Pep Talks to Myself

Lately I've had a hard time writing or getting into anything, really. I've been struggling with being stagnant after graduation. Where do I go from here? Why can't I seem to find a better job? If I go back to school, what should I get my masters in? What does it matter if I write or not?

Well, I gave myself a pep talk the other night that seemed to snap me back to reality, or at least writing. I told myself, J, you can either sit back and stay in this life you hate, or you can fight for a better future. I told myself, you are a fighter and you are going to fight like hell to keep doing the things you love. That means overcoming stagnation, fighting for a position, fighting against your deteriorating health. And it actually worked. I've decided to fight.

Part of that means returning to hope, returning to wishes, returning to dreaming up a better future. What this is means is that I inspire myself to write by thinking about the endgame, what happens after I'm published. I imagine what fans will like or not like, what they will argue with each other about, how they will react. My favorite past-time has always been imagining giving book talks or being interviewed about my books.

If you follow me on tumblr, you've probably noticed I've been in a bit of a tag vomit mood this week. A few of those entries were related to this kind of dreaming, where I imagine how future students looking at my work will imagine me and/or will interpret my books. This comes largely out of the fact that sometimes English majors over-analyze a book and find more meaning in it than the writer originally intended. Anyway, here are the tags, and links to their respective posts.

Part 1: A Response to Leonardo Da Vinci's hand studies
someday if my books are ever published students will study me and my weird (and somewhat macabre) obsession with hands and they will write papers about how I feared nothing but losing them. They will write that I was most fascinated by hands, how they mean losing everything and yet they were the key to creating everything. my hands are my everything. Just kidding. They will write papers about me saying she wrote a lot about hands and potatoes and we're really not sure why. Maybe she secretly wanted to be a farmer

Part 2: A Response to Seamus Heaney's "Digging"
 this is the post all the students who will study my works in the future will cite on their essays saying look Teacher she is obsessed with potatoes just like we said. this poem represents how she wanted to be a farmer just like all the generations of her family before her. both sets of grandparents and her uncle had a farm you know. but she didn't work on a farm so she decided to dig with her pen like Heaney did. as you can see I've done my research and I can find you more evidence of why Layman writes so much about hands and potatoes. She was kind of a weird writer but I guess all writers are weird. except this one didn't drink or take opium or anything. she was just obsessed with potatoes and hands I guess.

TL;DR: dreaming about being famous in the future helps me write my novels, because I feel like I have something to work towards. If you're having trouble, maybe this will help you too. Maybe I'm just delusional.

The New Order

This morning I emailed off my last paper for my summer course, which means I am now free to spend any time outside of work editing my novel. That's...a little scary, honestly, but it's okay. I had a migraine earlier, but once the excedrin kicked in I thought I might go read and I decided "No, I'm going to try to do some edits. If it doesn't work, I'll go read some Fitzgerald, but I at least need to try." Because that's my thing, I don't always try, I put it off, because "don't feel like it," or some other crap excuse. Today I tried--and turns out, I actually was able to do something with this MS.

When I am writing and especially when I am editing, I sometimes look at what I've written and think "Wow. I wrote this? Seriously, I did? This is actually really good." I might even realize deeper meanings in the prose that I hadn't consciously placed there originally, but is just so gosh-darned good. I amaze myself, sometimes.

Other times I look at the page and wonder how I even managed to get this far. I should have stopped ages ago, because obviously, I suck. I really suck. And I make really stupid mistakes, like using the wrong name for a character or have a seriously huge error in continuity or something like that.

But, it's edits, these moments are supposed to happen, right? (Oh God, I hope that's right.) I'm supposed to realize that I actually can make something out of what I've got so far and see the potential in my own work; realize that I have talent and build up my self-esteem to get me through to the end. I'm also supposed to find all those really stupid mistakes so that I can fix them—that's what editing is all about, really. I'm supposed to take something that pretty much sucks, but has potential, and turn that piece of coal into a shiny new diamond, ready to be cut and placed on a ring that I can later use to propose a marriage between myself and an agent.

So, bad news: The entire first half of my novel needs some serious work and the second half has a lot of errors with names and places.
Good news: I think I figured out how to fix it all, by rearranging some of the chapters in the first half. What was once chapter 1 is now chapter 4, and the prologue is gone completely (for now?). What was once chapter 15 is now chapter 5, and the end of chapter 4 will have to be rewritten to reflect the changes. Well, a lot of things will have to be rewritten to reflect these changes. All writing is rewriting, after all.