Lately I have been working on my book. That is a gross understatement. One could say that I carved Mount Rushmore and now I’m trying to rebuild another mountain that looks just like it used to out of the pieces. The book I wrote was necessary. I needed a place to fight some demons, but the finished product wasn’t what it needs to be. It was the battle but the whole book is the war. It has all sorts of key elements that need to be in A book. A better book. I need to prize those bones out of the dirt and turn them into a whole dinosaur skeleton now.
The hardest part for me is knowing exactly how to approach this undertaking. I wish I could meet a future self who hands me the finished book. I wouldn’t even need to open it and look inside. I don’t need to see how it was done, but rather just the knowledge that it CAN be done. Right now it’s all feeling very impossible.
There’s a story in all of that mess and as the author, it’s my job to extract it, clean it up, and let others enjoy it. I’ve been listening to podcasts about other writers, more specifically their process, their spaces, and even their fonts. What I love about writing is it is different for everyone, and I also believe it is different for every project. They don’t ask how, they ask how many. Some writers scribble out their books onto lined paper notebooks in cafes. Others sit at the laptop. Some limit themselves to 5,000 words per week.
I think that last one just shows that someone is actually a hobby writer with a full-time job at Cambridge, but what do I know. Maybe the point is to set achievable goals. One writer wrote a 200 page novel about a haunted apartment. She got reviews from the BBC. Why so many British authors? A couple reasons. The podcast was done by an Englishman and I’m sure that was his source of talent to interview. The second, it seems that the written word is still valued in other places. In America, we’ve got robots for that now and we’re all supposed to be fucking happy about it.
Speaking of robots. I’m fully aware now that social media is making me stupid and unmotivated. I think other than work I need to produce for social media, I’m going to go on a detox from TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. Maybe that’s why I can’t figure out how to work on this book anymore. My daily writer’s routine should not include “Doomscrolling TikTok for three or four hours.” I can literally feel the intelligence and ambition being sucked out of my soul.
I’m out here in the desert to achieve my goals. To disconnect from everything that is holding me back. Not to find comfort in the familiarity of failure. I need to do better. I need to remember that no amount of watching funny videos can match the rush I get after having written something I love. Seriously, there’s nothing else in the world like it. But it’s tough to remember that it only comes with a lot of work. There is no instant gratification in writing.
I just wish I knew whether or not the road I was taking was the right one.
Wendigo Mountain 