It is hard to get started with the writing.

Not with the blog writing. That gets easier every time I make a post. I even think of it as “scrawling a blog post” these days, which is another way of taking the standards off and drawing myself away from perfectionism.

I’m talking about writing fiction. Man, that is the thing. It’s the thing, and because it’s the thing, it’s big and scary and super-intimidating. I desperately want to be doing it, but it feels almost impossible to do right now. I think it’s partly because it’s so deeply integrated into my fight-the-fog plans.

That’s partly because it’s about expression, and it feels like (despite the blogging) the inner Lucy isn’t getting enough expression right now. The blog is plenty expressive, of course, but… writing fiction is different and I get to do different stuff.

It’s also partly because writing is part of my identity, really, and I feel that if I’m not writing fiction, I’m not really me. Some part of me is getting squashed. (I’m not sure if this is actually true, but that’s my sense.)

And it’s partly because I’m hoping to make some money out of it.

That feels a bit shameful to admit, which I guess means I still have some “artistic recovery” to do around this topic. Some part of me, I guess, reckons that I do not deserve to earn money from the fiction I write. Some part of me thinks I should be stuck writing fan fiction forever and I should never try to break out of the ghetto.

(Fan fiction is a nice, safe, friendly, comfortable ghetto – but it’s definitely a ghetto, especially if your dream is to build a career as a writer of fiction.)

This post does not have a point or any links.

I just wanted to acknowledge this: I want to be writing fiction. And I am not doing it. And it is hard.

The end.

…Um. PS: Hugs are appreciated, but you should also know that I am not in Deep Existential Angst or anything. It’s been a tough few days, for various I-don’t-think-they-are-related reasons, but I’m pulling myself out of that now. I’m basically okay: just acknowledging a hard thing. Maybe tomorrow I’ll acknowledge some things that are awesome, just because they deserve some recognition too.

Two things to know about me (that you may well have known already): I’m addicted to self-help literature, and I’m a bit of a butterfly.

So I’m passingly familiar with a bunch of stuff that I haven’t looked out and read all the way through. There’s a bunch of books that I’ve glanced through, and a bunch more that I’ve read half of, or read without doing the exercises. There’s a pattern here – either that I’m not good at reading self-help books “properly”, or that I’m great at finding reasons to tell myself I’m doing something wrong.

Oddly enough, that’s not what I wanted to talk about in this post.

What I wanted was to talk about one of those writers I’m passingly familiar with. Her name’s Barabara Sher. She’s a self-help author who, as far as I can tell, is all about making dreams come true and figuring out what you want. So she’s a big draw to me. But I’ve read less than half of her famous book, Wishcraft.

All the same: a lot of my friends – including Havi – are Sher fans, and there’s one quote from her that I keep hearing over and over again. I don’t know if it’s true for everyone. But it certainly speaks to me. It’s this:

Isolation is the dream-killer.

This feels true for me.

As a writer of fiction – as a blogger, an astrologer, a human being – I find that trying to do it all on my own, without reference to anyone, is a very sure way to do serious damage to whatever I’m trying to do. And for me, the sharing is necessary at an early stage. It’s the birth of the idea that’s the excitement point for me, and I want to share it instantly.

But there’s another side to that, because sharing one’s tiny new idea is immediately exposing it to possible criticism. And criticism is an even surer killer of baby dreams, even when that criticism is about pointing out things that might cause problems later.

What I want, in those first few hours (or days or weeks) of excitement is for people to jump up and down excitedly. Say things like, “Wow, that’s so cool!” “Oh, I can’t wait to read it!” “You’re gonna do great!”

Cheerleader stuff.

Somehow, though, it feels hard to ask for cheerleading. Because if you asked for it, the cheerleading could be fake. (If you said “please cheerlead me” to someone and they hated your idea, what would happen?) But also because – well – it’s demanding. The whole asking for what I want thing: it’s tough.

Part of it, I think, is finding people who genuinely think I’m awesome and want to cheer me on in everything I do. People who don’t think the best way to “help me improve” is to point out every tiny flaw, when I’m still in the creative phase.

Part of it is probably continuing to do this “working on myself thing”, too.

There’s lots of stuckness here. But it’s at least good to acknowledge that cheerleading is what I want and need.

