Laughter Through Tears

Sukkot is here! Sometime during the week, I really need to make myself go out for an evening walk when it's nice and cool and look at the sukkot in the neighborhood. I haven't ever done it and I've been living here for about a decade, all in all. Not cool.

I'm also visiting my sister this week, on the way to a medical test. And there's the yearly geek con, which is in hybrid format this year, but I won't be able to make it to any in-person events. I'll have to think carefully about online events. I haven't had a single decent writing day this week.

Today was supposed to be a writing day, but then I stayed up late, and then I slept late, and then I hyper fixated on a bunch of things, and... Well, you know. I could use the rest, anyway. Not that I didn't take a whole bunch of time off only last month, for my birthday, but I also had a stressful day on Sunday, when I had to replace my phone.

Anyway, nomadic huts. Can you see the stars through the roof of yours?

...so I'm writing a new game.

I'm still working on Turncoat, obviously. In fact, just this afternoon I was able to cross a few items off my to-do list, so I feel good about that. And I mean to work on it every day this week, since the holiday is happening entirely over Zoom.

But I succumbed to the New Hotness, and I have a new game.

Once again I am fighting my novel to the death.

I spent most of this afternoon watching the entirety of Russian Doll instead of working on a story submission that's due at the end of the month.

And now I'm sitting here, staring at this story, and the little bastard tells me it's perfectly happy being 1,400 words and doesn't want to be expanded to 3K, the minimum for submissions to the antho I've got my eye on.

I gotta write something, but I'm so fucking tired. And there is nothing to eat in my apartment that doesn't require preparation, which is by far the worst part of Pesach for me. I keep saying "I'll make" and then not making anything.

I reset my Patreon account because if I can't help myself I can at least help others.

I'm entering an adjustment period of unknown length with the new job. I am too tired to write, all the time. I had some hopes for the weekend but other priorities intruded. All I got around to is rereading some WIP stuff and posting a draft on the AO3.

Keeping up with chores and self-care is also work. And of course at the end of the day I only have about two hours of leisure time to myself in the evening, and by then I'm usually too exhausted for anything more challenging than TV.

I need to wash my hair, though.

Writing is half reason, half ritual. There's an element of magical thinking to it, and also an element of self-reinforced habits. You make your own recipe for a muse, more or less. Some of the advice for beating writer's block is so bland, or so arbitrary, you feel like you might as well...

Well, you might as well take advice from a video game.

In The Sims 4, individual sims are ruled by their mood. The canonical mood for creative work (which includes playing instruments, writing, painting and cooking) is "Inspired". Inspiration don't come easy -- except in TS4, where it literally does. True, true, it comes a lot easier if you have lots of money, or if you've already had success in one of the creative careers. But even at the lower levels, there is always something your sim can do to get in a creative mood.

How to beat writer's/artist's block, TS4 style:

• Take a "thoughtful shower" -- the easiest way, available to all but the poorest sims. Grants four hours of blissfully enmused creativity.


• Drink green tea (my flesh and blood self prefers ginger, because it's caffeine free).


• Interact with a reward you got from progressing in your creative career (lovingly strokes the paperback copy of the anthology I was published in).


• Cloud or star gazing (it was cloudy yesterday, dammit, why didn't I take advantage).


• Playing with molding clay (this is actually a good idea, I gotta get me something like that).


• Drinking coffee, but only if done at a cafe (can confirm, I just had a moccha latte).


• Completing a piece of art/writing, but only if you're at a low skill level (presented without comment).


• Mentoring from a sim with a higher skill level (...).


• A special creaitvity-boosting mixed juice drink called the "Prose and Pop". I'm gonna have a lot of fun trying to invent a recipe for that one.


• Just fucken' be born naturally creative or something. Don't even.

Ah, fuck it. I'm gonna go drink my ginger tea and eat my black licorice and hope for the best.

Talking about writing, worldbuilding and names in public makes me want to break everything.

So, in my life as a fanfic writer (which lbh is the best part of it always and forever) I have had two (very bisexual) unfinished longfics that I considered filing the serial numbers off of. As an exercise in long-form writing, the thing I spend my life angsting about, it wasn't a bad idea per se. One of these, I have more or less let go of the idea of. I don't really have enough passion in me to write a novella's worth of bisexual vampire urban fantasy in some "vague North American city" setting, let alone constructing from scratch the kind of secondary setting that plot would require.

The second, I have more complicated feelings about. Because the crux of that second story is an emotional arc involving a series of relationships and shifting allegiances between three very different people. My emotional investment in these three characters and their need to resolve around each other hasn't flatlined, even if it's not as strong as it was two or three years ago. And I'm still pretty mad about the worldbuilding things in the canon for that fic that I was using the fic to try and address. But time has passed and my storytelling voice has grown and evolved and changed, I did NaNo for 2016 and started developing a story of NaNo 2017 that I have high hopes for.

One of the things that I have high hopes for w/r/t this story (henceforth TAOS) is that, as I only just realized, it takes a subplot from this abandoned fanfic, guts it, reconstructs it, and basically wears its skin. And wears it much better, I should add, while also incorporating some elements from two of my favorite stories, the kind that I've been obsessed with referencing or retelling since, uh, time. TAOS basically makes the "bones" plot of the fic redundant, and undermines a lot of my reason for wanting to file off and rewrite it.

What TAOS doesn't have, though, is that complex emotional dynamic that I was so attached to, that I still want to revisit in some way, shape or form. And no, I cannot inject this dynamic into the story, either, as its structure is completely wrong and its core cast can't be wrapped around the ideas central to the character conflict in the other. Individual elements, maybe I could. Like, I could add an antagonistic, resentment to respect relationship that starts sexual and evolves into a romance. Probably. I could add a poly relationship, probably, pretty easily. But not the whole thing, not the complete structure that was the pivot of the emotional arc of the original fic. Not without it being awkward as fuck and undermining the narrative integrity of the plot and characters.

Now I'm stuck wondering whether I should just mourn that whole story and move on. Or leave well enough alone, allow it to stay dormant in the back of my mind, until my mind can find a suitable home for it, which may be years from now or never. Or force the issue, try to deconstruct the core plot elements that made that dynamic possible and use them as bones to build a new story more or less from scratch, without the social/political component that compelled me to write it to begin with.

Writing is hard.

Writing has always been a central part of my life and even my identity, even when I didn't practice it regularly. It's been a background goal for me to become a writer even though all the other ambitions that I've had and discarded. Eventually I had to make a hard decision and I decided to pursue writing as a profession and career, not a hobby. I still have a day job, obviously. And I still hobby write (fanfiction, and other things). But the goal is to write professionally.

Writing is a frequently frustrating occupation. It's hard work, and it's work that's often undervalued, sometimes even as it's in demand. As most fanfic writers have noticed. Still I've had some amazing writerly moments in my life, outside of the aspiration to go pro and alongside some bitter disappointments (in myself and in others). I wanted to write a lot about those, since one of them happened just recently and since I could always use a morale boost to my creativity.

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*glances up* What the fuck am I even talking about, who can even tell.

(actual playlist I was listening to when I was writing this.)