Excerpt from My Manuscript, Chapter 3.5ish:
Four years ended in a single phone call.
No steady, thrumming romantic rain.
No aching sobs that made us curl over and clench the soft of our stomachs.
No montage of him building me my dream home in sexy, unshaven spite.
No flash forward showing us rowing backwards in deep blue water dotted with majestic-ass swans.
Not a crumb of “The Notebook” shit.
I was curled up, watching TV on the stiff, mud colored sofa in parents basement, legs wiggling under a thick wool blanket, happily calculating all the money I was going to save. The corner by the bar was lined with bags still stuffed with clothes from the apartment I abruptly moved out of. The apartment that Cam and I shared for a year. The first space I’d signed for alone, in the same apartment complex I shared with my cousin. I was finally earning a little more money, confident I could manage on my own. But, it seemed, whenever I made any bold attempts to venture out on my own, the world seemed to remind me, cruelly, that there was always something or someone that needed more time, and care, and attention.
And for the last two years, it was Cam.
“I quit today,” Cam mumbled on speaker phone.
I set the phone on the counter, filling a chipped coffee mug with ice.
This series is about getting more comfortable with the never-ending, magically forgiving process of revision. In the words of Annie Dillards
One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better.
These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
I was talking with Cortney the other day about feeling like I’m in a neverending, pitchblack tunnel when writing or creating (projects that takes TIME) alone. It can cause procrastination, stalling, thoughts that you’ll never see the light at the end. “Showing up is the light,” he reminded me. Just showing up.
I hope you’ve been lighting your own way this week, friends.
Thank you for letting me share lil’ snippets of my manuscript and the 4th season of Passing Through The Podcast .
— Nneka