Allow me to write, just a touch, about recent dreams I’ve had. Mostly within the last few weeks, as the holiday season came closer and closer. Mind you – these are the ones I remember. The sensation for others still remains. Let me see if you find a common theme. And for clarity, I’ll be placing you in the driver’s seat.
“You find yourself on a writer’s conference at sea. Not on a cruise ship, but a floating city making its way through a flooded world. In that conference, you meet someone – another writer – who sparks with you. They enjoy the same works you do, they have the same struggles, and they also take pictures as well! Your wife is overjoyed. ‘You’ve got a writer friend! Get their email!’ But try as you might, you can’t write their email down. You try writing yours, but nothing comes out. The words are a twisted scramble of graphite gray lines…”
Or…
“In a distant college campus, you’ve joined a later in life writing course. You had to abandon your job to do it, but you’re there full of hope at first. The campus is beautiful, filled with ivy covered Roman columns and a massive library/bookstore. This micro-world is where Cambridge and Georgetown University had an unauthorized child. But the first day goes badly. You get lost. You lose books. You run into Doctor Who cosplayers who insist you rebuild their K-9. Classes are missed and all the while you see an old former friend laughing at you, publication credits falling from their hands like loose cash…”
Or…
“You finally get to see yourself as a child, thanks to advanced psychotherapy. The therapist says, ‘Go ahead. Say all the hurtful things you want to that innocent child. You can’t do it, can you? Because he doesn’t deserve it.’ But instead of the expected agreement, you see the stupid little shit you were reading crap, watching crap, not getting educated, drowning in food and stupid American culture and you grab his head in the palm of your hand. Howling, you smash his skull against an ancient table, pounding away until it breaks under your palm like a watermelon against a concrete deck. You fail at compassion for yourself…”
In dreams, my mind has been yelling this, over and over:
And its hard not to agree. This year started with promise: a new job I’d been actively recruited into for over a year. It meant I could say goodbye to a well paying, but soul-shredding job I’d been at for over a decade. In the first few months, I’d been very productive. Half a dozen short stories sent out to anthologies. And these were stories I’d really felt proud about. Ones I really enjoyed writing, not ones I thought “Oh, this is a good story that should sell well.”
I had a novel project outlined and ready to go for the year. And, I’d spent some of my money on a course to help me get better at my writing. It produced a story where I literally bled into the pages, mining personal fears and traumas.
And, on top of it all, my hockey team was on its way winning the Stanley Cup for the first time in their history. Despite our ongoing national nightmare, there was hope for me. Maybe hope for the world since we had the mid-terms coming up.
Then, plot twist, I was laid off at the beginning of June as part of a massive managerial purge. “There’s nothing you did wrong, we’re just going a different way.” This lead to three months of job searching, unemployment, and depression. Somehow I got 25k worth of writing done on the novel, but given that I had literally nothing to do but housework, job hunting, and writing, I should have finished the book.
The short stories? They went to anthologies that are either in limbo, or not publishing until 2019. All my other submissions. Depeche Mode time. And I should be happy I got personal rejections for some, but that seems to encourage Rejectomancy more than any other reaction.
- “It just didn’t come together for us.” – What does that mean? Was the ending wrong? The beginning? What else can I do?
- “We liked the story and the end was cute, but we wanted more from the prose.” – Does that mean my prose is dull and unimaginative? How can I improve on it? Should I read more poetry? Am I trapped to be boring?
- “It didn’t have the pulp feel we wanted.” – What kind of pulp feel do you want? I had people being sacrificed to the grinding belly-gears of a god to sustain a lost civilization! What did I do wrong?
I’m finding trouble finding hope. It’s easy to recycle the common wisdom, but hard to fight the counterpoint rattling in your head.
“Write what you want to write!” – “Yeah, but what’s the point if no one wants to read what I want to write. What’s the point of writing a story no one wants to read?”
“Just keep plugging away. You’ll get better with every failure.” – “Well, after some initial success I seem to be back to SUCKING. So, what did I do wrong? Maybe I just sucked to start with.”
“Try reading something to help refresh your imagination.” – “Oh, look, someone who’s better than me…”
“Your friends are getting published, take heart!” – “Yeah, I submitted to all those anthologies and magazines as well. Guess I’m a miserable failure and my prose isn’t remarkable enough.”
“Hey, all of us get lost in the darkness. Dreamers learn to steer by the stars.” – “Don’t you dare throw ‘The Pass‘ at me! That’s my favorite damn Rush song. It was my “Subdivisions” back in High School. But, guess, what, since then, I still haven’t figured out how to steer by the stars. I still want to take a one way walk off a razor’s edge and no amount of medication can help…”
2018 did get slightly better. I found a new job I like, that seems to like me. I found a few support groups and am still writing regularly. But how do you keep going when everything says, “Give up. You’re failing. Just drown yourself in liquor and first person shooters.”
My faith is breaking, and I don’t know how to fix it.
Biomechanoid Blues 