All That Matters

Where I've been (at the library)

Literally here.

I am here, dear readers, but also not here. I open Substack every so often to write but then I close it again. What is there to say when the world is on fire everywhere you look and everything you want to say comes up short and even if you were able to put it into words you don’t want to add to the noise because the noise—the noise!—is deafening and mostly you just want (need) to be quiet.

Speaking of quiet, I have found it at the library. I go there almost every morning at 9:00, which is when it opens, and I sit down in a seat I have to come to call “mine” even though some mornings someone else is sitting there. This used to freak me out so much because I was convinced that I could only write if I was sitting in my real seat and taking a different seat meant not writing and that would give me an actual stomachache and then I would have no choice but to shoot secret daggers at my seat usurper and get so distracted by self-loathing and also loathing of the seat usurper that I would lose a day of work.

But that was before.

These days, thankfully, I no longer care which seat I take. If someone is in my seat, I take a different seat. All that matters is that I’m there, in the library, where it is quiet and where everyone around me is working and I can open my laptop and the document I’m working on and feel free.

Six years after writing the first draft of my novel in less than five months, I recently finished the second draft. After years of torturing myself about whether I was even capable of writing a coherent novel, after years of thinking about the story, the characters, the plot, the theme and interrogating myself about all of this stuff at all hours of the night, having breakthroughs about their motivations and their character and how to build suspense and cycling through a lot (A LOT) of destructive self-doubt, I finally just sat down and started working on it¹.

That was in early March, if you’re interested in these things. Since early March, I restructured the book dramatically, cut 40,000 words, balanced out the narrative evenly between the three main characters and am now finally able to see the book. Before, the best way I can describe it is that when I tried to imagine the book, it was cloudy and foggy and difficult to grasp and even though I had a very clear plot, everything else was so blurry that it made me feel overwhelmed and frantic and depressed.

For a very long time, this made me feel like such a failure, regardless of how well other things were going in my life, and that feeling of failure ate away at me in a lot of different ways. Now the book is palpable, graspable, visible to me—in fact, it’s like I’ve put glasses on after fumbling around blindly for so long—and this clarity makes me feel like I could levitate. It also makes me want to cry—with relief and elation and not a small amount of grief for the hard time I gave myself for so long.

I call this latest version of the book the second draft, but of course that sort of obscures the many other versions that I got halfway into and then dropped for a multitude of tedious reasons. Six years—and many false starts²—lie between these two drafts, but I can see now that even though I thought I was wasting time, I was actually doing quite a bit. All that thinking/ruminating/obsessing was building the book out in my head and it’s partly what enabled me to sit down in early March and get this draft finished in less than three months. Not that speed is the point! It isn’t at all. I expected this to take a lot longer, frankly. But, just like last time, once I got started, things went very quickly.

Now I get to work on perfecting what I’ve got. There is still quite a bit of work ahead of me, and I know there will be hard days, but I feel a lot more confident than I used to. But I also feel lucky, not just because I like the book enough that I feel privileged to work on it, but because when despair about the state of our world overtakes me, fleeing to my book saves me. For a long time, thinking about my book filled me with such complicated, sometimes unbearable emotions. Getting to the point where it feels like a haven is heavenly.

So anyway, that’s where I’ve been. Writing, writing, writing. For once, for now, not anywhere where you can read it, but maybe, hopefully, one day.

1. This is also when I started taking Elvanse.

2. Oh, and an entire cookbook!