Belated

The Obligatory NaNo Update

Alright, I'll just say it right off the bat: I "won" NaNoWriMo without any issues, wrote 1,667+ words a day, blah blah.

The biggest hitch directly involved in the NaNo process was I forgot to put my word count into the NaNo website, so I couldn't get basically any of the badges. That's one of my complaints about the website. You mean I'm supposed to remember? Before midnight? Go away.

So I made my own little sticker calendar to keep track and have something to show off, plus to do something fun with my excess of stickers.

It's not too hard for me to do something like this, at least when I'm not working a job. I can be stubbornly persistent if I set a structured and specific goal for myself that feeds into my vanity or whatever. So, stuff was going wrong all month, but I did it anyways, even though I hated it sometimes.

As seen in my last blog post, I made a huge amount of plot and arc outline-y stuff and suspected it might make the writing easier. And it did! I mostly remembered to check my index cards, charts, etc., only had to shuffle a few things around, and was generally better able to stay on task. Some specifics of certain scenes surprised me, but not so much I got steered off course.

Even so, there's a lot of work to be done. The worldbuilding details are still fuzzy, there's some hard-to-explain fundamental issues I need to chew over, I keep forgetting to be explicit about a specific characteristic one of my chracters' has, and the whole thing is too slow and long with too much floaty feelings and not enough action. The latter has a lot to do with a historical truth, which is that in places where it snows in the winter, war happens in the warm months. So that's what I'm dealing with: finding ways for there to be tension and action when the war season isn't happening, while having that tension and action not be fluff.

The one unexpected outcome was me mentally reopening the subject of: this story is likely not a suitable debut story. For so many reasons. Such as it needs to be a series, which aren't a guarantee these days. It has four to five main characters to start (depending on how you think of it), then at least eight to nine as it progresses, with other characters undergoing arcs in the background. I'm finding that difficult to orchestrate; my skills are still developing. But also, the market is, from what I can tell, geared towards single MC stories, or at least less Byzantine set-ups.

It's not the end of the world. Personally, there's plenty of reasons to save this story for later. Not least of them being that it's going to be a gargantuan effort to do it the way I want, so if I'm waiting on myself to finish this, I might be waiting a whiiiiile. And it's important to me to do it right; it's been in my head since I was a kid.

So, what now?

I'm not entirely sure. I need to turn some of my processing power to something else, I think, namely something that could be a single novel with series potential and one MC. I have a good idea for one, involving repurposing an old beloved character and a story I've already tried to tell. I'd be starting mostly from scratch, whatever idea I follow, and that's intimidating.

And Now I'm Tired!

(CW: this segment briefly discusses self-loathing)

So here's a peak behind the curtain! I wrote that first section in early December, then couldn't bear to touch it for I don't know how long. I took nine days off writing at the beginning of December and it still wasn't enough. I dragged myself back to writing unwillingly and haven't gotten much done, except in drafting a particularly dark piece of short fiction.

Is this the dreaded burnout? I've been dancing on the edge of burnout for months now, wondering how long I could keep my balance, and maybe NaNoWriMo tipped the scales.

Or maybe it's the continual horrible news about the pandemic, and the fact that my husband has to go into the office anyways. Or the way winter treats me. I'm always cold, even though this winter had been warm. I'm lethargic and just want to lie in the sunbeam that comes through the living room window. At night, no matter how many lights are on, I feel like I'm squinting through the darkness of a cave.

Or maybe it's some short fiction submission stuff that's been happening that's making me spiral. And don't forget the new pains my body has discovered. For a few days, I've been having little flashes of nerve pain in my diaphragm and then randomly throughout my body. Not high on the pain scale, but so exhausting. Costochondritis acting up. Was in a flare for like a week earlier this month, now my period's coming so another one is starting. Would like to take a break from having a body.

I don't treat myself well enough, probably. At the beginning of the year, I set myself the task of writing six days a week. It didn't matter what I wrote, so long as I did. Then this developed into a 1,000 word quota six days a week, but with no stipulations on content. Then it occurred to me the importance of working as hard as I can towards my "career." That's around when the burnout dance started, I think.

It's probably just because I hate myself, but the discourse around taking breaks and rest is a crucial part of creativity irritates me. I justify this to myself by thinking that my health is a limited resource, namely I can only expect it to get worse with age, and any moment it could get a whole hell of a lot worse, perhaps ruining my limited capabilities.

