My Worst Self-Own

Newsletter 2023-12-29

The bonus letter is free for everybody this week. Merry Christmas!

Recently, something terrible happened: I achieved a goal. For months, I’ve been struggling to finish the edits on the sequel to The Chosen Twelve. Before that, I’d spent months struggling to write that sequel in the first place. Basically, writing is a struggle, and if you value your free time or quality of life, you should choose literally any other hobby in the universe. Woe unto you if you accidentally become successful enough at wordsmithing to turn it into a job, either full-time or as a side hustle, at which point you’re basically locked in. Stick to recreational activities that are guaranteed to only lose money, like anything on the water. If you own a boat, have seen a boat, or have even thought about a boat when sitting in a dark room hiding under a blanket, you are now hopelessly in debt. Enjoy your second mortgage.

The deadline for the first draft of the sequel was at the end of June. I knew about that hard cutoff a year in advance, yet it somehow took me by surprise all the same. I’m also surrounded by distractions, although my wife wants me to stop referring to my real life that way. I have a day job, a family, weekly writing obligations, and a cornucopia of time wasting activities I simply refuse to give up. If I stop playing Axis and Allies by email, Europe will never be saved/conquered depending on which side I’m on that game. While I was highly productive at re-fighting an eighty-year-old war, that didn’t help me put many words on the page. I picked at the book here and there over a series of months before I wrote the majority of it in a blind panic in the final sixty days before the deadline. When I sent it off, I slept soundly knowing I would never, ever have to write another word again. Then the worst thing ever happened: The publisher sent it back.

This isn’t widely known outside the publishing industry, but there is a position of pure evil occupied solely by psychopaths, megalomaniacs, and door-to-door salesmen. The title for that job is technically “editor,” but the duties extend far outside editing the written word. What an editor really does is ruin your life. And by “your,” I mean “my” because your book was probably a lot more polished than mine was. To be clear, I love my editor. She’s a kind, selfless person who puts up with far more of my shenanigans than any human being ever should. She also gave me a figurative roundhouse kick to my face (and feelings) by pointing out obvious flaws with my manuscript for the sequel that it was my duty and my duty alone to fix. Writing fiction is wild. You come up with imaginary people with imaginary problems and make up imaginary solutions. Then an actual professional receiving a professional salary writes back to you in a very professional email that tells you, in the most professional way possible, why your imagination is dumb. Then it’s my job to respond in an equally professional email that I professionally appreciate her professional feedback and that her professional words didn’t make me cry, like, at all. Then I get back to writing and the editor disappears into her lair until a few months later when it’s time for her to ruin my life once again.

This sequel is my eighth book. I thought I’d seen it all by now, but I ran into (or, more accurately, created) issues I’d never encountered before. The biggest difference between this time and all the others was this was my first true sequel. How to Save Your Child from Ostrich Attacks, Accidental Time Travel, and Anything Else that Might Happen on an Average Tuesday was the spiritual successor to Only Dead on the Inside: A Parent’s Guide to Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse, but they weren’t directly linked. Each one was its own island of insanity. Even the chapters within each book were isolated essays only loosely connected by theme and humor. Novels don’t work that way. You can’t finish writing a long work of fiction and only then sit down and decide what order you want the chapters to go in. Actually, that’s not entirely true. You can get away with it if you’re James Joyce, and then, when nobody can figure out what your book is about, everyone calls you a misunderstood genius and makes college kids read your work until the end of time. That reference is the one and only thing I got out of my English degree. Also, I never actually read James Joyce’s books. I never read anything, really, which might be why I ended up in this predicament. I flaunted the assigned reading one too many times and the writing gods smited me. The fastest way to writer hell is by using SparkNotes.

For most writers, a novel has to be in chronological order and make sense right from the start. Worst of all, it has to be long. So, so long. I don’t know who decided a novel should be made of that many words, but that person should be cast into the sun. My first book, that zombie survival guide I mentioned a minute ago, was forty thousand words. That’s a common length for a collection of funny essays. In comedy writing, you wear out your welcome fast when people get that much of you all at once. I’m best tolerated in small doses, which is why I became popular on Twitter and nowhere else. All my books after that one crept up in length—except for my children’s book, You Can’t Be a Pterodactyl, which was a glorious seven hundred words—but none of them approached the length of a fictional narrative until I actually wrote one. That was The Chosen Twelve. The first draft of the sequel, The Gods of Spenser Island, was seventy-three thousand words. After I went back and fixed everything wrong with it, it was ninety-nine thousand. In two months of editing, I cut two chapters, added nine more, and cried a lot. Not real tears, which would be unprofessional, but the metaphorical kind that drip down on the inside and flood my soul. I need a metaphorical sump pump.

