The Irreparable Sensation of (Self) Consciousness
Self-conch-iousness, if you will.
The best and worst feeling in the world is sharing my writing with another skull-caged brain who—shit, wait, let me set the tone first.
If you don’t have a face-to-face acquaintanceship with me, then you might not know that I’m shy. Introverted, sure. But shy? And you’re here from my tiktok account?
On the flip, if you have met me or observed me with your raw eyeballs, reading my newsletter or watching my tiktoks is probably the most you’ve ever heard (or read) me speak.
“Oh my god,” you’re probably saying, “she talks?”
To which I say, “Geez, I’ve never heard that joke before.”
Alright, don’t feel too bad for saying that; just get a better filler joke, I beg you.
So, how does it work? The whole “sharing and promoting writing—an intimate expression of your being—while being shy” thing? Well, I’ll be using this pseudo-essay to explain my answer, but here’s the tldr; it ain’t easy being people-pleasey.
Fun with imaginary friends and murder
One of my earliest forays into original writing was collaborative, if you can believe it.
The story—which was, perhaps, untitled—was a total rip-off of Hide and Seek (2005), starring Dakota Fanning as a girl with a murderous imaginary friend. Although my story did not contain mental illness as a plot twist (I didn’t understand the concept until much later), it retained thriller elements such as a chase scene involving a particularly sharp kitchen knife.
In the days of Windows 2000, when I received my first personal computer (the first with dial-up internet, anyway), I have a distinct memory of writing a short story via dictation. I recall leaning over my mother’s shoulder as she typed my words into the lawless land of WordPad, only peering at me once as I said the words, “And the imaginary friend is real and the knife she’s holding is also real.” That glance is etched into my mind with an unspoken implication of “girl, WHAT?”
Nonetheless, she typed it and printed a copy that’s surely been lost to the annals of time. I was nine or so, and my WPM was around the same.
I wrote original fiction on-and-off for the next few years—teaching myself how to type in the process—before I discovered the wonderful world of fanfiction, livejournal, and fanfiction.net.
[LEMON][M/M][F/F][Don’t like don’t read!!!]
My foray into fanfiction (for Naruto, then Bleach, then Supernatural, then H*mestuck) marked the era of writing specifically for an audience. From age 11 to…I wanna say 20? I learned how to cater to specific audiences while still writing to the tastes of my favorite reader—myself. Finding the correct balance was difficult, and I still don’t know if I have it quite right.
Cutting my teeth on fanfiction allowed me to explore genres and tropes with little restriction (Alternate Universe queen here). Here’s a summary of what I learned from my prolific fanfic career:
Supernatural mysteries and magical realism are my bread and butter
I love writing romance arcs
Dialogue > prose
I find it fun to formulate the right balance for sex scenes (i.e. what phrases are erotic but NOT sterile OR cheesy, how to transition between acts so as not to confuse readers and create broken limbs, what breaks immersion because you should be at least a little tingly around the abdomen reading it)
Correct characterization is key; reactions and motivations run parallel
Huh. Maybe I’m queer.
Though I dabbled with livejournal, I made fanfiction.net my home. Between writing songfics and beach episodes, I continued my original fiction journey in the roleplaying forums.
The collaborative nature of roleplaying was nearly as alluring as its anonymity. Together with internet strangers who probably don’t remember me, I crafted stories about cursed mermaids wrought with familial angst.
My time on the forums was brief, but I can still recall checking my email for daily replies. Hell, I think I even had an internet husband from the mermaid RPs?
Eventually, the rise of tumblr and Archive of Our Own (AO3) shifted my interests, and I—
Okay, look. I have to talk about H*mestuck now, and we’re all gonna have to be mature about it, alright?
Let me tell you about Homestuck
For the uninitiated, Homestuck was a long-running webcomic about four kids who play a game and end the world—and also a LOT of other bullshit. You don’t need to know its intricacies to understand this portion, but I need you to understand how absolutely MASSIVE it was on the internet during the early-mid 2010s. If you went to conventions, it was inescapable.
