Another day, another ten pages biiiitches. Yeah!
It’s easy for me to forget that I’m writing a book faster than I ever have before. It’s disorienting. As it always is whenever I’m doing something I haven’t done before. That disorientation is exhausting. I’m fighting burnout right now. But, it’s something I want to get done. It’s something I can do. I want to learn from it.
I write pulp. It’s plot-driven. The characterizations are thin. The prose is light and easy to read. It’s candy.
That’s what I’ve always read. Or, rather, what I grew up reading for fun. I actually have read quite a bit more than just pulp, and I need to read more, but that’s a discussion for a different time. I know I have it in my to write, maybe, one notch above pulp. I’m not doing that at the moment, and I guess I just say all this because that what I’ve been keenly aware of lately, as I write this book in such a short amount of time. And that’s okay, I guess is what I’m saying. Truly. That’s why I’m doing this. This is the exercise. I want to learn how to write fast. To churn the words out. The other half of it is, of course, to make those words better each time I go through the process, which is why I’m thinking about things like pulp vs literature in the first place. I want both. I both want to write as fast as I’m able to AND write words that are of impressive quality.
Not easy.
But that’s where I’m headed. Just gotta keep going, and push through the exhaustion. It’s a weird exhaustion—and I think that’s what it is, actually, rather than burnout—because the work has been good, still. The pages come, and they’re good pages, even though I’m teetering on the edge of collapse. I get my ass up right on time, day in and day out (even though it hasn’t been that long; we’re talking a month, now, which is nothing), even though I go to bed wiped. Repeat. There’s a power in the repetition. Undeniably. I love the routine, even if it scares me with how powerful it is. That’s what resistance fights against: if I do this for long enough, everything will change. Resistance doesn’t want that. It wants everything to stay the same.
so…I’m tired. worn out. and insanely productive.
Just need to keep going.