I want to give it all up.
All the striving.
All the pushing.
All the trying.
I just want to stop
and forget I ever wanted to.
I won’t.
But that’s what I want right now.
To quit.
Upon reflection, I realize I have motivation cycles. Perhaps more aptly, I have bouts of despair or abandonment compulsion (I WANT TO GIVE IT ALL UP) cycles.
I seem to fall into these sinkholes in the following circumstances:
As a horror author, fall is a significant time of year. Halloween and spooky season are ultimately horror season. This is the time of year when I should feel the most engaged, excited, and inspired. This is the time of year when everything I love should just be in the air around me. Yet, more and more each year, I just feel daunted. The expectations of the season have almost sucked the joy out of experiencing it.
Again, a time when I should be thrilled. I am an author, and I have a book being published. This is what it is about! This is the success! Yet it is simultaneously so draining. It is like the last mile of a marathon or labor at the end of pregnancy. Yes, a wonderful accomplishment and bliss is on the other side, yet as it gets closer, it feels farther away. As I slog through promotional preparations and launch requirements and steel myself for the incoming negative reviews, it feels like I will never cross the line, my baby will never see the world.
Trying to get a novel published may be a torment only surpassed by editing the damn thing. After pruning, packaging, fluffing, and presenting the manuscript with more diligence than when job hunting, my tender heart is only met with a barrage of rejection or silence. Insecurity, doubt, and self-loathing are all that swell to fill that void.
Any numbers. All of the numbers. Sales. Downloads. Reviews. Followers. Works in my library. No matter how I grow them, they seem insufficient. No matter how I scrape, they never seem to match the effort. Comparison is the thief of joy, as I tell my children, but these numbers are all based in comparison to other numbers I never meet.
Any of these things, all of these things weaken my resolve, cue my insecurities. Each beckons sweetly to just set down the heavy burden of the dream and let it simply float away forgotten.
This round, it is more than a beckon, and it is surely not sweet. I don’t just want to quit writing. Life itself is beating me up, for many reasons, and I want to quit just about everything. Add to this that I am experiencing ALL of these triggers at once. Fall and Halloween are approaching. Crystal Lake Publishing is releasing my novel Followers on September 24th. I am currently querying my novel Green Eyes to absolutely no success. And all my numbers mock me as my socials seem to have died.
It is all the things, all the things that make me want to give up on being an author.
What makes me not want to give up? Writing.
What am I not doing? Writing.
If I remain calm, I know from experience that these things will pass. I will excavate my motivation again. Yet the confluence of all the triggers compounding the angst and depression from the rest of life is challenging.
I feel overwhelmed and burned out. The chorus of the world right now.
I want to quit, but I am not going to. This too shall pass. I will ride this wave back into the writing for which I am here.
It’s June, so Happy Pride!
I never really talk about my own identity much because I have been in a monogamous heterosexual relationship for years now. I never had to come out or work to identify myself because I have never left that relationship. My bisexuality was always ancillary to it. I figured myself out under the safety of that umbrella. Since I am a white cisgendered woman living in a heterosexual relationship, I am cushioned by a lot of privilege, which often makes me feel more like an ally than a member of the community. I don’t want to occupy space on the platform I did not have to fight for. Yet, I still am what I am.
Since it is Pride Month, I thought it an appropriate time to write about representation, particularly in my own writing.
I am old enough to have watched representation drastically evolve in media. I can look back on some of the things from my childhood that were deemed so “progressive” that are now utterly cringy. That, in itself, is a sign of progress. Humans are slow to change, but representation does matter, perhaps for the people in the community seeing a reflection of themselves most of all.
But I, and the tiny little slice of media I produce, am changing too. My approach to representation in my writing has evolved lately, deliberately, and I can acknowledge that I don’t think I handled it correctly my entire writing career. Hell, I still don’t know that I have it figured out.
In my earlier writing, I physically describe my characters very ambiguously. As in, I never really fully physically describe them, or I never describe how they look at all. I may give you a detailed landscape of their entire marred psyche, but I leave their bodily traits nebulous. I may say a man has a stubbled chin, but what color is that stubble? What color is that skin? Is that chin on a square jaw or thick, doubled chin? Nope, nothing.
It is not that I did not visualize these characters in my mind. I saw them fully, every minute detail in full color and clarity. I just did not want to force my vision of them onto my readers. If my protagonist was a green eyed brunette with freckles, I wanted to allow one of my readers to make her another color or height or weight. I wanted to leave them open. I wanted my characters to be a “choose your own avatar” sort of experience.