I read Homestuck—all 8,000 pages—and was active in the fandom during part of its run (2009-2016; 2012-2016 for me). Participation, for me, meant writing fanfic, and boy howdy did I write a lot. Although I purged all fics from the web, I still have them saved on a portable drive. Recently, I added up their respective word counts and found that I wrote over 100,000 words of Homestuck fanfiction during those four years.
For someone who had only finished a handful of short stories and one book at that time (my bastard child Evaristus), that’s insane.
Now, I won’t torture you with the AUs I originated (one of which kind of blew up) because I have a grander point to make. I was writing for what is probably to date my largest audience. The things is, when you put something on the internet, you’re opening yourself up to critique whether you asked for it or not, and cutting my teeth on fanfiction gave me a thicker skin because—and this may be a new concept to you—fandom motherfuckers are picky as hell and they’ll scream at you in the comments if they feel you haven’t depicted the correct amount of repression from their favorite gay robotics genius.
And I’ll give Homestuck this: it sharpened my character voices.
My “big break”
The first time I attended a writers’ workshop was in my senior year of high school. I—at the behest of my journalism teacher—entered the Scholastic Competition of Recognizing Educational Success (S.CO.R.E.S.) in three categories: news journalism, editorial journalism, and creative writing. I ended up placing 1st-3rd in all three categories (I was that type of student), but in order for my short story entry to be valid, I was required to attend a (college level!!!) writing workshop.
Needless to say, I was incredibly nervous. I was seventeen, and I only ever shared original stories with my mother and my best friend. Sure, I posted fanfiction on the regular, but the internet is different (this is different, too); there’s a disconnect between myself and my faceless audience. I knew people by screennames and anime avatars, not by their real, incredibly fleshy visages.
But as I sat among the other participants (in a college classroom!!!), nervous energy emanated from everyone. At least I wasn’t alone in that mindset.
The professor arrived and gave us—to everyone’s horror—a creative writing assignment, the thrust of which have been dusted from my memory by the passage of time. We were given fifteen minutes or so to write creatively according to the prompt. No biggie. But then, oh but then… Then we had to share.
We had to share? With our actual voices? I had to make the sounds with my mouth and tongue and throat and vocal chords, all of which my teenage self specifically hated? Fuuuuuuuck that!
One by one, each participant was picked off. I remember stewing in my own nerves, a veritable soup of neuroses, flicking the clip of my pen until it snapped (I still do this).
But after each participant placed their paper down with tremulous fingers and the appeasing smile of a dog begging not to be yelled at, the professor would grin and repeat the same phrase.
“Oh my God, look! It didn’t kill you! You didn’t disintegrate!”
Bless that man; I have no idea what his name was, nor can I recall his face, but those words really did impact my squishy, developing writer brain.
When it was my turn, I was still a soupy mess, but I didn’t die.
The story, by the way, was “Near Death”—a supernatural story about a man cursed to experience daily near death experiences set in the Roaring 20s—placed second. I have a tremendous soft spot for it.
I had a vague realization that day that wouldn’t firm up until much later in my academic career, and that was that people really don’t hang off every word you say, even when you’re explicitly in an environment for that. People are always, on some level, more concerned about their own thing to notice or go as far to harshly judge your imperfections. And for me—a perfectionist at heart—that’s a major comfort.
Moving on!
Workshoppin’ the ills
Anxiety-ridden, English professional writing bachelor’s degree-holder reporting in to tell you that I actually enjoyed and dearly miss the creative writing workshop classes I took in college.
I had the same professor each time, and he had a golden rule: Constructive criticism only. If you didn’t like something, you’d better be ready to vocalize the exact reason why and have a suggestion to improve it. No cop-outs.
I think most people will tell you that’s how workshops are intended to function, but there are always assholes in the pack, and if your moderator isn’t worth their salt, things can go sideways quick.
