In my defence, in a pre-penicillin world I would be dead right now

Okay so I’m not done editing the book yet.

Look, in the last year I had a baby, nearly bled to death, discovered I had somehow managed to spawn the most active baby in the universe who requires a lot of running around after her as she explores everything and finds new ways to endanger herself, had a major month-long chronic fatigue syndrome crash, dealt with the dreaded eight month sleep regression that was really the six-to-nine month sleep regression, got mastitis uneventfully (but still unpleasantly) twice, and got mastitis very eventfully a third time.

By ‘very eventfully’ I mean that I ended up in hospital on an IV drip. The infection spread and became cellulitis too. Which was … bad. The skin at the infection site went boiled-lobster red and got blisters that turned into ulcers. I spent weeks barely getting out of bed, and I was still exhausted after finished the antibiotic course. A month after the hospital thing I was sent to a specialist who determined actually still had low grade cellulitis and needed more antibiotics. That was two weeks ago and while the exhaustion is starting to lift, I’m still not completely better.

AND STILL in the last year I have not only continued Silence Killed the Dinosaurs, but got way more organised in terms of social media management. I have started a whole new art enterprise (Lu Repeating, check it out). I have knit socks for family members, crocheted baby blankets for everyone I know who has had one in the last six months or going to have one in the next six months, and knit half (WIP) a hoodie for my partner that involved learning how to do intarsia. I have not just kept a baby alive, but (I think) made her happy, taken her to kindergym on the regular to burn off some of her endless energy, and gone out of my introverted and socially-anxious way to meet other parents with babies her age and foster friendships with them.

Also, when I say ‘not done editing the book’, I mean I have at least managed to send the problematic first three chapters to an editor (shout out to the brilliant EM Harding) and then re-structured/written them to my liking, so am now just up to … essentially proofreading, since I did so much line-editing and copy-editing during my endless full re-writes (though I’m sure I could wrangle a bit more out of it).

I feel so lazy.

Not sarcasm. I really, honestly, debilitatingly always feel lazy. Something is wrong with my brain. If you have a cure for whatever it is, please let me know.

I guess it’s time

Yeah, so, I’m going to get back into editing again.

Thoughts and prayers accepted for this ordeal.

In which I contemplate soil erosion (definitely not the same thing as making excuses)

I have not been writing much lately, but it has been semi-tactical.

‘Semi’ because a good portion of it is not optional. Approximately ten weeks ago a tiny human pushed its way out of me, shortly followed by a lot more blood than ideal, and thus I’ve been recovering from a) childbirth, b) blood loss, c) anemia and also a touch of d) post-partum depression, while simultaneously learning how to a) parent, b) breastfeed, c) change nappies without leaving gaps for unauthorized manure spreading, as well as d) unblock blocked milk ducts and generally prevent mastitis. And all of this happens with regular before-the-cock-crows waking.

Still, my hatchling has so far been a happy little thing with minimal fussing, and I’ve had some free time while she naps. It’s just that I’ve largely spent it doing art that does not reap money (i.e., not Silence Killed the Dinosaurs comics) and cruising up and down virtual fields of wheat in a combine harvester on Farming Simulator 19. I feel guilty. This is the first thing I have sat down to write in months, and I don’t really count this as writing writing.

In the lead up to the birth, I tried to plough through with editing my novel. It was difficult. I was exhausted from the pregnancy and low iron levels, worried about losing the baby, nervous about childbirth, stressed about various financial woes that we won’t go into right now, and just not in a fertile head space.

It was, I think, the moment to leave it. To turn the soil and give it some time. I knew that. My writing mind was dry and barren. But I also knew in the months following the birth I would not be writing, and that would be the ideal time to let my brain-field lie fallow. Frustratingly, my creative seasons would not line up with the … I’m out of on-the-nose farming imagery … hang on … the sowing period of my heart? Yeah, perfect.

So I pushed myself. I edited right up until the day I was supposed to be induced. I got done what needed to be done, but then I was done too.

My silence is tactical. This time is not wasted. I’m turning my soil.

(Also I have a tiny baby to look after, and they take a lot of effort and attention.)

Turns out iron is good for more than warding off tricksy fae folk

I’m pregnant.

If you want to read more about the process behind that (CW: pregnancy, pregnancy loss, blood, medical procedures, generally a bit sad and full on), I wrote and drew about it on Silence Killed the Dinosaurs. But yeah, the TL;DR version is, I’m pregnant.