Already I write through a haze, trying to remember what words are, how plot structures work, what idea I had recently and where I wrote it down. There's a part of it that's hard to describe...like I'm blinded by the sun, always, or like everything is soup, always, and I can't remember how words and ideas used to fit together. The result is that writing rarely turns out the way it was in my head, even though I used to be able to get it to do that.

I have so much work ahead of me, and not infinite time. The constant pain signals will eat at my capabilities. I will only get more tired. What is so hard now might be impossible later.

But also, I hate myself. So who knows how sound any of my reasoning is? As my husband pointed out, if I push myself too hard, then that isn't good for my long term health either.

I struggle to accept that I might be a "slow" writer. As if adhering to those goals I set for myself, as if "winning" NaNoWriMo is "slow." (Not that there's a problem with being a slow writer, but there's more of a problem when it's a race against your own probable deterioration). I'm just not fast enough to satisfy myself.

I push myself to identify those moments when I'm not doing anything and turn them into doing something. Lately, I get stuck in executive dysfunction. I do not want to get up and write, I want to remain here feeling terror, partially because my feet are currently warm, which I would lose if I got up. This always happens in the winter.

But also, if I don't write, I don't have a right to exist!

This may seem dark to some, but this is me being frank. I am planning a blog post on the subject of self-hatred, with my own take on the recent discourse on the subject, but the relevant part for this moment is that I'm tired of pretending I don't hate myself. Other than pain, it's the single most ruling condition of my life, and no one will know me if they don't understand that.

So, bleh, I'm not sure what I will do. Try to get through the winter, do what I can in the meantime, celebrate the solstice and the fact that soon, the days will start getting longer. Oh, and continue going to therapy. So stop worrying.

I Guess I'll Talk About Books Now

So, I finished the His Dark Materials trilogy and yay, it was fun. I honestly liked The Amber Spyglass less than I remembered, though not for the reasons other people seem to dislike it. I find the whole anti-religion thing to be fairly on the nose, I don't find it as bitter and ridiculous as I used to. I LOVE the mulefa and no one can convince me otherwise. I think they're crucial to the themes, actually, as a foil to the Church: a people who accept Dust and the beauty of growing into adulthood. The mulefa and the world they inhabit are also so creative, and I so badly want to hug a mulefa.

My issue was more with the logic and suspension of disbelief stuff. Like since The Subtle Knife I was getting irked at how Lord Asriel found his way into another world for the first time at the end of The Golden Compass and then so quickly set up a massive fortress and started fraternizing with rebel angels and built a multi-world army? Then the Church's original goal of trying to keep children from experiencing "original sin" through metaphorical castration so quickly adapted to the idea of multiple worlds and they navigated that with aplomb? It's like Pullman had a realization of what the series was ACTUALLY going to be about between The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife and just plunged forth without considering how some of this reads like retconning.

But also, it's a beloved story, and I don't care that much about all this at the end of the day.

I read Serpentine in one night, and that was cute, and started La Belle Sauvage last night. I'm hoping Pullman can actually make me interested in this prequel-esque story about Malcolm and baby Lyra. I'm honestly way more interested in adult Lyra and her relationship with Pantalaimon in the sequel (esp. as I have heard that it has to do with self-hatred or something? I was wondering how that worked with dæmons!)

I'm still reading Medieval Military Technology. Learning about late medieval castles right now. I'm not sure where the other two packets of the African Civilizations print out went so I'm kind of stuck there, because surely the moment I print out more is the moment the lost packets reappear. I'm theoretically reading The Silmarillion but it's so boring (sorry).

Last but not least, I read the anthology I was featured in, This Is Not a Horror Story AKA Ceci n'est pas une histoire d'horreur. I didn't want to leave a review on Goodreads because that seems...against etiquette? Because I'm in it? But I can genuinely heap praise on this anthology, and not because I'm in it (because I hate myself, remember?).

One of my dirty secrets is that I'm extremely picky when it comes to short fiction. Somehow, though, so many of the stories in the anthology hit the spot for me. The stories that are particularly memorable for me are "Back Home for a Bit," "The Puppy Farm," "Replete After Death," "Mara and the Volkhv," "Studies After the Human Figure," "Katu Latu Kulu," and "Fade to Black." That's a lot of the stories in the book. It's a good anthology. You should buy it, and not because I'm in it.

Alright, I'm going to go eat cheese or whatever and run laps with my anxiety for a while and stare at my pet rats. If I can muster it, my next post will be about self-loathing and why I'm tired of pretending it isn't there. Bye!