The Agony and the Ecstasy of Writing · 11:48pm Sep 19th, 2015
I finished another chapter of Three Nights in Manehattan, my Pirene sequel, and I am beat – yet also deeply excited.
It's amazing how exhausted I can be after a chapter, especially one that has such a furious climax as that one. It's nothing compared to ending a story – a sensation I've only been privileged to feel three times now, and one I hope I never get used to. I'm reminded of the Charlton Heston/Rex Harrison epic The Agony & the Ecstasy, dramatizing Michelangelo's painting of the Sistine Chapel. While I don't think I can really put myself onto that pedestal (or painting scaffold), I do understand what the title means. Even for something like fan fiction, writing in anything but the most frivolous way imaginable, it's the agony of pouring something of yourself into a work, and then the ecstatic revelation that you've created something with just a little meaning. Seeing others react to that, too, is something of an ecstasy.
Even as I work on finishing this piece, which was a personal request from my sister – I'd told her about it over a year ago, and she asked me to finish it rather than leave it undone – I'm looking at my publishable work, and I'm really starting to feel like I can take the lessons I've learned here and apply them. I'll put the same level of agony into them if it can make even a fraction of that divine spark, the thing that everyone in Pirene is so worried about, come out in my work.
It's going to be a long journey.
When pony writing might actually lead to a major "real life" accomplishment.
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You can do it! Mash those keys! Write harder!
Hey, just want to thank you again for your writing and for giving us another story.
I recently spent a week in the middle of nowhere on a lake with no internet and a dislocated shoulder. I decided to get around to re-reading Pirene like I'd said I was going to do for months now.
It was just as great the second time. It really is a fine bit of work. I'm enjoying Three Nights immensely as well, not just for the fight scenes, but because it's like a visit from an old friend, and because the world you've spun is so rich.
You rock. Whoo hoo!
3414451
That is as always incredibly touching~ Thank you.
What were you doing on a lake with a dislocated shoulder?
3414525 the short version of a long story is i promised my parents i'd visit them while they were on their vacation. My plans did not include me injuring myself (embarrassingly) the day before i was supposed to drive up. I didn't have the heart to back out.