I didn’t expect it to affect my writing, but it really has.

I made all these ridiculous goals to get done before the birth (about 6 weeks away now assuming everything runs on schedule, which it probably won’t because babies). They were:

Finish editing that novel I wrote.

Check bits of the novel with various people who know shit about either writing or some area of expertise that is relevant, and then make necessary changes when I get feedback.

Submit novel for manuscript assessment.

Finish another first draft I was working on that was stalled at about 2/3rds of the way through (stalling had more to do with life at the time, not ideas drying up or lack of interest).

Write and draw heaps of stuff for Silence Killed the Dinosaurs and potentially build up a buffer of work I can slowly post out over the first few months I have a baby.

Probably put a bit of effort into updating my Patreon tiers and generally promote it a bit, something I am terrible at doing.

All the usual baby prep stuff, but particularly crocheting and/or knitting a baby blanket and AT LEAST one toy.

Honestly, I still don’t think these were ridiculous goals for a 8-9 month time frame, especially since this is my day job (thanks, chronic illness and systemic ableism).

… but only if you don’t factor in pregnancy fatigue.

At least, that’s what I thought it was.

Since I already have a chronic illness literally known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, it seemed reasonable that pregnancy fatigue would slam me extra hard, but even so, it was brutal. It wasn’t just feeling a bit run down and sleepy; it was more like I got blasted back several years to early in my illness when I was too physically weak to walk around the house. From October through to March, I had to nap almost every afternoon. I couldn’t stay alert through conversations. I couldn’t go for my usual walks. I couldn’t do things like vacuum. I was a spaghetti-level mess. I hoped, hoped, hoped it would lift in the second trimester—for most people it does—but nope. It did not.

And on top of that? Depression.

Post-partum depression is something most people have heard of at this point, but although it is less likely, you can get a hit of depression during pregnancy too. Especially if you have a history of it and are high risk for PPD. (Who has two thumbs and not only a history of depression but also an official screening showing them to be high risk for PPD? It’s me. Of course.) The upside to my history of depression is that I have practice spotting when it starts creeping in (which can actually be really hard to do because you just stop caring about yourself and generally everything) and I already know what tends to work for me to treat and manage it. Which my doctor and I implemented. But it still takes time, and it’s still a fight.

How much editing/writing/drawing did I get done? Probably heaps, right? Because it’s not like I could get off the couch and be distracted by things, and besides, don’t creative types thrive on adversity and angst, tortured artist myth, blah blah blah?

Lol. No. That’s not how bodies work.

I was almost always too tired to think, and when I could I was locked in battle with my own mind. I got practically nothing done.

At least until I hit the third trimester and my doctor ran the usual blood tests and found my iron levels were very, very low. (You don’t need to worry about the baby. Apparently when it comes to iron, babies get first dibs and you just have to live off whatever dregs they deign to leave you. This was only an issue for me). Long story short, my doctor sent me to the chemo ward where I was hooked up to an IV of disconcerting black-red iron liquid and had it pumped straight into my veins.

Within a week, I had energy again.

So then I began working on my before-baby goals. Which I had to whittle down. A lot.

This is all to say I still don’t have a totally finished book (GETTING THERE. I have structurally edited as much as I can just now and am currently scanning on a description/word level, and bits of it are with people who know stuff) (… although, if I’m being perfectly honest, when I say ‘currently scanning on a description/word level’ what I really mean is that the document is open in the background for me to ignore while I write this as procrastination). I would be surprised if I get it to manuscript assessment pre-baby, but perhaps I can have it fairly ready and do that a few months after when (hopefully?) I’ve semi-adapted to life with baby chaos. I definitely will not have a completed first draft of a second book. Instead of being ahead with Silence Killed the Dinosaurs, I am so behind I’m still working on a story about Easter. I haven’t even finished the baby blanket.

Though I have crocheted a pretty cool elephant toy and grown a small human strong enough to headbutt my bladder and make a little bit of wee come out.

So, there’s that.

This isn’t about the US election

The last four-ish years have left me exhausted. It all stacked up. Being chronically ill, my four miscarriages, everything going wrong in the world. And 2020 itself has been a rough year for everyone. In the same ways. In different ways.

I haven’t got much (any) editing done lately. I meant to. I meant to have finished months ago. I meant to be querying by now. I meant to also be almost through a first draft of something new (currently stalled at about 50k words). I meant to draw more comics, write more stories for Silence Killed the Dinosaurs. I meant to have so much to talk about here.

