(no subject)
I can't count the number of blogs I've started in my head, in notepad on my phone, or even here on LJ.
It's been almost a year since I finished one.
It used to be that if I had an idea, I rushed to get it out. I'd blog it, and people would respond, and then I'd go on to the next thing. Breaking that habit has been excruciating. I feel like at some point I decided that if something was worth writing, it was worth growing and editing. Good ideas needed to be allowed to have time, I rationalized, but here we are and it's been almost a year since I put a real piece of writing into the world. I even have a hard time writing Facebook statuses of any depth, because I don't want to give that much of myself away.
I always said that LJ was the only thing I stuck with. I started in 2001. A dozen years is enough for anything to wear out, I'd say, but the truth is, even though I haven't been blogging, I have been writing.
In July of 2012, I started the real work on what has evolved into a novel. It's a coming of age story, a year in the life of a very lost young woman named Hannah who is languishing in a boring job when she reconnects with one of her college professors. The professor has a new career writing sex books and offers our heroine a door into a world she'd never dreamed of. Hannah steps through into a free-fall that takes her from the red light district of Amsterdam to the coke-fueled parties of Hollywood to an anonymous hotel room in the heartland where everything starts to break apart.
It's a story about the messy, tragic ways we try to connect to each other and the people we become while we're trying to figure out who we are.
It's a love story between two flawed people who are more comfortable fucking than they are talking about their feelings.
It's full of kinky sex, which I think walks the line between "kinky sex that furthers the plot" and "kinky sex because kinky sex."
I'm 60k words in and have another 35 or 40 to go. I know where it's going and the ending has already been written, but it will take a lot of work to fill in the gaps.
At some point, this book will be done and I'll have to let it go. By then, I will probably be two years into the process of writing it.
I am absolutely terrified that it's garbage. I wake up in the middle of the night gripped with fear that I'll release it to the world and the world will call me a freak. I worry that strangers will think that I'm a slut and acquaintances will think that it's autobiographical, but not as much as I worry that my father might read it at all.
I have never been this scared to release a piece of art.
A friend once told me that I was like a house. I'd gleefully show everyone the dirty laundry on the floor of the bedroom and the dishes in the sink in the hopes that they wouldn't notice that the attic door was locked.
This book is what lives in my attic.
I'm hitting "post" before I talk myself out of this.
Love,
Beth
It's been almost a year since I finished one.
It used to be that if I had an idea, I rushed to get it out. I'd blog it, and people would respond, and then I'd go on to the next thing. Breaking that habit has been excruciating. I feel like at some point I decided that if something was worth writing, it was worth growing and editing. Good ideas needed to be allowed to have time, I rationalized, but here we are and it's been almost a year since I put a real piece of writing into the world. I even have a hard time writing Facebook statuses of any depth, because I don't want to give that much of myself away.
I always said that LJ was the only thing I stuck with. I started in 2001. A dozen years is enough for anything to wear out, I'd say, but the truth is, even though I haven't been blogging, I have been writing.
In July of 2012, I started the real work on what has evolved into a novel. It's a coming of age story, a year in the life of a very lost young woman named Hannah who is languishing in a boring job when she reconnects with one of her college professors. The professor has a new career writing sex books and offers our heroine a door into a world she'd never dreamed of. Hannah steps through into a free-fall that takes her from the red light district of Amsterdam to the coke-fueled parties of Hollywood to an anonymous hotel room in the heartland where everything starts to break apart.
It's a story about the messy, tragic ways we try to connect to each other and the people we become while we're trying to figure out who we are.
It's a love story between two flawed people who are more comfortable fucking than they are talking about their feelings.
It's full of kinky sex, which I think walks the line between "kinky sex that furthers the plot" and "kinky sex because kinky sex."
I'm 60k words in and have another 35 or 40 to go. I know where it's going and the ending has already been written, but it will take a lot of work to fill in the gaps.
At some point, this book will be done and I'll have to let it go. By then, I will probably be two years into the process of writing it.
I am absolutely terrified that it's garbage. I wake up in the middle of the night gripped with fear that I'll release it to the world and the world will call me a freak. I worry that strangers will think that I'm a slut and acquaintances will think that it's autobiographical, but not as much as I worry that my father might read it at all.
I have never been this scared to release a piece of art.
A friend once told me that I was like a house. I'd gleefully show everyone the dirty laundry on the floor of the bedroom and the dishes in the sink in the hopes that they wouldn't notice that the attic door was locked.
This book is what lives in my attic.
I'm hitting "post" before I talk myself out of this.
Love,
Beth