Being in an environment with people intending to build you up and help you improve reaffirmed my desire to continue writing, to define myself as “writer” and hopefully “author,” one day.
As a flailing college student without a solid future plan, the reassurance that it was okay to love writing as much as I did (& do) alleviated a bit of that anxiety.
But, the workshops, huh? Let’s talk about those.
Due to the size of the creative writing workshop, I was only able to workshop one piece, which was surprisingly nonfiction. This newsletter aside, I’m not much of a nonfiction writer, but I was challenging myself.
Besides, I had my eye on a pretty girl whom I had a couple of ambiguously romantic hangout seshes with, and I was feeling inspired.
V.
She smiled, and the glare from her teeth nearly blinded me. She thinks I’m cool, said that I was beautiful, but she doesn’t know that she’s nurturing an ego that needs no inflation.
My eyes have started to burn in fear. No amount of medicine can stop my lips from bleeding and blistering in their rawness.
Might make her a pound cake, as a ‘thank you’ for the flowers.
[from “Missing Text from Journal No. 4”]
There’s nothing like dropping, “Oh no, I’m not writing from a man’s perspective. It’s about another woman. It’s gay!” in a room comprised mostly of heterosexuals who hadn’t even raised the possibility.
I married the woman I wrote this about, and I still haven’t let her read more than a snippet from that piece.
Although I don’t have an affinity for poetry, the same professor offered a poetry workshop, and I hopped on that immediately. I didn’t need it for credits, but I wanted to take it for fun and more student loan debt.
I’m…still not very good at poetry, but I gave it my best shot. Here, I’ll show you one of the poems I brought in for critique:
“Black Magic” Black magic is everywhere. It used to be confined in misty moors and marshlands whose water warble under the hanging moon, but has been made mundane by the evolving common folk who transmuted and claimed it. A coven of wizened witches sit in their sewing circle, threading and weaving to life new creatures cut from cloth with their spindly fingers that charm and mystify. Their work is black magic, drawn from the crones of yore. A young enchanter paints her lips pomegranate and covers her eyes in black kohl to beguile unsuspecting mortals underneath a veil of stars concealed by a cloak of clouds. Her beauty is black magic, gifted by Lilith herself. A serene shaman performs his ancient rituals with the steady hands of a master, instruments sterile and cold, made for dissection and destruction, and for raising the dead. His skill is black magic, summoned from the mystics. This form of sorcery is nothing new. Black magic is no longer immured on towering mountains, inside flowing lava, or underneath fertile soil. The ordinary has been imbued with a touch of witchcraft and rendered magical.
Bad, right? It’s cliché, and it’s not even my best work from the class, so I have no idea why I picked it for critique. I suppose it felt more “traditional” than some of the others (i.e. the tabloid poem).
Believe it or not, this poem sparked a spirited argument on the definition of “black magic.” Does the inclusion of “black” with “magic” mean to imply it’s evil? Or just alt? I watched two specific people volley accusations at one another knowing full well I hadn’t thought about the word choice that deeply. I just like witches, and I’m a shit-stirrer, I guess.
Post-college, I took a hiatus from writing to find a job, be miserable at that job, move in with my sweetheart, adopt a dog, and—
The world is going to hell and I’ve never written a novel I liked
Remember the thing that happened in 2020 that you should still be getting updated immunizations for?
So, skipping past literally everything that happened that year, around September of 2020, I decided that it was time to learn the skill of self-discipline and finish a damn novel.
A quick recap of the projects I’ve finished up until 2020:
Evaristus, a novel about an immortal family that I hate
“Near Death,” the aforementioned 2nd place winner
Demon Meat for Dinner, a novel about a farm boy protecting the gate to purgatory that I also hate
Too many fanfics to list
Too many short stories I no longer have access to nor can remember (does not bode well for their quality)
I turned 25 in 2020, so I was in the swing of a quarter-life crisis. My brain had firmed up, and oh my god what am I doing with my life.