It hasn’t worked out like that. The world doesn’t work out like that.

I haven’t even read many books this year. It’s nearly December and my current count for new-to-me books is a bit over 50. Which, I don’t know, maybe that sounds like a lot to you. It isn’t for me. It’s about half what I’ve read in previous years. I tend to get or at least approach 100 new reads. And I’m trying to be a Proper Writer^TM, so it is important.

I’m tired.

Over the last year, I had my fourth miscarriage in a row. A bushfire tore through my community. I bled so much I ended up in the ER and later had surgery (and I’m still not entirely sure why that happened. Probably to do with the miscarriages is anyone’s best guess). A pandemic began. My partner and I spent two weeks in quarantine. The state border between myself and my sister closed. The smoke from the fires set off my asthma and I couldn’t leave the house at all for a full month until my new preventor medication kicked in because every time I did the shock of the winter air made my lungs try to suffocate me.

When the pandemic started, I actually had a pretty good idea what it would be like for people. I became chronically ill in 2014, and for the first year and a half I was so sick I could barely leave the house. My whole life changed. I could still see close friends and family, at least, but I didn’t have much tolerance for it. I couldn’t handle more than a very occasional, short, quiet visit while propped up with pillows. I lost touch with so many people I’d always caught up with in groups because I simply couldn’t do those kinds of social gatherings anymore. I watched my life trickle away, wasted. It was lonely and frustrating.

That’s not exactly the same as a pandemic, especially because inside-time during a pandemic isn’t wasting your life—it’s saving people. I wish I could say something like that about my useless 2014/15. But, still, it was similar enough that I had an inkling of how lockdown would feel. So I bunkered down to draw light-hearted comics, hoping to save the smallest part of someone’s day. I didn’t know what else I could do.

But I’m tired.

I’ve become so used to bad news—in my personal life, in the world—that it’s hard to believe there’s any other kind out there. Hard to let it in when it happens.

It is happening, though.

I’m lucky to live in a place like Australia, where officials moved quickly and sensibly when the pandemic took off. Hardly anyone I know has had covid, and no one I know has died of it. My state had a little hiccup over the last couple of weeks and we went into lockdown … for three days before they realised the outbreak wasn’t as bad as they’d feared and let us out again. There are still extra restrictions in place and officials are watching the situation, but it’s starting to look like they managed to trace and contain all the cases in a matter of days. And Melbourne has been back on top of things for ages now.

There will be a vaccine. It may be a little way off, especially factoring in distribution. We may need boosters every year or so. But more and more candidates are finishing stage three trials successfully. Something is going to help. This won’t be forever.

The US yeeted Trump. (Well, maybe just a little bit about the US election, then). Honestly, I wasn’t sure it would happen. I’d completely given up on sensible decisions from people as a group. But his presidency is finally in its (very pathetic) death throws. We won’t see him on TV mocking people with disabilities or inciting violence against minority communities for much longer, at least not with any authority, and my friends in America should have a better shot at navigating the rest of the pandemic safely.

And maybe some other things are looking up too, although I can’t talk about it (I know, unfair of me).

I’m still tired.

I don’t really believe any of it yet, not deep down where it soaks into your bones and affects the way you think. But … maybe … things are going to heal. Not in a never-been-broken way, but at least in a better-than-it’s-been-lately way.

So I’m going to try not to be too hard on myself for collapsing. I’m just going to get up and get going again, between naps, at whatever snail speed suits my worn-out body and bruised psyche.

And.

One morning I woke up happy. I was happy before I even opened my eyes. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt that way. Almost four years, I think.

I made a discovery

Far out! You can make the first letter of paragraphs huge! Did you know you can drop cap here? Because I didn’t. This is awesome. Super writerly. Very posh. I’m seriously considering doing this at the beginning of every post from here on.

Uh oh. You can do it to every paragraph.

Cannot believe they did this. Because it’s ridiculous now. No longer posh. Not remotely professional. Who put this power in the hands of the common human, so prone to making terrible decisions and wasting everyone else’s time?

Koala.

I like writing in cafes

Definitely a cliche.

But it’s like having an office. Not a home office, but a proper office. Proper offices have noisy people moving about and stuff going on and people interrupting occasionally to try and get you do something. Only it’s much nicer to be interrupted by a sales pitch for another cup of coffee than by a plea for help unjamming the printer.

