While I spent a lot of in the last two weeks continuing to outline Full of Grace, and trying to get the main ideas of that world properly set up, my imagination strained at the sustained exercise. I ran into giant, blank sand dunes and raw empty beaches, where my imagining faltered, sputtered, stopped. It’s easy to disbelieve yourself and make yourself feel unsettled, unworthy. Meanwhile, the world of it crept up on me, and is always behind my eyes, like a shadow or a shade
Within the last few days, I found it was easier to revisit Leatherbound Hands, the novel-length fic I’ve been writing steadily. I had stalled at around 7,000 words on Chapter 6, at a place where I couldn’t write or imagine the next conversation, or the next emotion. I left it for a while as I outlined, and when I came back, the writing was easier. The break let me not think of the story, and regain my bearings outside of that world. It was like breathing — the imagination contracting to concentrate, and then relaxing again. When I opened up the file and reconsidered my place in the writing, what needed to happen next seemed obvious, and easy.
I’ve come from a week away from writing — a minor consequence of having a day job that occasionally requires days and nights away. In the interim, I talk a little about my projects with my friends — and I try to untangle for them and for myself how writing both original fiction and fanfiction reside at the core of me, silent and still and heavy, and really are the only real contributions I feel I can offer as a way, not to preserve my existence, but to prove that I lived, that I thought things, that I felt things this way and thought them through. It’s caught up with feelings of shame and pride and pressure and identity, but the spine that runs through it all is joy. Joy that I am able to write what I write, and the fear that no one will understand why any of this mattered to me.
