What’s cooking

As of last month, I’m a free agent, and it does mean whatever you think it means, although it probably doesn’t mean what you think it means for me. Look, upon my return from a very short trip to the relatively warmer London, the Dublin chill and rain blasted into me the moment I got off the airport bus but instead of annoyance I caught myself thinking, ah, Leopardstown, your girl is home.

Day after, the streets came alive with thousands of yellow leaves gone soggy with the somewhat regular assault of rain. You could say that I was still living in a fantasy of an overextended summer vacation, a kind of limbo filled with days of my kind of wanton debauchery (shameless Silksong marathons, bad food, and late nights, mostly) up until a couple weeks back. That now, as winter approaches, it was maybe time to truly hunker down with some decisive actions.

Submissions and vital stats

Not that I’ve been slacking more than usual on the writing front. I currently have three pieces doing the submission rounds, one novella in the last stretch of its nth revision cycle, and the scraggly beginnings of a long-form screenplay (my second, but my first English). These numbers are nowhere near what a lot of the published authors I know work with, and a majority of said writers have full-time occupations. But comparing oneself to others, for better or worse, is always a losing battle, so I only declare my numbers as a sort of additional data point that this is what it might look like for other writers.

I don’t actually think I’m a slow writer, I can stream-of-consciousness my way through any given topic like a spiked-up motorcycle driver weaves through rush-hour traffic in EDSA, but I do have a pronounced focus/attention problem. It’s gotten quite worse recently, and it’s pretty obvious it’s anxiety-driven. I take my wins where I can, because the wins do come up quite randomly (sometimes it’s coffee, often it’s I remembered to meditate, sometimes it’s a random urge, sometimes it’s a burst of motivation after reading a craft book or a good novel). I have also been working out at least twice every week at an actual honest-to-goodness gym since September, which on paper hasn’t really been helping with the writing, but in the words of Don Keefer recruiting Sloan to host a headliner news show, where she argues that she’s not a particularly good finance show host because a recent survey said 42% of people still believed some financial myth about what raising the debt ceiling meant despite her talking about it every night, and one of Don’s last-ditch efforts to convince her to do it was to say, “Maybe you helped keep it at 42%.” And you know what, I’ll take that logic. It could have gone way worse. Any given day I could be drunk at Grafton besieged by pigeons, busking with no pants on.

Is everyone addicted?

I think I really need help with the scrolling addiction, though I can’t imagine it’s a battle that can be won without digging really deep into the root of why I keep wanting to escape discomfort and boredom. I know the answer at an intellectual level, it’s probably something I can nonchalantly cite to a therapist and still be absolutely incapable of integrating and processing and learning from. That’s always been a problem, right? The illusion of bookish intelligence is that you really do know what should be done, you even know why things are the way they are, but hot damn, nothing in the world can really make you sacrifice a familiar suffering for any measure of uncertainty. Because for some reason or another, a part of me doesn’t want to budge.

But hey, like I said to a friend recently, worse comes to worst, I could just give up on writing. I mean, and when I say give up, I almost always mean, give up for now. See, I flash back to that time I was climbing Pulag, the laggard in a group of fit, actual mountaineers, when I had reached the first of five separate points in the two-day trek where I was certain I had reached the actual end of my rope, the last oxygen cell in my lungs, the last molecule of blood in my muscles, that I could not continue anymore and so had to give up. But then each time I “gave up,” ready to pay whatever amount of money to be lifted via helicopter, I would regain a small shard of grit. It wasn’t shame-driven, or motivation-driven, or some adrenalin-inspired optimism, it was truly simply the realization that there was nowhere for the helicopter to land where I had given up. And since I was waiting for nothing, now that I had caught some of my breath back, I might as well scuttle along back on the path. Then I would run out of air again, to the point where a doctor from the team wondered if it could be altitude sickness, and so I’d give up again, and again, and again, and again, except this time, we were at the peak anyway, and there was nowhere to go but down.

This is why I never got to see the sea of clouds, the one thing that was supposed to make the entire journey worth it. But other people aren’t me, they don’t know how far below I’ve started (health-wise, experience-wise, gumption-wise), that maybe, maybe my sea of clouds is still being alive enough to come back down. And so I think about that when it comes to my writing. It’s not like I’m ever going to be on any other kind of mountain where my innate mode of expression is not words. So I might as well give up when things get hard, you know? Because chances are, I’m still going to be writing at some point down the road anyway, who are we kidding. (Also, that nobody is ever coming to save you dahil bakit ka nga ba nasa Pulag with people who are way healthier than you?)

Tip: Ask better questions

Which is all to say I gave up a number of times on this novella that I’m working on. I would sit down and allocate hours to try and revise the last scene, and I would always just find myself reading or watching something else online. In the moment I would justify that by saying I was doing research for other stuff and while that might be true in a far-fetched, reaching kind of way, in the sense that everything is fodder, it still means no writing got done.

I wish I could outline what really helped. Often times I’d get into these pits of despair only to randomly get out of them alive and be so happy that I did get out alive that I would bury the memory of said despair and then learn nothing. But even if I think about what helped now, I really couldn’t identify how I stumbled upon the line of thinking that would eventually help me see a layer above my story. The problem I’ve been having was I was getting bored by what I’ve been reading, even if on paper (heh) it was supposed to be the culmination of everything I’ve set up in three previous little acts. And I guess I couldn’t separate that part of me that was so precious about this because it did read as compelling by the time it gets really hot. But the way to get there was such a massive drag even I couldn’t get through it. But another part, the part that I haven’t been listening to, knows that I’ve chosen my instinct for sappiness over the integrity of the story. That’s cheating I think, so I really have to work on that.

In any case, if forced to analyze how I got to the solution, I guess it was a matter of asking the right kind of questions. For this story, the question was, why didn’t it feel like the ending was working? And that got me to thinking about, well, what did my story promise from the beginning? What had I been working toward and did I pay off each and every step that I laid out? And if not, why the fuck not? That was my one job and I resorted to drama and sap over a satisfying conclusion.

Asking the right kind of questions had also been my savior in what used to be my day job. That’s the only way I could climb out of writer’s block in a few hours. Usually the reason I wouldn’t be able to enrich a certain piece of writing is because I didn’t have enough information. Same goes for fiction, in a way, where information is really about the world-building and how well you know your characters.

Camera didn’t die this time

I did an impromptu stream this afternoon to test out this cool little widget (check out the upper right corner in the image below) that allows anyone watching the stream to add their tasks to the common task board so that we can be a little bit more accountable to each other when doing the work. I mention this because it was through this stream that I was able to come back to the writing with a more committed stance.

It’s so weird to me that there’s this entire niche in Twitch where people just watch other people working so that they can co-work with them in a body-doubling kind of way. And it’s weird because it’s exactly what I need for myself to do the work. I always thought people wouldn’t understand what I wanted to happen with the stream. However, I would love to do this with other Filipino writers the way we used to when I had this four-person writing group, when I still woke up early enough to match the Philippine afternoon time zone.

My dream is to have this thing going where a bunch of writers/artists are on a Zoom kind of thing, being streamed so that other writers or other people working on their own art projects can join in and see other people doing work at the same time. To be honest it’s the one thing I miss from my previous work and life before the pandemic. I crave the connection and having lots and lots of people just in my surroundings, not necessarily to talk to, but to be there when I do need a chat, and mainly to be around so we can witness each other do stuff. So maybe what I’m really saying is, I hope to see you there.