i keep seeing this neon room

my dreamworld is complex

Time to be honest—sub makes me struggle. a lot. i’ve said, and still believe, that working on new projects is a great way of putting what’s out of your control out of your mind. but i’ve been in a slump since i wrote pubwip (my adult contemp horror about the, you guessed it!, publishing industry).

i’ve bought character art, which usually helps. i’ve outlined multiple projects. i do intend on writing those books. but it wasn’t fully clicking.

when i’m drafting, if it’s going well enough, i enter a state where everything’s so damn exciting! writing isn’t a chore, spending time with my characters is a joy, and i can’t wait to develop their relationships. i start obsessing, my writing sessions grow longer, and i’m not thinking about its chances in the market.

but it’s so, so hard not to think about its chances... i want to succeed. i’m tired of how slow this is, despite being well-informed about it for a long time now. it feels pointless to start new projects if the old ones haven’t yet sold. what if this one doesn’t, either? am i wasting time and ideas? rationally, i know i shouldn’t think like this. tell that to the Void. it keeps dooming and glooming and ignoring all reason.

anyway, i got over it, at last. after combining two different dreams—a haunted house by the sea, and a recurring neon-tinged setting—i picked out two characters who i thought could work in this scenario. i had two more from said house-by-the-sea dream! so, two of them came fully formed, with a family tree and work i’d done years ago, and the other two are still developing.

i chose epigraphs, wrote a dedication to my great-grandma. i think this is a book about grief.

then i started writing…and it’s flowing. it’s soon, but i can already tell, because i know what it feels like. this is going to be a project i stick with, one of those. part of me is telling me the writing is leaning too quiet, not commercial enough, that there’s too much backstory, the characters aren’t as interesting as i’d want them to be, and who the fuck is going to buy a book so…Portuguese. it happens in Sintra. two of the characters are Portuguese.

i don’t care.

right now, what i care about is being able to finish a book, again, and be passionate about it. if it sells, it sells. what do i know? i’ve been right and also wrong before. so, i’m giving myself permission to write a bad fast draft that i’m going to have to extensively clean up later. certain aspects are going to be niche and weird. those are problems for future kate to sort, not me.

what makes it different, you ask? i think it’s just the amount of sentimentality it comes imbued with. it’s wrapped in nostalgia, and bittersweetness, and a choked-up desire to go back in time or find a new, distorted reality, where i can meet grandma Glória again. it’s like lucid dreaming in form of a book.

then, there’s all the work i’ve previously done. there’s this one family that i created for an rpg, and i’ve missed them. i’m very fond and proud of them. i’m very attached to João in particular, my sad boy/life of the party.

and, of course, the familiarity. i’m writing about my own country for once, about things i enjoy about it, that other people might find stereotypical (and this is another worm swimming around my brain), but i find charming. there are going to be tiles, and Portuguese guitars, and the sea.

it’s similar to how we want the reader to feel, when we structure a story, and when we write a character. i care about this project because i know the traumatic backstory that spun it into existence, and its strengths, and where it will fail, and what the motivation behind it is, and what guides the narrative choices. the more real and palpable it feels to me, the easier it is for me to fall into the right level of obsession to write a good book.

so, join me along the way.

more coming soon ♡