Shame Has Its Place

 Why is it so hard? Because it's a white piece of paper. ~ Sam Seaborn

For the last month or so, despite what I may have told anyone, I haven't been writing. I haven't written anything since the last part of the Hannah Sketches, and I though I have started and stopped so many times, nothing has happened. Well, I can't even say that I've started and stopped. I've tried to start, and then I stopped trying. Yesterday was the last straw. Seriously, I can't take this crap anymore.

Yesterday I slept in since Elise was at her grandma's and I wasn't picking her up until the late afternoon. In that time, I skimmed through the entire novel that I wrote last year around this time, The Eternals, I've been calling it. It comes it at around 64,000 words (as if I can pretend I don't remember that it's actually 63,396 words and I'm just rounding up to make myself look better), proper novel length. It has a beginning, a middle, and a cliffhanger ending. It has characters that I sort of love, and some characters that I don't know probably as well as I should, but I think they are interesting enough to want to get to know. It has a plot that plods along like an old person on a Sunday morning, lazy and slow, and for a while you can't really tell which direction it's going in.

I wrote The Eternals in 46 days. Wait, you know what? Let me quote from my old writing blog about finishing the Eternals:

Writing a book, the entire act of writing and publishing one, whichever route you may choose, is fucking hard. Excuse my curse words, dear friends, but it's the truth. This is fucking hard, and I have an embarrassing little fact to reveal:

I never thought it would be this hard.

I finished writing the Eternals on May 29th, just ten short days ago, after a whirlwind of 46 days of pounding out the words and trying to make them resemble a book. It took seven days to realize what I had was NOT in fact a book, but just a pile of words printed on 232 pages of pristine white paper - paper that didn't necessarily deserve the punishment or the printing.

So there it is. 46 days to a completed novel. Technically completed. And you know what? It was fucking hard. But it was also exhilarating. I only wrote at night after Elise was in bed, and usually was armed with at least one can of Monster, and I stayed up until 3 or 4 in the morning regularly, on purpose. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and I had no outline. Just ideas flying around in my brain that came through my fingers and ended up in a document that was eventually printed and left to get dusted up on a shelf. 

After finishing it, I thought that I hated it. I thought it was total crap. I didn't look at it or think about it or touch it until November when I failed at my first NaNoWriMo attempt in three years and I picked up the Eternals where it left off, sort of as a consolation prize to myself, but that didn't work. I wasn't inspired, it fell flat, I didn't know where Leila's story was going. There was a whole bunch of other stuff going on this year - short stories, a couple of which I successfully published and got paid for, my zombie epic which has also gone stagnant, also because I don't know where it's going and I can't outline because outline kills my love of writing nearly instantly, and of course, there's been the Hannah Sketches. But none of it has really felt like enough for me. I'm busy all the time with projects that involve extensive writing, and I've been reading more than ever (and unfortunately not keeping up with my book list) but I haven't had a spark.

"They" say that you don't need to be inspired to write. You just do it. And I do, I do it, but I don't love it and I don't cherish it and it's not getting me toward my final destination. Well, everything is I guess, but this is not the time for prolific sentimentality. 

Yesterday, I re-read The Eternals, the whole shebang. And oh, it was crap. But in that pile of crap, I swear to god guys, there were some diamonds. There were bits that just frankly SHINE, and I'm not afraid to say so. Maybe you or you could read The Eternals and just dismiss it as crap, but I know I'm on to something here, I know it, and I'm not ready to give up on it - I'm ready to move on and I finally get why.

When I finished the Eternals last year, I felt like a rock star. Seriously, I felt on top of the world, I felt like I had slayed a motherfucking dragon. And now, almost exactly a year later, my self loathing has reached the tipping point. Funny, no? I finally hate myself enough for not writing to start writing again. I don't really have an excuse or an explanation for it, but it just works. Last night, I SHAMED myself into writing, and what came out of me was sort of miraculous. 

On another note, I haven't blogged much in a month. I suppose that's because I made the crazy decision to share my blog address with the world, which may or may not have been a good idea, but then today, after the blast I had last night, I say, FUCK IT!! I'm signing up for NaBloPoMo again. It can't do anything but good for me. 

It used to be so easy, I never even tried.

This was a very low-key weekend. I had big intentions of finishing my read through The Eternals first draft, and of reviewing two indie books I have read lately (I'll never, EVER insinuate that I think of myself as a good reviewer - sorry!), but instead I read, and I plotted. Sort of.

Yesterday morning I decided that I didn't want to do much of anything besides read. I picked up a book that I bought a while ago and never started reading - Divergent, by Veronica Roth. Well, I read the entire thing cover to cover yesterday and I was blown away by it. I couldn't put the book down, seriously. It was like The Hunger Games, only better, I swear. 

Something about Divergent really got to me, though. In the beginning of the book, Beatrice, (Tris), has to take aptitude tests and go through a Choosing Ceremony to decide which faction she is going to belong to. All I could think about when I sat there rapt, reading it, was The Picking. The Picking - the ceremony that takes place in my book, The Eternals. 

Now, the ceremonies are not alike at all, and neither are the overall concepts of the book. My book is about vampires, after all. It was just the way that Veronica writes and I don't that had me all fershnickered. She shows, doesn't tell. I tell, I don't show enough.

I know that if I pick up my manuscript and read through it with a red pen in my hand, I would cross out more than half of what is written there. I need a read through, I need some notes taken, I need a rewrite.

I can see it plain as day now, what I need to do. 

***

To me, this is the last day of summer.

Elise starts kindergarten tomorrow, so that means it's back to waking up at 7a.m. every morning until June, because if I don't do it every day, I don't do it at all. This means earlier bedtimes for Elise and more writing time for me. This means I go back to pretending that I have two full time jobs - one as a slave to Quickbooks and email and furniture, the other as a novelist. 

And this is the reason that I have never been able to take myself seriously as a writer - I write every day, THEY SAY, because I can't not do it. I've never had that sweet not-problem. 

Here's A GREAT PIECE OF WRITING ADVICE FROM BRIAN K. VAUGHN:

WRITE MORE, DO OTHER STUFF LESS.

That’s it. Everything else is meaningless. You can take all the classes in the world and read every book on the craft out there, but at the end of the day, writing is sorta like dieting. There are plenty of stupid fads out there and charlatans promising quick fixes, but if you want to lose weight, you have to exercise more and eat less. Period. Every writer has 10,000 pages of shit in them, and the only way your writing is going to be any good at all is to work hard and hit 10,001.

This means one thing to me: saying no more often.

It's the last day of summer. The last day of the time I yearn for (and live for) every year. This usually feels like a time of things dying and ending for me, because winter, so bleak - it is past the end, it is the dark and nothingness of winter. But this year, the last day of summer feels more like the beginning of some other season I am not quite familiar with yet.

But know this: I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year - and I'm going to win it.