the novel i'm not posting

so i'll post about it instead

towards the end of 2021 i started spending a good amount of my thinking on a story. a medieval fantasy romance. with like magic & royal courts & everything.

at first i was writing it to stop thinking about it. i would start daydreaming about the story, & inconsistences & gaps would start to annoy me, & i couldn’t solve them in my head, without paper to keep track of everything. writing it helped make it make sense, have some kind of shape. but then the more i wrote down, the more i thought about the story when i wasn’t writing it. i would run satisfying arcs or images over & over in my mind’s eye, & feel hungrier and hungrier over the prospect of connecting & completing them.

my reading tended more & more towards medieval history—as much as possible towards ‘girly’ history—you know, ‘how people lived’ as opposed to big events. the kindness of strangers, a vey disturbing book about the history of child abandonment, was one. a brief history of private life—the second volume, the medieval one—was another. a distant mirror of course & i dipped into the knight, the lady & the priest. this was also when i was super big on courtly love & that poetic tradition, reading guillaume de loris, rereading chaucer, reading malory.

but for all that attempted medieval immersion, my daydream world had a suspiciously contemporary edge. i emphasized the aspects of court life that felt most high schooly. the society was recovering from a world-changing plague. &, very embarrassingly, a lot of what i was interested in with magic, had to do with the consequences of the ability of magic-users to communicate with each other much faster at a distance than normal people, & to make magically-enforceable & verifiable promises between magic users, that normal people couldnt make. so… medieval magic internet & blockchain (i dont understand blockchain) (i’m cringeing too)

what i really don’t understand is how people publish love stories. i feel like i would die if you saw the dynamic that i find compelling enough to spend hours writing about. was charlotte bronte embarrassed about jane eyre? she should have been

to try to figure out how what i was doing stacked up, i read a few recently-written, very popular fantasy romances. im not going to name names bc i dont think they were good at all. i found it hard to believe that even the authors cared about them enough to write them. but i found it easy to believe that they felt separate enough from them to publish them

what’s really unfortunate is that my unwillingness to make any of this public (besides the occasional cryptic ‘it can never work’ tweet) has made the still-incomplete story worse reading for me. i think i can’t get good at this without you all seeing it, without seeing what makes people interested if anyone’s interested, what about it if anything other people like, how people interpret it. but i hate the idea of you seeing something i care about this much when it’s not good yet. tweets are very easy to iterate on & posts like this are sort of easy to iterate on especially if you bite the bullet & make yourself post every day for a month. but i cant imagine caring enough about a story to wrote a novel of it, & caring little enough about it to be okay with it being just something to iterate on