WIP Wednesday : Chasing the Dragon

Now that I'm cruising along on my wip, gunning for 20K by Thursday, I'm remembering what I love about writing. It's like a kind of high, and I won't deny I have an addictive personality. I float above the rest of the world, plotting and speaking in the voices of imaginary people, and typing late at night until my eyes are red. I'm like a junkie for the laptop, and every click on the Word Count fuels my high.

After the torment of this last round of purgatory in Query Hell and the endless revising and reworking, after the acceptance that a novel I spent the better part of a year on may not be THE ONE, my WIP progress is what reminds me why I can't keep from writing. Maybe I'm not good enough to be published, now or ever. But if I quit writing now, I'll never know. And I'll stop getting that rush, feeling that power, that, dare I say it, god-like omnipotence that comes from unleashing a character or a story you love into the world, or, failing that, at least bring them to life in the minds of a handful of people.

Athena's got nothing on my current heroine; she sprang into creation fully formed and cut her way out of my head and onto the page. She's convinced me to learn about new ways of life and cultures that are totally unlike my own. Though I know nothing about playing the violin, she is an expert at it. She faces adversity with her head held high, and isn't afraid to take on new challenges. She's also hot-headed, naive, and self-centered. She thinks the world revolves around her, and you know what, she's right.

My world does revolve around her right now. Together we're experiencing danger, fear, prejudice, sexual tension, first love, and the exhilaration of stardom as if we are the same person. In fact, I keep having to tell her I'm the boss and she's not. No, you can't kiss that boy right now, you have to wait until it moves the plot forward. Argh, no, you can't see ghosts. Wait, that might be really cool, actually. Okay, you can see ghosts.

More importantly, she distracts me from lamenting over the last story that made me feel this way. The one that has been edited within an inch of its life and still needs an major overhaul before I send it on one last ride on the query-go-round. Don't get me wrong, there's a thrill in seeing partial requests in my inbox, too, but so far, the pay-off has just not made the build-up worth it, if you know what I mean. And I think you do. I have to believe that practice makes perfect. Maybe it's just the writing endorphins talking, but I have confidence in my work, and I think maybe, just maybe, this story is THE ONE.

And maybe someday I'll have time to give the last one a major overhaul, or the one I wrote before that one, or the one I wrote before that one. And I'll have time to write new stories, bring new characters to life, their worlds crossing over into ours. But I know this right now; it doesn't matter how many stories I have to write, chasing the high that this one might be THE ONE. I'll keep doing it as long as it takes. Maybe it's because I'm an addict. I can't help myself. I want to feel the rush that writing-- even writing a mediocre book-- gives me, the kind of rush that even tops reading a favorite book for the first time.

So that's why I keep writing, more than anything. Everything else, rejection, publication, is just a side-effect.

Querying Hell, or, We can't stop here, this is Rejection country

Querying demons.

The worst of the horde.

Nothing sucks the confidence right out of you like a flight of these little devils on your back, circling and swooping on your self-esteem as soon as you hit send. A manuscript I thought was perfect (again) now seems trite and my characters shallow. That amazingly fresh premise I thought I had feels old and stale from contemptuous familiarity. I want to work on a new story, but the demons keep me too distracted; when I'm not constantly refreshing my inbox, my palms are too sweaty to hold a pen (I brainstorm longhand).

Rejections aren't so bad one at a time, just like these guys with the bat-wings flying overhead. But once they swarm, my cool attitude has reached its limit. Seemingly innocuous words like subjective, unfortunately, and connection rasp away my faith in my writing. It's a dark place, being in querying hell, one among a mass of writhing, faceless writers. (Which may be why we have developed such a large blogging culture, to give ourselves faces and individualism, but more on that at another time.)

Despite the fact that we writers may seem on the surface to be our own competition, it is this sense of community, of mutual experience and sympathy that helps me ignore the querying doubts. My development as a writer and as a professional would never have been possible without writing communities online, helpful writing blogs and and critique groups. Being a little stubborn helps, too.

What best soothes the wounds the querying demons inflict? Hearing about the experiences of other writers, sympathizing with their own self-inflicted purgatory, and being able to wish other writers well on their writing journey, and mean it. I want to give out to the world what I want in return. But at the same time, I'm a bit of a pessimist, expecting every query reply to be a big R. So I'm delightfully surprised if I get a partial request, or sometimes even a kindly worded rejection. It reminds me that there are people on the other end of this business, too, people who are as passionate about books as we writers.

Querying hell suddenly seems a lot more like a very crowded bus than an endless inferno. My stop will come eventually. Maybe I'll ride it all the way to publication. Maybe I'll get off early and start writing something else, and wait to get back on the bus when the next work is finished. But if I get off the bus in Rejection Country, I may never want to get back on. That's why this post is dedicated to everyone who shares their querying woes with the rest of us across cyberspace.

We'll stay on the bus together as long as it takes.

Anyone know any good driving songs? Anything but 100 bottles of beer on the wall...