I’ve been writing. I HAVE BEEN WRITING. It feels good. I’ve been focusing on DW whilst I think about how to go about fixing A Woman’s Conquest. The DW series is the one I’m most scared of because it’s one of my oldest projects. It’s one of those projects that I was afraid to touch with “amateur” hands. I rewrote it so many times as I developed my writing over the years, and it became an issue of “don’t touch it with poor writing”. Which might not make sense to others, but it was something that stopped me from working on it more than the world-building. I would refine the already fairly established world and look at the synopsis and improve anything that I might think doesn’t work now that I “know better”. But I wouldn’t do any real writing on it, afraid that I would ruin this precious thing I’ve been cradling for more than a decade. But the story can’t be told that way.

You hate it. You hate putting it down when it’s not perfect. But that’s how it works. You can’t perfect something without starting with an imperfect version of it. It’s such a weird issue we—some of us, I know not everyone has this issue—have as creators. And it’s so hard to get over it. But just work at it, defeat it, and be proud of producing a ratty draft, because now you work extra magic on that draft, and you’re making progress.