Writing Update

Been a while since I did one of those, eh?

Lately I've been feeling this pull back to the keyboard. Do I have inspiration? No. But I do have this urge to write that I haven't felt for a very long time. I also, while cleaning out my old room at my parents' house in recent weeks (that's a whole other blog post and also probably one of the main forces for this sudden nostalgia for the writing beast that I used to be), I found Chris Baty's much-lesser-known work Ready, Set, Novel!, a workbook for novel planning. At the time my parents gifted it to me for Christmas, I had inspiration coming out the wazoo and it was all I could do to keep up with it (remember when I'd do three novels a year? Ah, the good old days). But now... now that I've survived a college degree that did everything in its power to kill me, now that my only real writing buddy is dead, now that I've moved for good out of my parents' house... I'm tired of the seismic shifts, and I want to go back to the good old days, the way things were. Not literally, of course, I was living with an emotionally unstable caregiver and being ostracised by the church that is SUPPOSED to be loving and kind. But back to the days where I could escape by writing. Back before all the deaths. I want to time travel, just a few years. And the best way I can think of is to write again.

So what does that mean?

I've started on the workbook, though I went through my 'story ideas' file the other day and found one idea that feels promising. I'm also tossing about the idea of writing the sequel to 2253... the first actually decent novel that I wrote. I had a synopsis for a sequel sketched out before I even wrote the original in 2009, but in my early college years I started to lose the ability to write sci-fi, then I lost writing altogether after my 2016 novel. But if the goal is to time-travel, this would be the perfect choice -- the novel itself is about time travel, and this novel in particular is very strongly tied to and influenced by my dear late friend Brittney. She was the inspiration for the main character, and she also read and endorsed the original 2253 draft. Even before her death, I had planned to dedicate the book to her. If I write the sequel, I get to re-live -- just for a few more days -- the good times when she was alive and we would talk about computers and science together and we would write things and critique each other's work. It would be the continuation of a novel I have dreamed of writing since I was fifteen years old. My concern is that I'm so far removed from the person I was when I wrote it in 2009 that I wouldn't be able to get into the characters and the world of the novel properly and I wouldn't do it justice.

The other idea -- the one from my 'story ideas' file -- deals with societal and evangelical corruption, a theme I have visited several times over the years (probably because my writing is the only place I can have the illusion of even being heard, let alone getting justice). My main concern is that it would be too heavy for me to write this year, given everything that's happening in the world. I'm worn out from reading about and seeing injustice on my social media, and I don't know if writing a novel about it will make me feel worse or better. I'm also struggling to resist the temptation to overly-politicise this novel (which is difficult to avoid given the amount of social media I've been consuming lately -- no, I'm not proud of it, but I've been too worn out/unmotivated to do much else). This temptation has so far not been an issue with the 2253 sequel.

I'm not sure yet if I'm actually up to the challenge of NaNoWriMo, mentally. Yes, I did it last year, but that novel was actual garbage and I only won with fifteen minutes to spare. I have literally never cut it that close and never hated every word as thoroughly as I hated those 50k.

For now, I'll keep percolating these two ideas and probably decide at midnight on November first which one I'm going to do, like usual (I suppose it will be nice to have a 'usual' thing though -- there's so little of that left nowadays).