2024 Writing Log, Part 38

[rynling]

- I finished and edited the final chapter of An Unfound Door! The manuscript is now complete at a tidy 60k words. I am the slowest writer and the most vicious self-editor in the world, so this is a major achievement for me.

- I edited Chapter 5, Chapter 6, and Chapter 7 of An Unfound Door. Along with Chapter 4, Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 provide a solid set of scenes that establish Agnes’s character and background while still moving at a brisk pace. The purpose of this section is to establish a tentative sense of normalcy before Fhiad’s first viewpoint chapter in Chapter 7, which provides an alternative perspective that overturns everything Agnes has taken for granted.

- I started working on “Chamomile Field,” an original short (ghost) story for Caffeine Rush, a digital zine about coffee and tea.

- My review of HoverGirls is live on Women Write About Comics (here).

- My article “Eight Short Free Horror Games on Itchio” is live on Sidequest (here).

- The developers of Ender Lilies found my essay about the game and featured it on their official Twitter account (here). That’s so fucking cool.

- This week’s post on my book review blog is about 川のほとりに立つ者は, a 2022 novel by a prolific and award-winning (yet curiously untranslated) author named Haruna Terachi. It’s set up like a mystery story, but it’s actually about how people with invisible disabilities still face incredible discrimination in Japan. In all honesty, I didn’t like this novel, but I tried to be polite while documenting its existence. If you’re interested, you can read my mini-review (here).

- I commissioned the lovely HollarityArt to create a Warrior Zelda design based on the OG Zelda, and she came up with something really fresh and interesting. You can see the design on Twitter (here).

- I drew a cute teacup ghost and posted it on Tumblr (here).

I’ve been making a lot of submissions and getting a lot of rejections, and the rejections have been making me physically sick to my stomach. I haven’t been able to eat for three weeks now. I’ve lost weight, so much so that I had to buy new pants. I’m doing okay, I guess, but there’s no way this can be healthy.

On one hand, I’m happy to have finished the first draft of my first original novel. That’s an incredible accomplishment! On the other hand, I can’t help but be frightened of what comes next.

Comments

[lassarina]

Heyyyyyy congrats on finishing your draft! That's awesome!

I'm so sorry the publishing everything is making you sick, though :(

[rynling]

Thank you so much!

The rejections really are killing me, though. It's not even depression; it's just a vague sense of unease that makes me sick to my stomach. I was reading that ADHD people tend to be especially sensitive to rejection, and I always thought that was bullshit, but now I wonder. I can't imagine what it's going to be like to be rejected to agents only to (hopefully) then be rejected by editors.

Thank god I can still publish whatever trash I want on AO3. No matter how bad my writing is, I still get comments and kudos every morning. God bless that site, honestly.

[lassarina]

Yeah, I have heard that rejection thing (it also applies to the Gifted Kid population, of which I am one.) It sucks! Hate that for us.

Hell yeah, get your comments and kudos. GET IT.

[rynling]

This is a complete tangent, but

After reading the expression "gifted kid problem" enough times on Tumblr, I did some research into gifted programs. On one hand, the way American schools refused to engage in educational tracking yet isolated one group of children while telling them that they were special before sending them back to their "regular" classes was obviously a recipe for emotional disaster later in life. On the other hand, what gifted classes actually entailed sounds magical.

I feel like, for a brief utopian period before enshittification began in earnest, a lot of the innovation that took place within the sphere of the American tech industry may have been an attempt to recreate the magic of gifted classes. Like, what if there were a workplace environment where every idea was taken seriously, and where individuals with dreams were given the time, space, and community resources to thrive? What if we asked big questions like "how do we make 3D maps of cities" and "how do we build a rapid-fire book scanning machine" and then actually answered them?

I mean, fuck. I want to be in a gifted class.

[lassarina]

It was definitely an experience. One of the things I really liked about it was that classes often went faster because the expectation was that we would get the idea and keep up. It meant I wasn't bored in class! We got to do more complex projects and it was closer to what I ended up experiencing in college. I found it really fucking strange when I got to the "real world" and the foundational assumptions of knowledge and experience were so different. Like, my very first job, I had a customer who lived on "Chaunticleer Lane." I told that to my college friends and there was much delighted cackling. I mentioned it to my coworkers and not one of them had a clue what I meant. I don't mean that they weren't smart people! They were, and they were kind and interesting to talk about! But wow what a wildly different experience. (To be fair I completely missed references to most movies, TV shows, and music stuff, and still do.)

[rynling]

To be fair I completely missed references to most movies, TV shows, and music stuff, and still do.

To be fair a lot of the mainstream American movies, TV shows, and music in the 1990s were shit. There was something very weird in the water during that decade. Homophobia was a given, as were tasteless jokes about race, but holy shit. The misogyny was off the charts. I can't imagine what it must have been like to grow up steeped in that culture.

I mean, I guess I can. I guess, for better or worse, we all lived through Gamergate.

[lassarina]

Yeah, I've just never been good at TV shows or movies. I'll sit and play a video game for 12 hours but ask me to watch one hour of scripted TV and I will usually be climbing walls.