I Think I've Got it...

It happened. I think.

It happened. It's scary to think about, but there's no earth shattering apocalypse or orgasm or even boatload of money coated in coke and wrapped in bacon covered in cheese...

It just happened.

Yes, I'm talking about writing again, but writing is my life right now. It might feed my family one day (*tries not to laugh hysterically*) but writing means---well, it means a lot to me so:

I realized something and it's pretty amazing:

I've been trying too hard.

I was aided most by this article and then maybe some of this one too. It's been a slow burn over the past few days--pssh--past few years but by George I think I've got it.

Here's what I tell people about my writing life: I'm currently working on three novels. "Whoa," they say, eyes wide. "That's intense." Hell, yeah, it's intense and I'd probably be done with two and working on the last if I were Stephen King. I'm not Stephen King though, BTW. I'm a struggling undergrad in a writing program who isn't even really "working" on three novels. Not wholly.

I've been wrapped up in three concepts for three stories that I was head over hills with turning into three novels. One I call my "steampunk sorta-maybe disel-punk-esque" story is about a twelve year old boy named Cole determined to cross the country to track down his missing brother when his father dies.

The second is my "sci-fi" story that has a bunch of characters and absolutely no plot. A few situations, some endings, but no plot.

The third is my "fantasy epic in part 3" about a young woman who falls down a well all Alice in Wonderland like and lands into a world that smacks her right into a tense political conflict between warring countries.

I think these ideas are pretty awesome and I've been hanging onto at least two for the better part of six years. They are all the babies I care to have right now and my dream is to have them turned into full length novels that I will one day feel in my hands and marvel at their sheer reality.

That's not going to happen now. Not ever, but not now.

Charles Finch sums it up in his article under boldly named "Patience" and "Focus". Alien concepts to me only a week or so ago. A WEEK. But like I said, I think I've got it now.

See, I have neither. Patience. Focus. I'm fresh out, sorry.

And it's weird cause, like, I think back to a simpler time. Back when I would stay up all night clacking away on a dingy keyboard that was connected to an old computer that was a 1998 Dell or something. Anyway, then I was totally focused, or at least a lot more focused than I am now. I would sit and write and write happily 'cause I was just so excited to sink my teeth into my story and see where it took me. I never realized that momentum was motivated by a need to just get it all on a blank Word doc and keep going.

Somewhere I lost that. Every word had to count, every sentence had to be perfectly edited. I had to write that epic the FIRST time around 'cause Lordy knew there was to be no second go.

My point is, I've been trying too hard to be this writer that is thrown into our faces 24/7. The JK's, the GRRM's, the Kings, the Collins, the Roths. These supposed "overnight" sensations that found literary success in what seems like no time at all.

But that's not how it happens. We know that JK was rejected a lot before the lucky publisher picked her up. As GRRM worked on The Song of Ice and Fire trilogy he met the challenge of a 1,800 page book that I'm sure wasn't written in a month. Roth details her writing struggles in her blog.

So Rome wasn't built in a day and I was trying to build three Romes. It was more out of a sense that the ideal writer was to be bustling away at a dozen different projects and simultaneously churning out finished projects than arrogance, but maybe it was arrogance too. I thought it could be done. I thought I was doing my work justice.

Six years later all I've got is a smattering of written info for each and not one chapter in sight.

I'm humbled now if you couldn't tell. I'm not Batman, and aside from being pleasantly surprised at the fact, I realize I can relax and be a normal human who works on one thing. I can write those hot sexy new ideas in a notebook and know I'll come back later. I can attempt a disciplined writing schedule that won't be easy (the attempts will probably fail more often that not) but I can try. I can take some pressure off; I can breathe, I can relax. At least a little.

Most importantly...I can enjoy writing again.

Maybe.

Why Do I Even Bother?

Well, I've longed stopped trying to come up with the answer but--

This blog I follow--the author says it's her way of "thinking aloud". Now that's an idea. I've never seen it that way before...

But isn't that what everyone does nowadays with social media and whatnot? Think aloud? And it's annoying because some people don't have particularly interesting stuff they're thinking about to begin with and, so, if some dweeb teen is thinking about devouring a pack of cookies, and then takes a snapshot of said cookies, and then a snapshot later of having eaten that pack of cookies---see how banal and pointless it all is? Who cares, right? You follow that shit, you've probably at least got some blog or Twitter or whatever page you're following for the guilty pleasure of having a peek into someone's warped imagination and...you don't care, but you're doing it anyway. It all just seems so pointless. 

