Unraveling, but in a good way?

Warning: This is a personal, journal style post. I'm working through a thought-process, and it has to go somewhere, so I'm putting it here. This post may contain spoilers.

I seem to have gotten all tangled up. Not really sure what’s going on. I’ve been working away on Sixty-Six revisions. It’s coming along, but maybe not feeling as “together” as I thought it was. I’ve set my sights on a release date, ideally in the last week of October. But that seems like it’s coming up fast and I’m wondering if I’ve given myself enough time. 

There is a lot to do before then, but a lot of those things depend on having a near-final page count of the book. I could push it to November, I guess, but I hope I don’t have to.

My plan is to start ARC reviews on September 1, but I don’t know if it will be ready by then. So I guess I’m just feeling some pressure about that. I didn’t do ARC reviews for Maladaptive, and now I’m really struggling with visibility. There are a few people who have been really supportive and I’m super grateful for them. But I’m wondering if doing ARC reviews for Maladaptive would have even made a difference, and if that will be the case with Sixty-Six. All I can do is try, I suppose.

But there is something else that I can’t quite put my finger on. I think it started when I was putting together an Instagram post about what inspired Sixty-Six. That was a fun one, because the inspiration for it came from a fun place. Back when I was a member of a music-related message board, and I was chatting with an older member about his experience as a teenager in the 60s, listening to all of these amazing songs for the first time as they came out – songs that I took for granted because they’ve just always been there, my whole life.

One thing I didn’t mention in my post was that when I got the idea for Sixty-Six, I actively avoided writing it for months because I was already feeling forlorn about my track record as a self-published author. I didn’t feel like I had a lot of support (I will bet you money that my friends and family would be shocked to hear me say that, because they think being passively proud of me and liking my Facebook posts somehow translates into support, but anyway).

I guess I just didn’t have much confidence in myself, and I didn’t think I could write it as well as someone else could. I would have loved to read Sixty-Six, written by someone else, or watched the film or the TV show, written by someone else. It’s funny, they say “write the book you want to read” and that’s exactly what ended up happening, after the idea wouldn’t leave me alone.

That feeling of being almost harassed by an idea that won’t go away, won’t leave me alone until I take action on it – and even that is not enough, there is no satisfaction after an outline or a character sketch or a scene – it doesn’t stop until I see it through to completion.

That’s inspiration, right? The whole idea of inspiration itself as a concept has been nagging at me for like ten years, maybe even longer, and that’s not an exaggeration. There have been times that I have felt jubilantly compelled by it, or peacefully connected to it, but it has also felt kind of dark and menacing at times. You don’t hear people talk about inspiration that way. I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard any reference to inspiration or “the muse” as a dark energy. What’s cruel or negative is the absence of it. The longing for it is heartbreakingly painful. I’ve felt that, too.

But what happens when inspiration practically forces you to write something against your will, and then when it’s done, it abandons you, or worse, it sits and watches while you get punished for it? Punished with silence, with lack of support, with lack of interest, with misunderstanding and criticism. It doesn’t feel like a benevolent force at that point. Why would I want to willingly put myself through that again? And if that feeling returns, if an idea comes on so strong that ignoring it only makes it come on stronger, the compulsion to write it feels more like having a gun held to my head than joyful motivation. The compulsion becomes about getting a sense of relief from the pressure and the burden, rather than what is universally believed to be an exultant communion with an ethereal, fickle energy.

So what do you do when it feels like you’re being hounded by a cruel, malevolent form of inspiration?

I’m losing the thread here, I need to step back for a moment. The reason I’m thinking all this stuff is because after I wrote that post about the inspiration behind Sixty-Six, I decided I wanted to do one for Maladaptive, too. But that book didn’t come from a happy place.

Sixty-Six came from a happy place, but writing it was a dreadful, painfully brutal experience. Shelving it and walking away from writing completely gave me a sense of relief (kind of, temporarily… denial is a powerful thing.) Maladaptive came from an unhappy place, but writing it – once I realized and accepted that I was, in fact, actually writing – was miraculous, until I was finished. Since publishing, I’ve been on an unpredictable rollercoaster, the overall effect being… kind of miserable. Lonely. A near-constant feeling that something is missing.

The inspiration behind Maladaptive is a story unto itself – a story I’ve already written in a book called Maladaptive. So why do I feel like I’m not done telling it? Why is it still bugging me so much? Is it just that very few people have read it? That I’m just unsatisfied with the way it vanished into the vast internet black hole of self-published books?

I feel like I’m looking at it from a new angle, retracing my steps, untangling a massively knotted strand of fairy lights, looking for the ends of it, so I can plug it back in and see it all lit up so I can understand it. Make a connection that I somehow missed, whatever that might be. The “inspiration behind Maladaptive” post that I shared took days to come together. I had a hard time staying focused on the lit bulbs that I could see, because I know they don’t tell the whole story.

I’m talking about the snow globe, mainly. That snow globe idea was one of those jubilant muses that I desperately wanted to commune with. Instead of fighting against it and losing, like what happened with Sixty-Six, it really was like a beacon in the darkness that kept flickering at me. There was certainly some anguish associated with the snow globe idea. Seeing it there, but not being able to reach it. Grasping it, and then fumbling it. But it never went away. It wasn’t torturing me or taunting me like the Sixty-Six idea. It was maybe… the last glimmer of hope.

That is super fucking dark, I know. And while I’m prone to magical thinking, I’m not deluded enough to believe that something magical saved me. I did that myself, pulled myself out of the depths. I sought therapy. I found a creative way to do my therapy homework. I came up with my own therapeutic exercises. I knew that inspiration doesn’t just strike from out of nowhere, it comes from work. I made myself do the work, and I was rewarded with inspiration. It feels like the snow globe popped itself into my maladaptive daydream without any willful intervention from me, but the truth is, I opened the door to it by writing the daydream journal in the first place.