When something is that big and unwieldy, the scope makes any issues hard to correct. It reminds me of a story my coworker told me about when he was building his house. The construction workers poured the slab foundation in the middle of winter. The concrete cracked in the section under the attached garage. The foreman brought in my co-worker to show him the giant fissure. My coworker asked the foreman what he was going to do about it. The answer was nothing. There was simply too much concrete already in the ground to make changes. My coworker’s house would simply have this flaw for the rest of time and he would have to learn to live with it. I felt that way when writing this sequel. The first book is out in the world. Thousands of copies have been sold. It’s been read. It’s been reviewed. It’s been embraced, rejected, or forgotten, depending on the individual going through its pages. I know its strengths and, more importantly, its weaknesses more intimately than even my harshest critic. Trust me, no one hates me more than me.

It’s not that I didn’t know what was wrong with the first book. It’s just that there’s no way to get rid of those flaws without digging out the foundation and starting over, which could never happen if the house was ever going to get finished at all. Even if I did all that, the new foundation would just have a different crack somewhere else because there’s no such thing as a perfect house or a perfect book or a perfect anything, really. The only place a flawless story exists is in your head because once you type it out, everyone, including you, can see what’s wrong with it. I know where the cracks in the foundation are with the first book, and I built a house on top of them. Now I’m building a second story on that house. I can’t change a single word from book one. I have to live with it as is, forever wondering about what I could have done differently. After you reside in a home for long enough, the flaws become character. In a book, they become characters. Let’s just say any flaws make them more relatable. There’s nothing more unbelievable than a perfect person. Especially if that person is me.

This might all make it sound like my first draft of the sequel was terrible. On the contrary, I was actually quite proud of it. I was able to carry out the next stage of the story arc I daydreamed up all those years ago. It’s just that when you put something out in the world where other people can see it, it becomes clear how a daydream and a polished novel are two very different things. Getting from one to the other takes work. To finish the edits by the end of the year, I had to start canceling things, just like I did for the initial deadline in June. I turned down invitations to see friends and abandoned my weekly sessions of Axis and Allies. I didn’t have time for board games or Halo campaigns or movie nights with the kids. I cut down my hang out time with Lola to the bare minimum needed to maintain a marriage, which she actually seemed pretty okay with. In fact, she recommended that I edit even more books. I’m sure I shouldn’t read too much into that. It wasn’t just people I was putting off. It was chores and errands, too. I need to install leak detectors below all the sinks, deep clean the dining room carpet, and fix a thousand different things that are broken but that I’m too cheap to throw away. For the last few months, I started virtually every sentence I said out loud with, “When the edits are done…” Then, with shocking suddenness, the edits actually were done, and I had to do all of those things. It was the worst self-own ever.

That’s the conundrum in which I now find myself. It’s entirely appropriate that, in an article about the problems caused by my procrastination, it took me until this far down to get to the point. I’m off work this week, and the manuscript is away with the editor again. She’s on vacation for Christmas, so there’s no possible way she can send them back yet. This should have been a rare moment of calm amid a lifetime of chaos. Instead, I now have time for everyone and everything I put off for the last two months. This is the busiest week of my life. The house is a disaster. The yard looks like it was hit by a meteor. My children are unrecognizable, having aged three years since the last time I looked at them. I think Betsy is in college. On top of all the long term things I need to get to, the daily stuff keeps piling up. No matter how fast I wash, there’s always more dirty dishes and laundry. It defies the law of the conservation of mass and energy. The filth spontaneously generates from nothing. I’m grateful I had the chance to write a sequel to The Chosen Twelve, but I’m even more grateful I’m done with the edits (for now). I’m not grateful for all the chores that didn’t do themselves in my absence. That’s how I’m spending the magical week between Christmas and New Year’s. I’m tired of living in a cluttered and dirty universe. I should make up a better one, but then some editor would just tell me I imagined it wrong.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James