To Be a Writer Is to Be a Slave to One’s Whims
On shifting roadmaps and guilt
Dearest reader,
I write to you on the eve of my mother’s birthday whilst baking a pineapple and blackberry upside-down cake. My temperament is even, despite my worries that the cake is too pale, but other follies are quickly sinking in.
I regret to inform you that I am in the “find out” portion of fucking around.
What I mean to say: Goddamn it—I know I can’t make a joke of a story without a story coming out of the joke.
June is rapidly approaching; summer is inbound; my peak writing season is around the corner. I’ve had 2024 figured out since 2022. After completing Dionysus in Silk, I was to work a total rebuild of The Eyes of the Gyre Are Red Like Blood the next year, and the year after that would be dedicated to DiS’s prequel, the newly named Harlequinade!
But 2024 has been an odd year for me. I’m putting myself out there more, getting rejected by literary magazines and agents alike, experimenting with style and genre. Hell, I even took a shot at poetry—something the English Major College Student version of myself would balk at.
By the time I finished a farcical flash piece, I should have known that the energy had shifted. Things were never going to go as planned.
In a hotel room, I pitched a half-baked science fiction idea to my wife as we prepared to go to a Shannon & The Clams show.
“And I’ll keep it between 70k-80k because there’s no way I can write that long of a sci-fi novel.” The jury’s out on that one. “Just something I can churn out before diving into Harlequinade!”
The next day, after 11,000 zoo steps and Korean corndogs, I brought the idea back up. “Remember the Disney Channel Original Movie Pixel Perfect? It would be like that, ‘cept—”
I rambled on and off during that last twenty-minute stretch of road—as always—and feared how hyped I was becoming about the idea.
A day later, I began smashing names together. “Otto” and “Leland” and “Eulalia”—Eulalia? Oh, that’s good. And Leland? He would be one of those skinny little tech bros but with mad scientist inspirations—a real Victor Frankenstein. Hey, remember how you’ve always wanted to write a Frankenstein-esque story? Mary Shelley-style? You know how anxious the expansion of A.I. is making you? Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Hey, aren’t you running a workshop where you encourage young writers to play outside their comfort zone? Hey—
Alright already!
Okay, Brain, you make valid points. And here’s another one for you: I’m not ready to write Harlequinade! For a story that I’ve been devising for two years, it’s nowhere near ready for the starting line. There’s too much legwork I haven’t done, too many cult manifestos in need of completion so that the first draft isn’t an incoherent mess I end up shoving into a drawer to forget about (R.I.P. Devil Bluffs), and, damn it, isn’t writing by the seat of your pants fun when the stakes are low? This is supposed to be fun, remember?
“You must do things out of love, otherwise it's stupid. Is there a sadder word? No.”
—Orson Welles
Q: When was the last time I enjoyed writing? A: The last time I wrote an off-the-dome piece about two elderly ladies breaking bad. That was the last piece I wrote, so it’s not a distant memory.
Q: When was the last time you felt stress-free writing? A: 2020. SALTLAND.
2020
When I began writing SALTLAND, it was after a years-long dry spell. The last book I completed was in 2017, entitled Demon Meat for Dinner. Sick title, so-so book. A real two-star read from an amateur who started it at age 17. It took me four years to write, and that fact alone was crushing. I fell out of love with writing, becoming more enamored with retreating into my mind and imagining all of the stories I could write but would take me too long to finish.
The thought of beginning another novel was daunting. I stuck to “short” stories of the 7k variety in the interim. I graduated college with a professional writing degree and felt like a fraud. I found work in the behavioral health industry and felt like a fraud. I’d write detailed outlines with no intentions of following through. I held onto the characters of Daisy Blackwater and Gray Damour for longer than anyone knows.
And it was on a whim that I started SALTLAND. In a document entitled “Haunted Restaurant Story,” I wrote three character names and a laconic description: “Rival chefs solve haunted restaurant mystery and fall in love.”
I finished the first draft in three months, and I nearly fainted with delight. I’ve been chasing that high ever since, and nothing has felt quite like it. I planned my next novels years in advance and deviated from my roadmap almost immediately. I have always been a slave to my whims. It makes me feel guilty; it makes me feel like a fraud.
Dearest Me,
Who the fuck am I beholden to if not myself?
It’s Tuesday now. I am at work, sitting at my desk and admiring the beautiful roses clipped from my mother’s garden. It was 2017 when I brought the starter home to her on a whim. Neither of us knew how large it would grow, how rich its blooms would swell.
My mood is different. I’m thinking of myself less as a guilty party and more as a flower.
Look, I’m telling myself as I click through document after document of prose, poem, and essay, you’re fantastic. You set impossible parameters for accomplishment to stymie yourself. Remember when you unpacked that feeling in “God in the Rhinestone Aisle”? You’re 29 now. It’s time to stop locking the doors in fear of the hinges creaking.
All of that is to say,
I am giving myself permission to do what I want. And right now, what I want is to write a different story. No guilt, no strings, and no sprawling on the floor to groan about the word mines. Alright, I’ll allow some of the latter—I thrive from personal melodrama!
Come July, after I’ve met the woman of my dreams and sweat it out at Pride and enjoy Anniversary Crème Brûlée with the real woman of my dreams, I’ll be ready to spin a yarn about a man, an android, and a Big Moral Clusterfuck.
Until then,
I dream.
P.S., the cake turned out fine. I used brown sugar and the broiler to brown the top, then added cool whip and macerated blackberries for some sweetness to the tang. It was delicious. I cannot stress enough how delicious it was.