Been a While
42itous reminded me that I basically disappeared completely off of LJ. I moved to dreamwidth without really any fanfare, didn't accept LJ's ToS, and then also kinda disappeared off of DW.
I went back and accepted the ToS to login one last time and because I missed LJ. But it's a sad shell of what it once was. I don't think DW can ever come close, but I still need a place where I don't have to worry about putting any filter over my words, where I can just write stream-of-conscious, whatever's on my mind at the time, about any part of my life. For me, LJ started as a public diary and has continued to be there for me when I navigated all sorts of messy parts of life.
I'm still on Wordpress, but both those blogs (speckofawesome and KADoore) are pretty filtered. Speck is mostly for baby stuff and lofty goals. KADoore is my author blog, so it's even more filtered.
But here, here I am me. Messy, anxious, flawed, rambling at length about whatever is currently at the forefront of my thoughts. Occasionally DitLs, occasionally just catch-up posts.
This is a catch-up post.
I've been quiet because I've been busy, but not in any exciting way. Just in a spending-every-free-minute writing sort of way. Wake up before baby? Write. Stay up after baby goes to sleep? Write. Baby takes a nap? Write. Lunch break at work? Wash dishes I mean: Write.
I'm not complaining, not one bit. But my life is probably the least exciting of anyone's right now.
BUT I did make my deadline. In fact, several days early. All of that writing and homebody-ing paid off. I turned my manuscript in for book one and now I can breathe again. I did it, the thing I've been afraid of ever since my agent contacted me one week after giving birth and to let me know Tor was interested. I took the tiniest seed of an idea and turned it into a polished manuscript in just under eight months.
This was a really big moment for me. It's not just that I wrote a book. I've been writing books for years, decades. I proved to myself that I could do this, that I could write under contract, that I could trust my process and that the ideas would be there. Every step of the way was filled with doubt and fear, but I kept my head down and pushed through and here I am.
Hitting this deadline was very important to me. Even if I could push it back if it came down to it, doing so would have allowed doubt to creep in and take hold. I needed to prove to myself that I could do what Real Authors (TM) do, what I'd been practicing on my own for almost a decade - write under contract in a set timeframe. And apparently under some of the most trying circumstances possible - new baby, new city, depression, extreme sleep deprivation, and isolation. I'm sure it could have been worse, and maybe there were times I should have fucking chilled, but now I have no excuses going forward. I know I can do this now.
So when, inevitably, doubt and its friends impostor syndrome and anxiety return, I have a very big stick I can wield to keep them at bay.
Now, finally - not when I got an agent, not when I got a contract - I feel like I can call myself an author. There's no little twinge of guilt or shame or fear. I've proven it sufficiently to myself, which is more than enough for anyone else. I can do this.
Whether or not I'll actually succeed at doing this as an actual career... we'll see. A lot of it is luck. A lot of it is timing. I could still fuck it up in some new and exciting way. But at least as far as the writing part goes, I think I've got this.