I’ve been officially on Spring Break since Friday, so I don’t have to work this week. I have plans to spend the week doing absolutely nothing but editing a book and watering my seedlings. Maybe napping, since I feel like Daylight Savings Time has screwed up my sleep cycle. A bit of dreaming about Spring.
It doesn’t feel like Spring Break. I feel like I could go to work today and college would be in session and I would have office hours today. If I went into work today, I would find myself the only one, facing a locked building. So it’s really Spring Break.
I don’t do nothing well. I hope I can occupy myself with things to get through my Spring Break.
I think I have an idea for a book. The problem is, creeping doubts are entering my brain again. I don’t know how I wrote as many books as I have given these doubts are my long-time companions. What if I’m subjecting the world to mediocre, or worse, bad writing? What if there’s a reason nobody is reading my books?
This question is about flow. Flow is the state during an activity where we lose all track of time while doing it. The activity engages us completely, and it challenges us at an optimal level. Flow provides us with feelings of mastery and an active state much like meditation, and increases our well-being. It’s a psychology term first proposed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Writing is my flow activity. This is why I have been alarmed these past few weeks with my writing slump. Flow is necessary for my well-being, and I don’t have another flow activity as a backup. I felt a bit lost these past few weeks.
For the last week or two, however, I have been editing previously written works as a way to get through the slump. This has been a flow activity to me, and I am back to beating the tyranny of feeling the passage of time. It is also giving me ideas for a new novel. Back to flow!
It’s in the Hidden in Plain Sight universe, and it takes place before any of the other books. It concerns some characters of Whose Hearts are Mountains, the last book in the series. I don’t really have the plot, but here goes: MariJo Ettner is the main character, and she is an eminent anthropologist. She is also an Archetype, an immortal being who has lived for millennia. By the end of the book, she will help to start the collective Hearts are Mountains. She will play matchmaker with Alice Johnson and William Morris, another Archetype, who will have a Nephilim child. That Nephilim child will become the protagonist of Whose Hearts are Mountains.
It’s still in its fledgling stages. One thing the book needs is a plot; another is a theme. I am experimenting with this group of Archetypes and their isolation, fear of being discovered, and status as Archetypes not born in InterSpace. It’s going to take a bit of work.
To prepare, I am rereading/editing Whose Hearts are Mountains. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at it, and as I now have ProWritingAid, I am finding a plethora of grammar quirks. (It’s already been edited for awkward sentences and plot holes).
It’s nice to be writing again, although I’m not really writing yet.
I don’t believe in destiny. Or, rather, I believe in something destiny-adjacent. Not the deterministic concept of fate delivering us to our inevitable outcome, but a leading we could be taking.
Leading is a Quaker concept, the belief that God (or whatever divine presence you believe in) is leading us toward an action we need to make. These often point toward right action, or ways in which we can do God’s will. (Keep in mind that God’s will in this case is not the evangelical/supremacist vision, but defending people’s rights, feeding and clothing them, bringing the peaceable kingdom to earth. Pacifist and progressive.)
Leadings can be life disrupting, although I have never had one that defines as that. Quakers have clearness committees so that they can tell whether a leading is divine or just a whim or mistaken desire. Clearness committees are not perfect — I had a clearness committee for my first marriage and it blew up in three years.
I sometimes think writing is a leading. Why else would I write for no monetary recompense and very few readers? I may be called to put on paper the adventures of an agricultural collective and its preternatural visitors, dealing with topics like pacifism and discrimination. I don’t know — it’s been years since I’ve been to meeting and I don’t have a meeting to seek clearness with it. It’s also not disruptive enough to my life — if I wanted to quit work for writing full-time, I would certainly ask for a clearness committee.
I don’t believe in destiny, the belief that we have no control over what happens to us and we’re dragged kicking and screaming into our future. But I believe in leadings.
I have posted in my blog for 200 consecutive days. I have learned something from the process, mostly that if it weren’t for the post topic prompts in WordPress, I would never have written in my blog for 200 consecutive days. My mind doesn’t have that many topics to write about, especially in a busy semester.
I have also learned that the badge that I get daily: “You’re on a 200 day streak on Words Like Me!” is a far better motivator than I had guessed. Gamification is real. The tyranny of this little message drives me to post another day.
I don’t know how much longer I am going to write daily. I feel sometimes like I have nothing to say, or that people don’t care what I’m saying. Writing is a lot like that, though, sending words out into the world not knowing what impact, if any, they will have. On the other hand, 200 days is an awesome streak, and who wants to ruin that?
It has never occurred to me to write an autobiography. I don’t have a hook, or a reason people would want to read it. I’m not famous or infamous. I don’t have an exceptionally inspiring or tragic story, although I have overcome a childhood of abuse and bullying, and live successfully with bipolar disorder. I am pretty ordinary.
What I do have is joy. My day is filled with small joys — talking to people, being silly with my husband, playing with my cats. Nothing to write a memoir about, but joy is my natural state and my story.
The first sentence of any novel, any memoir, any written document is important. It grabs the reader and pulls them in. So my first sentence would have to be about joy. Something like:
‘When reflecting on my life, what stands out are moments of joy, with a feel that settles on me like a silver mist.’
I’ve concluded that my writing is not commercially feasible (traditional publishing) because it’s too short for fantasy. At 70,000 words on average, it’s not long enough for agents to be interested in it. It would be short enough for romance, but my writing is really fantasy (or to be more accurate, magical realism is more likely) which is not written short. However, I write tightly and don’t need all those words.
If I’m not selling in indie (self-published) markets, it’s because I can’t get enough traction with marketing. I have tried several things, and none of them seem to work. I feel like, if I wrote romantasy (heavy on traditional romance, lots of spice) I’d have a better chance, but I don’t feel moved to write about those things. I have a niche, but I can’t seem to get introduced to those people.
The saying “Do what you love, the rest will follow”? It does not seem true in my personal situation. I write because I’m possessed with ideas, and what possesses me is shorter novels. People have told me I’m a good writer. I think I’m a good writer.
I’m just trying to convince myself to keep writing, even though I don’t have a readership. It’s a hard sell, because I don’t do things just for myself; rather, I look at what they produce and whether they’re useful. Right now I am starting a garden; I don’t grow the seedlings for their own sakes. I grow them because they’ll give me food someday. My books will never give me food, and I have to figure out whether that’s okay.
Right now, I am burned out on writing. Nothing I write seems interesting; everything feels like a slog. I am swamped with negative self-talk that tells me I can’t write. I avoid writing. I have no ideas that possess me.
I miss my flow activity. I miss my desire to make something good out of a pile of words. I miss writing, but not enough to muscle through my negative feelings.
I might have mentioned before that I have a grow room in my basement to coax seeds into seedlings for the garden. I planted some early seeds on the second of February, and most of them have shown at least a little growth. I have cardoon (a relative of artichoke, except you eat the leaf stalks), mountain mint, yarrow, hyssop, lovage, lavender, and rosemary in a 72-cell seedling tray.
The lavender and rosemary are going very slowly, but both have at least one seedling up. The cardoon might need to be transplanted sooner rather than later because it’s big. I didn’t think the cardoon would come up so soon because I’ve had such bad luck with it before, but no, it popped up like the alarm clock had just gone off.
Growing seedlings helps me through a cold winter. Whether it’s the thrill of growing green things, the brightness of a room full of fluorescent grow bulbs, or the reminder that Spring will eventually arrive, it’s one of the best things for the winter blahs I’ve done.
One thing that worries me, though, is that I’m not writing. I’m burned out on writing, and have a lot of doubt about how good my writing is. But at least I have a hobby to sustain me.
Words Like Me 