i think i leveled up

I turned in a story on Friday. It was over a year late. It needed eyes that aren’t mine, it needed another pass from me, it needed a polish. So it isn’t done done, but it’s close enough to done that I feel safe writing about what may turn out to be one of the most important things I’ve written in my creative and professional journey as a writer, maybe a close second to Still Just A Geek.

I worked on this story for about eighteen months, even though I “only” spent about 12 hours actually writing it. It was a year late, even though it “only” took me three days to write the draft that I turned in. I have never worked harder or longer with fewer words to show for it at the end. But they are good words. I am so glad that I did this, that I put this at the top of my queue and left it there, even when I felt like I couldn’t put two words together, because when I accepted it, I made a promise to myself that I would do the thing,¹ and it was really important to me that I didn’t break that promise, even if it meant that the queue did not move at all, for a year.

I was so excited to do this when I accepted the invitation in late 2023 or early 2024. But the election broke me, and 2025 went from being a year I expected to be all about making not just this thing, but lots of things, to a year that forced me to turn off my engines, divert all power from all non-essential systems to life and mental health support, and run silent until further notice.²

Nearly every day in June and July, I woke up with my body completely dysregulated. It was its own alarm: the terror, the shaking, the nausea and sweating … all of that stuff I became an alcoholic to avoid before I went to sleep at night was now happening to me, ten years sober from alcohol, every fucking morning. And this was even worse than the other thing. Day after day, exhaustion and discomfort helped push my anxiety to record levels, worse than it had been in years. I felt like the ulcer my mom didn’t believe I had when I was a teenager was coming back. I was distracted all the time, constantly crashing into doorways and furniture, forgetting why I walked into every room. More than once, for days at a time, I felt like I didn’t even know myself.

I mean, it was a lot. And I say that as someone who has survived and healed from a lot, you dig me?

The dysregulation was a symptom, I knew that; but why it showed up when it did took a lot of work to uncover, probably because the cause turned out to be a lot of different things³ that ultimately revealed themselves to be a individual parts of a few things that I could look at and work on using EMDR therapy⁴.

EMDR therapy works so well for me, it is advanced technology that is indistinguishable from magic. But that magic isn’t a spell that cures everything and turns me into someone I’m never going to be. But it helps so much, and it heals so much, I literally feel pain and trauma leave my body⁵ and then over the next few days, I notice that space to enjoy the good things opens up. For months, now, I have been experiencing moments similar to the first time I heard the birds, as I notice that something which had been hurting for so long, I had gotten used to it, like the smell when you live next to the dump, was gone. And, just like I did then, I marveled that I was able to exist at all with the trauma taking up all that space.

The thing about my healing and recovery is that I can work my way through the level, get to one of those hideous Baron-Harknonen-meets-human-Bender-meets-a-gibbering-mass-of-eyeballs-and-teeth boss monsters, defeat it, and celebrate as I head to the next level … but there’s always another monster waiting behind some currently unopened door that I will have to eventually go through. So I celebrate the wins, but cautiously.

For the last year or so, in the exuberant haze of post-slaying celebration, I would sit at my desk, confident that The Thing was now going to begin filling the empty document. Most of the time, it was a frustrating, demoralizing experience as I dragged words, kicking and screaming, from my mind onto the page. At the end of those days, I’d curse myself and throw it all away. Once or twice, I enjoyed what I wrote, but when I went back to add to it, I realized there was a nice scene or two there, but nothing I could build into a story. Nothing I wrote made my heart sing. I never felt connected to what I had written. Maybe I’d put together one or two or even three nice scenes, but the reason I wanted to write it, the story I wanted to tell, I didn’t know what that was, because I was too distracted, too tired, too … broken.

I. Just. Could. Not. Do. It.

I’m gonna yadda yadda over a lot, because I want to hurry up and get to the fireworks factory. Maybe I’ll come back to it in the future. For now I will say I found myself in the middle of an empty ocean, floundering in the worst storm I’ve ever seen. I had all these instruments telling me how to get out of it, but I couldn’t adjust the sails to use them. I got frustrated, I got mad, I started to get depressed.

Yadda yadda, one day, as I was thrown wildly around by the violence of towering waves, it was like my body, or my Higher Self, or whomever is writing my life took pity on (or ran out of patience with) me and decided to do something about it. One day in late Autumn, it broke the glass and smashed a big red button which delivered this message: You will not be able to make good art, the one thing you want to do more than anything else for the rest of your life, until you slow down and let the healing take as long as it takes. We mean, really commit and do it. Yes, when it is hard. Yes, when it feels like you’re running in place on a patch of ice and if you fall it’s really going to hurt. Yes, when you are afraid. Yes when you are overwhelmed. Yes, yes, yes, you can do this. You must do this.

I heard that, paused, and I listened to what came after. I showed up and did the work. I started to slow down, but the way an overloaded cargo ship slows down over, starting several days out of port before it can think about actually slowing down again to dock without exploding like a Ford Pinto⁶

That brings us to sometime in January. I had been out of the storm and on dry land for a little bit, but I could still feel the motion of that storm, emotional landsickness from a body that didn’t realize the motion was a memory,⁷ but I also felt weirdly aware of how on solid ground I was, and that the discomfort was literally in my head. So I went for some walks, and as the landsickness calmed, all the years of reading books I didn’t feel had helped me at the time, books about storytelling, story structure, character development, writing process, books I read in an effort to get myself from a guy who writes things to a guy who is a writer, all came together at once, and before I realized it was happening, I think I got there. I think I am there, right now. Holy shit.

