Plus and minus

[truepenny]

Plus: New bread pans! One of my old ones has gone from non-stick to stick, so it was clearly time. And these are very pretty. And red! I'm very curious to find out what the loaves they produce are like.

Minus: I've figured out why I'm not getting any writing done. It's because every time I go to work on something, some part of my brain says, quietly but very emphatically, This is a stupid story.

Now, rationally, I know that's not true. The stories I'm trying to work on right now are neither more nor less stupid than any of the forty-some stories I've published--which is to say: No, they aren't stupid. But knowing that and feeling it are two different things. I'm not quite sure how to deal with this, because it's a really neat piece of self-sabotage: not only does it make working on stories seem pointless, but it makes asking anyone else for help seem equally pointless. What can they do except tell you it's stupid?

I suspect this is partly fallout from having Ace dump me last year--and although Tor was very careful and kind and explicit about the fact that they love my writing and want to publish me, it still hurts like a son-of-a-bitch to know that my career is so fucked up that the only way to do it is to give up my name. I know that it's not a judgment on me as a person, or on me as a writer, but I can't help the fact that it feels like one. And that, in turn, makes it hard to have any confidence in my stories.

So, yeah. If anybody needs me, I'll be over here fainting in coils.

Comments

[heresluck]

I know this feeling so well -- in other contexts than the writing of fiction, obviously -- and I was sitting here trying to figure out how we get through it, when we do. (Because we do.)

And -- honestly, the only thing I can come up with is at that some point we shrug and say "Fuck it, I'm doing this anyway, even if it's stupid, because I just want to, so there." We've talked about this before, right? About how there are only a few things in this world about which I can say that I love doing them as much as I love having done them. And that's the thing I have to remember when my brain gets recalcitrant. (And I've seen you like that, too, when you're writing and it's all humming along, or when it's NOT all humming along but you've found an interesting problem to solve. You love this, remember? The characters, the worlds. Even, sometimes, the process of figuring out the stories that go with them.)

There's no reasoning about feelings; logic doesn't work. So at some point we just have to give both logic and the feelings the finger. (I do love the thought of fighting irrationality with immaturity.)

In conclusion: here, have a pummelo.

[coffeeem.livejournal.com]

Excellent advice. And I also get a kick out of the idea of fighting irrationality with immaturity. *g*