I don’t know the right balance to strike between ‘talk about your failures and vulnerabilities because that’s authentic and interesting and relatable’ and ‘don’t project so much self-shit-talk that you reverse-wingman yourself to your own audience.’
‘Reverse-wingman’ is my new term for the concept of that type of sabotage, I guess, it just rolled out of my brain.
What I’m procrastinating from saying is:
It’s looking laughably unlikely that I’ll have -deep breath- -wow can’t believe the convention is to type unpublished works in all caps this makes it more embarrassing i know i could just ignore the convention but also i kinda like it- ACCESS ALL AREAS finished this month like I promised you / taunted myself that I would.
SORRY
there’s just been a lot going on, y’all. Revisions are strange. It’s a learning process. Very interesting. This sounds sarcastic but it isn’t.
This short story is not ready to be read by people. Full stop. For this purpose, I don’t count as part of ‘people.’ It’s not that the people couldn’t handle it for health and safety purposes (my first drafts are rough as hell but not that bad) (right?) (no one will know! for now), it’s that if people read it now — people I know, for fuck’s sake — my ego would suffer such critical damage that my sharing the story at this point would be arguably an act of self-harm. It’d wouldn’t be a difficult argument to make, either.
HOWEVER, this story will at some point be ready to be read by people, and at that point you’ll get to read it if you want. I have plans. After spending the last days/weeks agonising about the second draft (how do I do this? what should happen here? what if it was X? wait no, Y! no, back to X, wait. am I overthinking this? I’m definitely overthinking this. I’m wringing the life from this via excessive agonising. Fuck, I forgot to try and ENJOY MYSELF when that is crucial to creating, like. My best fucking work lmao) (also it’s fun) I wrote out an outline for the second draft that is not the first outline I’ve attempted (far from it) but it is the first outline I’ve felt this satisfied with.
Well, maybe I felt similar levels of satisfaction once before, i.e. when the idea for this short story jumped into my head practically fully-formed. But back then I was a naive idiot who thought that this would be a simple and not-extremely-long process.
AUGH ANYWAY
In the time between the last update and this one, I’ve mostly been agonising over how to start the damn action in the story. Like, how to play the opening premise. There a bunch of ways to do it and because it’s the second draft, not the first, I officially care More About Quality now and I overthink. EVENTUALLY I have settled on something I like. That was in that outline I mentioned. Man, I hope y’all like it too, the ones who will read the porno I am writing.
Since starting this newsletter, it has actually crossed my mind to consider regretting making the first short story I overshare about a pornographic one because the thing is, THE THING IS (imagine me gesturing dramatically and slamming my arm against furniture in the process, causing an entirely avoidable entirely anticlimactic hubristic injury)
the thing is
when you make art that’s, shall we say, bad, it’s about ten thousand times worse when said art is horny. Then again, there are some bad things that are probably made good because it’s horny, that’s sort of the concept of camp, right? I read Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp once.
I don’t think that will be the case for this short story, though, if I release it and it turns out it’s crap (wow, imagine. if my judgement was that bad. and I wrote such that you all enjoyed reading my newsletter ramblings but disliked my actual fiction lmao what a vibe). And I sure don’t WANT that to be the case.
This is all a horrifically long-winded way of saying: while I’m not super jazzed about this process being so time-consuming/etc. (SOMETIMES THE ART JUST TAKES TIME apparently? lkefkjgoirjogrj), I am fucking glad that I’m just gonna deliver late on my November promise rather than force myself to pull something together that will be punctual but unacceptably inferior to what I know I could do with more time.
Sometimes you gotta decide that something’s done, instead of endlessly working on it forever. Sometimes you gotta let go of perfectionism and just release the damn thing.
I am a very loud anti-perfectionism preacher. I’m telling you that so you’ll believe me when I say that
THIS IS NOT ONE OF THOSE TIMES. I DO NEED AND SHOULD KEEP WORKING ON THIS. AND IT’LL TAKE LONGER THAN THE NEXT WEEK. God that sounds long. In my defence, I do things that aren’t writing, too. For some reason.
Anyway, MAYBE I’ll have the short story ready by Christmas and then its release will be a yuletide/December Celebration occasion. Ha. I could shoe-horn in a bunch of Christmas stuff last-minute. (But I won’t. Thank fuck.)
I feel like I’m fumbling around in the foliage half-blind, forging new ground in probably highly inefficient, perhaps comically inefficient ways. That’s what doing revisions for the first time feels like.
On the day of the Queen’s funeral I got trapped in Hyde Park (long uninteresting story) and spent some time sitting at a kind of crowd wellbeing/assistance stall, borrowing their phone charger. To kill time while charging my phone, I was marking up edits on my printout of ACCESS ALL AREAS’ draft one. And one of the staff was like ‘are you revising?’ and I was like ‘yeah’ and then I realised she thought I was STUDYING as in for school/uni and that led to me telling her I was editing a short story I’d written, and she asked what it was about (why do they always DO that) and I was like ‘vampire musicians’ and she was like ‘what instruments do they play?’ and I was like ‘guitar, drums, keyboards’ and that was it. And then when I left the stall, she wished me luck with my story.
On that note I’m going to go. This has been the-most-like-a-straight-up-diary-entry update so far by far. I think. I hope you enjoyed it in some way.
P.S. I did a vlog. Please read the description. I spent way too long coming up with that description and also this horrible very fun title that I enjoyed a lot and also slightly hate myself for: