As predicted, Camp Nano finished without me succeeding to reach my goal. I would say I’m totally fine with it, but I’m not. Not because I didn’t win, but because I didn’t make the progress that I wanted on my book.
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Almost Poetry: Mirrors
The thing about looking yourself in a mirror isn’t about washing your face or shaving your beard or putting on makeup.
It isn’t about spotting all those new freckles on your nose or that new pimple that is still soft and tender or making sure that hickey is hidden.
Looking yourself in the mirror isn’t about seeing your eyes red and puffed and swollen after you’ve cried to the break of dawn just because or checking the angles of your chin that you think they don’t flatter you, reimagining, redesigning, wishing.
It’s not even about those times your reflection talks back to you, mocking, smirking, blaming you while you do nothing but stand there on shaky legs and sobbing breath and scream and scream and scream on the inside and nobody hears a thing.
The thing about looking yourself in the mirror is to remind yourself that you’re there, too. That you are like everyone else. Your whole life you’ve been looking through your eyes all day long, going through the automatic motions that you’ve learned to repeat day after day, hour after hour, seeing a world in which you are the audience as much as the center, the point of reference. It can make you forget that you, too, are there.
Because the thing about looking yourself in the mirror is to remind you about your physical existence; one face among millions. Similar but not alike. Not special but oh so different in every single aspect that makes what you are, you. That no matter what, those eyes will be there with you to meet you back, red, haunted, alive.
CampNano Progress Day 8
You’d think that by deciding to participate at CampNano, and a goal of 30k, I would have been consistent and on time and totally up to this, but you’d think wrong. The funny thing is, I don’t mind.
Didn’t read tag
I’ve always felt obligated to finish all the books I started. I don’t know why. Was it just a matter of principle or just because I didn’t like putting down half-finished books, I used to power through and finish any book I started no matter what.
The books that I have abandoned aren’t many and they had always made me feel like a quitter, as if it was exclusively my problem that I didn’t like them. Until this year that I said fuck it and I started dropping the books that didn’t engage me like flies.
Procrastinating productively Vol.2
I haven’t written in days so, like a writer committed to her writing, I sit down to write because it’s a thing that has to happen if I want to accomplish anything (like make writing my job *cough cough*), I open my document determinedly and I start writing.
At least, that’s what I’m saying to myself as I endlessly stare at the empty document willing it to life. When nothing works and the words don’t cooperate, I open tumblr because, you know, by scrolling down endlessly I might get an idea, or magically construct the sentence in my mind, or avoid any coherent thought over my story, or wish for the damned thing to finish on its own.
Reaching the finish line
A couple of weeks ago I finished writing the second (haha no, it’s still the first) draft of my first book, which I have named for now #angstyspaceopera, and it still feels weird despite the fact that I’m already deep in the process of drafting my second one (which doesn’t have a tag yet- I’m working on it though).
First and second drafts, they both took me a full year to write and I have to say, I’m thankful it’s finally done because I came this close to hating it. I started the first draft in June 2015 with absolutely no intention for the words I was vomiting on the paper to be anything other than what I had been writing all those years: self-indulgent scenes of my favorite tropes that I keep to myself and I revisit when I want to read something that I will, absolutely, like.