Tag: adhd

NaNoWriMo, eBooks, and Permission Slips

Welcome to November, the time honored month where every writer suddenly feels painfully behind on whatever their project is (myself included). Everything feels daunting, the air is colder, the days are getting shorter. Family holidays and the rising tide of compulsory gift giving capitalism are sneaking up on you, and you’re pushing yourself as best as you can.

It’s a lot, and I’m here to tell you that you are indeed doing your best, and your best is always enough, no matter what anyone else tells you. 

I ended October with a delightful bout of COVID (my second one within 6 months after 3 years of not catching it, so please be careful at those family gatherings) and while quarantined from my family, and unable to do 80% of my normal daily household responsibilities, I had a lot of time on my hands. When I wasn’t feverish and my brain was actually working, I discovered a fascinating ebook genre: Sentient Object Romance.

Some of these books were 71 pages, and some of these were even shorter, including a 13 page masterwork involving Pumpkin Spice Lattes in dubious places. The average Kindle page is 250 words, meaning that a set publishable length can be under 18 thousand words.

I checked further, what about sapphic wlw romance in general? I found some that were 100k words, but there were almost as many coming in around 76 pages.

As someone who started reading fantasy written by Brandon Sanderson, George R. R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss, this was mind blowing for me.

Yes, this is no magnum opus, and is likely classified closer to a novella, but for someone like me who is constantly fighting their dopamine seeking ADHD brain, a 40 hour work week, and parenting in the homework grade levels, it was a permission slip.

Permission to write something that didn’t need to be so long that it took years of my life, that didn’t need to jump out at a slush pile reading intern, it didn’t even need to be perfect. I looked at some samples and honestly I’ve seen fanfiction that was better beta’d and edited than some of these ebooks. I watched the author’s timeline waffle in the opening chapters, or have sudden POV shifts from tight third to omniscient, or even leftover pronouns from shifting first to third person. 

I sat there, and looked at these samples, and for the first time in my life I thought to myself, I can do better than that, so why aren’t I?

Cue 10 thousand words written in a quarantine induced flurry, of stuffing my inner perfectionist editor into a closet and going, “We can fix this later.” The absolute unfettered freedom of being able to write multiple chapters alone and going back to just add in a line of foreshadowing. In the realm of fanfiction you’ve got to have it perfect chapter by chapter, foreshadowing on instinct and the slim hope that you can keep your entire plotline in your brain across the multiple months or years it will take to get your gigantic fic (or 125k+ novel) to completion.

There’s a Voltaire quote that says, “Perfect is the enemy of good,” and I’d like to say that perfect is also the enemy of good enough, that you are good enough. 

I’m currently writing a seemingly self indulgent hair washing scene in a historical fiction hurt/comfort storyline. I went to check the stats to see if it really was as self indulgent as I thought it to be. Guess what? I discovered 20% of historical romantic fiction involves hurt/comfort, and furthermore there were no less than five books that included a hair washing scene.

Your words are good enough. That thing inside you banging at the gates to get out on the page? It’s good enough. You are good enough, and here is my permission slip for you to make the thing.

I can’t wait to see what you come up with.

Featured

Spiritual Toe Dipping, Pt 1 of 2

Or How Dionysus Shoulder Tapped Me

Lastly, and most importantly, thank you to Dionysus. Life has been much stranger since I invited you inside.

Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand

I have spent a very long time being a lapsed Pagan: Falling off the sabbat wagon, letting monotheistic epithets sneak into my lexicon, letting our child periodically destroy the altar space, tucked away as it was on a pull out keyboard tray. I did not expect a random chunk of polished amethyst to both re-establish my entire spiritual practice and then lead me into personal beef with fifth dimensional parole officers.

Let me start at the beginning. I grew up in a house where both my older sister and mother were in the same coven. It was not unusual for me to pull back a curtain and see warding pentagrams drawn on the windowsills. We had an extraordinarily robust lavender bush that I was not allowed to cut under any circumstances, and my daily experiences included the smokey incense flavor of the month wafting through the house or walking in on my sister talking to a jar of moon water. This was my life and my prized possessions as a pre teen were a tiny leather pouch of rocks (Botswana banded agate, amethyst, malachite and falcon’s eye) that would live under my pillow, a bag of terra cotta runestones, and the pentacle medallion I got stamped at my first Renaissance Faire.

Insert a vicious divorce, high school, a long bout with depression, a desperate need to leave home and escape to any college that would take me, and a long stint with poverty.

Eventually I came out the other side with a fantastic partner and a residency in a multigenerational household in the suburbs, complete with a rescued pit bull that I adored, even after she ate the aforementioned leather pouch and those prized stones and waning spirituality vanished from my life completely. Or so I thought.

Fast forward to becoming a parent, a Saturn return I didn’t even know was a thing until I was far beyond it, and a blue collar career path after going to college for a pre-med degree.
Now throw in the Pandemic and reconstructing sixty percent of a fifty year old house during lockdown while seven adults, a dog, and a five year old were living in it. The detritus of our lives and the two generations preceding it were rapidly cleared from affected rooms, tucked away, reshuffled, and then crammed into every shelf, corner, and flat surface available to us.

COVID raged and as an immunocompromised essential worker I kept my head down and my mask up and hoped every day I wouldn’t be the one to bring home the virus and infect our family pod. Vaccines rolled out, the construction finished, and I began a sourdough culture free semblance of life.

It was fairly empty facsimile. I realized my friends had all been inherited from activities with my wife and that I myself had not acquired a new friend of my own in….
Years, it had been years, and my very dear internet pen pal had been lost in a flurry of 5G paranoia and tinfoil hats as my five years of daily emails transformed into empty, aching silence.

So I did what any lonely queer person would do, I turned to fanfiction.

Sweet sweet hyperfixations, I have not tasted thee since A Dance with Dragons fell from the nearest Barnes and Noble (because in 2014 Amazon had not yet become the monopoly it is today and we weren’t smart enough to understand how important it was to always buy from local independent bookstores, or local independent anything, for that matter…). Nothing had touched the razed earth ground of my fandom soul since the travesty of Game of Thrones Season 8, and then came Motherland: Fort Salem.

Witches with deep, lore heavy world building and alternate US military history? Sign me TF up.
And that was before I knew it was queer.

It kept me rivetted, and deep in the bowels of our collective lockdown trauma, it gave me back my words.

Those words gave me a community, a community of likeminded neurodivergent genderqueer weirdos (most of that likeminded-ness I have just figured out for myself in the last year, thank you, Discord and Betterhelp).

And it just so happened that these weirdos like to pull Tarot cards…