I’m noticing that I haven’t posted to this blog for months. Last post date was – actually, I don’t even know without checking. (And I’m writing this post in a word processor, not in the Wordpress interface, so I’m not even looking at the site just now.)

(Edit: August 16th – almost 3 months!)

So in the spirit of the “process blog” thing, let’s try writing a blog post about why I’m not writing blog posts.

The first part is depression.

Yeah, right now, I’m still off work (as of the beginning of July) and I’m personally not expecting to be back at work this year. That’s kind of… weird to admit to, and weird to feel relatively calm about. Okay, so I need the time to recover from whatever it is that I’m recovering from. I’m kind of accepting that right now. And accepting that the recovery will happen, in its own sweet time.

And the depression makes it hard to do much of anything – including write. That’s tough. I signed up for NaNoWriMo in order to try to force myself to write, but I’m not holding myself to the full 50,000 words in 30 days. It seems too much right now. So I’m committing to writing something each day on this new piece of fiction I’ve started, and we’ll see what we have on the 30th of November.

So that’s the first reason and it’s totally legitimate and I’m kind of okay with it, even though I’m not okay with the not-writing-blog-posts. (I want to write more. I don’t want to say I intend to, ’cause I can’t seem to commit to very much right now, but we will see, okay?)

The second reason feels a bit less legitimate and a bit more complicated.

When I was first off sick, I was toying with the idea of quitting my job. (In fact, I’m still toying with the idea. But it’s on the back burner.) Or at the very least, reducing my hours. And because of that, I was looking at other income streams. And one of the potential income streams I thought about was this blog.

To the end of trying to get some money out of the blog, I signed up for three affiliate programmes, and started the process of changing the links (which linked to the things I was affiliate-ing anyway) all around here to my affiliate links instead of the ordinary kind.

I then got totally squicked out about it, stopped the changing, and haven’t posted to this blog since!

Argh. That totally wasn’t the effect I meant to have. Either on myself, or on my readers.

I guess I was concerned that I didn’t want to be trying to squeeze money out of innocent readers who didn’t come here to be sold to. And I didn’t want to sell – still don’t, in fact. I was concerne about money, and I can still be concerned about money, but I didn’t want to do something so not-transparent as changing all the links on my blog without telling anyone about it.

Right now, it’s kind of pot luck, so you may or may not be earning me a few pennies if you click on a link from this site, and then buy something. I will probably be changing all the links back to non-affiliate links – at some point when I can be bothered to do the admin. That’s not now, though.

If I do decide to “go affiliate” at some point in the future, there’ll be a blog post about it, and I won’t suddenly start trying to encourage my readers to buy stuff. That’s not how I roll and it’s not what I want to do, and officially? Ick.

If I’m going to do something other than what I do now for a living, probably I’m going to need to start thinking about money. And maybe this blog could at some point become a source of income for me. But I’ll have to find a way to do it that doesn’t make me feel gross – or cover my blog with advertisements. Because, ew.

I think my next post might be about rituals. Or play. Or saying no. Or one of the other three million things I’m trying to figure out.

Oh my God, people. I had to come blog about this because it was cool, and because I have to write it down somewhere. Also because I want to get it down somewhere in words (words! Outside-my-head words!) so that I can say, look, there it is, written down.

I was just cleaning a baking tray while I waited for my toast to toast for lunch. Also making a cup of my favourite tea. That’s what was happening in the real world. But what was happening in my head was complicated and awesome and sort of down to Havi (duh!) and Tim Brownson (about whom, more in another post). But also, of course, down to me and my own pure fabulousness (hahaha).

I’ve been thinking about various stuff lately which comes along the following lines:

1. I know what I want to be doing, really and truly.

2. I know what I need to do to make it happen, pretty much.
3. I absolutely don’t dare to take the risk.

And what I’d like to be doing is this: living in Deal, in Kent, with a cat. No longer employed in a boring day job of the kind I am doing right now, but making my living from writing fiction and selling it to people who want to read it – or having it published in a mainstream kind of way. Continuing to practice the “self friendship” thing and continuing to learn about myself, and perhaps starting to believe more in my aforementioned fabulousness.

(Lots of people who are not me seem to think I am fabulous. They can’t all be insane. That would not be logical, Captain*.)

