Trying to Make My Brain Shut Up For a Second

At supper last night, I made my family place bets on when the snow will be gone for good. Sully, the optimist, took April 14. I tried to be optimistic too, but I could not be that optimistic, and I chose April 19. Barclay, the realist and also the one in our house whose job depends so heavily on the weather that he kind of has to be obsessed with it, chose April 24, and Scarlett, who is obsessed with Barclay, chose April 24 also.

Looking out the window right now, none of these bets seem remotely plausible. We have a pile of snow on our front lawn the size of a car. The roads are covered in deep, sharp ice ruts. I don’t remember what grass looks like. Dirt? Flowers? Never heard of them. Warmth? Sunlight? Joy?

It’s fine. 

I’m in a strange, liminal place this week. I sent off the first draft of my latest book to my agent on Friday night (sorry, did you just hear that? Sounds like angels singing…). I’ve been working on that thing since November of 2021, and I shelved an entire book before that (maybe I’ll blog about that later; I don’t think people even know how many whole books get written and set aside in the course of an author’s writing life), so the reality is that I’ve been working towards this goal, the goal of having something done enough to share with my team, for actual years. In that time, I have not for one single minute felt like I could relax my brain and just not think about writing for a little bit. I have, for a few seconds here and there, thought about not writing anything ever again, but that thought made me very sad and I dismissed it every time it floated through my head. It is, it turns out, harder to consider quitting than it is to continue struggling. 

Anyway.

I sent my manuscript off, is the point, and now I’m following that old writing rule I’ve heard over and over and over: once you’ve finished your first draft, step back, close the Word document, and pretend it doesn’t exist for at least two weeks. 

This is hard. 

It’s like the characters are real people who live in another dimension, one I can see very vaguely in my mind’s eye. When I’m writing a book, it feels less like making stuff up and more like waiting for the people in the other dimension to do something or have something happen to them so I can write it down. It’s very hard to suddenly just ignore these other-dimension people, especially when I’ve spent so much time trying to figure out how to tune into their frequency. 

I got to the end of yesterday and felt guilty for not working on the book even though I knew that it was out of my hands at the moment and that I shouldn’t be working on it. Still, I kept having things come to me all day—dialogue, plot hole fixes, things to cut, things to explain. I’ll probably feel that way at the end of today too. That’s actually kind of why I’m sitting here writing this.

(You’re…welcome?)

Anyway. All of this is to say I’ll probably be killing time in this space a bit more in the next couple of weeks. It’s a frozen arctic tundra outside and will be until at least April 19, and my brain needs some serious distracting so it doesn’t keep wandering back to that alternate universe. 

Join me. Distract me. Wish me luck.