It is January 2023, and I offer you what light and warmth you'd like to accept from me here. Thank you for checking out this project!
This past April, I set a commitment to write and post a new short story for every decan of the zodiacal year. This goal amounted to writing, re-writing, and introducing a story every ten days or so.
Now. If you read that and thought, This lil weirdo is highly out of her depth and unhinged, you would be correct! From Day 1, I knew that my audacious streak was showing. With very ambitious creative goals, the risk of failure is very high. That's okay by me--my deeper goal was to work on changing my relationship to writing, which for almost a decade had been severely impacted by these internal, all-speakers-dialed-up-to-10, perpetually blaring intercom announcements:
- Can't let anyone see new poems, they're evidence that I do not have impostor syndrome but am merely a Real Fraud, and
- People might like you and love you more if you stop being a writer, and
- Okay so I'll just take three years to write one story and then another three years to revise it and then I'll take another three years to rewrite it and...
Thus, If I ended up writing any new work as a result of this project, I knew it would already constitute a serious personal win, and I'd be really happy with the experience. I promised myself I'd try hard not to worry much about being happy with the quality of the work--It is less important for me to write something good than it is for me to write something true.
It's January, now, and this is my project update. I wrote a TON, created many more stories than I thought I was capable of, and posted some to this blog! I'm shocked at how happy I am with how much of what I wrote. And I'm even more happy that my excitement about those stories is not because I think they are particularly well-written but because in the process of writing each of them, I came very much alive, and felt very beholden to the stories' quirks/characters/surprises/griefs in electric ways. For the first time in years, I felt that I were capable of writing as if my heart had caught fire.
I also failed to meet my original goal. By September, I acknowledged that I was not going to meet the deadlines I set for myself. Not without seriously compromising the care of the storytelling. I'd started jotting down brief story outlines without making any attempts to draft them, and then "counting" this as having completed a story for the assigned decan. I realized that I was treating the decan crossing like a to-do list, and that changing the list so that I could more easily consider it completed was feeding my desire to deem myself "productive", but was not nourishing my creative needs or operating system. In October, I decided to let myself fail, and set a commitment to change my course. I decided to halt my quest for generating new decan stories until I'd finished drafting the stories I'd planned, first. This has me slated to finish stories for signs Aries through Virgo--exactly half of the zodiac.
There was another important goal I did not meet: to put myself out there on the internet more regularly, not despite but because of the imperfections inherent in the art I'd made. If there's a part of this project that I abandoned out of fear, it's this one. There were a number of decans where I did draft a full story, but avoided posting it on the blog. I'd like to eventually make posts for all the decans below, even if I don't include the drafts.
Below is a write-up of the storytelling I've been doing since I last posted to this blog, which includes notes on what I have to look ahead to completing. I'm proud of the work I did, and I'm proud of my decision to stop working in my original direction. I'm proud like a little fussy peahen! I'm also thankful to the beings and forces who helped me have all of these storytelling experiences, and thankful to my spouse, who continues to make me scratch my head with happiness that he reads and supports my writing. And I'm so excited about the storywork waiting for me to return, day after day.
Thank you for having reading this.
-----
Cancer 1: Two of Cups
- Adaline lives a sheltered, religious, high-technology life on the Moon. Zach works hard to survive the tempests and ration blackouts on one of the surviving continents of Earth. When the two are brought together in a marriage designed to increase both their odds of survival, the seeds of conspiracy and revolt are unearthed, and begin to grow wild between them.
- I completed an outline for this story about climate grief, arranged marriage, extreme cultural divides, keeping in touch with the help of technology, and true love.
- I quickly realized that this story is going to become a novella. This December, I revised the outline I wrote in July, and now have about 5,000 words of notes on beat structure, character, and world-building. I'm so excited to get to work on this one.
- I wrote a story about ...climate grief, ancestral estrangement and reconnection, spiritual technology, nonlinear communication, and all three of my known maternal ancestors.
