Deep Breathing

I tried to edit "Soultainted" this month, and it did not go well.

Well. It's the end of May.

I was going to wait one more week to give you all an update on my editing, but there's no point, because I have made approximately...

... zero progress on Soultainted.

I know all authors get to a point with their books where it feels hopeless--where they hate it all and seriously consider burning their computers and walking into the void to become one with the emptiness.

I know writing a book is hard. I've written several at this point. The creative high doesn't last, and at some point, Karen has to come in and fix everything, and honestly, Karen is a bitch.

I know that I've been here before. Several times.

But that does not make it any easier or untangle the very real mess I have in front of me.

Status Report: Puzzle Pieces Everywhere

Backing up a bit, I will give you... well, not an update, but maybe a status report on the book.

Right now, Soultainted is about 165,000 words. That's longer than any of the previous three books, and there are pieces I still need to write at the end. This means I need to cut, and I'm trying to figure out where. There are several candidates on the table, but of course, they're all darlings, which means I have to be ruthless. That's hard.

I also feel like the book is light on setting, and really, there's a lot of opportunity for setting in this book. The problem is that setting is not my forte--character is. I would love to just camp out in the middle of long passages of dialogue and let these fractured characters fling sarcastic comments and acidic insults and sexy innuendos and inspiring speeches and gentle words of comfort around, but that gets old. The book needs more depth, and I think a lot of it needs to come from setting.

I don't like writing setting.

The first several chapters--the set up--is fine. The middle is all there, though it might need to be rearranged. I know where everything is supposed to end, but when I open it up and try to write those bits, the words just don't come.

I feel like I bought a 1,000-piece puzzle of blue sky meeting ocean waves with one tiny sailboat on the horizon, and I found the corners and some of the edge pieces, but no matter what I do, I cannot figure out which blues are what or how to turn them so they fit.

So far, okay, yes, I've been here before. I might just need to let it sit longer. Fine.

But there's more.

There's a Lot of Garbage on This Struggle Bus

Lately, I've been struggling with finding joy or purpose in any of the writing I do--client work or fiction.

On the freelance side, I don't think it's the clients or the work; I have great clients and interesting projects. I have wondered if I should step up my game and find more work, but I look at the landscape and I'm just discouraged and depressed. There is no shortage of content writers who are probably better or cheaper than I am, but also, AI is everywhere, and I just can't wrap my head around embracing that for any part of my work.

But most of my current discouragement comes from personal stuff, I think. I have been trying to figure out what's going on here--I mean, aside from *waves hand vaguely at the universe* everything.

For one thing, there's the combination of having an empty nest at the same time that I tripped over the menopause cliff and landed at the bottom. I'm still a little broken and bloody and trying to figure out how to climb back up to some kind of reasonably functional plateau in this incredibly quiet house.

I'm also looking down the road and wondering what I might need to accommodate in the next few years. Like so many of my generation, I have rapidly aging parents and in-laws at the same time that I have 20-something kids who are still settling and need coaching and support here and there. The road I'm looking at might involve a lot more travel in the next few years, a second homebase of some kind, or some combination of both. I'm not sure how to accommodate writing goals with all that looming, and it's hard to commit to a direction that I might have to radically change on a dime.

In the midst of all that, I'm facing a personal crisis of trust. I've never been a highly trusting person, but over the last couple of years, my ability to trust other humans has fallen off a cliff (much like my hormones). In recent weeks, anything I had left in there took a huge hit, and I'm back to thinking that maybe that whole ornamental hermit thing deserves a second look.

So it's possible that maybe there's just TOO MUCH in my head to really manage editing right now. Maybe all this stuff is just making too much noise and crowding out my writing and editing instincts.

I don't know.

But.

Inhale... Exhale...

*deep breath*

This is temporary.

It's always temporary.

Yes, some of the challenges are very new to me. I've never been an empty-nester navigating menopause before, and I'm stuck in a weird kind of familial/professional ambiguity where I'm not sure where I should spend my time.

But other challenges are old and familiar; I've always had trust issues, so feeling like I can't trust anyone now is nothing new. I guess I'd just hoped that a smaller community and some new connections would afford an opportunity to get past some of those.

I'm trying to bolster myself with the facts I can hang onto. I'm not as down as I was at the end of 2016, and I clawed my way out of that--slowly, painfully, using my fingernails to hold on to the baby root systems in the pit while I looked for a toehold to just boost myself a few inches.

And I've had my definitive crisis of faith, too, back in 2012 or so. Jesus and I worked that one out, and I don't feel like I need to rehash all of that again. (Thank goodness, because that really was a dark place.)

I have some reasonably good personal habits dialed in. I've gotten more adventurous with cooking, so The Man and I are eating pretty well (usually). The Man is in a good place with his work, which provides the bulk of our income. My kids are healthy and relatively capable of navigating their adulthood with a little nudging or support. And the Bestie and I have a short, fun trip to look forward to in September.

And I shouldn't say I don't trust anybody. I do have The Man, the Bestie, and my mom. That's not nothin'. And while I don't expect my kids or acquaintances to be confidantes, exactly, I do have a small network of people I can mostly rely on to do what they say they'll do and not throw me under the bus. Probably.

So... I guess instead of beating myself up over the lack of editing progress, I'm just going to accept where I am right now and try to embrace the tension and ambiguity.

If there's one thing GenX is good at, it's resilience.

And I am nothing if not a product of my generation.

So I guess I'm back on the blog/Substack with new stuff going forward. I'm going to try to fit in the editing as I can and see if I can get Karen to behave. As with so many things, it's two steps forward, one step back for a while.

Or maybe the opposite.

Maybe it's just an elegant and enthusiastic cha-cha.

(I'm not very good at dancing.)

In any case, I'll see y'all next week.