This probably sounds like a weird thing to appreciate, since a universal human experience seems to be hating offices, but I don’t have a real workplace. I don’t have a day job. I would like a day job. No, I would love a day job. It would take the pressure off making this writing thing work out, allow me to demonstrate my competency to myself and boost my self-esteem and, you know, give me a bit of cheeky spending money for those fun, luxury items such as bills and food.

But my chronic illness makes a traditional job unfeasible, and (since I have a partner who has a decent enough job to keep a roof over our heads) I sit at home all day doing the best I can between crashes with pens and a keyboard.

Pre-pandemic, my workplace was me and my cat. But there’s a really, really good cafe just over the hill, so about once I week (if I was feeling up to the walk) I would take my laptop over there.

Sometimes I would go to the cafe to change scenery. I find that really helpful for thinking. Just changing what’s around me can jostle things loose.

Sometimes I would go because I was struggling to focus, to trap myself in a place where I had nothing to do but write and drink coffee.

Sometimes I would go to get away from my cat. Don’t get me wrong, I love my cat, but he’s an entitled stage five clinger who will fight my laptop (And my arms. And my legs) to get my undivided attention. When he’s having a particularly dick-ish day, it’s good to be somewhere else.

Sometimes I would go because I needed to be around people. Not because I was lonely, per say. It wasn’t to have D&Ms with the baristas. It was just to see and hear people. To have their noise around me. To smile and say ‘hi, how are you?’ and say ‘yeah, good’ when someone asked it back even if it was a massive lie.

Before the pandemic, I don’t think many people would have understood why I needed that. Maybe you do now.

I really missed it this year.

Fortunately, things are looking good where I live. My state has had no community transmission for at least a month, and the few cases it has had have all come from overseas or interstate and been in quarantine the whole time. Our measures seem to be working. Because of my chronic illness (plus asthma, because I have that too), I’m still extra cautious. But the situation has remained steady long enough that I trust the measures to hold. Or, if they don’t, that they’ll give enough of a heads up for me to hide before covid gets absolutely everywhere.

So I’ve started (occasionally and while slathered in hand-sanitizer) to work in the cafe again.

‘Hi, how are you today?’

‘Yeah, good.’

Massive lie.

Bliss.

In a twist surprising no one, my own worst enemy is my brain

Editing something novel length is different to editing something short.

At least, that’s what I’m finding.

My work on Silence Killed the Dinosaurs means I’m pretty familiar with editing shorts*. I like to think I’m good at it. I certainly enjoy it. Sorting through the mess of a first draft for potential and patterns and then pulling them out to make it good is just so deeply satisfying. It’s the feeling of finally getting a nasty splinter out**.

But my process has always been simply to read through and make it better.

That hasn’t been working for my novel. A novel is different. A novel is big. It just doesn’t fit in your head all at once. At least, it doesn’t fit in my head.

If I try the old ‘read through and make it better’ method, I get bogged down on the first thing I stop to tweak. Like wearing a scarf that gets caught under a lawn mower. I get dragged right in, my brain hyper-focuses***, and I’m lost to the wider world. I can spend hours like that without noticing. But then when I manage to pull back, to read through what I’ve done, I realise that while the new stuff might work well in that precise scene, it doesn’t work with the book as a whole. Maybe I’ve shifted a character’s arc so it no longer flows nicely into the next chapter. Maybe I’ve reused a clever description that has to sound fresh later. Maybe I’ve accidentally announced a bunch of stuff that’s supposed to happen in a different part of the book.

In short, I lose track of the big picture.

And it doesn’t seem to be optional. I don’t know how to mentally hold myself back, keep that distance, to not give 110% of my attention to whatever small thing is in front of me at any given moment.

This is just the way my brain is. Sometimes it’s helpful—e.g., I don’t get distracted easily, I am very thorough and detail-oriented, and I’m weirdly great at rote learning—but not always. I struggle to take breaks, routinely working well into headaches or backaches and almost never remembering to stop for lunch without someone to prompt me (and I’ve had people say they envy me this, but no, trust me, it really is a bad thing, particularly because I have a chronic illness and if I don’t look after myself in these small ways it flares up and destroys me completely for a week or more). I waste so much time on tasks that simply do not require it. I can’t multitask. Cannot talk to people while I work, not even slightly (my partner can confirm this—I just stare blankly for a moment, possibly grunt, and then return to what I was doing, immediately wiping the incident from my memory). If I hyper-focus on anything at all after about 7pm in the evening, I will not be able to shut my brain off in time to fall asleep before 5am.

