STOP BEING SELF CONSCIOUS ABOUT YOUR CREATIONS STOP SECOND GUESSING WHAT YOU REALLY WANNA DO STOP DEBATING IT'S WORTH. LET YOUR ART SERVE YOU INSTEAD OF THE OTHER WAY AROUND
I'M TRYING 😭
It's just difficult because I'm trying something new. I've never written a 'dark' romance before and I have some VERY specific goals (writing a dark romance that ISN'T abusive or toxic but is still kind of fucked-up on the surface, writing some really scary shit without glorifying or romanticizing it, and just getting real good and nasty with it 😉) that are going to be really challenging for me. In a good way - I've read some INCREDIBLE books that HAD to be ten times as hard to write as they were to read, and I can't imagine the authors didn't spend many nights lying awake, staring at the ceiling and wondering "What the HELL is wrong with me? What am I even DOING? Am I insane? Do I need therapy or a lobotomy??"
Sometimes I wonder if I should start drinking 🍸
I think part of my hesitation is due to my inexperience in the genre, my concern that I won't do it 'right', and my anxieties around not having the experiences I'm planning to write about - I've never purposefully committed a crime, I've never been friendly with dangerous people, I've never been to space (nor do I plan to - space is TERRIFYING) and I've never endured the kind of treatment my main girl has. I'm going to have to make up a LOT of stuff on the fly and keep track of it, and I'm going to have to learn even more about stuff I've never been exposed to like organized crime and hands-on technical fixes. On top of all that, I'll need to walk a fine line between "this is so fucked-up" and "ohhhh this is HOT!"
The other thing is that I'm already a 'published' author and I feel like I have some high standards to meet and exceed. STARFISH is still my best work so far, IMO, and I still feel like The Dragon Prince's Consort didn't quite deliver the same quality. I learned a lot from it, but there's a part of me that isn't really happy with how I wrote the last third of the story. Some of that can be attributed to the fact that I was rushing things a bit, and some of it was because I had started a new job which ate up a LOT of my mental and emotional bandwidth. Since I took over for my mentor, though, I've been running things pretty smoothly so I'm hoping that my brain will come back to me soon. (Also fuck ADHD and anxiety - I'm told that going back to the gym will help)
In the meantime, I just have to keep trying. It doesn't matter how many times I have to re-start, re-write and re-structure, I can do this as many times as it takes. My Beloved Husband is FULLY supportive of me and my goals, so I have that in my corner 💜 So, I soldier on. You can't edit a draft that doesn't exist, and a shitty draft can be made un-shitty. Besides, writing is one of those things that both keeps me sane and lets me be completely unhinged so I'm not going to let a little difficulty stop me from doing it. I'm too goddamn stubborn for that 😃