The past year and a half (yeesh) has been this weird, motivating-one-week and demoralizing-the-next week time of my life. I've been trying to get back into just about everything in my life, and yet this one part has been eluding me. I want to try and make a post a week for now, I think, though I feel like I've made that promise to myself ad nauseum for half a year.
Things I am:
- still in Korea
- still writing
...and not much else is the same. I've gotten a lot worse at keeping in touch with people, but I feel a lot worse about it when it happens. At this point it feels like if I try to talk to someone they'll be annoyed I reached out since it seems like I don't really care all that much. Truth: I am just really bad at remembering. I wish friendships had an Amnesty month like the library. "Heyyyy friend, I brought a can of corn, can we pretend I didn't not answer your FB message for three months?"
IF YOU ARE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE, PLEASE PING MY FACEBOOK AGAIN, I SWEAR TO GOD THERE ISN'T A SOUL ON THIS GREEN EARTH I DON'T WANT TO TALK TO, NOT EVEN YOU.
On the Writing Front:
I managed to make it 50% through my Summer Camp NaNo before life blew me off the rails. I was going about 700 words a day and that felt good. I'd finally pushed myself over that "we need to get to the capital city as quickly but as much less boringly as possible" roadblock and then fell into a pitfall of "well I'm here but now what?"I've always been nervous about other people reading my work. I remember going to my first critique session in college and having an actual anxiety problem before class because I was terrified of any of these people starting to think about me as "that weird girl that writes Twilight crap." I had gotten into the program after being incredibly upfront about my desire to write YA, but my confidence in a letter and in person are two entities at opposite ends of a scale. You can even ask my fantasy writing group from back home - I attended and regularly gave critiques, loved every second of it, but only once did I bring my own writing. I was so afraid it made it seem like I thought I was too good for my own stuff to be criticized.* In reality, I was just too intimidated by everyone else's seemingly endless and unfathomable creativity.
So when I made the decision to get a second pair of eyes and managed to talk my friend into reading some pages, I was ulcer-growing nervous. I don't know what I was expecting, that they would laugh hysterically, light the papers on fire and jump on them with unabashed glee in front of me? I'm aware that the person I gave them to would at least have the decency to wait till I was out of the room to prance around my story's burning corpse in full-blown David-celebrating-the-ark wanton abandonment.
They meant well, and seemed to tolerate what they were reading. They asked questions sometimes which helped me sort some stuff out in my head. But it wasn't what they did. It was what the others around us - those who don't have as much at stake in the friendship - said that really got to me.
I think I've just coddled myself for too long by keeping myself removed from the general public in regards to my writing. Does anyone else have similar hangups like this? When my friend got those pages out to read everyone started asking questions. "What's your story about?" or "When are you going to be published?" Which seem like harmless questions until you go to answer it and the awkward laugh and the "aww, that sounds cool" dismissal happens that lets you know this conversation is over.
Neither of which are as bad as the guy who comes in, catches wind of your story due to someone's passing joke, and proceeds to ask if you're "just writing some more bandwagon Hunger Games shit."
That's what makes you smile and laugh and decide no one needs to know what you do in your spare time ever again. I actively avoid speaking about it now.
Anyway, my point is I've tried to get like eighty people to help me with beta reader/reactionary reads for my story and every time's been disastrous. Don't really know what to do. It starts to seem like the common denominator is me! Ha-ha...ha...
* Low self-esteem is like an exercise in horseshoe theory, I've found. It's like a mobius strip of "they think I must think that they think that I must think" that only ends when I'm a crying puddle on the floor.
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