It’s funny how people can say such lovely things to me about my writing, and I will still end up feeling so profoundly unsafe.
I don’t know, I think it hurts me to be misunderstood, or misinterpreted. I often feel foolish for caring so much about this one, silly thing. They’re just stories. They’re just for fun, so why are you taking it so seriously?
I don’t know. But the thing that makes me take it so seriously is probably the thing that makes me write so much. I care a lot. I am trying very hard to say true things in order to satisfy myself.
Sometimes I want to run away, when I feel like this. Drag all my little feelers back inside the shell, keep writing, maybe even sending out little messages in glass bottles, but in a way where the return response will never reach me.
That sounds awfully lonely, even to me. I doubt I’d like it very much for very long. I’m sure I’d get lonely.
But some nights I feel alone anyway, so what do we have to say about that?
Today I’m looking back at some longform essays I’ve written as blogs on other parts of the internet and thinking that the world—or at least my world—was better when that was the way we primarily communicated before shortform content rotted all of our brains (and here I am @ing myself).
I think the thing that skeeves me out when it comes to writing longform content, which is to say exposing more of my innermost thoughts and feelings than can fit into an extremely cultivated PR-friendly soundbyte, is the fact that the internet is forever and the things we post here never really die. It’s less that I’m afraid I’ll say something offensive and more that I’m afraid my cringe will live on forever, long after I’ve stopped believing whatever it was I’ve said, or that saying it is a good idea.
But you know, as cringy as I find some of the things I’ve posted on the internet two, five, ten years ago, it’s fascinating to see the record of who I’ve been and what I’ve believed so strongly as to write it down and make it public. And often, too, there are little bits of wisdom there that I’ve forgotten, or else I think that past version of me is braver than I am now.
My therapist would point out that if you were to ask that old version of myself, they would say the same thing; it’s easy to glamorize the past and harder to admit that more or less, we are made of the same stuff in perpetuity. Same cringe, same bravery, same heart.
I am cringing already.
But cringe is dead, or something. And it does occur to me at times that no one will really know me if I never let myself be known. Maybe there’s another essay coming sometime soon about how the recent insane-person drama in a fandom I’m involved in has seriously wigged me out and given me a stomachache for the last week, and how I have inexplicably found a new hobby this year and that hobby is “pencils.”
I’m basically always just trying to make interesting work, share other people’s interesting work that I find, and to generally be a force of kindness and goodness in the world. You know, no big deal.
You might have noticed that I keep posting serials and then being like nvmd actually.
I eternally vascilate between “writing ‘in public’ in the fanfiction way is peak” and “actually I want to disappear into my cave and emerge with a book in 3-4 months; nobody talk to me.
There are two wolves, etc etc except one of these wolves keeps undoing the other wolf’s work.
I am trying so hard to finish something. Literally anything. My bibiliography seems to indicate that I can finish books! So why is it that lately I feel like I can finish exactly nothing? The unpublished words keep stacking, and with it, so does my S T R E S S.
I need to sell books and pay my rent; I resent capitalism and want to be an Artist. It is what it is.
I’m flighty. I start a lot of WIPs. I don’t abandon them, but sometimes it takes me quite a while to circle back around. It’s less writer’s block and more “writer wants to work on everything simultaneously.”
I’ve been working on a mafia-ish thing. You can read part of it here. I have more written than I’ve posted. Hideya and Ruby give me cezhou vibes a little bit (for the girlies* who’ve read QJJ, iykyk)
The Fox and the Rose has also been out of Kindle Unlimited for a hot minute, and I still haven’t put it up wide on other stores yet >.> I realize that looks super goofy and I hope to fix that asap!!
#using the blog as a blog #witness the author’s slow breakdown that hopefully is still kind of cute #pray for me y’all
I usually have at least a week of false starts after I finish writing any long project. I finished the second Fox and the Rose book and then… flailed. for like 2 weeks straight. I always have way too many WIPs in the pipleline, and whenever I finish a book, I am usually excited to get back to one of them.
Usually, the next thing I write doesn’t end up being the thing I thought I was going to write.
I was really excited to revisit Mouse and Charis in a tentative story I’m working on, set between Fairytale and First Aid.
Ah, another false start. I’m back to working on Koreatown, and maybe this will be the one I finish.
I’ve also been making a lot of art. I probably owe a longer post to this, but I’ve been increasingly… idk, disturbed by gen AI and what it’s doing to the cultural and fictional landscapes. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably noticed that I have some AI covers on my books. I don’t love it. I go back and forth on it.
Often, I think it’s what I need to do in order to make sales, in order to produce books that are pretty enough to gain an audience. I am small and fleshy and made of meat and unfortunately I need to pay rent and pay for medication and buy food. And yet I do on some level think that every piece of AI art makes the world worse.
For years now I’ve gone back and forth on the idea of illustrating my own covers. Something in the idea must appeal to me, because why do I keep ending up here, time after time, year after year? But the process is so big and daunting. I don’t know how to have time to be a “professional” artist in that way and also to be a writer. The indie output schedule is brutal. I am never really keeping up.
Anyway, I don’t say any of that to make you feel sorry for me, or to excuse myself from anything, if there is something to be excused for. Just… this is where I’ve been at. I’ve been drawing a lot lately, making a lot of frankly very bad drawings of my characters, and also a few good ones when I get lucky. I’ve been thumbnailing covers and trying my best and just… trying.
Artist: jonasgoonface on Tumblr
I spend a lot of time thinking about this comic by jonasgoonface on Tumblr. I think about this whenever I make another bad drawing. I can be worse!! Maybe in a world full of AI, every bad drawing means more, if nothing else as an act of very human mark-making.
I’ve been working hard, and I’m quite tired. Feeling kind of wrung out but also like there is so much more work to do.
Mostly, I want to lose the AI covers because I feel like they cut me off from a community that I love and care about, a community that supported me when I was in fandom and that (understandably, laudably) loves their artists deeply and wants to defend them.
I don’t know that I can change all of my existing covers—certainly not overnight, not right away, and maybe not for a long time. But I can think hard about what I’m going to do moving forward, and i can try to do some things differently.
I’ve been hibernating lately. I had a bad couple of weeks, and now things are better-ish. I feel pretty good.
I’ve been cross stitching a lot, and (related) watching a lot of The Rookie (2018 cop TV show) of all things. It is not that good! I have binged like 4 seasons in a few weeks!! It’s possible at this point that I am only watching this because I am somehow incredibly invested in Tim and Lucy getting together. I don’t even ship het. What is even happening.
I’ve also been drawing and painting a lot, and writing a lot, too. I started working on the sequel to The Fox and the Rose again, and I still love this project as much as I ever did.
I’ll show you some of what I’m working on sometime, but for now I’m going back to writing. ✌️😚
Edit: This is now lowkey a liveblog
11:11pm – I am lowkey obsessed with how Lucy is insane levels of jealous every time anyone is nice to Tim or Tim is nice to anyone. Aaron looks like an excited puppy getting to ride with Tim. Lucy looks like she’s about to do a murder.
