Milestones

Hello, lovelies! I think we’ve just learned by now that promises aren’t kept by bloggers during finals… *cough cough* I failed *cough cough*.

But wow, I think this is something to be celebrated.

I remember when I first joined. I remember the two weeks of persuading my mother to let me have an author blog, the thrill of my first follower, doing Kellyn Roth’s blog tour. That, in my opinion, was the highest honour. Not only was a published author acknowledging my existence, it was a good published author who was my age. Kell had the talent and the determination to do what I couldn’t: publish a book. And I, with maybe five or six folowers who struggled to get their own novel to 10,000 words, was uniquely asked to be a part of the blog tour.

If fetus me could be noticed, so can you ^.^

Anyways, I say all that to say: I’ve come a long way in a year.

Yup. It’s been a year, two days, and about an hour since I created this blog. Who knew? WordPress did, apparently. They sent me a notification two days ago. (Shows you how active I am…)

Anyways, since then, I’ve written three novels. Together, they came to about 70,000 words. In my mind, that was not good. how could that have happened? How was I legitimately so bad at writing that three novels of mine amounted to 70k, while other writers wrote 70k in a single novel? I became so depressed I almost quit writing altogether.

That was when River of Silence presented itself in my face.

Beautiful, wasn’t it? A book that illustrated having beautiful talents, yet still getting lost in the void of invisible. It would follow Aberfa and tell of her journey to the River while trying desperately to be heard by someone, something. Excited, I took to this new idea.

I fell short.

Ironic, isn’t it? When you have a great idea, yet you can’t seem to properly express it, your self-confidence takes a really heavy blow. It drags you into questioning and self-doubt, down into a deep pit of writer’s block that seems bottomless and beginningless.

For at least a month now, I’ve been battling this author’s depression. I’ve heard that writer’s block is tough, yes, but nobody prepared me for this grueling work. Articles claim that all writer’s block is inescapable, but does this paticular dark pit have any defining moments, or is it just a void where you’re not sure if you’re even falling?

Nobody seems to have answers to this. To be honest, neither do I. Maybe there’s another side to this, but it all looks pretty dark – and it has for a while.

But suddenly, it clicked.

Is this not what my main character is feeling?

Is this not what Yina feels?

Later, I might do a character study on Yina. Even better, that might be a part of my blog tour, so I can see how my character looks through someone else’s eyes.

Will I even have a blog tour? I don’t know. I don’t know if this book will ever hit Amazon, or if I’m too small to be noticed by the big people. But all I can do is hope, right?

“Even if hope is useless… if it’s stupid and misleading… if there’s no point to it… in this whole universe, can anybody really do anything but hope?

“We are humans who you can’t even see on the microscope of everything. Hope is all we’ve ever really had.”

I hit a milestone today. As of this minute, River of Silence has 21, 609 words. I’m officially in the middle part of my first story, the story that I will see through to the end. I don’t know if anyone will ever buy it, I don’t know if it will ever even hit the shelves, I don’t know if this struggle is even worth anything.

But man, sometimes it’s fun.

“Aghast, I must wander to the edge of the waters…”

                            ~Sel