Getting Back to ________.

There’s something I’ve been avoiding, and while going through my socials, cleaning them up, and getting ready to put myself on a schedule to produce content, some kind of content, I had to admit something to myself. A good portion of what I started online, regarding my presence as a writer and creator, was all geared around this one particular project: The Chosen.

My feelings are still sorting themselves out.

Back in 2018, I gave it my best shot to conceptualize a novelization of a game that had a tremendous impact on me in terms of… what occupied my brain. Since 2012 I’ve been playing with the idea. I had little snippets written here and there, scenes I used to practice my craft skills in university, and character profiles. I worked so hard on character profiles. Then I had a shift in my life, and in 2016 I began to re-contextualize the story, and… we got closer to that 2018 date, but then I petered out. It took so much energy to draft that first chapter and I excitedly showed it off, and to be transparent I needed the ego-stroking and dopamine rush to keep going, but that didn’t happen and the one person I had been hoping would be enthusiastic about my project said some really harsh things about my writing. I still haven’t recovered from it and I still haven’t quite forgiven them, but I learned my lesson about showing them any of my work that I’m not already impartial to. That wasn’t the main reason I stopped cold turkey, but it was certainly a contributing factor. The other contributing factors, in no particular order, were the multiple traumatic events that happened in my life—realizing and coming to terms with my two best friends abandoning me as my mother died, creating a whole whirlpool of loss I was neglecting and not processing; discovering I was donor-conceived after my mom’s sister died; coming to terms with the knowledge I am far more attracted to women than I am men; going into isolation at the start of the pandemic and discovering I’m definitely not neurotypical; coming to terms with the fact I experienced domestic violence with my last partner and, as such, the whole “friend group” is tainted, leading me to be even more isolated than before; and finally—as I’ve been coming into my own, starting to live as authentically as I can, I’m incredibly disappointed in so many people in my life. Younger me might have gone off in one of her angry, misanthropic tirades like she used to do as a teenager, but that’s not our vibe anymore. No, I’m just disappointed.

So, this story that I had about friendship and found family and supernatural beings and trauma and loss and grief had to be set aside. It already went through a lot of changes, and I suspect there’s more to come, but I need the space and time to let it… grow again? I had added characters, split characters, added more characters, combined characters, re-introduced characters, re-envisioned characters, and all of their ambitions, desires, and identities will inevitably shift the story. Internally, I am groaning. I had done so much work writing the plot out and trying to tell myself the story and I was feeling optimistic, but right in that sliver of time when I started NaNoWriMo and my computer gave out to when I finally built the computer, I got hurt—emotionally. Something already shut me down on the project all over—remnants of it in my Ko-fi profile, a whole other Weebly website—but this was a whole new emotional pain I had to process. And it indirectly involved one of the main characters: Ken.

One of those two friends I lost at the time of my mother’s death inspired Ken. It was him and his character, Seta. Initially, when I conceived this project, it was Seta (and another two player-characters) who was the plucky werewolf and I was creating the story as a sort of… a platonic love note to those friends? I’m not sure what I would call it. Then when I came to terms with never seeing those friends again, I had to come up with new characters. I borrowed heavily from my friends’ likeness in the characters because there was still a part of me that hoped maybe someday, they would read the novel, recognize what it was and who wrote it, and reach back out to me. The new characters I created were ghosts of the people I remembered and missed. Without really thinking about it, I cocooned this story intending to win back some friendship, and I ultimately wasn’t writing it for myself. I knew once I had to process the new hurt that the characterization of Ken I built would need to be dismantled and reconfigured, but I thought it would be a quicker process. Going from Asimov to Daniil and Valentine, and then back around to Kane was a long, long process, but Ken was straightforward and a very clean homage. The simplicity, of course, hides the complexity of my trauma and what I have to do to make that character completely and wholly mine, like Daniil, Valentine, and Kane. So, I wait. I wait and I let Ken stew subconsciously until the organic change presents itself. What does that mean in the interim?

A shit-ton of imposter-syndrome feelings and even worse feelings about myself because I have to set a project aside and come back to it later. I feel like a failure. It makes me feel like I shouldn’t call myself a writer. It makes me question why I’m on this crazy rollercoaster, to begin with.

In the previous entry, I wrote about the things I’m passionate about. I laid out the foundation of my brand. I noted, at least I’m sure I did, that initially what got me into storytelling (if not writing) was that I used it as a coping method and form of escapism. My girlfriend joked that I earned a degree studying my coping mechanism, and I made it my special interest.

I hate to realize she was kind of right.

So I need to go back to my basics, and I need to do some palette cleansing. I’ve been thinking about poetry lately. I want to see what I can jostle out of my brain.