- I did not post this story on my blog. Instead, I revised it and submitted it for consideration to Apex Magazine's forthcoming Asian and Pacific Islanders issue. Iori Kusano accepted the story for the issue. "The Matriarchs" will be in the world in April 2023. When I got this news I got down on my knees and cried a lot.
- I wrote a story that alternates between the points of view of an invasive, ultra-empathic alien (who is sort of like a fungus and a jellyfish had an asexually-reproduced baby) and a human man (who happens to be a struggling alcoholic), who makes a pilgrimage to the alien after seeing her change someone's life on a local TV news report.
- I really enjoyed writing this story. It was a weird, challenging, emotional experience. The story was very concept-driven, which isn't a modality I had tried before. It also drew on very personal material, and I found myself feeling uncomfortable when writing the human alcoholic's story. I still need to post this story.
- I wrote a story about a far-future space station that sends its teenagers to an off-site military academy designed as a competitive game arena in order to socialize them for adult life back on the colony. This story was obviously inspired by The 100, The Hunger Games, and my day job.
- This story started out as a "Look how much I'm into this world-building exercise!" piece, but I used a structure where the story is told completely in letters written by 5 separate characters who never receive any replies, and this turned into a "Look at how obsessed I am with the tragic intimacy we can have with the people we're in direct conflict with!" project. This was the first story I wrote where I felt really fired up to send it out into the wider world, so I refrained from posting it and started sending it out on submission.
- My immediate goal for this story is to give it a much more thorough revision process than I gave it before sending it out. I might try to send this out for critique swap on one of the community SFF Discord servers.
Leo 2: Six of Wands
- Jason and I got married! We wrote our vows, and spoke them in front of the friends and family who gifted us with their presence. The most mysterious, creative, actionably loving thing that I could have done this year could not have been done alone, and I got to do this with my life-mate.
Leo 3: Seven of Wands
- I started feeling the anxiety of having fallen behind on posting to this blog. I resolved to try writing a very very short story: exactly seven sentences that detailed an "epic fantasy quest gone very wrong" scenario in which the "chosen one" is really the only person left standing at the most terrible part of the quest. The reason she's alone is not because she is uniquely strong or gifted or talented, but because everyone else who started the quest with her dipped out and left her to proceed alone.
- Sometimes my concepts have a story in them, but no story really happens because my heart isn't equipped to bring one to life. The core of the story is of obvious importance to me, and I love existential re-engineerings of epic fantasy. The sentence constraint led to it being more of a writing exercise. Maybe someday I'll revisit this one.
- I wrote a story about the custodian of a private, exclusive school of magic who has resigned from their job and left a letter for their successor that contains additional training material for certain responsibilities and opportunities that were not included in the job description.
- This story started out as a bit of a conceptual exercise: a list of seemingly mundane maintenance and caretaking duties that have more to do with a magical life than is sometimes discussed. However, the more I wrote, the the story became about hierarchical labor structures, the under-appreciated and underestimated radical foundations of domestic work, the need to subvert and recreate institutionalized education, and the joys of stories about going to magic school.
- I'm excited to slot this into my "under revision" folder. I feel proud of how far I took it by the end of its first draft--this is an ambitious story, despite being quiet in many ways. I am thankful for the places the story asked me to go in my worldview, and for the cleaning/caretaking it demanded I do in the spaces therein that under-appreciated and underestimated the radical foundations (among other things) of domestic work and workers.
- I'm writing a story about futuristic chess, the romance of celebrity, intergalactic class oppression, and the prison industrial complex. It's also about how rare, precious, and crucial an honest conversation can be.
- This is the story that led me to choose to stop generating new outlines for the sake of keeping up with my Decan Crossing timeline. I initially set out to "write a story that is just a chess game but make it entertaining." The story quickly became about a lot more than the single game shared between the two players. I wanted to commit to giving this one the care and attention it needed, given my privileges in relation to the subject matter and the structural depth required to make something like this stick together.
- My goal is to complete the first draft of this story by Februrary 2023.
No comments:
Post a Comment