I guess that's how I feel about blogging. It feels pointless to me. ME blogging stuff about...whatever--ME--I guess, my thinking aloud--that feels pointless. I wish I had the energy to be clever and thought-provoking, or at the very least the ignorance to not know any better but...

I've already said that I hate to complain on here. It comes across as a pathetic livejournal or something and I already have one of those and I've never used it thank you very much. I just have to try harder. Except that trying to do anything just feels pointless right now. 

Sigh. 

Fuck my life. 

Shits Nasty, ya'll

Soooo...

Instead of doing any actual work on my three novels/stories/bullshit in progress I've just been writing short naughty erotic stories about my characters. 

FUCK MY LIFE 

Excuses, excuses...

40 Excuses I use NOT to write: 

1. I'm too tired/hungry/sleepy/sluggish

2. I don't have a proper journal...

3. Or pen...

4. I need to spend more time looking for a job--

5. OR reading. 

6. I haven't read diversely enough. 

7.  I read too much "genre" fiction so my ideas and stories are poor and unworthy anyway. 

8. I need to spend more time worldbuilding or fleshing out a plot, characters, etc. 

9. I don't HAVE a feasible plot OR conflict to BEGIN with, so what's the point? 

10. My handwriting is too sloppy. 

11. Writing is worthless--I should be focusing on getting a REAL degree so I can have a REAL job! 

12. Unless I hit it big like JK or GRRM I'm just wasting my time. 

13. I'd rather make love to spend time with my Netflix account. 

14. Breaking Bad 

15. Breaking Bad ON NETFLIX

16. THE FIRST FOUR SEASONS OF BREAKING BAD ON NETFLIX

17. Whatevers on TV at the moment. 

18. I get so full when I eat that it saps away any energy I could use toward writing. So there's that. 

19. I'm reading a book that I've either a) never read or b) finally trying to get the time to read. 

20. The webcomics I'm following at the moment (eg. The Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal, Teahouse, Starfighter, Sfeer Theory, Oglaf...) 

 23. Drawing doodles of flying penises in my journal.

24. Netflix (it's ALWAYS Netflix!) 

25. Talking to my family

26. Email. 

27. Food. 

28. Reading articles ABOUT writing instead of just, you know, WRITING.

29.  Acquiring beautiful leather bound journals...and spending more time flipping through the blank pages and WISHING I had the fervor to go to town on them with ink. 

30. Delicious Emily games

31. Having to babysit my niece. 

32. My older brother delightfully putting a harpoon into any plans I've set aside to get some writing down with his last-minute grocery shopping journeys which requires me to make the trek to his house and watch his precocious little girl. 

33. Needing the right font to head my chapter titles with. 

34. Buzzfeed. 

35. Pooping. 

36. Sleeping 

37. Oiling and/or messing around with my hair

38. Listening to my Ipod

39. Poking at my face

And: 

40. Spending the last hour writing this damn thing. 

THIS IS MY LIFE.

Kal's Very Bad Day

Mom and Dad. Mom and Dad and your little brother Kaelo.

Family, but you don't have that anymore. Maybe you never really did. What you've got is a proficiency with weapons and machines, a whole bunch of tattoos that hurt like hell, and a screwed up childhood that sometimes you can't even believe you really went through. You're one of those kids.

But yeah. Here you are. Sitting on this stupid little bench in this stupid little park watching all these Earth kids and their parents having fun and shit. Laughing, playing, having picnics and enjoying each other's company. All you really wanted was to just have your lunch--stir fried bulbs of Kortorian onions with tomatoes--in peace while you waited for your next job to start, but now you’re getting an eyeful of familial happiness that brings you crashing back to a lot of bad memories. Memories that you thought you'd gotten real good at pretending didn't exist.

Like when you finally made up your mind to run away from your uncle's house. When you got tired of it all one night—the beatings, the mockery, the endless pain-- and decided that you weren't going to wake up and face the same hell you'd been going through for the last five years. You weren't going to be hit across the face with a leather thong, or have your step-aunt throwing hot grease onto you when you slept in too late for her liking. You weren't going to keep picking scabs you got from harvesting the soft silk nestled inside the thorny stalks in the pasture out back behind the house, until your palms got good and bloody. You weren't going to keep smelling the liquor on your uncle's breath as he held you in front of his face after he’d slapped you so hard you saw stars, warning that you couldn’t mess up again. Then there were your cousins...your cousins and the horrible shit they did to you when the lights were out and the house was quiet. Maybe that had been when you’d decided a life in reckless space was better than another minute of torture there.  

