The Daily Report

I’ve decided to resume my formal daily posts. As much as trying to keep them up when I’d hit bottom caused more problems than it solved, they’re a useful tool for structuring my work day and work week, and it gives me a good record of both how I’m doing and what I’m doing.

Objectively, this has been a good week for me. On Monday, I created and shared two things. On Tuesday, I wrote a fairly long short story. Yet yesterday, when I couldn’t get up the focus to produce something, I felt once again like I’m stuck in an uncreative rut, that I am a disappointment and failure because I might go one single day without producing something I can point to and say, “See what I did?” This despite the fact that it was three days into the week and I had already posted three things to my Patreon.

Part of the reason I came up with the idea of posting things as Things of the Day was to make it easier to remind myself that yes, I am doing things and making things that people enjoy. The downside is that it’s become another arbitrary standard to live up to.

The reality is that no week in which I write an entire short story should be seen as a waste, no matter what happens in the rest of it. The reality is that this has been a profoundly creative and successful week, and it’s not over yet.

Mikki Kendall (author, comic book writer, and journalist) has been talking on Twitter about setting up a Patreon where she writes one short story a week. I think of her as a dynamo. I look at all the things she does and I feel humbled. And I know she can do this. But the thing is, I know I can, too. The difference is when she talks about writing a story a week, I say, “Wow, what drive! What talent!” but when I look at myself and think about a story a week, I think, “Well, that’s a start. What else have you got?”

And it’s not that I think I should be doing better than her. I look up to her. That’s just how perverse this kind of thinking can be. When someone I admire is doing something, I can recognize that it’s admirable. With me? I’m stuck with these feelings that if something comes easily, I’m not applying myself and if something takes work, I’m not good enough to do it.

Writing a short story every week for me more or less amounts to writing one in one day. It has to be the right day, I have to have the right block of time and the right idea, but when it all comes together it happens in one day. The one short story I sold externally last year was written in a day. “Walk Briskly” and my long short story in Angels of the Meanwhile were each written in a day. It’s just how I write.

But I find myself thinking, if I could write those stories in one day, and there are five work days in a week, why don’t I have five stories? Or even “just” three or four, to allow for bad days and off days.

I’ve certainly had to tell my share of ill-informed critics over the years that writing is creative labor, not mechanical labor. I can sit at a keyboard and punch buttons to make words come out, but that isn’t the same as making a story come out of it.

Like so many other things of this nature, I can explain this to others and mean it when I say it. The problem is telling it to myself.

I think maybe this is part of why I started floundering when I stopped engaging so much with people who would make the same complaints, the same arguments, the same accusations over and over again. There is no doubt in my mind that dealing with all of that was detrimental to my health and a suck of my time and energy, but it also certainly helped reinforce to me that I knew what I was doing, when I spent a good portion of every week defending myself to people who were sure that I didn’t.

So basically I’ve got two approaches that I know are unsustainable. I cannot be the queen bitch of the internet flame war and I cannot be a shrinking violet terrified equally by the lurking specters of success and failure. It seems like the obvious answer is to strike a balance, but if I knew where that balance was or how to maintain it I wouldn’t be here.

That’s not to say I don’t have any answers, or any plans. I did yesterday hit on the solution to some of my long-term plans regarding the use of Patreon and how I position and sell myself. I think this post is long enough as it is, though, and I don’t want to bury my plan of action under this meandering introspection.

The State of the Me

So, an upper respiratory thing has been making its way through my household and it’s my turn to have it apparently. A little scratchiness of the throat, a runny nose, achy joints, and a little bit of brain fog is the worst of it. Nothing serious. Not even terribly bad fatigue. If not for the aches, I’d assume my allergies were flaring up. This particular ache is always an infection thing for me.

It’s coming at an okay time, all things considered. I’ve already done quite a bit this week, so if it knocks me on my backside tomorrow then no real harm done. I’ll probably be over it by WisCon time next week.

Plans For Today

I’m about to get out of the house in part to try to clear out some cobwebs. Later this afternoon I’ll make a post outlining my plans for Patreon. I may also kick around some flash fiction ideas.

Every once in a while, I have a day where I can cut through all the B.S. in my head and just sit down and start writing. My major goal in life is to figure out how this happens and make it happen more often.

Today I woke up with a small idea for a story in my head. I sat down to try to write it. I wound up writing something else instead. That’s okay. Part of why it worked is I followed where the idea took me, not where I had expected it to take me.

The resulting story (short story, 4000 words) is now up as a patron-only piece on my Patreon page (https://www.patreon.com/AlexandraErin).

I know that part of the B.S. in my head is that the kinds of stories I like to write—and the plural is used deliberately, as it’s not like I write just one kind—don’t sell easily. They tend to be longer and more introspective. I don’t always have a traditional plot or the conflict that people are looking for. The story I wrote today falls into a niche that I’ve started calling “eldritch realism”… stories that are to horror what magical realism is to fantasy. It’s not a horror story. It’s kind of like a Lovecraft story if, when faced with something unfathomable, people in Lovecraft just shrugged and got on with their lives.

