faced with as a blog-reader, I would want to read about the progress, the attempts, and the experience of trying to get from point A(mateur) to point B(ook sold to a publisher or self-published). I would want to learn from those experiences to apply them to my own journey, to become more educated than I currently am – I would want to know what it’s like for someone who’s “been there” so that I can feel more prepared myself if/when I take the same journey.

Because that sounds very interesting. How do you deal with agents and publishers and editors and contracts and publicity? How do you learn what to do; how do you recover from lessons you only end up learning the hard way, improve your craft, all that shit? What is the industry like for a new writer; that sounds daunting as hell – not something I want to dive into without any preparation. But if there was a blog that detailed that journey, I’d be keen. I’m sure that blog is out there, somewhere. But while I can identify all of these selling points for this hypothetical blog …

I mean, there’s a reason I haven’t done any of that shit myself. I’m too scared of what will happen to me if I offer myself up to that experience, the things that might happen that can’t be un-done, the ways I could be taken advantage of. I could end up losing the rights to my own work, or get swindled, or whatever – never mind just getting rejected over and over and over again. And after all that, I’m supposed to have the energy to blog about it?

But that’s about all I can think of.

Maybe if I was taking a course, it’d be okay. I could discuss theories and models being taught, my thoughts and feelings about them, reflecting on how it might apply to my own process – I don’t know how interesting I’d find that, but I do think I’d be interested enough to have a read.

But all of this is making me think that, unless you’re going through “the struggle”, trying to “make it” as an unpublished author, the appeal of a writing blog kind of necessitates that the blogger is actually a published writer who can speak from a place of personal experience, of the industry, of the community, of their own process, etc. There’s a reason I was so hot for Writing Excuses for so long (and will return to it one day, I’m just a bit over it right now, perhaps given my own current writing angst). Hell, even if they’re not published, they can still speak from the place of experiencing having tried to get published.

I mean, you’re reading this post here; is this what you were hoping for? A blog post about why none of this blogger’s blog posts are or ever will be any good, and how good they potentially could be if they were a more interesting person? What is this shit?

But honestly, I still don’t mind. This is my blog and it exists in the form it exists in, and for the time being that suits me fine. I’m not a Blogger; this isn’t my job or my main hobby – it’s a tool that is sometimes useful, sometimes irrelevant to my day-to-day life, and that’s cool with me.

Case in point: all of this has gotten me thinking. It’s shaken me out of my stupor a bit; it’s given me things to consider, to speculate about – maybe even to try out in the future. And given that we’re still in the grip of COVID-19 as a species, and I personally have been in a month-long slump, I’m gonna go ahead and say that, today, this tool has been a very useful one. And however much it might sometimes feel like I could and, therefore, should be doing more with this platform, in practice I only need it to be what I need it to be. It’s fine just the way it is, for me.

And since I’m pretty sure I’m my own most devoted reader, that works out just great.

Writing From Here

I’ve been agonising over my procrastinating for the past three weeks, and treating myself quite badly for not wanting or having the inclination to get some writing done. It makes little sense, as 1) I’m not getting paid to write, 2) nobody else is dependent on my ability or willingness to write, and 3) no that’s about it. I was going to say “it’s supposed to be something that I enjoy doing”, but that’s not really true anymore, and that’s part of the problem.

And in trying to get to the bottom of this problem, I’ve become aware of something. I have a strategy that I turn to, when I’m trying to get myself into the “zone”, to summon inspiration and enthusiasm from the endless depths of the void: I vividly imagine my story-worlds and fantasise things happening within them. I project myself into those worlds and, much like a maverick cop holding an incriminating photograph up to a suspect’s face in an attempt to shame them into a confession, I hold up these imaginings to my mind’s eye in an attempt to stir any slightest feeling of, I dunno, giving a shit. “Don’t you want this to happen?” I demand of myself. “Don’t you want this to be real? You can make it real! All you have to do is WRITE.”

And while said fantasising does sometimes result in neat ideas that I file away for hypothetical future use – well, both “hypothetical” and “future” are things that are different to “actual” and “now”.

But my mind has been unable to reconcile these two things. Bringing myself closer to my ideas should result in me feeling more connected to them, right? So why isn’t this resulting in me doing more writing? Is it just that my ideas suck and I don’t care about them, no matter how “close” they are? Is it that I now just resent myself because I have such a long and consistent track record of being shitty to myself because I feel absolutely irrational shame and guilt when I’m not writing?

Or is it because that’s not where writing comes from?

