Hi Betts,
I recently listened to an interview with an author that said “when they decided to get really serious about writing and their dreams they made a ten year plan.” So me being the planner that I am, said maybe I should do it too, especially since this writer is pretty successful. Have I made a decent enough plan? No, because being real about your dreams and committing is scary af.
But I have developed this thinking that each story I have to work on has to be “publishable” and if I can’t immediately envision its success I need to push it away. For some people this is fine. For me, I’m pushing aside every idea and am constantly writing for an invisible audience. Which has its pros and cons.
I want to become efficient so that I can be a good author. One who meets deadlines and puts out work they are proud of. But I’m wondering if it’s even possible to try to work to be an author and still create work that is fun and true to you? If a decision isn’t meaningful I won’t include it in my outline. It feels like the only time writing can be fun is when I was young and had no clue about market and rules and just assumed my dreams would come true.
you know, what i keep finding over and over again is that i was right about a great many things before i had any idea what i was doing. i just didn't know why i was right, i had no context or evidence for my rightness. granted, i was arrogant, but arrogance isn't wrong; it's just uninformed. when you inform arrogance, it becomes confidence. you become informed by getting a lot of feedback on your work and giving feedback on work; having your work accepted once or twice and accepting someone else's work; having your work rejected hundreds of times and being the one to reject. maybe you've done all those things already, in which case you're firmly on your path and there's not much you have to do besides keep going.
i definitely relate to what you're saying, though. i would be lying if i said i wasn't just days ago in a phase of berating myself for my failures and wishing i could work harder and more efficiently. i've cultivated some confidence about my work, but there are some ways in which i'm too arrogant and others in which i'm too humble. i have a long way to go still in informing myself about my work and the process of making it.
you'll be in positions where you have to make creative concessions for the sake of publishing, but don't make them before you get anything on the page. listen to your own ideals and make those ideals happen in your work. a year ago, i finished a novel that was my favorite thing i'd ever made, and i was so proud of it, but i knew it wasn't publishable in the state it was in. even though i'd worked a year on it, it was still an early draft and bore the marks of an early draft, but i couldn't see that because i'd never taken any project further than that one. i'd never felt closer to a project or more intensely toward it. and when i was done, i went through six months grieving it, in a sense, because i knew i'd have to rewrite it. i had to kill the thing that it was in order for it to become what it needed to be. i came to accept that, and the next six months sat on the frustration of not knowing what direction to take it, but having the wisdom to know i couldn't rush it or force it.
and then the fix came to me all at once. the fix involves getting rid of many things that were once dear to me. not even darlings, but entire themes i felt were meaningful, that were the very things i want to share and explore in my work. i don't feel so bad about giving those things up now. what i take out will be put into something else eventually, and what i keep will stand out more starkly. the new parts i write will fit better and serve the story itself, even if it's no longer the story i originally intended to tell.
when you're drafting, your work is in a private conversation with yourself; it's about you even if it isn't. but it can't stay about you. eventually it has to stand on its own. and you might think, well why can't i just write something that stands on its own to begin with? but if you do that, writing is just work, it's business, and it may be more efficient but it's also less meaningful. there's no such thing as efficient creativity. it takes as long as it takes, and if you force yourself on a ten year timeline you might as well focus that energy on something more lucrative and within your control. there's so much about writing that's just chance and discovery and failure and faith.
so i think you should go back to assuming your dreams will come true and not thinking too much about anything except the work itself until you get to the point where you have to. and it will hurt. it may hurt more than anything hurt you've ever put yourself through. but trust you'll get to where you're going, even if it takes longer than you intended.
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traveler, wait! it's dangerous to go alone, so have some zhongli thoughts for company!
i think life with zhongli as your significant other would be best described as the love behind every little action and gesture the two of you make. even with all the years you've spent at each other's side (either married or just simply together), the romance never dies. but it shifts and goes through changes, like stone giving way to the gentle embrace of time.
one such example is when the love shared between you calms into something that can blend in with the walls of your home. it matches the color of your curtains, the painted flowers on cups left on your tea table, the clothbound books and scrolls tucked away into the red cedar scroll shelf you had diligently sought after and haggled for when your lover had mentioned it once in passing. it's in the crinkle of your eyes in the morning when you sit at your table together and eat. it's in the shape of his smile when he returns from his work in the funeral parlor to you and the home you've made together.
when you grind ink for him while he works beside you, or comb and tie his hair for him in the morning when sleep still clings to the edges of his eyes. when he combs and washes your hair for you in soothing baths, or leans down to massage the stress of the day away from your tense shoulders when you come back home to him.
acts of service that don't really feel like acts of service — not to zhongli or you. gestures of devotion seem like a more apt term, now, when love is so ingrained in your lives that the word can no longer be used to describe it. you've turned the word from noun to adjective, from adjective to action. love is such a small word for such a boundless concept, but you manage to fit it in every word, every action, and every day leaves zhongli helpless and wondering in the dead of night of what to do with all the love he holds in his hands, specially made just for you.