And, apparently, I struggle to edit novels.

It’s no use trying to force my brain to be different. I’d probably break it trying. Instead, I’ve been finding ways to approach the problem that suit it better.

Between drafts, I found the trick was to make it visual. I got index cards, wrote key points on them, added sticky notes, colour coded various things, and then pegged them to a line and moved it all about until I was happy. I needed it set out like that, to see it all at once, all together, for my brain to grab on properly.

But I’m in a different place now. I’m polishing an existing draft, not totally re-writing it. I don’t need to majorly shift scenes around, just play with their colour, intensity and expression.

What seems to be working for me has been to start with a pdf copy. I read that, made as many notes as I wanted on it, but could not change the actual text. This let me keep moving, which in turn let me get the big picture. When I’d read through the whole thing (several times. There’s really no changing me), I made big picture edit plans to work with the book as a whole.

Then, when I had both a plan and a document covered in notes, I started using them as a map to edit the draft.

Which is what I’m currently doing. I’m still hyper-focusing and getting carried away by small-picture tweaking, but as long as I keep checking in with my map, it stays harmonious with the whole.

And it’s going much better.

So far.

(If you also have problems like this and know any tips for dealing with it, please let me know).

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* Maybe this is news? The odd conversation has made me realise that some people assume I just type through something linearly, knock out a few comics in an hour or so, then immediately hit publish. This might well be how some blogs are written, but please do not confirm this for me as even the theoretical possibility of this creation method causes me mental anguish. (For context, I’m trying to be a bit looser on this blog, and I still re-wrote this from scratch three times, edited it for a whole afternoon and then put it aside for a day while I eyed it suspiciously in case it I changed my mind about anything [sentence written: 11/9/2020]. Scratch that, a whole weekend [14/9/2020 11:30am]. WAIT NOPE I’M GOING TO EDIT IT AGAIN [14/9/2020 11:50] … … … maybe I should talk about this whole other thing as well? NO. Jeez, Lucy, that would require a whole rewrite. Just do another post about that another time. [11:52]. Now I’m just googling stuff in case it’s relevant [12:16]. OH SHIT IT’S RELEVANT [12:21]***)

** I was actually going to say like popping a really big and awful pimple, but I thought it might be too gross, so only you footnote aficionados get that image. Enjoy.

*** Holy shit. I’ve always thought of this as ‘hyper-focus’ because that’s just what it feels like, and I just googled it there’s a legit psychological thing actually called ‘hyperfocus’ and from what I can see it is the exact thing I experience. I’m not just … weird? This is … actually a lot to process.

Really expected to have finished editing by now

I also expected to be writing mostly amusing, light-hearted, non-whingey posts for this blog.

The problem has been that I have had both a depression crash and a chronic fatigue syndrome crash.

That is to say, I had a week where I was so emotionally flattened that my only achievement was the world’s longest existential groan, and then I spent the very next week filled with soup instead of muscles and a brain. Since then, I’ve had days where I’ve been physically capable of getting things done, and I’ve had days where I’ve been emotionally capable of getting things done, but they have rarely overlapped.

Of the two, depression has been the bigger problem for editing.

To plan the more significant, big-picture edits, I read through my book. And it was total, unfixable, crap. Just limp and unfunny and terrible and I should hide under a blanket for the rest of my life to spare the world from myself.

However, I could not give a reason why something was a problem. Things just felt bad in a general sort of way. Nor could I deal with the problems. Any fixes I could come up with felt just as bad, possibly worse. Most incapacitating of all, I could not imagine the book finished. And I could not work towards a goal that did not exist in my mind.

But the depression lifted as I read, and things changed. I started liking everything more and more. By the end, I was happy. There were things to fix, sure, but I was pleased with what I had achieved and had ideas of what to do to get it where I wanted it.

So—partly because I was curious to see if the experience would be different, and partly because I had generated no useable editing notes for the first half of the book anyway—I read everything from the beginning again.

It was different. Very different. Surreally, jarringly, nightmarishly different.

My first official depression diagnosis came in 2009 (though I believe I was depressed long before that). Since then, I have consistently seen a therapist, majored in psychology, and even briefly trained to work on a suicide hotline. Through all that, I have never had the effects of depression made this obvious to me.