I had to write something, if only to prove to myself that I was capable. I had the perfect project to tackle, too! I had a collection of characters rolling around in my head since 2017—Daisy, Rafe, Gray, Swanhilda, Marigold—and an outline I had knocked out in two days to boot! A complete, scene-by-scene outline? Me? I never outline my works to that extent. Let’s GOOOOO—
So…I didn’t use any of that (lol). Actually—and this is almost embarrassing to admit—I found inspiration in anger.
I remember seeing a tweet (remember Twitter? I wish I didn’t) disparaging butch lesbians, as written by a WLW, and it got me heated. While the exact contents has been overwritten by other, more pertinent information, the misogynistic undertones and overt lesbophobia lingered with me. So, what did I do with that anger?
You know, my PCP asked me how I had made it so long, unmedicated, with anxiety and depression without having any of the typical vices and inquired if I had any hobbies. When I told her that I was a writer, she said, “Ah, that makes sense.”
SALTLAND was birthed from the desire to write a butch x butch romance as, I don’t know, an apology? An ode? I think an ode; I love butch women.
SALTLAND, a haunted house story-cum-butch lesbian romantic comedy, is the first novel of mine I’ve ever actually liked, and its conception and subsequent execution were formulated on total whims. But, man, did it work!
Discipline wasn’t in my repertoire; I got by in college by being a first draft procrastinator whom drove herself to the brink of insanity thinking about what she would write for weeks before actually writing it. Something-something-perfectionism blah blah.
This is something that I’ve carried over to my writing process—the overthinking. I’ll spend months leading up to a new project using all of my spare brain capacity thinking about what I want to write rather than doing it, and—personally speaking—that helps me weed out the bad ideas from the decent ones.
Not the point. My point is that my motivators spawn from panic, and in September 2020, I had a life-changing idea: I’m gonna post my goddamn word count daily under threat of personal, imagined humiliation if I fail to meet my arbitrary goal of 1k word per day.
And what can I say? I’ve written five books that way, and three of them are actually good! The masochism-tango works, even medicated!
Of course, my body is migraine-laden, and my stomach can fall temptation to the promise of out-of-town trips to a good restaurant, so I’m not as stringent with it as I was at the beginning. I can take two, even three days off per cycle, it’s fine. The masses aren’t that angry with me for falling victim to head lightening.
After proving to myself that I could finish lengthy novels, something appeared to unlock; I’m in what I call my “creative renaissance,” and I’m still going fairly strong.
The Creative Renaissance
Oh my god look at the length of this post. Okay, speed round; what have I written in this creative renaissance?
SALTLAND (novel)
Devil Bluffs (novel; trashed because I hated it)
The Eyes of the Gyre Are Red Like Blood (novel, version 1)
The Pre-Afterlife of Hiram Paris (novella)
Dionysus in Silk (novel)
A Superior Man Encroaches On the Farmer’s Daughter (short story; still needs editing)
God in the Rhinestone Aisle (short story)
The Eyes of the Gyre Are Red Like Blood (novel, version 2 rebuild)
Five novels!? DAMN! Twelve year old me would a) never believe it b) be disappointed I’m not traditionally published yet.
Let’s conclude this already
Alright, let’s firm up that thesis: the best and worst feeling in the world is sharing my writing. This is a statement that sounds contradictory but is really just nuanced as all hell.
Whether I like it or not, sharing my works exposes intimate knowledge about myself that I may not realize I’m even sharing. But honestly? If reading about the splitting of public verses private persona, about the experience of a delayed adolescent exploration of identity, about a woman breaking past self-sabotaging tendencies, or about two d*kes hunting ghosts and falling in love hits its reader’s head at just the right angle that it lingers, then that’s a good enough tradeoff for me.
Congratulations; you now know too much about me. Sorry! As a reward for making it to the end, here’s a picture of my dog, Chickpea:
