authorpreneur

I owe the world a novel in 70 days.

I see no reason why this can’t be done.

Modern authorship is a make-your-own-rules kind of game. Self-published, mainstream, hybrid, neither (ask me about subscriptions to The All-Hearts Cabaret) and it’s up to you, the author, to decide how you want to play it.

Me, I’m doing my freaking best under the weight of my neurodivergent, gender-baffled self-awareness. I want to be/do/know/have/eat/encompass everything that exists, and this is a real problem when it comes time to make decisions.

And yet…

On Tuesday I visited one of the very nice nurse practitioners at my doctor’s clinic. No knock to the NP, y’all are keeping Western Medicine functioning, but this poor child doesn’t know me from a hole in the ground. So she went ahead and prescribed me medication that I (and many of you) expect will make me want to unalive myself.

Baby…I don’t do speed.

I just don’t. That class of drugs is Bad For Me. And when the popular literature tells me that no one knows *why* this particular drug works,? No. Just no. I’m not that messed up, TBH. I *like* my neurodivergence for the most part. It’s fun to have this many ideas. Maybe I could do better at keeping appointments and finding my keys, but the last time I tried this class of meds was a nightmare. I made a vast number of bad choices, while totally ignoring the work I needed to do, and ended up sobbing under my desk more days than not.

So…fuck you.

Fuck this.

Please, please don’t take my experiences as advice. You do you, as we say, and decide for yourself. Me? I’m going to just learn how to be this shambolic, well-intended, heartfelt and whole and every now and then problematic neurospicy genderqueer who gives no f’s for ordinary people’s comfort because I’m having too much fun.

There is no right way to do life.

I’m trouble, but it’s the good kind.

We get them from drinking, from drugs. From the ending of a significant relationship. From reading a book so stunning you can’t imagine reading anything else until you’ve gotten over it. And from writing, though I won’t claim to have produce any truly intoxicating prose. Yet.

Funnily enough, one of the hallmark symptoms of a book-writing hangover is complete denial that that’s what you’re experiencing. I laid down 20,000 (coherent, edited) words in only a few weeks. Yesterday I cried as I wrote the ending, because it’s a teaser story for a series I’m writing next year so it doesn’t end with a happily ever after, or even a happy for now. And yet this morning as I sat dumbfounded at my desk, unable to rouse the slightest interest in any aspect of authorpreneurship, I didn’t once think I had a hangover.

Of course I do. I broke their hearts (spoiler: they’re not mad at each other.) And yes, fictional characters are just words arranged in a certain sequence on a page, but they are also active thought-forms, with what often feels to their creator as a sort of independent self-awareness. It takes time for the writer to detach from a deeply felt composition. I’ve nursed this idea for a year, and now it’s no longer necessary. There is a measure of grieving in this. The last book was worse, as it was the culmination of two years of work and hung on a character who has become as real to me as my IRL friends. That I can’t shake his hand is slightly painful.

Only yesterday I wrote that creativity is a strange phenomenon. The existence of the writing hangover just proves my point.

Remember to refill the well.

Tag: authorpreneur

Crunch Time

The hangover