I also know that Patreon is really an ideal solution to the problem of writing things that I know people want to read but I don’t know who’d want to publish. That’s basically what it’s there for. You can support me directly, if you like to read the sorts of things I like to write, and you can read them.

But the feeling of “But how can I sell this?” still stops me dead in my tracks far too often. I know the market as it exists is not actually a referendum on anyone’s value. There are a lot of externals, a lot of hidden biases, a lot of randomness, a lot of confluences of circumstance, that flow together to make the market what it is at any given moment. I’ll tell anyone else who’s writing for themselves not to mistake the market’s actions for a judgment of their worth or the worth of their work, and I’ll mean it. I’ll mean every word and hope they believe me.

But it still gets me sometimes.

I’m having a good week so far. I’m a little gunshy about observing when I’m having a good week. It’s like I’m afraid I’m going to jinx it. But yesterday I designed and posted a monster, which sparked some inspiration that might turn into a new D&D pamphlet, and I wrote a filk song. Today I wrote 4,000 contiguous words of fiction that I’m happy with. That’s good.

Sometimes I make a post like this and people (who, I’m sure, are mostly well-meaning) tell me not to focus on the negative or stop dwelling or whatever. They miss the point that if I’m talking about my problems, that means I feel good enough to confront them. A lot of my blogs over the years have had a tagline along the lines of “quietly thinking out loud”. I’m not necessarily writing them so that people can keep up with me, though you’re welcome to do that. I’m definitely not writing anything here looking for advice, unless I explicitly say so. Most of the time, I’m just working through things, the best way that I know how.

So, my recent and unexpected travel combined with disruptions to my dietary regimen knocked me on my ass for about a week. Longer than I’d hoped/expected, even though the disruption was expected. I’m back in the saddle and will be starting the next book of Tales of MU this week or the next.

One thing I have really struggled with over the years is finding a healthy balance in terms of my self-image. At my most productive, I feel invincible and feel like a creative demigod who can do no wrong. At my least productive, I feel like a fraud and a sham who is incapable of anything. In my attempts to work past this, I vacillate between trying to find a way to ride the feelings of omnipotence or remove my reliance on them.

There’s a saying that perfect is the enemy of good; i.e., as long as you believe that no imperfection is acceptable, you will never accomplish anything and so deeds or works or acts that would otherwise be good fall by the wayside, abandoned or repudiated because they aren’t perfect.

I think this saying is appropriate when talking about how we deal with other people. It’s possible to idealize others, which leaves us in the position where we can be disappointed and even betrayed by something very small; the proverbial fly in the ointment.

But when it comes to ourselves, I believe it’s not the quest for perfection that’s the problem, exactly. I think a better maxim would be that acceptable is the enemy of good. There’s nothing wrong with striving for perfection, it’s the idea that there’s a minimum standard of acceptability that’s the problem. Absent this, you can try for perfect, you can try for better, but still be satisfied with good, or even good enough, or even the best you can do at the moment.

Actually, I used the phrase “good enough” in that last sentence, but I think that’s the whole problem right there. What’s enough? How do you know when it’s enough? If you don’t know if something is enough, the only thing you can really do is ask yourself, “Could there be more?” As long as the answer is yes, you can try to do more, raising the chances that you’ll hit that invisible and unknowable benchmark of sufficiency for which you’re striving.

The solution is not to throw out any concept of good or perfect or better (which is my favorite target/goal, not to do it right or to do it perfectly or do it well but do it better), but to throw out the idea of enough.

I’m intermittently paralyzed by the feeling that I haven’t done enough, that I haven’t written enough or inspired enough or done enough to help the people in my life or been there enough, and if this motivated me to do better, it would be fine, but it doesn’t, it just sends me into an endless spiral of trying to figure out how to begin to make up the imagined deficit.

I keep thinking of 2015 as being a ghost year or wasted year for me, a stand-out year among wasted years in a wasted life. I know this isn’t true, intellectually. 2015 was the year I became a published poet, and the year for which I received my first two Rhysling nominations. 2015 was the year I wrote two short stories that I think are the best I’ve ever written (“Walk Briskly” and “Inside, Looking Out”, which is in Angels of the Meanwhile.) It was the year of Sad Puppies Review Books and my improbable collaboration with John Scalzi. It was the year for which I made the Hugo longlist, and if I didn’t make it onto the ballot, it’s not for any reason having anything to do with me.

But fear of measuring up to some chimerical notion of “enough” still halts me in my tracks. Sometimes it keeps me from starting things. Sometimes it keeps me from finishing them. Sometimes it just keeps me from telling anyone about them.

Despite the circumstances, seeing my family the other week helped me put some of this into perspective and gave me the shot in the arm (it’s a mind-arm, I guess) that I needed. It’s just taken me a while to regain my physical equilibrium.