Well, it’s about that time again for my unofficial monthly blog post. I don’t plan to stick to a schedule when posting on here, perhaps someday I will, but for now, I just post when there’s something to talk about.
I tend to think that my life is wholly uninteresting. I wake up, go to work, and go back to sleep, which is most of my days. I wish my life was more interesting, but there just isn’t a whole lot to do that interests me, that I’ve found. Then, of course, there’s the depression. I’ve struggled with depression for a long time and I ultimately think that I’m in a much better place mentally than I have been in years, but some days are harder than others and truthfully the last few weeks have been harder than usual. There are a lot of things coming for me soon which require a lot of preparation and change and that can get very overwhelming for me, though I know the outcome will be worth the stress. My life is uninteresting, so I fill my days with things that interest my brain, even though I know it isn’t the most healthy for me. Social media is so easy to be sucked into and I often spend hours on end scrolling. It’s entertaining, but I wouldn’t say it makes me happy. It’s just easy. I’m the kind of person that doesn’t enjoy being alone with my thoughts, so I will often put on a podcast or a video or tv show on in the background, just to fill the silence. Then I get sucked in and am no longer productive. It’s hard to balance productivity and things that bring me joy, especially when feeling a bit less than myself.
In the last few weeks, I bought a new video game and I’m obsessed with it. When I don’t have the energy or motivation to do anything else, I can play it and it genuinely does make me happy. I still struggle with feeling inadequate when I don’t do anything other than play my game most of the day, but it feels better than the constant scrolling. In my little game, I have my own life there and there’s so much to do that only I want to do, not influenced by anyone else’s thoughts or opinions. On social media, I see a lot of people living these “perfect” and “ideal” lives, something I’ve never even come close to having and it leads to a lot of comparisons. The comparison then leads my brain to spiral. “If I’m not able to have a life that looks like that, I’m not worthy. I’m not enough.” The reality is, I am enough. Everything that I’m able to do every day is enough. Someday I hope to have a more interesting day-to-day life and someday I hope that I will be able to accomplish more in 24 hours than I am currently, but what I can do now is enough. Social media is staged. The people pushing this perfect and idyllic lifestyle probably don’t live like that from day to day.
Circling back around to the title of this post, I have writer’s block. Today is the second day where I have left my house to go work on my book at a coffee shop and I’ve stared at a blank page, just trying to figure out what to put on it. I have a finished outline of the plot structure, I know how the story goes. I could explain to you in great detail the characters, everything that happens to them, the setting, the mood, I could tell you everything. However, for some reason, I can’t put the story on the page right now. Everything that comes out seems so poorly written, compared to the plans I have and what I have already written. I truthfully haven’t even reached 20k words yet. My book doesn’t even have a title. I am so passionate about this story and I want to see it on shelves someday, but I can’t get it out. Why is that? Probably because I fear failure. I have always feared failure. In everything I do, I try to rationalize what I can do to not fail. In a professional sense or even in the sense of failing a friend. I don’t know if anyone will ever read my book. I want more than anything for everyone to read my book and all the other books I have planned in the back of my head. I’ve wanted to tell stories since I was a kid. I used to spend my free time in elementary school filling composition notebooks with stories and characters and ideas. I want this to be my life, but I don’t know how to get to that point. I know that before I get there, I will deal with a lot of rejection, which is also a fear. Even though I’ve come to terms with the fact that not everyone will like what I’ve written, I don’t want to submit my manuscript to a publisher and have them tell me they hate it. Yet at the same time, I want nothing more than to have a finished manuscript to start sending to publishers, which brings it back around to writing.
So I sit down to write. I go over my notes. I read through my outline. I turn to my manuscript and get ready to type. Nothing comes out. All the creative ideas I had when I wrote the outline are just non-existent. Combatting this is difficult, where to begin? I read somewhere that a good thing to do would be to write about the block itself, so that is what I’m doing here. I think it’s maybe helped. Time will only tell. I’m going to read when I get home, I think.
In one of my last posts I talked about a book I had started reading, unfortunately, I took a bit of a break on that one to read a different book from my list: The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton. I’m about halfway through it at this point and I think it’s pretty good. The beginning was a bit hard for me to get through, it felt very slow. Now that I’m into it, though, I’m enjoying it a lot more. I recently purchased an e-reader, the Kobo Libra 2. As much as I adore my books, I’m trying to downsize my things and want to resist the urge to buy new books plus I find it a bit easier for my brain to read on an e-reader, since purchasing it. It will never replace the feeling of owning physical copies of my favorite books, but it is a great way for me to absorb new stories and I’m grateful for it. Perhaps when I finish The Devil and the Dark Water I will write a review of it here.
To not leave this post on such a melancholy note, I’ve put together some images from my inspiration board for this book I’m working on. I’d like to talk a bit about what it’s going to be about without giving too much away. The story follows a young woman, Lorelle, who has recently inherited her Grandfather’s bookstore after his untimely death six months before the beginning of the story. She is doing well navigating the grief of losing her last remaining family member and being a business owner when two little boys she used to babysit go missing, only to reappear later that same day, seemingly different. As more children fall victim to this same pattern, Lorelle begins to unravel something darker at play.
Thank you for being here,
Kayti