I don’t know about you, but it’s been an active summer over here. Getting out, making the most of the weather, even when it’s been ungodly hot. This is partly due to summer traditionally being a slower time of year for psychotherapists, so let’s just say that I’ve been putting in more reps at the gym and visiting my favourite local places more often.
The only thing I haven’t been doing actively is writing fiction (or writing of any kind, other than texts to myself). Part of it, though it wasn’t intentional, is perhaps to take a breather. It’s a bit hard to communicate how writing has taken up a lot of emotional, mental and psychic energy, this year in particular.
I handed off Book Three to my agent in February, with all the angst that comes with this. The not-knowing, now in its seventh month, the having to work with the unknown around whether it will find a home, not to mention how this would inevitably affect me and my confidence as a writer.*
On top of this, I pushed to make some major revisions to a very personal essay, dealing with my uncle’s murder/guitar, and inevitably my childhood. I’ve never really worked on something like this, as raw as this, and I’ve found myself struggling to find my voice within the piece, discovering that I’m possibly holding myself at arm’s length away from it, no matter what progress I feel I’m making otherwise.
There’s also a fourth novel that I’m about 100 pages into, and I like it, but I’m struggling to fall back into it, and I can’t help but feel that the unresolved nature of Book Three’s future is adding some distortion to the proceedings. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m afraid of writing, but there’s a wariness. It feels as if I need to work to sort out my relationship with writing: why do I want to do this? What do I want out of this?
It’s funny to read the above, because I started it with saying that I was having a really active summer sans writing, and proceeded to list a series of writing-related issues; clearly my mind is still carrying on the business in some automatic or unconscious way. Ugh. In any case, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to take a breather, for some perspective. God knows I wish more writers would do this.
* there have been a few rejections but all have contained personalized feedback…which is rare. Everyone seems to generally like it, which I didn’t encounter when either of my two last books were being submitted around, so I’ll take what I can get.
