I’m about 40,000 words into NaNoWriMo now, and the project I thought I’d be working on didn’t pan out. I started it. Book 3. I wrote the first 6 chapters, and then I wrote a few random future chapters, and bits and pieces of a scene, and I was like, “This do be some heavy shit.” And then I froze. My emotional capacity for what I could handle tipped to overload, and I lost under the mounting pressure of 1,667 words a day.
So, I switched. I realized book 3 is going to take a while to write. It’s not something that will easily write itself at this point, and even the parts that do write themselves, well… I need to take breaks. I need to practice self care. I need to monitor my emotional well-being. See, the thing about being autistic, and an empath is I feel a lot. Like, a lot-a lot. And there are scenes in book 2, whole chapters even, that I cry in every single time. I’ve read them through so many times, and I still cry. And there are some parts of book 3 that have felt even more emotionally taxing to me.
And I love that about myself. It means I can really fuel that emotion onto the page, and hopefully create an emotionally compelling story that my readers can fully engage in. But it also means that I feel every.single.emotion I write. The really happy ones, and the really thrilling ones, and the ones that crush your soul. So all my lovely outline and plans from October sort of got thrown out the window. And I went from planner to pantser within one week.
The story I switched to is one that has been really dear to my heart. My husband calls it my “feel good” story, because even though it deals with really heavy topics, the kind that require trigger warnings, my two main characters are so adorably cute together that they create this really beautiful, cutesy, fluffy romance on the page. And so, even when my characters are struggling through their trauma, the healing that blooms between them is enough to make you all warm and fuzzy inside.
I don’t know if it’s a story that would ever get published. It’s lit fic, and I don’t write lit fic. I rarely read lit fic. And I definitely have no experience in the genre of romance. So, it’s very unknown territory to me. The pacing feels slow, and some scenes I write so delicately due to the subject matter, I feel like it’s great realistic writing, but maybe not the best fiction. So I’ve just been posting the parts on my wattpad. And while the releases have been sporadic as of late, I am posting things as I’ve been able to. (I’m an endless editor, so the chapters take forever to feel truly complete to me).
I’m not sure if I’ll finish the story in the next 10,000 words, but I do hope I can give this story a fitting end. A very happy end. Because people deserve to heal from their trauma. They deserve all the love and support in the world. And in real life that isn’t always there. But in fiction at least, I can write all of the could haves, would haves, and what might have beens. I can write all the happy endings to help make the real world a little easier to cope with (or, fuel your escapism.).
~Kat
Tempest in a Teacup 