Alright, y'all. Real talk here: I have been on the struggle bus. I've been having difficulty balancing my mental health with my insatiable need to be productive, with my self imposed deadlines, with my actual grad school deadlines...and I'm not exactly failing, but I don't exactly feel well either.
I've been, well, languishing.
It's taken me 2 weeks to line-edit half of Book 1. Before, it's taken me 2 weeks to do global revisions on half of Book 1, which is arguably a much harder--albeit much less tedious--task.
I keep getting distracted by other projects, namely grad school. A couple months ago, I could get distracted by grad school and then instantly hop back into manuscript edits, all within the span of a few hours because I had passion! I was fueled by purpose!
I still have those things.
But I am tired.
I keep fighting the urge to beat myself up over my exhaustion, because everyone knows the best way to overcome exhaustion is to berate yourself into working anyway. (This is not a healthy strategy. Do not do this) I am forcing myself to take breaks. I am struggling with my lack of productivity.
And the other problem: the very moment that I got inspired to do things finally--big things!!--it was not on Book 1. It was on my capstone, which is not due for four more weeks, and which is essentially done. It was also on Book 2, which, as we all know, was finished in August right before I started my fourth round of edits on Book 1, and which essentially does not matter.
Yes, this beautiful book that I spent a whole summer on (and more, if you count the false starts back in Winter 2021/2022, in between waiting for betas to read Book 1) does not matter.
Because if Book 1 is not adequately line edited, then I can't hand it over to my alphas in January. I can't begin querying until it's the most perfect version of itself that it can be--because I've been there before, when it had some known flaws and I said "I'll deal with it later," and I got nothing but rejections. Without these edits, I can't hope to snag an agent. I can't hope to get a deal with a publisher.
I can do nothing, and Book 2 will never see the light of day, if I don't finish my edits on Book 1.
It's basically a horrifyingly stressful version of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Ugh.
I knew all these things. And yet, when my brain started giving me the solution to why Book 2 wasn't working, why I knew it wasn't working even as I had been writing it in July, who was I to refuse to listen?
So, I listened. I stopped Book 1 edits at Chapter 18, because this was the chapter where the epiphany occurred to me. I had decided that Ais's arc, after all of these drafts, was so beautifully complete that putting Book 2 in her POV no longer made sense. The personal growth was done; reading Book 2 and watching Ais backslide would not be heartbreaking as I'd intended, but would feel like a stupid reversal of all the ground gained in Book 1.
As I was writing Book 2, I'd been playing around with the idea of putting it in Emrys's POV instead, but Ais's arc was not well-developed in Book 1, so I knew I'd need at least two books out of the trilogy in her POV to finish it.
But I never gave up on the idea of Emrys as the narrator of Book 2, especially since I loved when one of my favorite trilogies, His Fair Assassin, had a different narrator for each book and an overarching story for the trilogy, into which each narrator/book fit into. It's a gorgeously written trilogy, by the way, and so, so underrated. Please read it, especially if you love killer nuns and romance.
Right as I was getting ready to start Chapter 18 edits, I suddenly had the instant fix to everything that's wrong with Book 2: I would put it in Emrys's POV. I would condense the beginning of it, which was overlong anyway and which I'd already earmarked for edits back in August. I would cut all of the Cailleach stuff, which I stupidly kept trying to shoehorn in--an approximate third of this book--and would replace it with Emrys's quest to get his powers, which I'd had as a planned novella and now could happily fit into a book.
Obviously, I did not do all this in one weekend. And obviously, thinking about this book and knowing that I couldn't touch it was just burning my brain out. I had spent a whole weekend spiraling to no end. It had ceased to become generative and instead was becoming toxic. So what did I do?
I redirected. I bargained with myself. I said, "you can spiral on this project after you finish your annotated bibliography, which you've been procrastinating on this entire weekend because of said spiraling."
And so, I did. And by the time I finished my bibliography, I had exhausted my little hamster on the wheel. All the good ideas were on paper, safely recorded. I was free to live my life and go back to Book 1 edits.
When I'm tired, I find myself spiraling more and more, because my brain gets these ideas and wants to put them into action, and I find that either a) the timing is inappropriate or b) I'm too tired to actually write anything decent.
This is how I come out of it, and I don't know if this will be helpful to other writers, but I hope it is.
At the very least, let this be an apology and an absolution: I am not where I want to be on Book 1 right now, but that is okay, because I know I'll get there.
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