Alright so I understand I’m still an aspiring author in every sense of the word. I’ve adopted the mentality where I know I must act the part I hope to play, so I try not to make a lot of self-deprecating jokes regarding my progress. This is more pertinent as an attempt to stay away from the deep self-reflecting – dare I say, emo – posts of the past.
I have an idea for an update where I was going to share the changes I’ve made in my tentative release schedule. I don’t think Seth’s Novel or Dean’s will be among the first releases – depending on how Percy Jane shapes up.
To get to the whole point of this – and I apologize to those tired of hearing me be a little negative about things – I’ve been failing. Failing so hard recently. Last week I made a joke about how the time spent writing my entry could have been spent either editing or writing. I still feel strong about having something new posted here once per week, give or take a few days.
I’ve been stuck and it only dawned on me today what has me in such a shape. The absolute worst part of writing is the self-doubt
I would love to sit here and tell you, “my overnight job is so taxing and my sleeping is so out of whack it’s hard to find time to edit.” – that’s bull. I’ve sunk 20 hours into Fallout since picking it up five days ago.
Next up is the excuse, “Man, I just got Fallout 4. What do you expect? The game is absolutely amazing you’d be inhuman to not play it.” – that’s not valid either. Well yes, the game is amazing and I have been playing it, but it’s a symptom. It’s not the cause.
Somewhere in the middle of this ditch-digging process of editing this manuscript I lost it. I lost the confidence in my work, the chances of success, and more importantly the valuable time I have been wasting trying to see this come to light.
The thing is evidently self-doubt is very natural. Everyone – even the well established – will feel it’s debilitating pressure.
I feel indebted to podcasts like the Dead Robots (and the Facebook community for it) for helping me stay focused for so long – it was only a matter of time before I hit this rut.
All is not lost though – I didn’t want to come on here and tell you all that I haven’t opened Scrivener in four days, and my NaNoWriMo project is still at zero words on Day 15. At least, I didn’t want to do that and leave it at that.
I made sure to edit another chapter in the manuscript before writing this. You know what? It felt good. I think this self-doubt in the end was as much about being burned out than anything else. I was plugging away for 5-8 hours every day and it got to be a little much.
So thanks for sticking out through the post, next week I’ll fill you all in more on what I project my release schedule will look like in 2016.
November Goals – To be completed before November 30th
Edit the final seven chapters of Seth’s manuscript
Win NaNoWriMo – 50,000 words done on Kruegers.
Yeah, Writer’s Life!
Cheers
~Devin
The World Is Broken 