HALFWAY TO BOOK 2, time to kill the momentum and navel-gaze

Last week, I had a cold. Very interesting stuff.

The past few days, I’ve been feeling… a bit off. I’m thinking… maybe it’s the last vestiges of the cold? Maybe it’s my iron deficiency? Or the weather cooling off? Have my final, fleeting tendrils tethering me to sanity finally snapped? I’ve been cooking a lot— maybe my leftovers spoiled.

Yesterday-ish, something strange happened while I was writing BOOK 2. Like a shaken can of Coke… it popped off.

I’m sure I had moments like this while writing Don’t Worry and certain pieces of fanfiction. I don’t remember them exactly, I never catalogued them, but this almost jubilant, detached-from-reality, anxiety-adjacent fluttering in my stomach and my head is not a new sensation to me, though I certainly haven’t felt it in a while.

I’m on the record (multiple times) stating how frustrating I find it that, despite being a hearty skeptic in every other aspect of life, I am graveyard-level spiritual when it comes to writing. It’s woo woo up the wazoo in here on how I get a story from my brain onto the page. It jumbles and tumbles its way into Microsoft Word, and somehow, THERE IT IS. It makes me mad just having to admit this (again). Why did I go to school for 4+ years when I could’ve played a $20 ouija board for the same result?? I say, spirits, tell me how to write, and they say, have you considered waking from a fugue state to a completed manuscript?

Back to Coke. I’m over halfway through the book. Along with the spiritual journey described above, I am also getting nervous, because the more I write this book, the more I like this book, and historically, the more I like what I write, the less chance I have of making any money off it. Ah, the webs we weave.

That being said… progress is progress. I can barely even keep up with my fingers, even though my outline has mostly petered out by this point/is no longer relevant. The rest of the story is in my head. I can feel it like an egg yolk still in the shell. The pieces aren’t all in the right place, but that’s immaterial. The protagonist and the love interest are fighting and snapping and colliding and flirting and desperate and absolutely panting for each other but can’t do anything about it because of how books work (still got about twenty thousand words to go, ladies <3), and god, it’s so hard to invest in your own world and words and characters, and it took me almost forty thousand words to get to this point, but now I’m here, and it’s like, hello, I am pulling back the velvet rope, you have entered the special VIP club of my heart, the legendary Fifth Chamber that my original female characters call home.

Is it, like, good? Mmmmmmmmnnnnnnnnnnnyeeeeeeeeaaaaahh idunno. In my head it’s delicious, and until I have to start sending it out to agents begging for representation, that’s all that matters.

Is it a regular romance like I originally threatened? Mmmmmmmmnnnnnnnnnnnyeeeeeeeeaaaaahh idunno either. I can never admit this to anyone except my lovely empty yellow stadium (great acoustics), but I have no idea. I don’t know anything about traditionally published romances. I’ve read maybe two in the last ten years? All I really know about the genre is how OTT annoyed i get when I see those ugly-ass cartoony cell shaded generic romance covers that look like the graphics on a tech giant’s self-serve help page.

Are there actually interesting, complex characters in romance novels? Are they all supposed to be trope-y? That’s what I was going for, but then I made them interesting, and interesting begets interesting and then it all kind of snowballed from there. Not bragging. Between me and someone who writes stuff people actually want to read, I know which one of us is making the kind of money that can influence elections.

But then how do I sell it if I can’t say it’s about Type A and the Party Girl (a very early description of the main pairing)?! Are romance characters allowed to be deeply flawed in a way that isn’t also sexy? Are they allowed to be wrong about things that aren’t just how much they don’t actually totally hate their hot academic rival, or whatever?

A story can be anything. A story that sells cannot.

This lightheaded gentle-uneasy euphoria is good, in a way. It’s an indicator that the good juices are flowing, not just the regular ones. That the part of my writing I would call ME and not just writing (generic) is finally seeing the light of day. Creatively and personally, that means a lot. Financially, it’s anxious crickets.

