Hey, y’all! I’m traveling, and meant to write a letter for today, then time did this thing where it’s like, “What are you worried about? You have plenty of me!” and then it buggers off and is all like, “Later, sucker.”
Little bitch.
Anyway, next week is the fifth Monday of the month, and I take those off anyway, but I’ll be back on November 6 with an all new Dear Writer!
BUT WAIT… before you skip to the letter:
If you have a novel, screenplay, or other long-form fiction project you’d like to finish in 2024, you need to sign up for my Year of Writing Magically Workshop. Applications are open now, but space is limited. Don’t wait to apply!
If you’re interested but not sure, I’m holding a free pre-workshop workshop via Zoom on November 14; you can register for that here.
Okay. Go ahead. You can read now.
Dear Writer,
Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1999.
I remember one summer night in the mid-80s, walking down the street with my friends and someone had a boom box blasting Prince’s 1999 because back then you had to earn your mobile entertainment with physical labor and we were all screaming the lyrics into the balmy darkness and laughing at the ludicrous concept of 1999. It seemed like such an absurd idea, a future so distant that I thought it would never, ever come.
Yeah. 1999 was almost 23 years ago. And now it’s almost 2022.
Sorry. I know it’s rude to bring it up, but y’all.
It’s almost 2022.
I’ve been thinking a lot about time and reality and the nature of the universe lately, mostly because I have a story idea that is itching for me to tell it but I can’t because I have Stuff To Do and this story is just following me around like a toddler, pulling at my skirt and asking, “Can we go yet?”
Part of me wants to say, “Yes,” and just go, but I can’t. I need to have patience. I need to wait. These are things I have not been good at, historically. If jumping the gun were an Olympic sport, I’d be a gold medalist. Once I’ve made up my mind that I want to do something, I never, ever wait.
Now, I am waiting. And it’s not entirely unpleasant, this very new experience, but my restlessness is growing. This morning, apropos of nothing, I told Ian that I wanted to move my office into another room and that I wanted to buy a new iMac because my second monitor died, even though between us we have so many extra monitors in this house that it’s kind of absurd.
I just wanted to do something new, now, because I have so many other changes on the horizon and I hate waiting, so if I can’t have those changes, I’ll take whatever changes I can get.
But here I am, patiently waiting and moving through my year the way I planned it and oh my god, can we just go already? At the same time, I feel zoomed up so far into the future that my head is almost halfway up the arsehole of 2022. Time is both flying by and taking for-ev-er to get me where I want to be.
But the research for the new book is soothing me a bit. It’s just a little bit of leaning forward into the new existence that will come after HSW comes out and after I finish up the other fiction book that needs finishing just for closure’s sake and then I can actively work on whatever the hell this new thing is which I think might be science fiction-y? If you can believe that.
The world is full of surprises and, apparently, so are we.
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
What’s super weird is that, after all of these dystopian stories and the certainty that the end of the world would come for us in death and scarcity and hunger games, I’m thinking about the breakdown of society in terms of story world-building, and it’s an interesting idea. What if the apocalypse we’ve been preparing for isn’t an asteroid or nuclear war? What if all of this sturm and drang now is just us growing up? And when we do, in much the way that at one point we ceased to be infants and became toddlers, it’s the end of one existence, and the beginning of another. The end of one world; the start of a new one.
Look, if the timeline of the world’s existence was expressed in terms of one 24-hour day, humans showed up on the scene at four seconds to midnight. Civilization came in at one second to midnight. We are babies, moving from toddler to kid with one hell of a temper tantrum. That’s scary, and not without consequence. We’re living that consequence, those of us who are surviving it. We are all experiencing loss, grief and existential dread.
A bomb didn’t go off, but a bomb kinda went off. And there’s no going back to how it used to be.
Which is a good thing, because this was the bad place.
It's a new dawn. It's a new day. It's a new life for me, and I'm feeling good.
While everything is going on now, with the world changing and me moving from an old life into a new one (although not fast enough) and with me putting my life’s work down on paper and having it ready to go in the new year like that’s a fucking thing people do, I decided that now is the time for me to process my childhood trauma.
Y’all, there is nothing in this world so hard that I cannot make it harder.
It’s coming on like a birth; I don’t have control over the timing, but I need to get on board because this thing is happening whether I’m ready or not. My damage is protecting itself; in recent weeks, my body dysmorphia has been about as bad as it has ever been. My therapist told me I needed to parent my inner child, and she explained what that meant a few times, but I still didn’t understand. Not like I was deliberately resisting the idea (although I was) but it was like I couldn’t understand, like when I was in astronomy class and the science got to a place where I couldn’t follow because my brain just wasn’t attuned to that kind of thinking. Yeah, that’s what happened when she talked about my inner child. I am perfectly capable of understanding what it means to parent the abused child inside, but I honestly still respond to that idea with, “What are you even talking about?” a response whispered into my consciousness by the damage that childhood left behind. Meanwhile, my damage is curling around the last little bit of dark, gnarled weedy real estate that I’d left it, defending its ground.
I’ll figure it out. And when I do, like all the other damage, when I finally get the courage to stand up to it and tell it to get gone, it’ll just disintegrate and float away in a truly anti-climactic puff of smoke. My damage has been very much like a childhood bully. It puffs up and gets all big and scary and says, “Don’t come near here or else,” and then I spend months building up the energy to look it in the face, and when I do, it doesn’t even whimper. It just goes away, and I’m left thinking, “That’s it?”
But it wasn’t the looking it in the eye that worked the magic. It was the months building up the energy to look it in the eye, which I did by facing the damage, little bit by little bit, until all that was left was the dark ghost that would blow away with one stern look.
And so here I am, piece by piece, event by event, dancing the disentanglement tango with both my personal past and, like many of you, the old world that turned out to be a load of bullshit. The one where it was necessary to work at least 40 hours a week to make someone else rich just for the “good” health insurance that would leave us bankrupt if we we had the nerve to actually need it. The one where we were never good enough as we were, so we had to spend our money on products that would make us thinner or younger, with more hair and whiter teeth, as though those were things that mattered. We all know that’s bullshit now, right? The college education that puts you into debt for the rest of your life. For what? To be a battery for the matrix?
A bomb didn’t go off, but it is the end of the world as we know it. I won’t say I feel fine, because I don’t, but I do see an opportunity for a new start. New starts are hard, but they can also be beautiful.
And I have to believe this one will be, because here I am, with my head halfway up the arsehole of 2022, and I can’t wait to get started.
Everything,
L