Working on Everything but the Story

I threw a lot of energy into trying to get this blog looking better and working on websites and stuff. It was for good reason though; I had been sick and didn’t have the mental energy to sit and focus on my own projects, so I did other work. But now I am feeling a touch guilty. That usually happens to me when I do something other than what I had been diligently chipping away at. It’s still something I need to get done; I’m manning this entire ship by myself so it stands to reason I would need to take time to figure out some coding and write the blurbs myself.

You know, sometimes I can’t believe I used to know so much HTML and a bit of CSS, and then I stopped working on websites for like ten years and all that information left me. Templates definitely make it easier now but I used to do some really phenomenal work on Freewebs and MySpace back in the olden days. I dated myself there, didn’t I? Not entirely the point I’m trying to make right now—somehow I’m supposed to be seguing into Imposter Syndrome feelings, and again, I don’t have a structure set for these blogs. They are as aggressively free flowing as a stream of conciousness. I’m supposed to be setting up my online presence to be appealing to readers and publishers alike, ready and available and do my own self promotion. I realized I’ve been putting off a lot of it because I have so little to offer right now (and like the first chapter of The Chosen hasn’t been updated or had more added to it in over a year) and I feel like I need so much more for people to look at before I feel like I may make a Patreon? That’s such a silly thought to have. Shouldn’t it be that I have that all prepared and readied for when I post regularly so I can just automatically direct people to them? I suppose it embarrassed a part of me I started everything like a year ago and then I fell into a pit of… depression? ADHD rabbit-holing? So I made the Ko-fi account back then, believing I’d be posting a lot more regularly and then it just sat there dormant until I remembered it these past two weeks.

I’m trying extra hard now though to be more accountable to myself and my writing practices. I want to take a moment and appreciate the fact I have been working on the story for the past several months, but it’s not just been actively putting words down onto paper. Or rather, the screen. I’ve been working on Obsidian for world building purposes and Plottr for story structure. It’s been a lot of lore-writing and note-taking, and imo being worthy of appreciation, but how can anyone appreciate it when there’s not yet a fully fleshed story for people to read? I am forever and effortlessly envious of artists working on their own stories and comics; people can see the character designs and get hyped about it and the artist can develop an audience just by posting art. I follow so many artists on IG because I already love the art style and I am so excited for the comic when it comes. The same can’t be easily said about writers. My work around for it has been getting art commissions of the characters and saving to post those once I have a little more traction with my schedule. It also helps to have a partner who genuinely loves my characters, creates sketches of them and posts about them to their own social media. But again, what can I show for people that then become interested in the characters and I have only a chapter posted that doesn’t even contain the characters they’re interested in? Scraps! All I can offer are scraps!

My health has been doing a lot better so I’ve been meaning to get back into the saddle. I’m nervous though I might hit another wall of anxiety and not feeling good enough with my writing, but that’s just it. The first draft of this thing doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be done. Then, when it’s done, I can worry about making it good enough. I suppose I might have been hiding from some of the responsibility of writing by working on story-adjacent stuff. Yeah, I definitely was very guilty of sinking a lot of time into Pinterest boards for characters. This is probably why I enjoy Plottr so much. There’s a lot of information I can plug into it and working on summaries of things without actually writing the scenes themselves out. Right before I had the kidney infection, I was working on the Snowflake Method to get myself to buckle down more seriously into the act of actually writing. I last left off somewhere between writing out the character goals and having to expand my paragraph summary into a page-long summary. It had been working, but then I got flighty.

I really wish there’d been parts of my undergrad and graduate school that had us working on stamina for writing. I understand the MFA thesis is part of that, but something more on hands and structured. I can’t even fathom what that would look like because it also couldn’t be done in just one semester, especially if it’s a large class. The one novel class I took, a workshop for novels in progress, wasn’t any different from the short story workshops I took. (I do have to have appreciation though for the short story workshops in graduate school because I presented three different stories for one semester, two for another, and that was super refreshing in getting more work done versus spending the entire semester on one story.) I realize I’m a slow writer and I take time to plan things which is probably why and how I got little benefit from the novel class. I was also suicidally depressed and most of those classes I spent in a sleepy, paralyzed daze. We’re past that, however. The here and now is more important and the most important thing is that I’m now dedicatedly working on a novel. Even if sometimes I run and hide from doing the actual work. This is my process and hopefully I will get it to work for me.

Maybe next week I will have better news to share. Best of luck to me, until then.