Bernadette Benda

“I mean pants are basically a chair that you wear.”

SOMEONE (me) should really go home instead of shopping for upholstery at the craft store. (I just want to say that the selection was horrendous. All the fabric either looked like it came right out of 2008 or was taken from an old car.)

I finished my revision (re-write) of Oh, Wonder Why the Sun Fell (OWWTSF). I originally wrote it back in 2017 for NaNoWriMo and have since….re-written it twice now. That means I have written that novel at least once a year. The first draft was 60k, the next was 84k, and this last one was 126k. It just…keeps getting bigger *laughs nervously*

Now I’m gonna let it marinate and have been putzing around with some other writing stuff. Prepping for NaNo, journaling, putting together a zine. This last one I’m really excited about because I’ve never done it before, but I had the idea because I know someone who is putting together an art show, and I wanted to submit something, and of course that required putting something together to actually submit (because my piles of edited and half edited novels don’t count).

It’s making me think of how nerve wracking sharing your writing with other people can be. It’s like, “Here’s a piece of my soul, I hope you like it,” as if we’re offering a piece of cake or something. Writing is desperately personal I think to all writers, sometimes I think more personal than other art forms (not that other art forms aren’t personal. Spend a year inside a dancer’s head and see how personally we take everything.) But I think writing is weird because it’s hidden up until it’s finished (minus the editing process and such. But even then, you don’t share a work till it has been polished, even if it needs more polishing). Writing can be created entirely in secret.

Dance is something you do with other people. Visual arts like painting, sculping, are things you can do with people, in public, or have people watch you create (though I am sure there are plenty of artists who prefer to create in solitude *ahem. me*). But no one is going to sit there and watch a writer write. Because it’s boring, and if you try and read what they are writing they will promptly shut their laptop and possible hiss at you like a mangy cat.

(poor mangy cat. But that is a reference no one is going to understand).

And half finished sketches can look beautiful, half finished sculptures. But my half finished first draft? Egad. You might find some golden nuggets in there, but most writers would be too embarrassed to let you see it. (Personally you might wonder if I have any grasp of the English language, writing “know” instead of “no”, missing punctuations, and a paragraph with the worst beats you have every seen because every sentence is the exact same length.)

And even though sharing our writing, being published, etc., is an important part of a writer’s dreams and desires (I mean who doesn’t want their novel to be on the bestseller list), the writing process itself is something we covet and love dearly, and would do it even if our writing never saw the light of day.

Anyway. That’s enough thoughts for the day. (If I ever end a blog post like that, I’m doing so only because I wrote the first half the blog in the morning when I was all pumped up listening to good tunes (the Solo soundtrack is soooooo good) and I finish it in the evening after I get back from work and am tired and hungry so I have nothing else left to say.)

Fyi, if you’re following me on Instagram (or want to follow me, or didn’t even realize I was on Instagram), recently I haven’t been doing posts because honestly I don’t have the time to write good ones, BUT I have been very active on Insta stories, so that’s where you can find me daily.