What’s funny is that I did exactly the thing I knew I was going to do, and got in my own head. What’s funny is that the post immediately before I wrote the first chapter of the novel this blog is supposed to be about, I was talking about the three week gap in posting (when my initial goal was twice a week or thereabouts) and how that was evidence of my own anxieties about writing and putting myself out there.

What’s funny is, I haven’t updated this blog in three months this time, and I also pretty much haven’t written a single damn word that entire time.

And what’s really funny is, as I’ve helpfully titled this post, I will very probably keep doing this.

I say “funny.” What I mean is “immensely disappointing, unsatisfying, frustrating, and self-deprecating.” It’s like dropping all creative projects and sprinting in the other direction (to instead spend 3 months pretty much exclusively reading fanfiction and enjoying the creative talents of others while shutting my entire brain off) has fed the self-doubting demon that lives inside my chest.

It’s not even that I don’t have inspiration. I do. I want to write. I started writing an actual honest-to-god narratively relevant smut scene to my main work, and then a friend of mine made a comment that wasn’t even disparaging, just wasn’t enthusiastic about it, and it was like I zhwooped on back into my silly, comically-overlarge hermit crab shell and pulled my little feet so far back up in there you’d think it was as fuckin’ empty as I feel.

WOW I’m being dramatic. Sorry. Again, been reading a lot of fanfiction.

This is part of the process too, I guess. The very ugly part. I’m not going to fill this one with beautiful hopeful platitudes about how you should always keep on going because your story matters. Like, yes, it matters as long as it matters to you. But I am full of bitterness and self-loathing just like any other depressed, anxious artist, and that’s the side that decided to bridge the 3-month gap.

What an experience this would be, if it’s your first time in the Workshop. I mean, welcome, first off. I’m not always like this. The point is to show the entire process of writing, even the ugly self-hating parts, which we landed on right between chapter 1 and chapter 2 (well, and halfway through book 2 of a different project, and a quarter of the way through draft 9 of book 1 of The Darling I Refuse To Kill, and in the planning stages of book 2 of That One I Actually Published, among about six other stubs).

Even when I can’t make myself write, I’m thinking about my stories or my characters. I’m hating myself for being unable to bring them to life. I think of little scenarios for them, how they’d speak, little scenes I haven’t gotten to, and I dream and ache to put them on the page, but when I open my documents I just sit there in a cold sweat getting overwhelmed by what’s already there and what I might screw up by adding anything else when I don’t feel like my head is prepared to produce perfection on tap.

And yeah perfection is the thief of progress and good enough is good enough and done badly is better than not done at all and as long as it’s only in your head it’s no good to anybody and on and on and fucking on with the things we’ve all heard a thousand times.

You want to know what usually gets me out of these slumps?

Me too.

No, seriously.

It’s never one thing. It’s rage, sometimes. I get so angry with myself I just do what I’m doing now, only not for an audience. Sometimes that’s enough. It doesn’t feel like it will be this time but I suppose we’ll see. Sometimes it’s a dream, a scene from the future, A New Idea I can get started on. Sometimes it’s easier to start with art, and sketch my characters in different poses or making weird faces, and that makes me think about them and how I love them and love their stories and I want to do more.

Sometimes these things end up sitting for months. Years, even. Untouched, “last edited by you on August 6th, 2019” or whatever. And then the dam breaks and I add a few paragraphs or a few chapters.

It’s never been easy for me, at least not consistently, to allow myself to say what I want to say. That’s as true for fiction as it is for this blog. I don’t want to be observed. I’ve learned to be quiet, stay under the radar, don’t have opinions, don’t say anything anyone might disagree with, don’t say anything somebody might not care to hear.

Don’t tell stories, because nobody will ever want to read them. People will laugh. It’s a waste of time, time I could be spending on something that matters.

I learned that, and I want to fucking unlearn it. Because ultimately who gives a shit? If I post a novel nobody but my parents and my friends read, it’s not hurting anybody. If I write a novel I never show anybody but I desperately love the characters and I enjoyed the world I crafted, shouldn’t I be allowed to love that story and that world? Shouldn’t I be allowed to be proud of myself?

I’ve never been proud of myself for anything in my entire life. It’s going to take more than getting mad and writing a blog post to change that.

But writing this is writing something, and writing something is a start.

I’m going to try to write again this weekend. We’ll see what happens. It might be more of the same personal angst, but it’s words on the page, and, well, it’s all part of the process.