You’re supposed to warm-up before you do anything strenuous, to avoid pulling something important. Something critical to your ability to wash the dishes or your hair or falling asleep without pharmaceuticals. Writing counts as strenuous. My brain needs all the stretching it can get these days.
For the past thirteen years, I’ve been working on a book. The Dead Dad Book. Is its working title and also a giant spoiler alert. In case you skimmed past that part where I’ve been working on this for thirteen years, I’ll repeat myself: THIRTEEN YEARS. THIRTEEN YEARS I’VE BEEN WORKING ON THIS BOOK. On and off, sure. Some years, I gave it barely a passing thought, but still. That’s a lot of years. A lot of years to not be finishing a big project. It’s time to wrap up and move on to the rest of my life.
2025 feels like a completion year. I’ve been feeling that strongly and the astrologers and intuitive I see on Instagram seem to agree, which is always nice. I enjoy being right. Completion of creative projects, completion of old patterns and healing cycles. Completion of The Artist’s Way, something I’ve tried numerous times and never actually finished. A friend swears that it’s changed her life every time she’s finished. I just want to get more than halfway through it. A positive life change would be a refreshing bonus.
So I need to finish this book. (And all my other books, but that’s a problem for another day.) As you can see from the existence of this blog post, I’m procrastinating. I call it warming up but we all know what’s really going on here. Procrastination, stickiness from the depths of my consciousness, resistance to everything the writing - and finishing - this book means.
I’m beginning to understand why writing it has taken so long. This book has been more a process of healing generational wounds - raise your hand if you have alcoholism in your family! - than of just writing some stories and calling it a day. It’s been a transformation of my own ability to relate to my emotions, rather than numbing them. It’s been a part of the healing process after my father’s death.
Here are all the reasons I’m resisting finishing this book, in no particular order:
I don’t know how to write a memoir / book of essays / how to book on healing generational trauma and a family lineage of alcoholism.
I honestly don’t know what this book even is.
Not sure I’ve actually healed any of those things.
The thought of sending it to agents and getting rejected as many times as my other books have feels like a sad trombone in my soul.
My brother doesn’t want to be in it - at least he didn’t last time I checked which may have been seven years ago now, but I can’t imagine much has changed - and it’s hard not to include him. You can’t just vanish a main character. So I’ll need two versions, the public version and the family version.
That’s too many versions.
I never remember things accurately and I both want my family to look over it and don’t want anyone to see it until it’s published lest the “that’s not how it happened”s come rolling in.
Do you know how many drafts of this I have? Scattered over laptops and the cloud and notes, both paper and digital? Neither do I, because I lost track years ago. The first draft of this book has been lost to time and space.
I gotta quit with this list, I think it might be making everything worse. Turning my book warm-up into an anxious brain dump. Not that I have anything against a frantic brain dump, but maybe you shouldn’t publish them anywhere. (Totally going to.)
Maybe I need to actually stretch. With my body, not my fingers clacking frantically on a keyboard. Get the blood moving and the heart pumping and bring some motion from the physical space into the etheric space from which I need to pluck this book.
Because my trust in my ability to finish this book, to make it something entertaining and helpful, something I’m really proud of, has eroded in recent years, I’ve been tuning in for myself about how to best finish it. Here’s what I got yesterday: “Just write your memories. Just write it for you.” Here’s what I got today: “Imagine this book in every bookstore you ever walk into for the rest of your life - what would you want it to say?”
Either way, it feels like a lot of pressure. So here are some mantras: Done is better than perfect. Things can be fun and impactful without overthinking then to death, or over the course of decades. You can do this, but…you have to actually do it.