Let Me Tell You About My WIP...

...while also telling you more about where I'm at.

It’s snowing outside, so it’s officially Bjork Vespertine season. I write this while listening to Bjork’s Post, I won’t lie. Bjork has always been winter music for me. I was a huge fan of Bjork in my teens. I remember in 2003, changing my desktop wallpaper to a picture of Bjork and my dad was like “Is that the latest teen singing sensation?” and I was like, “Uh…no.”

Most of this year, I’ve been listening to 90’s music. It’s for my WIP, which has a Gen-X protagonist. The novel is called Mommy Complex and I wrote the initial draft back in November of 2022.

I wouldn’t even say it was much of a first draft, just a stupid NaNoWriMo project that was more of a joke than anything. It was something to get me back into the swing of writing longform after the sting of rejection of my first novel, and writing the short story collection that I still get a little butthurt about because it isn’t selling as well as I’d hoped.¹

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The WIP was supposed to be a fun erotica book to potentially self-publish, but then it became…not that.

Mommy Complex is an erotic horror satire. It took all of 2023 and like half of 2024 to figure out who the characters were and what I was really saying. It’s the first book of what will be a trilogy satirizing key elements of the dark romance genre. It’s about American culture. It’s about white feminism. It’s about the horrors of the modern age.

Since September, I’ve been writing the second draft for my Advanced Novel Writing course. In the course, I have to write 50,000 words of my novel in 5 three-week sessions. I don’t have a ton of extra cash, so dropping money on this thing had me wary, but it’s been a long time since I’ve written on a deadline, and I knew that by signing up that I was also signing up to restructure my writing routine.

I usually work twice a week. On work days, I drop the kids off at school. Then I bus down to the local coffee shop, and sit and write for about 45 minutes before work starts.

Considering that I’ve spent my entire life being a homebody, writing out in public has been a nice change. It was a fantasy of mine for a long time. Now, I have a reason to get one of those overpriced Freewrite keyboards, but I probably won’t. I’ve already got the magic happening in my Notes app.

Write. Work. Return home.

Copy. Paste. Email.

Copy. Paste. Edit in Scrivener.

On my days off, I cut my scenes down to what I think is minimalist perfection. Then I send in the 10,000 words and hope for the best.

My instructor really likes it so far. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. It makes me feel really good. It also makes me feel like I wasted a money, as he doesn’t really have too much criticism. I’m still glad that I took this course. At least I now know that I’ve figured out how to write a damn novel.

A while back, I got Save the Cat!: Writes a Novel and it helped me map my plot points. It helped me figure out what kind of book I was even writing. It’s helped me refine my writing process. No longer do I feel like a fucking tourist in my own novel. I can tell you were all the beats are, and the function of each character, and the arc of my protagonist (kinda? mostly?). I’ve figured out all my shit.

The only thing I questioned after writing this 3rd session is whether or not to cut back on the sex scenes. It’s been a thing I’ve questioned since I realized that this book was more serious than silly. I know how people feel about sex scenes. I know that I like them. I know that my work has always walked that dental floss tightrope relatively well.

I don’t know why I keep questioning it. When people review my gothic short story collection, they always cite “Honeymoon” (the experimentally-structured story with the most graphic sex scenes) as their favourite.

I always worry that I should move on from writing sex scenes. They’re a distraction. People will skim them. The sex might ruin my chances of serious publication. The sex might also be a selling point. But then the people who read my books for the sex scenes might feel alienated by the “upmarket” components of the book. I don’t know.

This is a normal negative feedback loop for authors who bridge genres to experience.

I recently finished Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama, which has some rather graphic sex. The scenes themselves were bluntly-written. They were mechanical and without any flair. They weren’t what I would consider sexy, but I liked them. They had a carnal energy to them. A menace. A malice. They said something about sex in fiction without saying anything at all.

The book inspired the hell out of me, to say the least.

As for my mom life, my kids are getting older. I’m slowly slipping out of my mom role and back into real life. It’s been a tiring transition at times. I find myself spending less time on social media. I don’t take pictures of my outfits as often. I don’t even dress up as often. For a while, it felt wrong, but I’m slowly getting the hang of it, not putting on makeup, not spending time trying to present myself to the world.

It feels good just not caring.

I feel a bit like my self-conscious teenage self again, where I used to escape the realities of high school by hiding out in my notebook with headphones in. I just don’t have the self-consciousness anymore.

Every day, despite the current reality, I feel a little more at peace with myself. My house is kinda messy. I really need to clean some rooms, but the novel needs writing. It needs my attention, and I find myself drifting into the world of my novel more and more.

The static of day to day life seeps in less and less.

I feel like a real writer again.

1. Please please please buy Ending in Ashes. It’s a gothic short fiction collection full of recycled gothic tropes written to satiate the most refined of readers. If you like Chuck Palahniuk and V.C. Andrews and Gillian Flynn’s writing, it’ll be right up your alley.