The specter of unfulfilling yet gainful employment looms over my head. Not going to lie, I think that helped light the fire under my ass. I need to sell a story that leads to selling more stories, because if I don’t, I am going to spend the rest of my life working low-level office jobs and barely being able to afford to support myself. It’s not all about money, except for when it is. Art for art’s sake doesn’t pay the bills.

I just read a non-fiction book that chronicled the history of class in the US*. Kindly, I would call it a soporific tome. At the same time, it helped me clarify a lot about my two main characters and their relationship to their own class and class backgrounds (the timing ended up being a happy coincidence, I never meant to read it as research). Not only that, but it got me thinking about my own relationship to class (despite being Canadian, but Canada is nothing if not the US’ annoying younger sibling who both wants to assert its independence while also following in America’s footsteps as much as is humanely possible, ASK ME ABOUT THE CANADIANS WHO FLY CONFEDERATE FLAGS).

At the end of the day, if working low-level office jobs is what allows me to live on my own, even if the budget is tight, who am I to complain or move above my station? Why is a life lived with access to healthcare and food and shelter not enough? I don’t deserve more or less than the next person who works low-level office jobs that allow them access to healthcare and food and shelter. The “more” I imagine for myself is no different than the “more” anyone else in my position dreams of.

Knowing this does not change the fact that I do want more for myself. This is a class issue, but it’s also an existential issue. Sometimes, I imagine a life path for myself in which I write THE book of the year, decade, century, whatever. I get every single thing I have sworn will visit Ultimate Happiness upon me. I contribute to society. I live in a beautiful home with enough room for my family and friends to comfortably visit. I have an incredible relationship and friend group. I have hobbies that I enjoy and I am in good health. I have more money than I know what to do with, and the rest gets distributed to family, friends, community, and charity.

Maybe the true existential crisis is my bone-deep certainty that even in a world where all of that is true, it will never be enough. There will always be an ambiguous, amorphous “more” that is missing. There will always be an undefinable and unfillable hole somewhere within me. I wish I didn’t believe that some of us were just born unfixably sad, but I do. I can move the goalposts for my own personal happiness as much as I want— “I will only be happy when X happens,” and so on. Maybe I’m just saving myself from the ultimate disappointment by setting goals so unattainable they can never be reached. Because on the off-chance I achieve them, well, then, “I will only be happy when Y happens”. If I achieve that impossible goal? Well, the latin alphabet may end with Z, but there are other alphabets.

Once I learned how to write with more depth than a teaspoon, I think my outlook on life became obvious in my stories. Something that set my fanfiction apart (for good or ill) was that all joy was tempered by the knowledge that happiness is fleeting while life itself is an infinite struggle. Very Sisyphean of me.

This will seem so hilariously small in comparison, but all those years I spent convinced fictional characters Dean Winchester and Castiel falling in love onscreen, becoming canon, whatever, was the equivalent of happiness for me, a real person in the real world, is a perfect example of this. Pinning my dreams of fulfillment on something that is literally fake (and, talk about setting unrealistic goals, lol) as opposed to anything tangible represents such a damning microcosm of this exhausting mindset. So, I ask myself, I’ll finally be happy when the fictional men kiss? There is no greater plan for me (ME, real ME, the one and only ME) than the two guys on TV locking lips?

What kills me is I knew this. Somewhere in the worst, most realistic part of my mind, I knew it was horseshit. Why else was all my fanfiction undermining itself by wagging its finger at the reader and reminding them that the pursuit of happiness is nothing more than a cage we enclose ourselves in!? I knew it, and still, I persisted in the delusion, because what else could I do? The cognitive dissonance in my life at the time— in my relationship, in my friend group, in my job, in my belief that forever-happiness was waiting for me, somewhere out there, if I could just find it— was immense. And damaging. And a product of my own fevered brain that I do not think is something that can be medicated or therapized away.