I don’t think I can explain how weird it was to see, really see, that certain thought processes are completely shut off when I am depressed. To understand that depression changes the way my brain operates. To wonder how many things I deeply, genuinely, and incorrectly believe I dislike simply because I tried them when I was depressed. To realise the depths to which I cannot trust what my brain tells me about my own feelings and reactions to the world.

Perhaps a decent analogy is to imagine you’re flying a plane at night through clouds. You can’t see anything out the windows—not the horizon, not the stars, not anything. Under these circumstances, your inner ear is not enough to tell you if you are flying level with the ground or even which way is up, and you know this. To fly, you must pay attention to what your instruments say about the outside world and your plane’s position in it. But this is normal. You fly like this all the time. It shouldn’t be a problem.

Now imagine the air traffic control tower calls up, mid flight, to tell you your instrument readings are wrong. Not all of them, and not all of the time. But they can’t tell you for sure which ones are feeding you faulty information.

Or, worse, imagine the tower never calls up at all. Imagine you just kept believing everything the instruments told you was the complete and perfect truth.

It’s a lot.

So I’m just going to ignore it and deal with a practical problem. Which is that I strongly suspect the bout of depression I just had was triggered by medication I was taking for those couple of weeks. And although I will not be on this medication constantly, I will need it for the odd week or two-week period over the coming months.

In fact, I’ve just started taking it again.

You know that feeling when you get strapped into a scary ride and you realise that, actually, this isn’t going to be fun at all and why the hell did you pay for it to happen, but it’s too late, the ride is moving, and you’re just going to have stick it out until it’s over?

Yeah.

I hope that just knowing to attribute any worthless, hopeless, flat feelings to the medication will help me remember it’s all a lie and there’s a reality beyond just waiting for me to come back. I hope I’m wrong that the medication caused it.

Just in case, I wrote myself a letter.

(Yes, my handwriting sucks)

It would probably be more professional not to say any of this hey

The way I got myself through my first draft was to tell myself over and over that it was allowed to be terrible, many people refer to first drafts as Vomit Drafts*, the point of them is to just get the basic framework down, there’s plenty of time to make it perfect later. No pressure.

But that just put it off until the second draft, and when I got there the pressure threatened to crush me. To dodge it again, I told myself, chill, this almost certainly still won’t be the final draft. And, okay, some friends might end up seeing this one, but you have about 90k words to get through before you have to commit to that, and anyway it will just be close people with similar taste in books who already know plenty of embarrassing stuff about you. No pressure.

Again, the pressure loomed for my third draft. But I had practise this time, I knew the drill. I told myself, look, okay, we’re getting further along in the process, I acknowledge this, but there’s still editing. Perfect is Future Lucy’s job. And yeah, you’ll probably want more people to read it, but before edits it will still just be people you know and no one laughed at you or disowned you for your last draft. No pressure.

Things were starting to look pretty real when I realised I was up to editing, so I said OKAY BUT THIS ISN’T THE FINAL EDIT BECAUSE OBVIOUSLY THERE’S HEAPS TO FIX CALM DOWN CALM DOWN NO PRESSURE IT’S GOING TO BE OKAY DON’T EVEN THINK THE WORD PERFECT THAT SHIT IS STILL FUTURE LUCY’S PROBLEM NO PRESSURE OKAY.

This is a long, winding way to say fuck you, Past Lucy.

You knew you had a perfectionism problem. You could have worked on it as you went. The first couple of drafts could have been for developing a healthy acceptance of flaws as part of a never-ending learning process. The final draft would have been a great time to challenge where your idea of perfect came from in the first place. Why do you think it’s valid? Is it even possible to reach? What’s the worst that would happen if you don’t? Edits should have involved setting realistic project goals and cut-offs. And through everything you could have eased yourself into the unavoidable truth that not everyone is going to like what you write. I mean, goddammit, your book has puns, talking animals, and a deliberately absurd magic system with ambiguous rules. You know what you did. You know it will never be everyone’s cup of tea. You know you’re going to have to live with that.

But no. You put it off, piled it up, fed it with the promise of one day, next time, so that it grew into an impossible monster and hit me, Once-Future Now-Current Lucy, in one overwhelming avalanche of paralysing, soul-smothering anxiety.

Please, please, please, do not do this to me ever again. Especially not during a pandemic, after four miscarriages, and when you know we have a chronic illness that blocks us from having any other job to give us a sense of self.

You really need to work on yourself.

(Editing is going super well, by the way.)

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* although why they do this when Barf Draft is right there, I will never understand.