And while I was doing the dishes, I was thinking about this desire and about how to get my life a bit closer to it. In the process of thinking about it, I hit upon a plan: to try it out. I can’t suddenly snap my fingers and be making money from writing, but I can work to make more space for it in my life. And I can definitely try the experiment of quitting my job, moving to Deal, and getting a cat.

So – that’s what I’m going to do.

Not right now, for lots of reasons, most of which boil down to “I’m not insane”. But I’m going to start putting things in place for it right now. The important stuff being:

1. I’m going to sort out my provisional driver’s license and learn to drive. (Public transport is not as good on the Kent coast as it is in London, and I will probably need a car.)

2. I’m going to start saving money on a regular basis, which means figuring out how to put a curb on my spending – so a little working on my relationship with money is in order. Also, budgeting.
3. I’m going to start making and keeping “writing appointments” with myself, at least half an hour each day.

The plan is to have a driver’s license, a car, and £7000 saved up by this time next year – which will incidentally be right around my 30th birthday (I’m 29 tomorrow). £7000 is, I figure, about enough to live on for six months, with some emergency money set aside too (I also have credit cards in case of real emergencies – but I think I am going to pay them off now and stop spending on them for the forseeable future, in the attempt to work on this “saving money” thing).

I feel rather energized about all this! I really want to do it and to give it a go.

I must also blog about Deal soon. The short version is that I went on holiday with my mum there, a couple of weeks ago, and fell hopelessly in love with the town. The long version will have to be a blog post all its own, because there is lots of stuff to think about it.

Deal and Tim Brownson. My blog will not be short of topics!

*Sorry, obsessed with Star Trek at the moment. Spock-logic may become part of my personal process and a way of seeing outside my patterns – you never know.

So I got back yesterday from my week away. And I’m hesitating to write this post, because while I had a fabulous time in many ways, I was also fighting monsters all week. And the monsters are epic, and it’s very hard not to fight them. I experimented some more with my monster book, and it didn’t go so well. I still have a long, long way to go with all of this.

There were twenty of us in a house in Derbyshire. Twenty wonderful people, I should add – among them some of my favourite people in the world, some very close friends, some people I only get to see for this one week each year. But – twenty people in a house for a whole week. This is the kind of thing I’m scared of anyway, but after the year I’ve had, a year in which my confidence in my ability to do anything, and particularly to interact with other people successfully, has been horribly dented? The concept was terrifying. I didn’t really believe it was going to happen until I got to the airport where I was meeting people – I didn’t pack until the morning I was leaving (and forgot so much stuff), didn’t sleep the night before, left terribly late. Avoidance syndrome in all its full-blown, shaking-in-my-boots glory. Yeah, it was bad.

It didn’t help that I was constantly trying to talk myself out of my fear, telling myself that I’d done this before, that I’d met most of the people I’d be sharing a house with before, and once I got there it would be fun. Now, I know that this doesn’t work (I’ve known for ages that it doesn’t work; I’ve recently had it spelled out in so many words, thanks to Havi, and now I actually get that it doesn’t work) but it’s hard to stop doing it. I’m only slowly working on the alternative to trying to talking myself out of things, which is to say, “okay, I’m scared. Hi, fear, what are you after?” It’s hard to do that. And I didn’t do it at all that day.

And here’s the thing I’m ashamed of. I spent so much of the week hiding. Hiding from these fabulous people that I mostly won’t see again for at least another year, if then (shit happens, people don’t always make it). I took a bunch of naps that I’ve mostly trained myself out of needing (naps are a major feature of my pattern of “being depressed) – simply because I needed the alone time. I spent lots of time writing, and using my notebook as a shield against other people even when I was in the same room as them. Even though I was there, I felt like I missed so much of the week because of my inability to take part in all of it. I’m beating myself up for that. And beating myself up for beating myself up, and… Ugh.

The cycle, it is vicious.

I’m not sure how to break out of it yet, so I’m simply trying to acknowledge that I’m here, in the vicious cycle and hurting. Maybe I’ll try to do a couple of things that I know make me feel better – take a shower, get rid of some trash out of my room, see if I can get a few things done.

On the plus side – all that using my notebook as a shield had one positive effect. I wrote words! Actual, original words, not fanfic. Okay, so they’re not exactly in story form, but I’m working on not worrying about this. The idea of this notebook was to take the pressure off and not worry too much about writing presentable words. Instead, I’m simply letting the words in my head rush out onto the page in a vaguely narrative form, and okay, there’s lots of notes, and undefined stuff, and there’s lots of stuff to change before it becomes something I would want other people to read. But oh my God, people. I wrote words! I’m so proud!

