Announcing Finishing a First Draft

There's a saying that you should only write when not writing is more painful than writing. Nobody but people who written volumes understand that. Writing can be such a slog but if you have to get it out, you must.

I am the kind of person who always read a lot because he had few friends and little better to do, and then when I started writing, the kind of person who always in High School got high marks for his essays and always had to read them out. Once I got on the Internet in 1988, I came into this habit of never fully processing anything until I had written and posted about it, and I probably should apologize to many people previously on Usenet for that. Then there was the blogging days, and now the Twitter and the Facebook and you get it: I do not shut up. I did stop reading books because I get too much emotionally involved and start behaving badly towards my own health (no movement, no sleep) but I still read a fuckton of social and blogs and online.

But yeah, blogging and tweeting is not writing. And as a romantic and superhero-imprinted and very sexual, but also often very bored as I am, I have been constructing emotional scenes and weird scenarios for decades now. And after having talked for it for years how I wanted to write a Gay BDSM Superhero Romance Porn novel, eight years ago I started. And tore the result up, waited another four years, and then started again in July 2016, went back to that first chapter for a year, and finally in 2018, while I was searching for work and a home in Berlin, got earnest on chapter two. Because you can do writing anywhere in between applying for things and waiting for replies.

And at that point it hurt more not to write than to write. I was isolated, lonely, cold, and there were all these imaginary friends waiting for me to create them and put insanely dramatic words in their mouths in between saving the city. I don't know how to write prose, really. I am fine with the essays I vomit out in the heat of the moment and then post, but I suck at story-telling, expressions, surroundings, action. That's the craft and I never bothered to pick it up. But Inow had to learn because I was on a roll. I ended my first draft three weeks ago.

180.000 or so words. Oh God.

I don't think I will ever let anyone really read it. I don't think anyone should--although one person has read about 60%, and their edits of the first chapter have proven invaluable to steer my thinking about how to communicate. I am moving my first draft chapter by chapter from Medium.com to LivingWriter to do an editing pass, applying to the first chapters what I have learned to do by the eleventh, and I still think this is not interesting for anyone but me. It's a complete Mary-Sue (me) shipping with the main DC heroes, although I tried to make them more interesting.

But I sure had fun doing it. I finally discovered the fun in writing without being read. I don't need this to be read. I just needed a fun hobby. When you crochet a terrible sweater, you don't want to see it in the Louvre. You want to have had fun crocheting. And I loved this process.

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We have a problem though--I have revised the first two chapters and while some writing is getting tighter, it's not getting *shorter*, and the plot is simply not ecpi enough to warrant such space. Ouch.