I've returned from the dead, as promised. Mainly because I put this on my calendar as an event so that I wouldn't forget to write.
I'm doing this in between meetings, in between beta-ing my Writerly Wyverns' stuff, in between editing/writing my own crap...in between a lot of things. That's emblematic of the past month, actually: a train that keeps chugging along and speeding ever faster as we near month's end.
My physical health has fallen off the rails a little bit--this smoke is not great for me, and taking walks in the heat while still B12 deficient tends to just make all my muscles hurt like I haven't been taking my vitamins--but my mental health is actually doing okay. And, the biggest thing here is that I actually have writing news! But for this all to make sense, I think it's time for a good old fashioned story.
For about six years, ever since I graduated high school and started my college journey, I thought that there was only one story in me: Aiselde Dinsmore's. The character of Ais gradually coalesced in my mind as a cooler version of me who could process the day's stressors and keep everything together. And when I started writing her story--with ZERO plans, might I add. I am never pantsing it again. Editorial nightmare--she became a way to process my past traumas. Writing SLL was heavy, difficult work, and it carried the weight of all my shame. I believed in Aiselde's story because I believed in the importance of healing myself and of healing others who read her story. But the more time I spent editing, and, oh boy, did I spend time editing, the more I retrenched myself in those traumas and that dark room. I couldn't see a way out of Aiselde's story. I didn't believe I had anything else in me.
Heavily revising Emrys's story during the first few days of CampNaNo gave me the will to write something different. First off, I'd plotted the revisions down to the most minute details, which was awesome. Second, his voice differed so much from Ais's, and I started to love that. Where Ais was moody and brooding, guilt-riddled and sad, Emrys was so quietly judgmental--a side of me that also accurately reflected my teenage journals. I started to have fun writing again, even knowing that I'd eventually make him my villain. And third, the Writerly Wyverns sprints really got me back into it. Because writing had become such a chore and so tied to guilt, shame, and blockage (partly an effect of being in Ais's head and partly an effect of querying), I knew I needed some healthy competition to get me out of it. On our discord server, there's something called "sprints," where everyone who joins writes together for 30 minutes and competes for best word count afterwards. I loved it. I wrote 16,000 words through sprints alone (one of my friends even finished his book!).
I was chugging along with Emrys, doing alright, sending out my queries (2 new for every rejection, that was and still is my rule)--and then disaster struck.
Okay, well, not disaster. It was actually really great news. I got approved for Rita A. Rubin's indie queer monster anthology. I had a word count. I had a deadline. I had guidelines. And I had absolutely no clue how to write Ais into this--there's no true monsters in her world, after all. Oh my god, was I going to have to write a new thing?
I, embarrassingly, panicked a lot, even though the thing wasn't due until August 31st. And then I got to brainstorming almost as soon as my panic abated. Short stories were outside of my comfort zone; I'd only written them twice. Monsters were outside of my comfort zone, too. Writing something not set in Ais's world was very, very clearly uncomfortable for me.
But what I came up with absolutely lit me up inside: a chronically ill healer falls in love with the banshee who's heralding her patients' deaths. I planned this whole thing out over two days; even as I did my sprints on Emrys's book, I still couldn't stop thinking about my sapphic banshee story. I had to write the damn thing, obviously.
So, I did. And, dear reader, I loved it so much that I got the short story bug in me. I searched anthology open calls and found many, two of which close later this month. The one was for a horror story, which I submitted yesterday (fingers crossed!). The other is for a "transportation" story, which I fell so much in love with that I might have created a whole new WIP? I discovered my writing flows much easier in past tense. I also learned that I like writing twenty something characters a lot more than teens...and that I could explore the various parts of me in different ways through these stories.
My BansheeWIP heroine suffers with chronic pain. My JerseyDevilWIP heroine is legally blind. My BookPortalWIP heroine is a former gifted child. All of their identities are inextricably tied into their plots and I like this very, very much. So I found joy in writing again, but I will not be writing much this later half of the month. Other than BookPortal, which I *may* be coming down to the wire on (it has a July 24th deadline), nothing else needs edits and no other anthology calls are closing this month. August has a deadline for a pitch only--no need to write a thing if it doesn't get selected. September has two deadlines, but one of them may work for BookPortal if it doesn't get accepted by Vellum Press, and the other one I'm not sure I'll even do. So any writing that I do will be on the full novel version of BookPortal.
But I'm taking a break. QueerPit is ramping up beautifully. I want to get my beloved beta reader back comments on his story before then, especially his first chapter. And I think that I might take the time to just be. Although my carpal tunnel and severe neck pain appear largely to have been a side-effect of my various vitamin deficiencies and grad school trauma, I like to limit how much I type just to protect my joints. I am still deciding if I personally will have the bandwidth to pitch/support QueerPit as an author, considering I'll also be doing it as a moderator...and considering the next day, I have an Honors Alumni Happy Hour.
But we shall see!
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