I knew that’s what I was doing. I didn’t know if it would work, but I hoped that it would. Now, it’s true that I did think the maladaptive daydream journal and the snow globe idea were separate things. I did believe that when I had exhausted and expelled the former, then I’d be able to conjure the latter. Get one thing out of the way to be able to begin the next. So when they merged, it was truly a surprise to me.

That’s the fascinating thing. I was working so hard to “clear out the junk” so I could get to the snow globe story. And my brain did what brains do – synapses fired, and it made a connection between the daydream and the snow globe story in an instant that was too fast for my conscious mind to track, and suddenly the two neural pathways in my brain fused, and it felt to me like something magical and beyond my control had happened. It felt otherworldly. Jubilation! Inspiration had returned. But I did all of the work that made it possible.

Why am I science-ing this? I’m not sure. It doesn’t kill the magic of it. I think what I’m getting at is that inspiration isn’t inherently kind or cruel. It’s neutral. The expression of it feeling like a malevolent or benevolent force is something I can’t explain. I could say it’s just my own state of mind, but that doesn’t quite connect those dots. There is no rhyme or reason to it that I can spot.

Maybe I won’t get to the bottom of that just yet. The point of this exploration is to figure out why, after writing the “Inspiration behind Maladaptive” post, do I feel lost and forlorn. And I think it’s because in the untangling of that string of lights, I’ve identified the main bulbs – the snow globe, my therapy exercises and breakthroughs, the tarot deck, the characters, my ADHD diagnosis, my maladaptive daydreams and sexual fantasies.

I’ve untangled enough of it to know that one end of the strand is plugged into Sixty-Six. The snow globe may be the glimmer of hope, the true flash of inspiration that willed Maladaptive into existence. But that’s not where it started. It started seven years ago when I gave up on Sixty-Six. The exact moment when gave up on myself as a writer.

I didn’t touch that in my post. It’s a lot to unpack. That’s why it took me so long to put that post together. I had to pull that thread out of it, or else I was going to end up retelling Maladaptive all over again in a 20-slide carousel on Instagram.

Oh, is that it? Am I getting warm? Am I sad because despite having already told this story in novel form, in a book that I’m immensely proud of, that I self-published and that a few people have read, I’m still trying to tell that story? Is it that it isn’t done with me yet? What will it take for me to feel a sense of peace?

I gave Cara Sixty-Six so that all the time and effort I spent on it wouldn’t be wasted, and it wouldn’t die with me. It basically became a character itself in Maladaptive. The idea was that it would help me close the book on it (pun absolutely intended) and release it in a different way, give it at least a different kind of life, so that the dark cloud would dissipate, and I could move on from it.

But it continued to hang around. Now look at me, rewriting it to publish it. On the surface, that is a huge leap forward. That is the definition of a breakthrough. And again, this is happening because of me. I did the work to get to this point, to make this happen.

Now that I’ve reclaimed it, it still carries with it that sense of dread and foreboding that was always there, from the very beginning. Ever since the idea came to me and I spoke to it out loud and told it I didn’t want to be the one to write it, that it felt too big for me, that I wouldn’t do it right, that I wanted someone else to do it so I could just consume and enjoy it.

The dark compulsion is still there. Maybe not as strong as it was back then, but every moment of the rewrite has had that same vibe about it. That same, “I don’t want to do this, but something is making me” vibe. I mean, fuck, what the fucking fuck is that about anyway?! Why does this book have this gnarly vibe attached to it?!

I recently ended up having a conversation in Cara's voice with River as a way of dealing with an intrusive thought I was having while re-writing Sixty-Six. Like, I entered this negative self-talk spiral, and River legit showed up to call me out on it, and I ended up writing out the conversation because it felt way too "momentous" to just let it fade away. 

It was thrilling, in one sense, having those characters so readily spark up in an instant like that. I mean, it was like River was checking in on me. Rationally, I know it was my therapy at work, because Maladaptive was essentially the mentally unhealthy part of me and the self-compassionate part of me battling it out for my soul. But it also gave me that feeling that I wasn't done having that conversation yet.

The connection between the two books is kind of freaking me out. Because Sixty-Six is part of Maladaptive lore. In the public realm, as far as the universe is concerned, it belongs to Cara. The two books are now inextricably linked, even if they are standalone stories and can be read independently of each other.

That feels kind of heavy. And it’s not something I did on purpose. It feels like… you know when you’re writing and you have your plot outlined, but then the characters start doing things you didn’t plan on and all of a sudden the story goes in a different direction and you have to decide to force the characters to stick to the plan, or just let it unfold organically?

This feels like that. It’s not that I don’t have control over what’s happening, but I didn’t even have an outline for this. After Sixty-Six, I didn’t think I was ever going to write another book. After writing Maladaptive, I didn’t think I was going to end up publishing it. I definitely didn’t think I was going to revive Sixty-Six and publish it.

I’m the one who tangled up this string of lights. I got myself into it, and now I’m all confused about what it all means, and wondering what happens after I publish Sixty-Six. I’m still trying to find the other end of the string of lights. Even though I’m the one making the decisions, it feels like this chapter of my life is writing itself, and I have to figure out how to make it all make sense.

Maybe that’s what I’m feeling. Uncertainty about where all of this eventually lands. Will I find the end of the string of lights when Sixty-Six is published? Will the saga finally be over? What if I don’t want it to be? What happens then?

I wrote the snow globe story. I thought it was over, but… is it? Am I still living inside the snow globe moment? And if I am... where is the bulb?  Something is under my skin, but I can't tell what it is. WHAT IS IT???