On being lost in your own head (Monthly update #6)

Also: Disney Princesses, video games, God, Little Shop of Horrors

I’ve spent a lot of the last couple of years lost in my own head. Whatever that means.

Two-ish years ago, when I landed a literary agent and pulled back on all the gig work I’d been doing in order to focus on fiction (read: focus on sleeping in, petting my dogs, playing video games, etc.), I found myself suddenly shocked at how completely I’d lost my sense of time, reality, etc. Turns out living in your imagination all day does weird things to you.

Or maybe “lost in my own head” is just sort of my default setting. Without the constant deadlines to direct my daily life, my brain retreated to where it was comfortable, which was up its own metaphorical butt, thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking. The real world has always seemed like a foreign country to me, and thinking about doing things in it is almost always more interesting to me than actually doing them. Maybe that experience is typical of the sort of people who become writers (or not! I have no idea), but it’s far from conducive to living in the real world—which kind of sucks when you need to actually sell books, or for that matter, pay bills or make a dentist appointment, or do literally anything else.

Maybe that’s why the writing that comes easiest for me tends to be the stuff where my characters are lost in endless recursive solipsism. My debut novel, Ophelia, Alive (which you can read for free by signing up for this newsletter, but also makes the perfect gift for all occasions), was basically nothing but that.

But while my tenuous grasp on reality might work as subject matter for interesting books, it’s absolutely not conducive to getting those books written in the first place. When you’re sitting at your keyboard and your head is swimming with thoughts about thoughts about thoughts, an hour can go by and feel like a minute (or vice-versa!), and then you become convinced that the entire fourth dimension is a conspiracy built by a daemon who wants you to always be confused and miserable.

All of which is why I’m eternally grateful for having found a job that fits into my life and writing career (“career”) so well. For a few hours a day, I sit at this church front desk, get my RDA of Genuine Human Contact™️, and—usually, on a typically slow day—get to work on my novel while I watch the security cameras. And every once in a while, I hit the jackpot of Csíkszentmihályian “flow.”

Tuesday this past week was a good day—a quiet day at the ol’ front desk, so I threw myself into my work-in-progress. This is a book that’s been slow going, in terms of getting not-garbage onto the page, and I’ve been averaging about a page a day since I started this draft back in June, but on Tuesday I suddenly found myself in the proverbial “zone” and cranked out several pages at work, and then half a dozen more after leaving for home, without any friction at all. It was amazing.

Oh, and also, I was at the part of the book where the main character starts to lose his grip on reality a little. Probably just coincidence, though, right?

Man. Sometimes I wish I could relate to normal human things, but I guess being really good at capturing endless, bottomless pits of dread and despair is a skill of sorts, too. Right? Guys? 🕹🌙🧸

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Poll of the moment

I’ve found I have a binge-and-purge relationship with video games. I’ll get really excited about them, and buy a bunch and throw all my free time into playing them, only to wake up and be like, “Whoa, I could have read so many books in all that time”—and suddenly I can’t play games at all anymore. Then, later, I’ll start binging again, and the cycle will begin anew. Am I crazy, or…?

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Two years ago: Little Shop of Horrors taught me everything I know about storytelling (and revision)

I really poured my heart and soul into this piece, which in retrospect was a weird use of my time: Why did I think the internet would be flocking to read an article about a horror-comedy musical from the eighties? Do y’all think it would have done better if I’d put something about ✨Disney Princesses✨ in the title? Because I promise they figure into this piece as well!

Public indifference aside, this piece is about something really important to me as a writer: how the changes made between the 1960 B-movie The Little Shop of Horrors and its 1982 off-Broadway adaptation really solidified in my mind the difference between a rough draft and a polished, compelling story. There’s also a shout-out to The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin—but you’ll have to read the piece to see where they figure in.

I worked way too hard on this one, so please give it some love:

By early evening on the twenty-sixth, I was looking at a completed 75,000 words of literary horror—and the night was still young! I had some time to celebrate, and Netflix streaming had recently become a thing, so I popped some popcorn, climbed into bed with my laptop, and—for the first time—watched Roger Corman’s 1960 film The Little Shop of Horrors.

Seventy-two minutes later, I closed my laptop, thinking “…crap, I’ve really got my work cut out for me.”… (Read more here!) 🕹🌙🧸

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⬅️ In case you missed it: War is peace, freedom is happiness

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Stuff I’ve been enjoying lately

Suppose you were the first person in your tribe to have ever seen an ocean. You could reach down and cup a bit of it in your hands to show the others, but it would not be blue. A description of it could not equal the experience of it. A piece could not come close to representing the whole. You might be able to make them understand there is a lot of water, somewhere, but not much beyond that. This problem is deeper.

You all know I believe in God, but I’ve never in my life had an experience I could describe as unambiguously paranormal or supernatural. I’ve long had a bit of sympathy for skeptics and atheists on that front: my own personal experience of the world is a purely materialist one, so I can’t blame anyone who concludes the universe is purely material.

That’s not everyone’s experience, though. An awful lot of people (probably more than would admit to it) have had experiences that they can’t explain—and that, crucially, have changed them profoundly.

It’s in that spirit that I’m pointing you towards this beautifully written essay, by a man who calls himself simply Some Guy, about the time he came face-to-face with Some God, and left his angry atheism behind forever:

If you have ever read the Allegory of the Cave, it was as though my ropes were cut and I beheld, at last, what strange things there are that make the shadows on the wall. So, it is hard to use words to describe the experience because I believe that what I experienced then is where words and experience come from. I glimpsed the sun outside the attic.

Is it true? I have no idea. But it’s a fascinating story, and it’s well worth your time. It’ll take you about an hour to read, so make yourself a cup of coffee, get comfortable, and gaze into the eternal. 🕹🌙🧸

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Reminder: By popular demand, my new monthly feature, Ask a church receptionist, debuts in a week or so. Send any and all questions about the Bible, Christianity, or anything else to luke.t.harrington@gmail.com. Thanks to everyone who’s already submitted one! You guys are the best!

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Favorite comment of the month

Well, I think what gets missed is that there have been big cultural shifts. Back in the day, if women were unhappy, they didn’t discuss it over the back fence while hanging out the laundry. Society was much more conformist and there was pressure to perform happiness. You just wouldn’t have told some survey-taker that your life was miserable. Now, things have swung the other way, and there’s so much more talk about mental health. People feel left out if they don’t say they’re depressed or anxious. In Mad Men, Betty Draper tells a nine year old boy that she’s “so sad” because she can’t tell anyone else. If that episode were set in today’s world and not 1960, she’d be telling everybody.

Margaret Atwood has a huge backlist of great novels. The Blind Assassin and Alias Grace are a couple of my favorites. I think you would like Oryx and Crake. —Elizabeth Sowden 🕹🌙🧸

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