So you left. You stole all your asshole uncle's earnings out his safe, picked his cooler of all its food, and ran through the grass and trees and sand until you finally managed to bribe your way onto a cargo ship that was headed straight for Galmaki Central. Things didn’t really get better after that, maybe even worse when you thought about it, but you knew that no matter what happened you would never, EVER, go back to that house again. To those people who were supposed to be your family but lacked all that ability in all sense of the word.

Then there was those years you spend with that crater faced, bounty smuggler who was supposed to be helping you out, being your partner as you helped collect bounties with him, but turned you into a servant instead. The one who made you come along, help him hold down some guy who owed him money, while he gutted a hole in his stomach. You never forgot how that poor bastard's blood splattered in your face, how you watched it pour out that hole, how you held your mouth shut until you were finally out of that miserable, urine smelling apartment, out of that bastard's sight, and vomited your insides out and cried and cried as rain poured over your back and washed the puke away.

Wanna know what was really fucked up about all that too? When you finally came back to that bastard he laughed and pointed to your shirt and asked, what's that? And before you could answer he knocked you to the floor and kicked and kicked you until you felt a rib crack, and then he just laughed as you laid there on the floor, crying, and he said, Gotta learn to take the good with the bad. He threw the credits you earned from the job on top of you, but took a few extra because you still had "expenses" you needed to pay off. Good with the bad your ass.

But you left him, right? Yeah, you left. You ran away from him like you ran away from home. Yeah, you got mixed up with some more shit that earned you some ugly scars that you could see on your body but actually feel inside your heart. But that’s when you got harder too, tougher. More cold. Then again, maybe you've always been hard and cold. Maybe you've never really been a nice guy, maybe there's never been anything innocent about you, even with Mom, Dad, and Kaelo's deaths. Cause in truth you really can't remember what it was like to have them close to you, to have family, so for all you know you've always been fucked up.

So you're back to the park now. Out your head and watching these fucking Earthling families having fun and shit. You watch as a human father throws a football to the son, as the mother brushes the daughter's hair and rubs her face into the curls. The fathers and sons go back to the blanket they've laid out in the grass when the game is done and the mother opens the basket she brought along and hands everybody sandwiches. They're smiling even through peanut butter and jelly, even when one of the kids spills something on their newly pressed shirt.

The mother still smiles and laughs though as she cleans them up. They don't get beaten, they don't get humiliated, and they don't get raped. They're still a family and not just when it suits them. You have to wonder where the justice in the world is.

So now you can't eat anymore, no, no. You close your container of food and feel the dressing and sauces gurgle in your stomach. You feel that impulse to run away and throw up, to cry, to scream, but you fight it this time. You fight it because you're not some little kid anymore, scared, alone, and vulnerable. You know how to take care of yourself, how to get money, how to get food, and how to make sure nobody ever, EVER, treats you like you're less than anything ever again. You can fight back, you can endure, and you certainly can sit in a crowded park on a summery day and watch the family that you will never have.

Just had to...

"....Having swallowed these ideas, people regurgitated them at me at nearly every turn. And for a time, I swallowed them, too. As a black woman, I believed I wasn’t supposed to be a writer. Simultaneously I believed I was supposed to write about black people — and only black people. And only within a strictly limited set of topics deemed relevant to black people, because only black people would ever read anything I’d written. Took me years after I started writing to create a protagonist who looked like me. And then once I started doing so, it took me years to write a protagonist who was something different."

N.K. Jemisin, Dreaming Awake, a post from her blog

Here's the link.

Believe it or not, I actually DO have something to say about this quote, because since I've started reading this woman's book (The Broken Kingdoms, second in the Inheritance Triology series), I've fallen head over heels. Seriously--I NEED her in my life. 

So, again, we'll see what happens. 

"A great deal of the conversation about publishing and diversity is grounded in the idea that there simply aren’t many writers of color. One of the most frequent derailments during any conversation about this topic is the belief that because of historical, institutional racism and the socioeconomic consequences thereof, there simply aren’t as many writers of color. It’s also popular to create an exhausting statistical frenzy by talking about data collection and submission ratios and the like. These are comforting explanations. If we can blame history and institutional racism, if we can blame math, we don’t have to accept responsibility for reading narrowly."

                                                                                                                          ----Roxane Gay