ONCE AGAIN, i have forgotten how to sleep. How does this continue happening to us all!!!
Anyway.... Something has happened in my documents this weekend and I'm really ruminating on what to do about it. This will become a homophones problem very soon but I kind of just want to go ahead and talk about it. Guy who can't keep his mouth shut about something for LITERALLY THREE DAYS.
So, like, I have felt so unimaginably horrible about Pactbound over the last week, which is part of the cycle that I mention all the time, but Holy Shit, I can't look at any part of the work without feeling genuine disgust. There are times when you have to force yourself to work and times when you have to let things percolate. There's a writing manual I read last year that I mostly thought was incredibly stupid, and one of the things in there was this bit about there being "stages" of creativity; How there are times when you're in a, say, Drafting State, then a Revision State, then an Inspiration Gathering State, and you shouldn't go against your feelings when you're in one of these stages and try to do any other sort of work, because it's just gonna go nasty.
I thought it was really stupid when I was reading it, but now I finally get what he's talking about, because I know by some sort of instinct that I can't really force myself to edit right now with the way I feel about myself and my work. So I'm actually sort of proud of myself for pivoting like this and focusing all that self-destructive energy in a new project instead.
The thing is, I didn't actually expect the project to go this well. Like... I didn't expect to like so much of it. Don't get me wrong! Most of it is trash! You physically cannot write 25,000 words in two days and NOT have about 24,999 of those words be hot garbage. But I'm really sorta liking this thing, and since it's so much smaller in scope--I don't expect to add more than another 10,000 words onto it--I'm thinking, well... I could probably edit this whole thing in a matter of months, right? And wouldn't it feel nice to have something bigger out for consideration?
It wouldn't end up getting picked up anywhere or anything, but it would make me feel a lot better about myself just to have something in motion. Really, I'm just thinking about making it the "until I quit my job" project, since I'm spinning my wheels crazy style lately.
I'm so so so so so so mad about what happened at work last week. And the thing is, most of it is LITERALLY my fault, because I know it isn't fair to be cruel to someone just because you feel they're being cruel to you. At the same time: I hate that there's a brand of disrespectful that a cishet white man can get away with being even in our profoundly liberal office because "he's just like that," and that my defensiveness against his behavior is considered totally unreasonable in comparison. Really, what I'm most pissed about is being told that he was "sad" that I seemed angry with him. oh my god??? grown man is SAD that i want him to do his job correctly and talk to me like i'm not an idiotic child??????
It's not actually anywhere near as deep as all that btw. Which is why I got so nasty to myself for the rest of the week, because I really do feel horrible for getting as angry as I did. I find myself thinking very often that I wish someone would just scream at me when I do something wrong so that I wouldn't have to punish myself. Like, the systems in my childhood home were bad, but they at least taught me this little ritual for easily tidying up self-loathing! Adults don't need to get punished to get better, though; We're all grown ass people who get to be awful and then learn from it. And hurting yourself doesn't fix anything, fixing it does, duh!
This little project has been a great little disappearing act for me, and I feel a lot closer to myself even if I'm still Sort Of Fuming A Lot. I dunno, man. 92 days.
I don't really know a lot about Brandon Sanderson or his writing, but occasionally I'll see a clip of him teaching a writing workshop, and in one them he said something to the class about how your job when you're first starting out isn't to publish, it's to learn how to write novels--that you should make a billion bad projects and not show them to anyone because you're just learning your process and what works. I've also said many, many times how Pactbound has taught me how to write: How much I have learned from all my mistakes and how much better I understand the concept of story itself and how much easier I've thought it would be if I were to start from true stage zero all over again with all the knowledge I have now.
Well, it's pretty neat to see that I was right about that, because I know this is a draft I couldn't have pulled out of my ass like this two years ago. It took three pages of notes and a weekend to write a story with recognizable structure and themes and heart and even some sentences that are actually comprehensible. That's not nothing. And I'm gonna let myself feel good about it because it's been like a business week and a half since I've felt good about anything. I mean, if that's a weekend, imagine what I could do in a week?