my way of saying hello

new year, new ... something??

It’s about five p.m. on New Year’s Eve. I am curled up in a corner of my bed, in my pajamas. I’ve decided that my New Year’s resolution will be to finish a book. This has been my New Year’s resolution for about, oh, twenty going on twenty-one years running? (For context, I am twenty years old.)

I have this problem with committing to things, even if I really, really love them. For example, I’m absolutely terrible at sitting down and watching TV shows! Last year, season 2 of the hit Netflix show Heartstopper came out, which is a story I’ve followed for years. Guess what I haven’t seen yet?

Some other stories I’ve followed for years are, well. My own. Some of my first conscious memories revolve around stories. I remember writing a story about a flying pony kidnapping a young girl on a piece of paper folded into a book. I remember my mother reading Percy Jackson to me. I remember my slightly disastrous first NaNoWriMo. But for all of these things that I’ve written, the list of actually finished pieces are depressingly sparse.

I have, as a conservative estimate, started about a billion long-term projects over the years. And I can count, on one hand, how many of them I have finished. (Like. Three.) The longest thing I’ve ever finished is thirty thousand words, still ten or so thousand words away from being considered a full novel.

But I do my best to look on the bright side of things. Thirty thousand words is still a lot more than most people write, even if it is gay Star Wars fanfiction. And hey, a lot of people who read that fanfiction seemed to enjoy it! Even if it’s cheesy and over-the-top in places and melodramatic as hell, it is a finished project. Something I committed to.

Over the past week, I’ve gotten about thirteen thousand words into a brand new project. This type of productivity is not exactly common for me, so if nothing else, I am grateful for that. The project in question is looking to be an extremely typical contemporary het romance where the billionaire heir falls for the average everyday girl.

If I sound demeaning of the genre, I don’t mean to. It just isn’t what I typically read, or even write. My romances tend more queer, speculative, and self-aware. They also tend to be unfinished. Most of them never even reach thirteen thousand words.

But as I’ve been writing this brand new cheesy, over-the-top, melodramatic project, I’ve found that there’s something very freeing in, for lack of a better word, not caring about what I write. Or, not not caring. Just that there’s a difference in writing a project that you’ve invested months or even years of your time in, and a project you started just for funsies. Just to see what could happen.

And here’s what could happen: I get another week into this project and then abandon it forever, looking back and cringing at that one time I tried my hand at Substacking and/or writing straight people. (No offense to straight people. I just am very distinctly not one of them.)

Or, it could go like this: I do actually commit to something. I keep up the Substack and I write the book, and hey, it’s cheesy and over-the-top and melodramatic, but it’s finished. And, most importantly, it’s mine.

And then, obviously, I self-publish it on Amazon for creative control and somehow make a bajillion dollars and a movie deal, but all that stuff would come later. If—actually, when. Let’s go with when. When that stuff comes, it would have to start right here. With me committing to something I’ve started.

In a year, this post will either be really ironic or really poignant. Hopefully, it’s the latter.

Either way? Let’s give it a try!