June 23, 2021
Day 263, Week 37
- Words: 76,502
- Revision v4 Chapters: All
- Emotional State: Terrified
The Book
In case you were wondering, there are many strains of imposter syndrome. You think it’s just the one where you suck, but there are other variants, such as: your book idea sucks, you can’t write, your prose is simplistic, why do you think anyone would want to read this, this has no depth, and the all-encompassing, you just suck at everything.
I’ve been bouncing between ‘your prose is simplistic’ and the ‘you just suck at everything’ for the past few days. This is for two reasons:
- I’m reading Meryvn Peake’s Gormenghast series. His prose is dense, complex, and needs careful reading to fully capture the image he creates. It took me a bit to get into the rhythm of it, but it’s quite lovely. And absolutely nothing like mine.
- Feeding off of my prose imposter syndrome variant, I then decided to broaden it and capture the you’re-not-great-at-anything demon who has been quietly chewing on my ego in the background. Because, you see, I’m a surface skimmer – good at many things, but not great at anything. And mostly, that’s okay, but sometimes it comes up to bite me…like now.
All of this is being driven by my looming due date. My book is due at the copy editor’s by 5 pm on Friday. This Friday. There will be NO changes or additions made to it after that point. I have 2 days to either turn this into a masterpiece of prose or accept it’s the best I can do and hope it’s not as bad as it appears to be when compared to Titus Groan.
I need more time.
But if I spend any more time on this text, I’m going to hate it. I’m already getting a bit bored, but that’s after the 20th read, so I think anyone would be at this point.
Oh boy. This is way more scarier than I thought it would be…and I already expected it to be terrifying.
Marketing & Life
Moving on to safer topics, ones that make me a bit less uncomfortable. I’ve done some outreach. I’ve even reached out to more famous authors for quotes for my cover and marketing, which is a nice little success for me. I’m doing a review of a fellow author’s book and we’re planning on review swapping, which is also nice.
And I’ve also put together a playlist for the book. I focused on lyrics mainly, but also wanted to like the songs chosen. It’s an interesting mix of be brave, I want to be myself, you can’t break me, you can’t take me over, fear my monster, and I guess I’m alright with this.
And of course, it’s in the proper order. There is no way a child of the ’80s is going to create a mix that is higgledy-piggledy put together. Every song must play in its spot. It also follows the arc of the book, so there’s that.
Did I mention before that I like to make things complicated? Yeah.
In other news, I caved. Last week I mentioned trying to avoid buying a new journal to create my version of the bullet journal. Yep. One trip to Staples to print out my manuscript later and I’ve got a new journal, some new pens (I did buy the cheapest ones), and some multi-colored post-it notes.
And now I want to buy a new gadget to write on. Because my eight-year-old Mac, my four-year-old gaming/work laptop, and my Linux-based year-old desktop tower aren’t enough places for me to write. But…it’s so cool. And cheap.
“It” is the Alphasmart Neo2. It’s a word processor from the 1990s. It has a keyboard, 8 files to save to, and a 4 line screen. And that’s it. You can type on it, save it, and then when you want to be able to actually edit it, you connect it to your computer and it literally types word for word the contents of your file.
Seriously, it’s cool. But I don’t actually need another gadget. So why do I want one?
I have no idea. I blame it on copy editing.
To read more of my weekly whine fests and writing journal journey posts, click here.