“If you are focused on fame or exposure – any external outcome – it’s easy to forget exactly why you started a creative endeavour. You feel pulled in every direction by your audience’s expectations, you make compromises, and you end up with work that isn’t authentic.”
These were the first words I read in “An audience of one” by Srinivas Rao; I have read something similar to this before, but not sure if it was quoted in another book or not – but still, it resonates with me a lot.
Back in 2003 I sent of a synopsis with three chapters to a publishing house of a piece of work I had completed, I was actually accepted immediately and I was excited about it but I was also deflated, because it was my first ever attempt to get publish and I never had a rejection slip – and as stupid as it sounds, I was looking forwards to a rejection slip, because it’s what every writer expects… maybe I am stupid, but I was mixed about it.
At the time I lived with my mother and when my mother demanded to know what the letter was that was in my hands, I told her – she started planning how to spend my advance immediately and I conveniently lost the letter and never went through with it.
Why?
Because I didn’t want my mother spending my advance and secondly, I was shit scared of the fame it was going to bring, because the review I got from that publisher was amazing!
This made me scared to write for about a year actually.
But I got back into the flow of writing again and I didn’t plan to publish at all, until I met Paul and I felt I needed to try and get serious about my writing, so I can pull us out of poverty somehow.
But this hanging over me – the need to write – put me under a lot of strain and I was dismissing the fun ideas for the commercial ones.
Around 2017 I decided to write whatever I felt like and see what happens.
I started having great ideas and working on them off and on until the summer of 2022, when too many people were interested in a particular piece of work I was the most excited about – like a rabbit in headlights I got afraid again, there is more to this story – but basically, I felt like I have expectations to live up to now – and I am terrified of letting people down!
But the thing is, I have let people down – because I’ve allowed myself to get so wrapped up in a game of somebody else’s making, that I’ve literally lost my mind this past year – procrastinated on everything on every level of my life except inch loss (not losing weight but I am losing incredible amount of inches weirdly enough) – as far as my writing is concerned, I write one or two poems a week now and that is all I do.
In the past few days I have tried to write again, but it’s just snippets and plans and every few days, something happens to emotionally upset the cart again.
I’m very vulnerable right now, I’ve been vulnerable since 2017, but since February I have struggled to keep things together at all and even starting to battle my old foe, anorexia off and on again.
Most days I eat 1200 calories, but I have been known to only eat just under 800 in a day and I am not sleeping until I literally pass out as well and I rarely sleep for more than 5 hours at a time.
The concept that I could be capable of suicide hasn’t left me, if anything, its increased and I have been struggling to fight certain urges.
I’ve had a lot of tension headaches in the past few weeks too, which isn’t helping and especially because I am in a state of confusion about my life – there is a big upheaval soon in my life, but I have very little details to share about it right now – other than, Paul and I are separate now, but we are still living together and I am due to move out at any moment, but we don’t know exactly when and that is the most frustrating thing about it.
I have no idea where I am going or who with, I just know that there are a few options for me and that a certain relative of mine will possibly become available to have me stay with them for a while, but nobody is being clear to me about anything.
The start of this post however, was that I find it hard to write to people’s expectations unless I have a deep relationship with that person and then I tend to write even more, because I am doing it for them and I enjoy making people I love happy.
I guess I am needy like that!
But it’s difficult to write, when nobody in your immediate social circle cares about the fact you write and just don’t enjoy listening to you talk about it and that the only people who want to hear what you are writing are people who genuinely want to steal your idea from you; Which is something I learned last autumn that someone wanted to do this about one of my projects, my steampunk anthropomorphic project to be exact.
That was a shock when I discovered their plan of becoming romantic with me, just to take the credit for my work as a romantic/collaboration!
I wouldn’t have minded if they were up front about it and were willing to share the credit with me and state that the brains which started the whole projected was me initially – but they felt they needed to sneak around behind me a bit, which wasn’t very nice.
This project is a long series with complicated characters and plots – it’s not a one off novel, it is a series which is really meant to have been a comic rather than a novel.
This is what I consider my main project right now, but just because it is my main focus doesn’t mean it is my priority to publish first, no.
The novel I wrote in 2003 which was accepted for publication, I feel needed more work and I did more drafts on it and I feel it’s even stronger now; this book is likely to be published first. I am on its final draft, a better draft than the original finale – I have sixteen more chapters to draft out and it is done, it is a thirty six chapter novel.
This work is known on here as my Dragon 1 Project.
It’s likely to be first, once I find where my printed papers have been displaced to, then I can write more towards it; in fact this is what I have been doing these past couple of weeks, I have been sorting the house out of its piles of strewn about papers trying to find the seventeen chapters of that last draft, so I can get finishing it.
But as I am finding papers I am copy editing everything to put on cloud, so I never lose things again!
Copy editing is boring when I have to focus on it, because when I find old ideas lying around and some unfinished stories and I copy edit them, I make amendments when I do so and I get in the flow of wanting to add more things to it, but I have to keep disciplined and keep to copy editing only, because I need to get Dragon 1 done and not start doing a hundred other projects, or else I never get anything done!
So this is the situation here recently.
I am trying to get back into some sort of flow again.
Thanks for reading!
tardycreative.com 