Purging Some Creative Energy

So, I’m not free from the bad episodes. They still plague me occasionally. Maybe once every few months, it’s hard to tell (I don’t keep track of that closely). What I can say is that I had been trying off and on for several weeks to write up a blog post and then got paralyzed a paragraph in or so every single time and I would give up. I tried to write through the… episode(?) last time and sort of had an ugly downward spiral. A little bit of time has passed and I don’t feel as negatively as I did. I still have flickers of anxiety, tiny little sparks of… something that’s fighting against me. A lifetime of rejection, maybe? It’s not fun to feel like your own psyche is attacking yourself and that it’s something you have to deal with every day. I guess in a dumb poetic way, how would this not be part of my life? I’m dealing with chronic inflammation and an overly sensitive immune system that will attack itself. Sometimes I think about Keats and how, in 12^th grade English, our teacher went on a small but impassioned lecture about his brilliance. She was singularly convinced he was the best poet to have ever lived, and that he had “been taken too soon.” Was he, though? The best. I want to mediate on my relationships with writers, novelists, and poets alike. My craft ancestors. I find my contemporary seniors to be, without fail, disappointing. Just about any time I idolize a writer and say I want to write like them, publish stories like them, they inevitably do something that sours my tongue, and I am reminded that we shouldn’t put people on pedestals. I used to feel safe drawing inspiration and venerating writers from the past, but they, without fail, have all been racist or had very questionable relationships with young people.

I am meditating on the lack of exposure I had as a student to writers of color and from other countries where the majority were not white. A younger version of me definitely would have been resistant to learning about anything “other” if it didn’t pertain to my immediate interests (I was already resistant to things that weren’t based in fantasy or were favorably historical), but the current version of me has been re-exploring writers I was exposed to in my college years. Present me is thankful for the exposure, but also very overwhelmed by what I could read next that would serve as an aspiration. A few months ago, I think I had sworn off finding new writers to aspire to be like because of the aforementioned reason, but also because of my nature, as someone neurodivergent, I learn best by mimicking and imitating, and I can’t help but feel that would lead to a lot of cultural appropriation on my part. I don’t want to take space away from others in an industry that already favors cis-white men, so I feel like I’m trying to walk a very fine line between reflecting a more realistic world and not stealing space so to speak. I’ve known for a few years now I’ve wanted sensitivity readers for my work and that’s something I’ve had to think about budgeting for.

I had, a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago or so, some minor breakthrough with the story. Sort of. At least I felt that way. Right now, I can feel myself resisting talking about this. I want to take a break, go sit somewhere cooler, and regather my thoughts. I don’t have pre-programmed eloquent words sitting at the tip of my fingers as I type this to feel good about what I want to say. (Maybe I am dehydrated.) Or have I already mentioned all of this? I can’t remember and I am trying to resist the urge to go back and read older entries (since that seems to be a contributing factor quelling my steam to write). Anyway, the point is, I want to talk about this.

To give a full historical scope of this, the story I’m talking about was initially based on a World of Darkness tabletop game I was in with people I considered my friends. By the time I finally divorced characters from people, I was shakily trying to reconstruct the scenarios I played through. So, like, the initial story went something like this: a fallen angel gathered a group of supernatural creatures to see who would make the best soldier in a war against God. The game that story was based on petered out because the storyteller didn’t know where he wanted to go with things, so I had to figure out an ending and segue into the next part of the story. So, the fallen angel, pretending to be a demon, attempts to gather people for (in hindsight, this might have been better suited as a weird sort of heist story) this test; he had them make deals with him (through charm, trickery, or straight-up force) so he could give them special gifts and then… things were just supposed to happen? I say that as if I didn’t draft out the entire story. I got the flash drive instead of being lazy and trying to recall things by memory.

That was going to be the crux of the first book. Both the first 2019 version I was envisioning, and then the 2021 version I was working towards (before plottr and my computer had their episode), including the cutting of one character, Friday. The reason I’m sharing this is that after my minor breakthrough and the decision to deconstruct the sort of Bible fanfiction the story had, few elements of this original story are returning. In trying to move away from the Bible fanfic vibe, I’ve had to re-examine who Jacob was—the fallen seraphim of chaos. There is, to my understanding, a bit of Catholic trauma imbued into the character that I lack as someone not raised Catholic, and if God is really no longer in this story, and there are no fallen angels that want to save humanity from God, then Jacob is no longer Jacob. His desires and motivations are no longer the same. So, Jacob Mann has become Richard Havik. And that’s all I really got. Ken and Billy are to become foils of one another, and Valentine and Celeste are to be foils as well. Daniil is still involved in the plot. Perhaps the person everyone is trying to save, but I don’t think Aaron will make it, much like Friday.

Vampires will look different, but that was something I had been working on in 2021, along with werewolves. There are now also sorcerers, hedge-riders, and cunning folk. I’m still trying to figure out changelings since I want to reserve that specific name for fair folk who take the place of humans, and I have to come up with a new name for humans who have been taken. The Fair Folk are also going through a change—I’ve been researching and pulling from first-hand descriptions of who these enigmatic beings are. By the time I’m done, there will be a lot more going on behind the scenes in the universe, so I’m just hoping people will enjoy the world-building. I’ve notes running in three places at once—discord, notebooks, and oblivion. I would like to share them, but only when they have more coherent thoughts behind them instead of just… bullet point notes. Or maybe I will post them anyway as noncoherent bullet points.