I have always known that I was mostly faking it, when it came to writing stories. I always felt like I had always had some grasp of the skills, but very little understanding of how to use them. I know that I’m reasonably competent and occasionally even good as a blogger who writes stories about his own life. I know that I can effectively recreate the emotional sense of a place and put you there. That’s not nothing! I’m proud of it and I love doing it! But when I tried to take that particular set of skills and translate them into writing stories of my own that actually say something through characters who grow and change in a story that evolves as I tell it rather than remember it, I couldn’t do it. I didn’t understand something fundamental about the discipline, and I didn’t even know where to look to find it. I think maybe it isn’t one single thing, and maybe it isn’t something that is meant to be easy or even logical in its discovery. At least, not for me. And I’m not even sure I’ve completely put it all together, just that I’ve figured out enough of it to finally get the key to turn in a door I’ve clawed grooves into, trying to brute force my way through it.

I started from the very beginning: What story do I want to tell, and why? A couple days of long, quiet walks later, I knew. It was simple and clear: I want to tell a dark fantasy story about a man who’s been running away from himself for so long, he doesn’t realize that he’s been caught, until it is too late. I want to examine where his greed comes from and why.

Where will I set it? Who is the guy? What happens after we meet him? Is there a twist? What is it? Who wins at the end? I allowed myself to write hundreds of words that didn’t work, knowing that they were getting me to the next hundred words that did, confident that I would be able to clean them up later⁸.

I had such a great time. I felt creative. I felt clever. I felt productive. I felt like I knew what I was doing! I wanted to reach out and tell my friend this was happening, but after blowing so many deadlines, I didn’t want to say anything unless and until it was done.

While I was busy not texting my friend, my friend texted me. They told me no pressure or expectation, they know what I’m dealing with, but there was a week left if I still wanted to turn in the thing. I replied that I would do my best, and mentioned that I’d been working on it, but didn’t go into the rest. I really wanted to stay on target, use The Force, blow this thing and go home.

Late in the day last Thursday, I finished the draft. I looked at it again Friday morning, was happy to discover that it held up, and turned it in with a note that said I thought this was about 90% done, but I needed fresh eyes to look at it, for those things I inevitably miss, or things that are left over from a previous draft that I didn’t notice were still there.

And I waited.

Yesterday, my friend texted me that he loved my story. Shortly after, the editor replied that he had no notes and was ready to publish it as-is. I asked if I could have a day to do a polish and just look it over one last time.

After my coffee and Marlowe’s walk this morning, I opened up my current draft and began reading it aloud. I made cosmetic tweaks here and there, tried out something in a scene that didn’t work so I deleted it all, and was sincerely shocked at how finished it actually was. It was more like 98% there, not 85% like I thought just 24 hours prior. I realized that I was having fun reading it, like it was something I hadn’t written, but was enjoying on its own merits.

That was wild, man.

So, after about 18 months, I “only” spent about twelve hours over “only” about four days working on the thing, but I think I spent roughly 540 days with this story, while it taught me how to be a writer.

What do you mean, Wil? I’ve been reading your blog for 20 years. Of course you’re a writer. Yes, I’ve written lots of things in 20ish years, but I always felt like I was mostly faking it. I could stack story blocks on top of each other, but if the stack got too tall, it always fell over. And even if I was in love with it before it fell, I didn’t know how to put those blocks back in order because I didn’t know why they went in that order, just that they fit together well, mostly by accident.

Something is different, now, and some other ideas that have been sitting on shelves in my creative mind, gathering dust, have begun to call out to me for the first time in years. Two things that I really loved developing but never finished are probably going to be combined into one thing, and I think I may even have a chance at pitching the result to a publisher.

I didn’t notice until today, editing this post, how much my growth as a trauma survivor and my growth as a writer have in common, even though I’ve always known they were linked together in ways I was aware of and ways I was not. It is not lost on me, at all, and it is not even a little coincidence, that I ended up writing a story about someone someone who knows he has trauma to heal, pain to reconcile, but unlike me, he choose to run away from it instead of doing the work. Of course, it’s also just a nice dark fantasy story with a little horror around the edges, too.

None of this was easy, but I believe that nothing truly worth doing ever is. There were times when I felt lost, and afraid, times when I gave up. My god, I gave up half a dozen times. But I got lucky, and the project moved slowly enough for me to catch up.

Now, I have to rest for a minute, but when I’m done, I’m going back to work. I have these stories I want to tell, and I think I actually know how to tell them.

Thanks for reading. I’m glad you’re here. If you’d like to get my posts in your email, here’s the thingy:

1. Hell, I was excited to do the thing. I had a ton of ideas to choose from, and any one of them would be such a thing! ↩︎
2. That work is ongoing. I’m going to be on a recovery and healing journey for the rest of my life, with its own storms and calm seas. At the moment, I feel like I have just emerged from one of the must brutal storms I have gone through in a long while to find myself on pretty calm water, so maybe we can think of this as putting into my logbook what it was like to weather that storm, so I’m better prepared for the next one. ↩︎
3. I almost called them “little” but there are no “little” traumas and I have to remind myself not to minimize my experience, so I’m going to remind you, also. ↩︎
4. EMDR is science that, for me, is indistinguishable from magic. ↩︎
5. I know, that’s weird, especially from Captain Skeptic here, but it’s happened enough that I have to accept it, now. ↩︎
6. I’m auditioning phrases to use when I want to say “slowly and then all at once”. This one probably isn’t getting called back. ↩︎
7. Stares at camera in Trauma Survivor ↩︎
8. This is significant for me. I spent so much of my life (and still do, contra best efforts) just terrified that everything I tried to do had to be perfect on the first try, or else my dad would be right about me. It’s damn close to impossible to be creative when I feel that way, and even harder to make myself keep going with “good enough” or even “bad but something”. I’ve worked so hard to stop judging myself, I’m giving myself a footnoted gold star for actually getting there. ↩︎