Friday Feels #31

This week felt like being in a starting line waiting for a gun that never went off. Do the Germans have a word for that feeling of being keyed up about something exciting that feels imminent except you have no idea when it’s actually going to happen and it keeps not happening (yet)? Germans have words for everything, especially compound emotions. So how about this: excitement + anticipation + uncertainty + frustration + malaise? That was my week, lol!

I came to the (belated) realization that I am doomed to exist in a state of frustrated anticipation. Waiting is basically my default mode, I guess … simply because my brain runs at a completely different speed from the rest of the world. I am forever waiting for people, things, life to catch up to me. For years and years, I thought this was a character flaw – lack of patience, pretty mundane – but now I see that it’s a question of cognitive functioning. Understanding this doesn’t change anything, practically speaking, but it’s helping me see and make peace with the fact that it’s not something I can “fix” about myself. I just have to learn to live with it.

On the bright side, reviews for my book are slowly trickling in – and they’ve been amazing! I am so thrilled to see that people are getting precisely the book experience that I wanted to create for readers. There is no better feeling for a storyteller. Sales are also ticking along, though I’m trying not to get hung up on those numbers. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m a debut indie author without a massive platform or audience (yet, haha) and that getting traction for my books is going to be a slow marathon, not a sprint. Particularly since I don’t write in a genre that’s ripe to go viral. What I’ve read in a lot of writer spaces is that building up a backlist – i.e. publishing more books – is key to expanding one’s audience and reach. I’ve got a plan for that, so we’ll see how it goes.

I had mixed success this week with my goal of reducing phone screentime. I did cut down a bit, but not nearly as much as I had hoped. I think my hopes were overly ambitious, tbh. But I did manage to read a couple of fantastic books, which I feel sorta balances things out. One of them was Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, and the other was The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. Both feature complex, fascinating older female protagonists with memorable voices (both books use first person narration) that stay with you even when you’re not reading. Of the two, I liked The Sentence a little more, because I found Tookie an easier character to connect with than Janina (and it’s worth adding that both are, in different ways and to different extents, difficult and somewhat “unlikable” characters).

On the other hand, I made very little progress this week with my current Classic Lit book choice, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. The writing style (which is a deliberate authorial choice, I’m sure) makes it a book that I find challenging to “binge”, so I’m reading it very slowly in very small chunks. When I’m also in the middle of a more “gripping” narrative (like the other books I mentioned), it tends to get put on the backburner. I do plan to buckle down next week, because I dislike dragging out books for months on end.

The good news is that we survived Blue Monday, which means that January is almost over, which means that we are one month closer to March, which means spring. Yay! This feels kinda blasphemous to say but I’m already mostly over sweaters and ready to move on to lighter layers.

Have a great weekend!