Poking the bear

Is that a terrible title? It might be a terrible title, I'm not sure. 

Anyway that's the current/temporary title for the novel formerly known as Imposter Syndrome. Because that book has gone on a whole journey that I can't even get into really, from conversations with friends that uprooted some wild things from my past that I had not really been aware of until seeing them through someone else's eyes. 

This is why they invented therapy, you know. I should look into that. Just. WHEN.

The novel was originally about (oh my God) a young composer who got tormented out of her conservatory by some assholes (nonfiction) but solved the can't-compose-anymore problem by studying the work of a specific musician (just elided a bunch of decades there) but then got continually hounded by imposters online, which was truly a feature of my last year. Except it's me, the comprehensive scholar of anything I'm interested in, so I was like: no, they'd never make that grammatical mistake, the wording is all off, that's the wrong emoji. Report imposter on social media platform. Over and over and over.

I cannot help being a literary analysis person and a linguist and paleographer.

So in the book she kept calling out imposters but then one imposter turned out to be kind of amazing despite that and ended up becoming important? I don't know, I never got that far--that version of it got tossed a while back. Like December or something. A draft I threw out.

Now it's about much more interesting things. A history of anger and how ugly it is to have that inside you. Class differences and how that played into the conservatory rejection--truly a thing I never put together about my own life experiences until THIS SPRING, sitting on the ground by my car with a piece of the car in my filthy hands. Revelation by rusted out brake back casing, detached. Amazing. It's about rejection and alienation. Seeking outside validation, when everyone knows you only really can build on inner validation. But when you've never had the outside validation, you search and search for it desperately. It's also about that desperation and how it drives you.

The book is now about 90K words and heading for the downhill run to the end, because I have to go back and add in all those things to the first 50K words before I got all this enlightenment about everything.

It's been such a weird and incredible time, I can't even express it. Best thing ever. I'm writing more music but also expanding how I think about that. Like one day I might even write something that's not a cello solo with a viola, cello, and bass. Imagine! Too bad high notes hurt my brain. I won't even let the viola or cello go above F lately. I've always disliked high notes. 

Though recently I listened to the first good piece I wrote when I started back, Stop All the Clocks, to Auden's Funeral Blues, and it goes quite high. Goddamn that piece is good. That one and Beaufort and Wild Geese, I will stand on those as good work I've done. Not that they can't be better (they can for sure, I seem to color inside narrow lines) but I'm proud of them.

I had a transformational moment a few weeks back at like 3 a.m. that deserves to be in a museum. Like a life-changing reversal of all the badness. I can't really explain but it was like math. Like a GRE logic problem, really. If x then not y. Therefore throw y out forever, y is wrong and you never need to think about it again. 

I'm cured. Isn't that amazing? What a project to embark upon. What an incredible way for it to go. 

This book gets into such personal nightmare territory that writing it has been utterly harrowing. Like shaking and making a scream face like someone's stabbing me while I write it sometimes. I've had to medicate myself for panic attacks. It's incredibly painful. It's about all the worst and hardest things from my life, isn't it. I keep having to go do all this physical work to deal with the fight or flight. 

My friends have been utterly incredible during all this. Thank you infinitely and forever, friends! You're a beautiful miracle. It means the world to me. 

For writing time, I've been depending very heavily on my favorite album of all time, Unreal Unearth Unending, to the point where no matter how grim or distracted I am, I've Pavloved myself into starting writing the minute I start the album playing. Yesterday I was laughing as I imagined hearing it in a place where I couldn't write. What would happen? I imagined myself all frantic, looking for paper, writing on walls.  

I need the help, for real. I'm pretty brave sometimes (while also completely chickenshit anxious) but facing this down has been insanely hard. Well, yeah, like facing down a bear. Infinite thanks, emotional support album! Also, the full range of human emotion thing is a struggle for me, as I tend to want to retreat into an unfeeling object like a pillow or block of wood for safety, so that album always gets me feeling emotions again like a person. Messy! But healthy, I guess. Humans! If you cannot generate your own emotional range, store-bought is fine. 

It's a miracle I go back and write this again every day. But I'm so lucky because I got my major trauma over composition addressed in a way that turned it around, which is kind of insane, really. I didn't know that could actually happen. Like that you could turn it off like a light switch. I thought I had to compose my way out of it. Well, I kind of did, actually. So good job, me. 

It also goes back to my friend Catriona loving one of my pieces, Beaufort, flipping out over it, which made me so happy I went and pushed ahead much more, which led to all the other things. So thank you to Catriona!

There were also some bonfires. I do like burning stuff up. It's gone forever that way. I also had to cut up a lot of downed trees with the chainsaw. And split a lot of firewood to burn off the anger that keeps coming to the surface as I face these terrible things that I hate so much. Cruelty to myself and others, people being destructive, bad memories that stick with you and come back and hurt you. All the fires and anger the character almost can't control and splitting wood still need to get written in. Class, all the various ways that affects a person in an alien environment where you're specifically not valued and are excluded for being who you are--something nobody can control, by the way. A lot of things have to get written in. I might go back and add all that in before writing the ending. You have to get the ending right or the entire thing falls flat. 

Still need a better title, though. Don't poke the bear is a thing people say, though, and it fits so well for having that terrible anger inside you. What other metaphors are there for riling up that lurking anger that will explode? Have to think about it.

Yesterday I saw an absolutely lovely review a stranger left on my album on Bandcamp. It totally made me cry. The album wouldn't have existed without Catriona's feedback. I'm trying to think out the next one but the novel and work are using up my entire brain. One of these days I'll get the space and peace to think through the lyrics, not my strong suit at the moment. One thing at a time. Or seven, sure. Ten! Ten things at a time, that's plenty.  

So here's a book I'm writing that has changed my life entirely because the process of writing it made me dig up and deal with all sorts of things I've never examined with an objective mind. And because a friend who sees things with kind eyes and an outside perspective allows me to comprehend things I had never really understood at all before. Feels miraculous to me.

The structure of it is extremely solid, so the rest is just writing and rewriting until the narrative lives up to its bones. It's going to take a lot of time. But didn't I publish four books last year? And an album this winter? I've got time.  

Oh, the album is here. Revenant, as in, one who returns from death or a long absence. Yes.