A couple of days ago, my friend visited me and she said, "I have this song that reminds me of you. You should listen to it." So I did. Dream Out Loud, by Alana Lee. In all fairness, its a very relevant song. My entire life now is fueled by my current dream starting to come true. And that's pretty overwhelming. A good kind, though.
Lately, I've been putting pressure on myself with deadlines. Edit so many pages in a day, get to a certain count or make it to the end of a chapter. Yesterday morning was a time when I really struggled to concentrate. But I got myself out for a while, came back with a fresh determination and edited thirty-odd pages. I post a lot of my progress online but Twitter probably gets the most of it; a while ago, I tweeted: "Edited up to Chapter 14 and I feel like a man starved and thirsty in a desert and there's no hope of water and every direction looks the same."
Well, I'm now about to edit Chapter Twenty-Five and I've found water, I've found direction again. I explain all this in such a cheesy way, I know, but that's what I'm good at. I'm good at dramatic writing and making thought processes in my stories deep and winding and emotional. I'm great at that. Not many people have gotten to see that, either through how bad I am at verbal talking or the fact that they've read short pieces I've written for them and that writing hasn't expressed my serious writing style. But after getting the idea to write Imperial Infiltration, I discarded everything. Any other writing ideas I had that niggled at me, I wrote down and stuck them to my bedroom wall, delayed them. I knew this idea was enough to give my full attention to and in turn, I owed this idea no distractions. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and eventually, I had a first draft to edit, finishing at 116,000 words.
Now, with only 50 pages left to edit (my own edits, this is only the first round, wooo), II is standing at 120,000 words. I'm not entirely sure how I've managed to add another 4K to it. I feel like I've taken a lot out of the story but this is only the first edit. I have so much further to go with Imperial Infiltration (and, of course, this entire process but with Book Two).
But as I edited, everything started to happen. I realised that I wanted to self-publish. I advertised myself and my book; I posted my progress very publicly and frequently; I came up with the idea of selecting five trustees to read an early copy of my book to assist in another round of editing. I advertised for a critique partner. I realised that my dream is starting to come true, it's actually taking shape. People started listening to me about it as I circulated progress. This morning, I got a mention from a Twitter mutual who I actually think is great (and extremely good at taking on Lila Bard cosplays) to tell me they were following my writing progress on my Instagram and I cried a little. Good kind of crying though. Someone I don't know in person and haven't talked their ear off about constantly writing has noticed what I'm doing and told me as such. And that was pretty amazing to read.
I skyped Dayna (she's basically my soulmate of five+ years) yesterday and I was basically telling her my planned schedule for Imperial Infiltration and I started laughing because she looked at me so incredulously and I said, "I know, I don't stop." But that's just the thing: why I've set all these deadlines and time limit for the early copies--I work better under pressure, when I think I have to complete something by a certain time. Otherwise, I'm lazy enough to not get anything done. I keep getting told to relax the pressure on myself but I can't because then I get very little done. Aside from writing, my motivation has been looooow lately and I've wanted to be sat glued to my laptop, writing or editing or noting the structure for the second book. BUT, I think I'll finish these edits today or tomorrow. If not, I want them finished by April 20th and then I'll have a week off. I'll be glued to my notebook and gather material for the second book whilst I wait for any critique partner responses or reader ones, if anyone reads II by then.
I want nothing more than to hold up my laptop and blog posts and manuscript to my grandma, tell her everything about this and have her be proud of me. But I can't, and that's life, so I did the next best thing that I could think of. She got the book dedication for Imperial Infiltration. Before I even starting writing the story, I wrote that page out on my document because I knew she should get it. I wrote a list of all the dedications I want to have starting future books and hers was first. So, this book isn't about my grandma, but it's for her because I think she'd be proud of the grandchild who watched her do her morning crosswords very frequently and liked to think could help out to find words I didn't even know.
Imperial Infiltration is the dream that's for the younger me who sat obsessed with wordsearches whilst my grandma did crosswords. It's the proof that I can write one book, fail with that, but then write another with different characters and a different world and overcome any comments to tell me to stop, and just write.
(I told you this was cheesy.)
I'm extremely nervous about letting some people read my story, more so with my family. My mum once asked me why there's fighting and war in my book when I'm such a peaceful person. Because that's just how and what I write about. There needs to be violence in this story. It's part of one of my protagonists. She also asked me how I could write kissing scenes when I haven't-- anyway, I told her that I'd not killed a man, or served an Emperor, or lived in a palace, but I still wrote about those. It's called imagination that I put to use.
I've had a lot of people tell me that dreaming is no good, that I need a reality. I've seen others get told that their dreams are silly or unreachable. But here I am, getting my dream. And I can have both a reality and a dream because they're actually merging right now. Sarah J. Maas said, "the world will be made and remade by the dreamers," and it's true. If there's no dream to someone, what's the point? Where's the happiness or the thing to keep going? There have been days when I've been grasping at this dream to give me strength and to keep me going on when there's been nothing else. Dreams are the things that remain when everything else disappears. It's something for self-empowerment. It's a goal. I once got told that I was a silly dreamer. Well silly or not, dreaming or not, I am publishing a book. My book. And in summer, I'll hold my dream in my hands purely because the only courage and strength I found in myself was to fight back against those trying to push me into realities that didn't work for me. It's a sad thing when someone gets told to stop dreaming because it's believed that dreams don't come true. They can. Even if they have to be merged sometimes with reality, they can still come true.
Keep dreaming, even if you're not a dreamer. Dreams are always there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWot2EJ_ezE