it's a song and dance he can never quite stray from. even when his heart calms in the daytime and he can look at you with all the assuredness of a lover that loves and knows he is loved in return, all five thousand years of wisdom leaves him when night comes and you're asleep in his arms. he has loved plenty in his long lifetime. friends, family, even past lovers that he can only maybe recall when he can recognize a quirk or quality present in you. but it's in your presence that zhongli remembers that even an archon can become just a man weak to the war between heart and mind. what good is five thousand years of wisdom when it can't tell him what to do with all the love he has for you? how can he show it without scaring you away? you know who he is and you've said time and time before that it doesn't scare you, that you love him no matter what form or identity he takes but what if —
you shift in your sleep and all thoughts cease as he swiftly readjusts his hold as to not disturb you any further. in the dark of your room, zhongli counts each breath and beat of your heart and wills his own to match the tempo of yours. in the morning, he'll reprimand himself for entertaining such foolish thoughts while you hum and converse in front of your shared vanity. he'll share these thoughts with you as he always has, and you'll put down your comb and grace his face with crystalfly kisses as you always have in return. your routine shifts to make room for assurance during the times when he needs it, and the same goes for him when you speak your own fears and doubts as well.
it's part of the comfort of your life together, as strange as it may sound, that you live with all the joys and lows your love brings. sometimes, he wishes he can give you more and do away with all his mortal doubts completely, but a moment of contemplation reveals that it is exactly these doubts that make the softer aspects your lives shine all the more brighter. is this why you allow yourself to feel all your emotions, rather than push back and try to reason them away? is this why you've always placed so much importance in letting him know that should he ever need it, your shoulder is his to lean on? zhongli understands the rationale behind it and has given similar advice to mortals he's met before, of course, but it seems that even he is not immune to the irrationality of the heart. there is much wisdom to still be learned, he concedes. five thousand years is no match for an emotion that has existed since the dawn of teyvat, after all.
time doesn't completely erase all the insecurities of a man who has loved and lost so many in his long lifetime, but zhongli finds that he doesn't entirely mind. come trials and tribulations, he'll stand firm and weather it so long as he can keep holding your hand through it all.
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seriously, though. i work in higher education, and part of my job is students sending me transcripts. you'd think the ones who have the least idea how to actually do that would be the older ones, and while sure, they definitely struggle with it, i see it most with the younger students. the teens to early 20s crowd.
very, astonishingly often, they don't know how to work with .pdf documents. i get garbage phone screenshots, sometimes inserted into an excel or word file for who knows what reason, but most often it's just a raw .jpg or other image file.
they definitely either don't know how to use a scanner, don't have access to one, or don't even know where they might go for that (staples and other office supply stores sometimes still have these services, but public libraries always have your back, kids.) so when they have a paper transcript and need to send me a copy electronically, it's just terrible photos at bad angles full of thumbs and text-obscuring shadows.
mind bogglingly frequently, i get cell phone photos of computer screens. they don't know how to take a screenshot on a computer. they don't know the function of the Print Screen button on the keyboard. they don't know how to right click a web page, hit "print", and choose "save as PDF" to produce a full and unbroken capture of the entirety of a webpage.
sometimes they'll just copy the text of a transcript and paste it right into the message of an email. that's if they figure out the difference between the body text portion of the email and the subject line, because quite frankly they often don't.
these are people who in most cases have done at least some college work already, but they have absolutely no clue how to utilize the attachment function in an email, and for some reason they don't consider they could google very quickly for instructions or even videos.
i am not taking a shit on gen z/gen alpha here, i'm really not.
what i am is aghast that they've been so massively failed on so many levels. the education system assumed they were "native" to technology and needed to be taught nothing. their parents assumed the same, or assumed the schools would teach them, or don't know how themselves and are too intimidated to figure it out and teach their kids these skills at home.
they spend hours a day on instagram and tiktok and youtube and etc, so they surely know (this is ridiculous to assume!!!) how to draft a formal email and format the text and what part goes where and what all those damn little symbols means, right? SURELY they're already familiar with every file type under the sun and know how to make use of whatever's salient in a pinch, right???
THEY MUST CERTAINLY know, innately, as one knows how to inhale, how to type in business formatting and formal communication style, how to present themselves in a way that gets them taken seriously by formal institutions, how to appear and be competent in basic/standard digital skills. SURELY. Of course. RIGHT!!!!
it's MADDENING, it's insane, and it's frustrating from the receiving end, but even more frustrating knowing they're stumbling blind out there in the digital spaces of grown-up matters, being dismissed, being considered less intelligent, being talked down to, because every adult and system responsible for them just
ASSUMED they should "just know" or "just figure out" these important things no one ever bothered to teach them, or half the time even introduce the concepts of before asking them to do it, on the spot, with high educational or professional stakes.
kids shouldn't have to supplement their own education like this and get sneered and scoffed at if they don't.
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