And I’m going to continue. I have a beautiful notebook and the perfect pens (details are important!) and know where to get more of both. And there’s a story in my head that I’m dying to tell, even if I only tell it to myself. It’s liberating not to have to think about shape, or word choice, or where to begin and end, because I’m not really writing it, just telling myself a story – I don’t have to worry about anything. It’s awesome.

I’m a word person. A word person that’s actually producing words. Words of my own. It’s amazing!

In summary? There’s been a lot of good and a lot of tough in the past week. I’m trying to sort through the tough and capitalize on the good as much as I can. And believe it or not, I think I’m doing sort of okay.

Assuming nothing sidetracks me massively (which it might!) the next post will be about that failed experiment I talked about before.

I think it’s time I made another post about writing, what with this being a writing blog and all. At least in theory.

What I’m struggling with at the moment is the simple process of having ideas, of having something that I want to write. It’s funny, because I’ve talked before about writing fan fiction – and when I’m writing fanfic, ideas simply aren’t a problem. I have plenty of ideas. When it comes to my main enthusiasm, I have a list of story ideas as long as your arm and the list itself is large enough to intimidate me. I have a smattering of ideas for other fandoms, too. But finding “original” ideas is much harder (and by “original”, I simply mean something that’s using characters I have invented myself, rather than writing other people’s characters or fictionalizing real people. “Original” in the sense of Something Really New And Ground-Breaking is something quite different and not what I’m talking about. That’s for another post).

I suppose that part of it is that I have quite specific ideas about what I would like to start off with. I don’t yet want to embark on a novel. In fanfic, I’m primarily a writer of vignettes and short fiction, and that’s what I feel comfortable writing and what I’m most practised at. But while I have original ideas, they are mostly for stories that could be novel-length or even longer. Mostly they’re gay romance, which again, I’m happy with as that’s what I’m used to writing and I enjoy it very much. But I’m intimidated by novel-length narratives and by the research that’s necessary to make most of them work. (And, rather worse, by the fear that my research would mean my premise turned out to be impossible or at least prohibitively unlikely. I’m good at inventing premises like that.)

One solution is to take some of my fanfic ideas and “file off the serial numbers” – that is, to modify the characters and settings to a point where they become my own instead of belonging squarely in the universe that first inspired them. In a way I’m not 100% comfortable with that, because it feels like passing something off as my own work when it was in fact inspired by the work of someone else – but on the other hand, it raises questions about where the line is between inspiration and plagiarism. I don’t want to steal someone else’s work and pass it off as mine. I especially would feel horrible about making money out of playing in someone else’s sandbox. Even if, to extend the metaphor, I had used different toys, repainted the box and replaced all the sand. I mean: at what point is it a different box?

(And at what point does it pretty much run on a theme of lots of other boxes, many of which I’ve never even seen?)

I mean, I’m not ashamed to be influenced by many people’s work – from the creators of various books, TV shows and movies, to musicians and actors, to other writers of fanfic in my fandom and many others. I’m not ashamed to be inspired, and riff on my head on someone else’s story. But what if this was different? What if they… or what if they never…? And that’s what fanfic is, writing the what-if that, as a writer, makes your fingers itch.

And as a writer, that what-if is a wonderful place to get started. It’s a wonderful way to generate ideas. Because if that happens, and then so-and-so does this, then… And suddenly you’ve got a story. The question is how, with your own characters and ideas, to generate the right kind of what-ifs, the ones that make you feel that you’re dying to start writing right-the-fuck-now so you can see what happens.

(And do you know what? I just realized that. In the process of writing this blog post. Isn’t that awesome?)

So there it is. The more I think about it, the more I think that “filing off the serial numbers” is a good idea – taking one of my fanfic ideas and changing it until the characters are really mine. Start asking the questions, “what could I do with this that wouldn’t make sense if it was still a fanfic story?” And then play with it. Build a universe for it. And write it. I’ve done it often enough in my head; it’s just that I need to do it on paper or screen and make words out of it.

I want to write something original – I really do – and I think this might be a way to do it. Maybe “inspired by” isn’t the same as “stolen from”, even if you started with what-if and went from there.