I hit 72k on “Happy Farm Adventures” yesterday, having been writing at a steady 4k or so a day the last two weeks. It’s a great reflection of my mental state as the darkness sets in and my regular old anxieties begin to wrestle with Seasonal Affective Disorder…a perpetual up and down that I try to drown with early morning walks, exhaustion, and alcohol.
I think I’m pretty pleased with it. This manuscript has surprised me so far, considering it was meant to be a simpler, standalone story that explores certain angles we don’t really see in The Agartes Epilogues. I’m a little unsure as to whether I’ll be able to wrap it up in 100k as I planned, or it’ll go a bit over. I don’t know. The plan is to finish it within the next couple of weeks.
One other thing I’m trying these days is shutting out social media during specific times of the “work” day. Easier said than done, since I keep finding ways around it. It’s very nearly a cat-and-mouse game I’m playing with myself. Can Present Kay create a problem that Future Kay can’t solve? Which kind of sounds a lot like how I write, actually. I probably have more in common with the villains and anti-heroes in my stories than I’m willing to admit.
I also sometimes have to understand how hard I am being on myself.
I like to joke around and say things like “My boss is a bitch and she doesn’t pay me either,” but there’s a lot of truth behind it. When you can wake up at 5 am in the morning to start writing, and keep drifting back from chores to the computer until late into the night, you realize that the writing itself is a coping mechanism for things in my life I otherwise can’t control.
Just for starters, I can’t control that this is about the only productive thing I can do that I don’t completely suck at.
I also can’t control my sales or how people react to my work. I’m a bit of a realist, so in the beginning I really wanted to see whether I was moving towards the right direction with regards to my work (you know, am I just kidding myself? Everyone and their family think their work is good enough to sell). I realized this whole year that this “right direction” is blurry at best. People tell me it’s “unconventional.” This is both good and bad. A lot of wonderful people have assured me that this is “good,” and that I should continue with this even as I make improvements here and there. But it’s also bad because sometimes I don’t know what to do with it…I don’t know how to sell it, I don’t know how to reach the right audience that will appreciate it, I don’t know what else I can do to make it “better,” and all it takes is a quick glance at my books’ Goodreads ratings to derail me mentally so I end up bothering people in my close circles with existential angst that leads nowhere (to the point that one of my best friends even sent me a copy of Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus).
So I work. I find a lot of comfort in understanding the craft and what I try to do with it, even if I can’t exactly write in a way that’ll appeal to most people. Sometimes, if I’m feeling particularly nasty towards myself, I’ll tear my work apart to try and find what is lacking in it. I am not the sort of writer who pretends like I’m above criticism because opinions are subjective, anyway–I value my readers’ time and do listen, which is why you can read Jaeth’s Eye and then The Wolf of Oren-yaro and understand everything that happened between those five years.
But there’s only so much I can do. Only so much a single person can work with. I can give it my all–and I do–but I’m still only able to give myself, and that has limitations. I can’t write like anyone else. I can turn the mechanics upside down as much as I want but at the end of the day, I can only write like I can. If people don’t like what I have to offer…if this doesn’t work, then…
I can at least say that there is joy between these pages, even as I’m stumbling bleary-eyed over these manuscripts. I may have drawn the short end of the stick, but I can still dip it in tar and paint pictures.
