Taking on more challenges, a tiny step at a time
It’s time to stop procrastinating over what I really want to do
This weekend, this is the one. This is the weekend when I finally stop procrastinating and get on with some fiction work.
We’ve had several intense weekends with friends and family, and during the week I’ve either been in hospital or working on my latest PhD chapter. I submitted on Thursday, spent Friday at the physiotherapist telling him about all the exercise I’m sort-of-trying-to-do while I recover from surgery.
It was hard, really hard. I’ve had a few wonderful messages from people who remember Amnar from the old days, which has buoyed me a bit. I set myself a couple of challenges, including writing and submitting a post to a publication, but the big deal was doing the vital work of plotting something, anything, in my OneNote Amnar file.
I have a few problems here. The first is one most writers would love to have: I have a bunch of things to work on, but no idea which one to focus on first. The second is one a lot of writers have but don’t want: I’m terrified of sitting down and writing about it.
I’ve tried to keep my feelings hidden for such a long time it’s difficult to break down the walls. I’ve also been forcing myself into writing, which doesn’t work. The part of me that doesn’t want to do it because it’s still upset about What Happened Last Time waits for its opportunity and then I find I’ve spent several hours on Twitter talking about Assassin’s Creed Odyssey rather than actually plotting.
I used to be a pantser, but I’ve found the benefits of extended plotting are helping with the constant anxiety and depression. I’ve been fighting off post-submission depression since Thursday, and that hasn’t helped. Suddenly, I have the freedom to write fiction and no excuses.
I have managed to conquer a few frightening challenges: I’ve submitted an article to a publication on Medium; I wrote a review I owed the BFS; and I’ve actually sat down with World Cup matches in front of me, and worked on the first act plots for all of the things I’ve got swirling around in my head. I’m not sure whether keeping up with all three is wise, but this is the way I’m going at the moment. The point is to do something, not to try to force what I do beyond facing the fear and the churning emotion when I open up the OneNote file.
The only way to manage the terror, to reduce it, is to face it consciously. It doesn’t have to be in massive doses. What I’ve done so far will only mean anything to people who read Amnar back-in-the-day, but nevertheless, here is what is swirling through my head:
Amnar: After talking to a dear friend who read through God of Elephants in 2016, I’m probably starting in the wrong place. I’ve rolled all the way back to when Maali was 20 and about to become a Servant. I have two ideas here, one a full-blown book, and the other either a short story or a series.
Five Empires: I’ve spent about a year thinking about this, since a friend recommended I start there. I sort-of agree but my heart is pulling me back to Amnar. In the first part of the year I wrote nearly 70k of a first book, but I’ve had to scrap that and go back to the start, polishing and polishing the plot all the way.
Not expecting myself to write, just to focus on tiny details of plot has helped get past the block. It is still immensely painful, but I can see the progress there. The next step is to develop some sort of consistency, rather than disappearing into the ether for an age under the guise of doing the washing up or writing the PhD.
The Charm Quark is the pseudonym for Joely Black, a writer and academic with an obsession for dragons. She has a PhD in Historical Geography from Lancaster University, and is now working on a second in Classics from the University of Manchester. The best part of it is telling people she studies Ancient Magic for a living. She also writes fantasy fiction under the titles Amnar and Five Empires. She lives in Manchester with her partner, Dragon’s Claws, a cat and the best two rats in the world.