The intention was inclusive. However, as I reflect on it, I do not know how effective it is. I question if, instead, it was more avoidant, just lacking the courage to tackle authentic representation. Can a character be a fully developed person without the influence of their race, size, all the physical traits that affect how the world treats them? Have I been doing my characters and their readers a disservice by leaving these details open?
I also did not make deliberate representation decisions. My writing ideas come to me like dreams, and I just capture them in words. I didn’t make calculating decisions on who and what to portray, like hitting demographics. Many of my characters have been in interracial relationships or have interracial children because that is my life so that is what my mind repeats to me. It is not exclusion so much as simple narcissism.
I could not leave my characters’ relationships as open to interpretation as their appearances. Their orientations were apparent when I included their partners. Yet, if I did not include their relationships, I did not really identify them. In The Waning, my narrator Beatrix is a lesbian and spends the majority of the book thinking about her girlfriend. In Followers, the friend and photographer Brady is a gay man living with his partner. But characters who are not active in dating or a relationship could be straight or queer or asexual. But should I have defined them? For everyone or just the significant characters?
So in my writing prior to 2020, I kept things open and flexible to be filled by what my reader brought to the page. Then I changed my mind and my approach, and true to my extremist nature, I went in the opposite direction. Where I used to avoid describing race, I made race a thematic element. Where I included LGBTQ characters, I made their experience part of the plot. In my new work in progress (WIP) novel, I made the deliberate choice to take the story and attempt to look at it from perspectives besides my own. I took what could be considered by experience and attempted to shove it away from the center of the narrative.
I don’t know if I am doing representation correctly now. The WIP has not even seen publication yet. I’m not even sure how wrong I was doing it before. But I am trying to learn, evolve, and do better. I am trying to find a way to tell my stories in a way that resonates with people, not just myself and not just people like me.
I enjoy seeing representation evolve and diversify in media. I know it still is not perfect. I know it still has strides to make. I just hope I can contribute in a positive direction. And if I am not, I hope someone out there will gently call me in to suggest where I can do better.
Per my marketing plan (that I am trying to hold myself to), I am supposed to be writing a blog about my book Savages.
However, if I’m honest, my mind is like quicksand lately. Thoughts turn into holes that swallow and crush me until I can no longer breathe. Motivation and focus are figments I cannot seem to get my hands around. Whenever I seem to catch my balance, a hole in the bottom of my brain opens, and I am dragged below the surface again.
I am in this place for many reasons. Things happening in my life, my brain itself. This place is not new. I am a frequent visitor.
And perhaps these broken fragments of my mind do piece back together and relate to Savages. Savages started in this place, after all. The idea came from the darkness, blossomed in my hopelessness.
Sometimes, there is inspiration in the darkness.
Other times, like now, there is mental catatonia there. Lethargy. Detachment. Resignation. Overwhelm.
Yet Savages came from that terrible and wonderful balance when the darkness pinched and sliced and bled some brilliance out of me. I took everything awful I felt and tried to say something beautiful with it. Did I succeed? You would have to read it to decide.
When I read Savages (and I have and I have listened to the audiobook), I always feel the same swell of emotions that inspired and drafted the book. Savages will probably always be my baby, my first book and my first love. They are all still tucked right behind the words. I feel all the darkness soaked into the pages. So I’ll never be able to see the work objectively (as if the author ever could). It will always exist in the dark place for me.
I don’t know why depression and writing walk hand in hand for me. Mania and writing surely do not, though I would love to fuel my craft with that energy. There is just a certain point in the descent, a certain shade in the darkness where my mind unfurls and all the words pour down on me. Any deeper and it swallows and crushes me, but before that pain is some terrible sweet spot.
I have been asked if it is worth it, to suffer the pain for my art. On some days, curled up at the bottom unable to think, I would say no. However, on most days, when I hold something like Savages in my hand that was born from that darkness, I do not even hesitate. It is always worth it, and I honestly do not know how I would function without it.
If you want to read my dark baby, you can find Savages here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07C2T88RZ/ I personally recommend the audiobook, but I might just love to hear my words in someone else’s voice.
(Apologies for the detached brevity. Hopefully, next month finds me more solidified in my efforts.)
Fiery Pen 