Preemptive Retaliation

There’s a meme floating about that says something like – a panic attack is only a panic attack if it comes from the French region of Panique, otherwise it’s only Sparkling Anxiety.

So last night I couldn’t get to sleep because of Sparkling Anxiety.

I’ve been working on this novel of mine – this novel about Artificial Intelligence, and Art, and Humanity, and the weird, tense string that holds the three of them together. I’ve been trying to write three hundred words a day, aiming for a chapter a week if I can.

-Wait, hold on, that makes no sense, because that would mean that each chapter is only 2100 words long which isn’t true because they’re way, way, way longer-

I’m trying to write three hundred words a day, and so far I am succeeding because the end of the day I have three hundred more words than I had before. They are bad words. They are clunky and awkward, and take unexpected turns because I need them to. In the notebook where I plotted out an argument, I wrote, “These people are right in their distrust in the future of AI,” and then the main character, “Comes in and proves them wrong and they all fuck off.” As I wrote more and more, I find it’s more complicated then that, and a simple conversation becomes a stilted back and forth, where in a few weeks time I’ll have to go back and completely rework to make a modicum of sense.

Part of this is why I hate writing. I have an idea and jot down a vague outline to follow, and boy is it just great. A tour de force of story and character. But then when I sit down to write it out, to expand it and give the skeleton some flesh and bones, it just becomes a slog. It’s a fight, every word and every sentence, it’s a fight just to get your thoughts out on the page.

I think part of it is because it is imperfect. Every sentence I write is not going to be the final sentence, and I’ll have to go back and rework it. This in itself is not a problem, but it’s the restriction of self-editing that I’m having issue with. How can I just accept the fact that I’m putting words down good enough? Because it’s not. It’s amateur and shit and needs to be thrown out being completely repurposed.

I don’t know. I remember when I was twenty and I dropped out of university to write full time – no writing job, no prospects, no career, just the belief that a barely employed dropout would soon be raking it in.

But here I am, at thirty-five years old, with a terrible self-published book, a few short stories and nothing else to show. You’d thing in the last fifteen years I’d be a bit further on.

This post has turned pretty maudlin. Oh dear.