My inability to believe in uncomplicated happiness might be what kills this book deal. My refusal to write characters who are easy and fixable and palatable is not compatible with the romance genre. I should’ve written horror, but get this, I hate how dour and misanthropic the genre as a whole is. Go figure. I tried my hand at literary fiction— crickets. Guess what genre I’m returning to for book three? News at 11: dumbass tries writing literary fiction again.

Maybe thriller/mystery is my calling. So much of what I read is trash, the closest you can get to AI that’s still written by a human. But there are diamonds in the rough. There are Tana French’s and Gillian Flynn’s. I’m no French or Flynn, but I am pretty grim and dark without being the much maligned grimdark. I like to think those darker sensibilities might make it a place I could carve out a lil niche for myself. For now, at least, I am steadfastly ignoring the depressing lesbian vampire romance that has been lurking in the dusty corners of my mind for ages. Maybe if BOOK 2 ever moves, depressing vampire romance will be next. If BOOK 2 doesn’t move, well, guess it’s back to the drawing board. I have two lesbian domestic thriller concepts that have been percolating for a while in isolation. We’ll see.

Maybe the problem is the lesbians. No comment 🙂

So much of this is just straight whining. I am not even convinced keeping a blog where I endlessly yell into the void is even good for me. Giving me a platform, even one as small as this, plays on my ego, which already got puffed up enough during my time writing fanfiction. I come onto the blog, spin out and navel gaze for a few paragraphs, then disappear again until I need another brain dump. I don’t know. Lots of people blog. Surely they don’t overthink it to this degree? It’s hard to know when ruminating on your life and your choices and being responsible, accountable, and self-aware crosses the line into needless and pedantic narcissism. WHO THINKS ABOUT THEMSELF THIS MUCH?

And yet, if I don’t, who will? A hard life lesson I am still swallowing is that no one is ever going to care about me most, except me. Which is how it should be. Only me is me. Only you is you. You will only ever truly know yourself and have your own best interests at heart. No one else can be to you what you are to you. At the risk of sounding like a moody teenager, it’s agonizing to know that no one will ever truly understand me. I can never invite someone else into my head (not that I would, given the absolute STATE of it), and they can never invite me into theirs. We are all an island. My dismay over this axiom goes a long way to explaining why fiction and fanfiction has proven such an escape for me over the years. What a relief to be able to get into someone else’s head. To know someone else like real people can’t. To know there are other people like me, or even to know there are other people who aren’t like me. People who think like me and people who don’t. Fiction builds us the boat we use to visit each other’s islands. All this time and we’ve failed to understand that life… is like Animal Crossing New Horizons. —oh my god wait, you fly to other islands there. Never mind. You know what I mean. Simile cancelled.

I don’t know. I don’t think I ever will. If there’s one thing I do know for sure about other people, it’s that no one knows what they’re doing. Some people, the well adjusted ones, have made peace with this. The rest of us live like we are on the perpetually sinking Titanic.

My best solution so far is externalizing. Getting out of my own head (aka the opposite of writing blog posts about it). Focusing on writing helps. Physical activity/exercise REALLY helps. God knows how annoyed I was when I discovered the crunchy losers who told me going outside would make me feel better were actually right. Pricks. I’m playing local sports. I go on lots of walks. I love hiking. I’ve been cooking up a storm. I’ve been crafting and doing puzzles and even trying to watch movies all the way through without looking at my phone (yes, the bar is on the floor). Anything that forces me to interact with the world that actually exists versus the evil shadow version of the world that lives in my head (writing being the obvious exception, lol, at least that is a DIFFERENT shadow version of the world) is something worth exploring.

Another facet of externalizing: I’ve almost written another full ass novel! Regardless of the publishing status or quality or accompanying existential dread, that’s awesome and I’m proud of myself. And when it feels like my island is shrinking and I’m almost submerged, one of the few things I can cling to is that every word I write gets me one step closer to a fully functioning boat.

*Book was White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg. Great if you’re interested in the subject matter. Even better if you need to incapacitate a home invader.