And, in fact, that’s exactly it. I honestly can’t remember what flipped this switch for me, but sometime last night while I was only half-awake, I realised that I can’t write from within my stories. I have to write them from here. Because while being “in” my stories is very imaginatively immersive, here, in meatspace, is where I am a writer. “In” my stories, I’m a part of the structure. But here, I’m the one doing the structuring. When I was feeling, earlier in the year, like I’d returned to 13-year-old Jason levels of excitement and looking-forward-to-writing-ness, it was because of this. I wasn’t trying to embody or live out my stories; I was excited to tell them. To create them. I got hype by being here, in the real world, and creating something that wasn’t there before, doing something consequential that extended beyond just myself. And you can’t do that if you’re doing all your work in your own head.

This realisation comes during week 3 of Camp Nanowrimo, and there’s about 2 weeks left to go. I could, conceivably, still “win” Camp Nano, at least based on my being able to write almost 50k words in a fortnight with that truly inspired crossover fanfic (still not finished, probably never will be). But this Camp Nano was never about “winning”; it was about writing, getting back in the saddle and remembering how to ride. Remembering that I enjoy the ride, for its own sake, not just based on where it can get me.

I realise now that, actually, I do enjoy writing for its own sake, not just as a means to an end. I also realise that I don’t want to be writing all the fucking time. I’ve caught myself, once again, in a toxic loop of taskmastering myself for the sake of looking like I care about being “productive” to … myself? My Superego? The Eye of Sauron? (Is there a difference?) And while it’s distressing and disappointing to know that this is still a thing that I do and a way that I get with myself, at least I’m catching myself out now, and finding that in doing so, I have a willingness to find a better way to live my life. That’s progress.

And, also, I’ve run out of games to distract myself with and have already re-watched all of Critical Role. If excuses were the problem, I’m out of them.

And if not knowing how to write given where I’m at right now was the problem, that problem is solved. I can do this. I just have to do it from here.

Nanowrimore

Time for Camp Nano again already, huh?

Maybe it’s the pandemic; maybe it’s years of acclimatising to an insular lifestyle and the consequent cabin fever that accompanies it, but whatever the reason, I’ve had a hard time keeping perspective for the past little while. I thought I was back on the writing wagon, but it turns out that I just wanted to be. I needed a break, to stop trying to force every one of my ideas through a story-shaped hole and just let them be whatever shape they come to me in – and it’s been good for me.

So good that, actually, I do think I’m ready for more writing now.

B and I have been having some soul-searching chats for the past few weeks, which has been very cool. It hasn’t all been about writing, but it’s still resulted in a lot of writing-related inspiration for us both. I’m ready for something more than just sitting back and letting thoughts come and go as they will; I want to write some stuff.

First, I want to get back to Bad Guys. I’ve realised that this project is not only still in the experimental early stages in terms of the actual work I’ve put into it, despite the fact that it’s been on my slate for two and a half years now, but also that I’ve been holding myself back from giving it as fair of a chance as it deserves. I am more or less discarding the zero draft I have now; this is a full rewrite – and maybe the first of several, because there’s more than one way this story could go. It might be a long time before I settle on one. And that would be a frustrating prospect (and may turn out to actually be exactly as frustrating as the prospect of having to write several whole zero drafts before something sticks sounds) …

Except that I’ve also been having other ideas, and brainstorming with B has amped me up for them. These may not end up turning into a story, but they’re ideas that are fun and exciting and I am so close to feeling confident about my writing again. I took more of a confidence hit after that huge fanfiction sprint than I realised at the time, and it’s taken a while to build back up. So I’ve got at least these two projects on the go, going into Camp Nano July 2020, and perhaps more as time goes on. Nothing’s settled right now, and that’s fine; everything’s up in the air, and rather than wishing it was on ground level with me, I think I can spare some energy jumping up to catch it.

Just gotta be careful to pace myself and be sensible and responsible with this. As I say, it’s been hard to keep perspective, and I’ve been getting pretty harsh with myself lately – that’s something I definitely want to avoid going into Nanowrimo. It’s been a rocky year, to put it mildly, for everyone in the world – I should be a little less surprised that it’s been no less difficult for me than previous years, at least.

And focus on just having fun this Camp Nano, rather than trying to achieve some arbitrary productivity goal. To re-capture the joy of writing for, well, the joy of it. I’ve said, emphatically, that I don’t enjoy writing for its own sake, only what it can give me. But I’m no longer convinced that this is true, or at least that what I said means what I think it means. I do miss writing, being moved by my ideas and the possibilities that I don’t see so much as feel. It’s starting to feel like it used to, when I was 13 and just starting out, exploring this amazing new tool and all the things I could use it to express about myself. I never thought I would feel that way again, and admittedly as I write this I’m quite disconnected from that feeling. But not so much that I think I’ve lost it entirely. And the fact that I got back to that point at all tells me that something I’m doing is working, and worth the effort to keep on doing.

I feel like I care again. I said at the start of the year that I wanted 2020 to be my year of caring about things for a change. And I’m committing myself, here and now, to making this Camp Nano an exercise in doing just that.