On being scared, doing it anyway, and nurturing self-love

Hello from the first day of Lambda 🌈🌈🌈

I’m writing this on Saturday because by the time this newsletter hits your inbox, I will have left (bright & early) to catch a train to Philly. Wait a minute, you might be thinking, isn’t Lambda virtual this year?

You’re correct, it is! But thank goodness for kind and generous friends, because one of mine has offered me a place to crash for the next six days so I can workshop, listen to craft talks, and read from somewhere other than my bed / desk.

Anyway. Lambda starts today! I’ve been looking forward to this moment for so many months, and the fact that it’s already upon us is shocking in the way the passage of time is always, somehow, shocking. I applied for this retreat last December, spent the first four months of this year in absolute agony knowing I would find out whether I got in by April, and then had to be more in agony for a hot second before I got bumped off the waitlist. Being able to actually attend the retreat starting today is such a gift, and one I intend to make the most of.

But! More about the retreat in today’s “from the heart.” Scroll onward for thoughts on nerves, photos from the past few weeks, and a “from the page” section that’s all about the writing break I took this month!

From the heart 💗

Here’s a truth tidbit: I’m exceedingly nervous for the upcoming week. Like…terrified, actually. My nerves started when I first saw the list of people in my YA fiction cohort for the week and read their impressive bios, and continued as I turned in my workshop piece, and have grown slowly & steadily over the past few weeks as we get closer & closer to the opening ceremony.

It’s no secret to anyone who knows me but at all that I have a lot of insecurity, that my impostor syndrome rages and looms large, and that self-doubt is my constant companion. I have lived this way for decades now, and though I’m in therapy (multiple times over!), and though I do my best “fake it til you make it” impression by going after the things I want despite the sometimes immobilizing terror…the self-doubt persists.

It fogs my brain, interrupts my dreams, colors the view I take of the world. It’s the reason I’m in a constant state of whiplash — I’ll go from really liking a piece I’ve written to immediately drowning in self-doubt about whether it’s any good at all; whether I am any good as a writer; whether I should keep pursuing this dream or give up entirely.

The only thing that I have wanted consistently throughout my life is to be a published author. The only thing that I have wanted forever is to share my stories with the world.

But I don’t just want to share them, is the thing. I want to share them and be lauded. I want to share them and be feted. I want to share them and be loved for them. Alongside my dreams of publishing have always lived dreams of being known.

But being known can be terrifying, too, when you hate yourself. When you recognize that the person who knows you best in the world — yourself — hates you, and you begin to believe that anyone else who gets close to understanding you in a similar way will also hate you. It begins to seem impossible that anyone would ever love you, because you don’t love yourself.

And yet here I am, scared yet persisting.

Maybe that’s a hint that somewhere beneath all the layers of doubt and self-loathing and impostor syndrome is a kernel of belief. Somewhere, deep down in my soul, I do love myself. I love my words. I love the way I craft sentences and formulate paragraphs and create images out of nothing but words on a page. I love the way my laugh rings out and echoes in the silence. I love the way my curls fall and my eyelashes catch the tears that surface. I love the way my fingers fly across the keyboard and words appear, straight from my brain to the page, straight from my heart to yours, and suddenly we’re both a little less alone, aren’t we? Because I see you and you see me and that’s possible because I’ve crafted a two-way window with my writing.

Maybe, instead of nurturing the doubt like I’ve done for the past two decades, I should nurture that small seed of belief and self-love.

I have hesitated to do so for years because I feared being proud, because “pride goes before the fall.” But, fuck, that’s a way of thinking I’m trying to unlearn, isn’t it? If I can embrace Pride in who I am as a queer woman, can I not embrace pride in who I am as a writer? As a friend? As a human in the world?

So that’s going to be my mission for this week: to nurture that small seed of self-belief, self-love, self-pride. To coax it forth and blow love upon it and let it have a safe haven and nutrient-rich soil in which to grow. To recognize that there is a part of me that believes in my writing abilities and the stories I have to tell — and there’s nothing wrong with that! It is good, even, to love one’s craft.

