(Occult, in this sense, meaning hidden from view. Since this is late-mid November, you can guess that this late blog implies it’s been another surprisingly busy month and change.)
I posted a short story – VVV – onto Patreon, and it’ll go public later (December 1st). But, in the meanwhile. … You may remember the first time I mentioned it was January. While a little long for a short story at 7 000 words, it has not taken all year to write. What it has done is provide a central focus for a minor psychological crisis around my writing career.
That’s still getting rolled around with my therapist, but the not-so-short version, at the moment, looks something like this:
I have a ton of writing aspirations, and, unfortunately, most of them haven’t resulted in the success I’ve dreamed of.
What were my aspirations? Among the most concrete, I hoped to land traditional publication for Aconite Braid, I hoped to reach the earnings break-even point on Dog Country and Mouse Cage so sales of those count as profit, compared against the production costs.
(Dog Country and Mouse Cage are still in the red – they haven’t earned more than the cost of edits, covers, etc. To be clear, I literally could not do ANY of this without the support and donations I’m given through Patreon. Your support is how I’m able to do ANY of this.)
It is hard, extraordinarily hard, to put hundreds, if not thousands of hours of effort into books only to finish it all up and sit here and stare at what I’ve achieved, and realize…
… I thought I was a ‘professional’. I thought I was good at what I do. My aspirations were, I thought, aligned with that. But I’ve failed to reach them.
This shouldn’t be news – I’ve been struggling valiantly for decades at this point. Why is this coming into focus now?
I’ve been avoiding confronting it. I’ve been telling myself, hey, things haven’t been great, the last project didn’t perform as I’d hoped, so I’ll put in even more time on the next one and work extra hard and be even more perfectionist, and I won’t release anything at all until I’m certain that it’s going to pay off this time.
And in the case of VVV, even at the scale of a short story, that meant close to a year of desperately hunting for a way to make it align with my grand artistic vision that’s going to make it ‘perfect’.
And in the last few months, I’ve realized… that type of perfectionism is maladjusted.
It’s saying, ‘I am going to protect myself from ever having to confront the fact my aspirations have gone awry… by pretending that if I work even harder, I’ll reach them next time.’
And now I’m feeling like this assumption, which I’ve used as a shield for years, might not be true. I keep working harder, but I achieve less.
I previously mentioned experimenting with the scribbles site. (https://scribbles.malcolmfcross.com) In some ways, that has made the problem even worse. I’ve posted some material on there that I haven’t even done an edit pass on and I am sort of proud of some of it.
So now I have to confront difficult things about my writing career. I have to face up to the fact that putting more and more and more effort into fewer writing projects in the hopes I get it ‘perfect’ this time is holding me back.
And it’s not easy.
But it does make me hopeful I’m going to figure all this out and get more work out there.
VVV is not perfect. I want it to be perfect, but I have exhausted myself trying to make it perfect. I have other stories I want to write – a lot of them. And I need to keep searching for other ways of doing all this until I find one that works for me.
And, y’know. I’m proud of the fact I continue this valiant struggle, and even if I feel a strange shame over VVV not being perfect… I am proud to get to share it with you all.
So. I’m going to keep working on writing, and healthy practices around writing, and… with some luck, I will find more to share with y’all soon.
As ever, thank you for the support – not kidding when I say that I would be unable to achieve what I do without you all.
