Drifting through Procrastination.
Journal 96 3-16 July 2023
I didn’t know what I was going to talk about when I sat down to do this post.
First, the spacebar on my keyboard is starting to go out. That’s aggravating. Second, I still haven’t worked on the novel, and third I didn’t think I had a good back up topic to write. It also didn’t help that a week’s worth of insomnia finally caught up to me and I sleep in an extra three hours.
The time I would normally write this post within.
I thought up a couple dumb topics: A discussion of tropes as used in K-Dramas (and really as the country that makes my favorite phones why do you do things with cell phones that aren’t real?)
More map talk.
Horror as a spice/enhancer/ add-on to other genres (I’ve done this in the past multiple times already).
These all seemed silly and weak… though I might still put in my cellphone rant at the end of this journal.
Still have nothing
Instead, I’m just sitting here realizing that everything is just more procrastination. Recently, one of my customers told me that they found this website and I was flattered. Then a couple weeks later they started talking about how they were still reading the posts and I was more than flattered.
He asked me point blank, why wasn’t I writing the novel…?
Now, the normal answer is that if I miss a few days, it always gets harder and harder to get back into it. The last break I took was over the holidays, literally from Halloween to Christmas I did no writing.
It was the longest break I took from writing since I started my Master’s Program back in… 2019 or more accurately the end of my Bachelors 2018. For over four years I managed to write just about every week, and I have the word count charts to prove it.
Faced with the question I thought it through… the holidays, and losing my brother just months before… it made sense that my mind didn’t want to think about the story. But what about now?
March 23rd to Today
The last time I worked on the novel was the 23rd of March.
I did work on some notes and character ideas… and I have been working a lot on the next book. Working on the world in general. (I’m repeating myself; the last five posts are nothing but justification for my procrastination).
Three months and three weeks spent ignoring the manuscript.
Why?
I’ve built models, drawn maps, populated a whole city, bought new notebooks/graph paper to make even more maps, filled 420 hand written pages of notebooks just on a single city and I have more to go.
Hell. As I sit here writing this, I’m wondering what is stopping me from opening Scrivener and just getting to work. Just picking up where I left off and writing?
The Answer
Sigh.
Here’s the answer. When I take time away from a writing project, I start to lose confidence in my own abilities to write. Despite the fact that I’m still making maps and writing characters. My mind obviously functions.
But the thing is I’m a hybrid writer. I have a basic outline but a ton of my story is created on the spot. With such a long time away from the keys I need to go back and reread whole sections of the manuscript to get the ideas back in my ind. To remember the things that I added randomly.
Did I break Errick’s sword and replace it with a new item? My paladin was armed with a spear… or did she take Errick’s sword after he got wounded? What about the A-Story? Did I already have the scene where Slater talks about his past and confronts Kuran?
In short, my style of writing really NEEDS me to not stop until the whole thing is done. BUT all but 1 novel has been written in sections with months or even years of gaps between them. My thesis novel, The Ashlands, was started years ago, paused, and then restarted during my bachelors with the first five chapters worked on over and over for those classes. But chapter 7-15 ignored. Then when I started my masters (years after I started the novel in the first place) I wrote the last 120k, after delaying another year, in a four-month period.
The beginning, middle 8 chapters, and last half of the book are three distinct shifts in tone and style. That I have tried to smooth over in rewrites.
Meanwhile, I think that the book should probably be much longer and more time should be spent expanding sections of the book. But in my head, I have the voice of many advisors telling me that a first timer can’t sell such a huge book.
And now I’m on a different topic.
No Plan
Sorry. This is what happens when you don’t have a plan before you start writing a blog/journal. Then again, I believe this post SHOULD be like this and not an essay. I mean I am great at essays, but I’m not trying to teach here. It’s letting you folks inside the “office.” Behind the scenes, inside my mind for a brief visit.
The short answer is that I got lazy and took a few weeks off from writing. I think for Easter and my Birthday. And then I became afraid to go back to the novel.
Seriously. Afraid to open the file. I started to think I couldn’t do it. That I shouldn’t do it. That the novel lacked. Or that I would have forgotten things and wouldn’t be able to pick up the narrative again.
It became easier to ignore the book and work on other things. Because I still want the stories out and I still want to work in this world.
In Addition:
Besides the fear… you get the second guessing. The need to revise. I spent so much time away form the book that I’ve thought of different ways to write it. I had this problem with the last manuscript. Where I stopped, started over three separate times. Completely changing the opening narrative. Removing whole povs, and changing the general structure of the story.
Even now I think the The Pharaoh’s Gambit should have kept in the villain POVs that I removed. I also think the narrative overtone should be done batter. The strict POVs might have been a shitty choice. It was fine as an experiment with the Thesis novel, but that doesn’t mean the entire series has to be done in that fixed camera style.
Second guessing. Procrastination. Self-doubt. And, of course, Imposter Syndrome, our old friend.
It all means I should really never stop writing. Never take a break until the entire ROUGH DRAFT is finished and done.
I want write right now, and yet I know I have a list of other things that I need to get done today. I’m already making the excuses while my mouse hovers over the Scrivener icon. Maps! Characters! The history and politics of a fantasy country.
Fuck. Which way do I go?
If I work on the manuscript, you’ll have word counts next week….
If I keep at my maps and notes… well, we’ll have more of these posts every other week.
I think I’m running out of space to have my K-Drama talk, so I’ll save that for another post.
Thanks for reading this far.