May we all learn to love ourselves a little more fully, a little less fearfully, this week.

From the camera roll 📸

From the page ✍️

Taking breaks is really, really hard. I don’t like doing it! Especially now, feeling like I have this pressure to rushrushrush and write the next book so it can be ready to go out on sub ASAP…I have piled so much pressure onto my own shoulders that it’s truly no surprise I buckled under it.

Toward the end of June I started to realize that I may be dealing with some burnout. After two intense years of grad school, during which I drafted two novels, signed with an agent, and wrote 80 pages of another novel, two short stories, and about 100 pages of attempts at a middle grade…I didn’t stop. I revised HEX twice during the first half of this year; wrote a short story and revised it; and outlined a middle grade. In June, after deciding to rewrite HEX from scratch, I wrote about 12,000 words of that new version of the project.

And then I crashed into a wall and realized I needed to take a break.

Originally I was only going to pause for about a week or so, but then, on a phone call with a good friend and while looking at my calendar for the month, it began to make more sense to just…take all of July off from book work.

Which was, of course, a terrifying prospect — see earlier notes about how much pressure I’ve put on myself!

This pressure is partly due to just how long I’ve spent trying to publish a book (I queried my first novel beginning in Dec. 2014, and I’d been writing and revising it for at least a year and a half by then). That’s 11 years during which I drafted and revised seven novels, started countless others and got anywhere from 10,000-50,000 words written, and queried five books. That’s a long time to chase a dream.

Last year, I achieved something I’d begun to think was impossible by signing with my literary agent. I never took a second to just bask in that accomplishment, instead diving immediately into revisions so we could yeet it off to editors within three weeks of signing. I conquered one mountain and immediately started climbing the next.

The pressure was also due to finances, because y’all — ya girl is broke. I’m not going to get into the nuances of my financial situation in a piece of writing that is posted on the world wide web, but suffice it to say, credit card & student loan debt is a beast and I spend a good chunk of my time with my heart in my throat stressing about money. I thought, if I could sell a book for any advance, that would be a boon. Not a “quit your job and be a full-time writer” boon, lol, but a “pay down some debt and have a little more breathing room” boon.

All that to say, I’ve taken a month-long writing break this July. It’s been terrifying. I’m in a place where no matter what project I take on next, I’m going to have to start it from scratch, drafting from a blank page and revising multiple times before it’ll be ready to go out on sub. I had such high hopes for HEX being ready, and it’s heart-breaking that it isn’t1, and I’m scared that my potential debut day is pushed back even further now…

There is so much in publishing that is out of our control, and the conventional wisdom is to only focus on what you can control, that is, writing the next book. But what happens when you can’t do that? When the one thing in your control is the one thing you need to take a break from in order to save your sanity?

Despair.

It’s been a tough month in terms of creativity. It’s been a great month, too — I’ve traveled to multiple places, spent a delightful week visiting a friend and her family, have Lambda to look forward to — but my heart has felt the lack of my novel-writing.

On the bright side, that does mean I’m ready to dive back in come Aug. 5! I’m excited, refreshed, have a shiny outline that is thrilling, and my brain has used some of this time to toil away in the background on scenes, snippets, and surprises the book will hold. I can’t wait!

Alla prossima 👋

It’s been a wild week in news, and I am reeling. The most important thing, though, is that there is still a genocide occuring in Gaza at the hands of Israel. Palestinians are being killed and are dying because of the bombardment but also because of the awful conditions on the ground — the illness, the lack of medical care, the lack of safe food & drinking water. As we in the US have a new presidential candidate, it’s our duty to make sure Kamala Harris and her team know that a free Palestine is NECESSARY, that it is an issue we care about that could cost her the election2.

Recently I read about what’s happening in Sudan, as well, where 2.5 million people may die of famine within the next few months. Sudan has been in the midst of a humanitarian crisis most recently kicked off in April 2023. One thing I’m going to do is read up about it, learn how to talk about it, and learn how to help.

That’s all from me this week. Love each other, be good to one another, and embrace yourselves. You deserve it.

— Karis xoxo