Aria and David Griffey

A few days after my son was born, nearly nine months ago now, I made up my mind and finally deleted Instagram and Facebook from my phone for good. Not long afterward, I deleted the Substack app also. I had been deleting them off again, on again for months since we closed our used bookstore earlier that year, which finally freed me from my basically contractual obligation to post to the bookstore’s social media three-plus times a week. For years before that, I had been using Apple’s built in screen time app to (ineffectively) limit my time on the apps. It took having a second child to wake up something in me that realized that the apps were mainly a waste of my very limited, very precious time. And it took several months of low screen time for me to realize that I had been mentally checked out of my own life for years, maybe since I first entered highschool.

I won’t pretend I’ve been perfect. I ended up having to block the Substack website, as well as the app, because I couldn’t break the habit of torturing myself by reading through reams of Notes from people arguing about everything from artificial intelligence to birth control, and I’ve benefited massively from not having a million well-argued, dissenting voices bouncing around in my head 24/7, confusing my parental intuition and destroying my ability to discern what is actually right for myself and my family. In the end, all of these apps were smoke screens between me and the actual life that I’m supposed to be living right here in Central Ohio.

And so I started digging in to the tasks right in front of me: renovating half of my in-laws’ house so we could move in with our kids, planting a garden out front, teaching my toddler to say “please” and “thank you” (we’re still working on that), watching my son turn from a sleepy newborn into an active, very loud baby who can almost crawl now, working on bookbinding commissions for both individuals and a local career center, and, yes, writing.

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Yesterday, I finally finished my draft of The Hope of Rebellion, sequel to our debut novel The Heart of Resistance and the second book in our Steampunk trilogy. Really, I have been meaning to write this blog post for the past two months, but the draft was more pressing, so after nearly a year and a half of on again, off again work, I dug in and pushed myself to finish it. I finally feel like I have things to say on the internet again, but the real work, the book-making work, had to come first.

Probably the biggest lesson I am learning right now is how to do tasks at their appointed time, not when I feel like doing them. I am a very routine and schedule oriented parent; knowing roughly when the baby needs to nurse and the toddler needs to nap next is what kept me sane through the days of two-under-two, and it has continued to work very well for my children and our family. However, this means that certain things must be done at certain times, or they will not get done that day. One of those things is writing. David and I have allotted ourselves one to two hours nearly every evening to write, and that is when writing happens. Sometimes, he will write a few snippets on his phone before work or during the day, and I will occasionally sneak a bit of writing in during naptime (which is technically my bookbinding and/or mama nap time). But evening is our writing time, and write we must, barring extenuating circumstances of course.

This idea of doing things that need done, regardless of whether I feel like it, was utterly foreign to me up until very recently. Three years ago, I wrote my first Substack post (in the good old days, before Substack became discount Twitter hell) on the subject of why I hadn’t been writing. I will quote my own words at length, since they express still express my old problem quite well:

To say that I have not been writing at all is somewhat disingenuous. Technically, I have been writing quite a lot since the time when I tell people I stopped writing (the late summer of 2017); I have written blog posts, poems, website copy, loan applications, college essays, and even brief forays into the fiction that I so desperately long to return to. But none of it has felt quite right. In the summer of 2017, I burnt myself out on writing and fell into several months of miserable depression that then turned into multiple years of mental health issues that, though now mostly resolved, still occasionally rear their ugly little heads. Ever since then, I have been trying to start writing again. Everything I have written since does not feel to me like real writing, but rather fits and starts, small forays that amount to nothing.

I am beginning to believe that the old feeling is gone for good. I am beginning to reckon with the idea that perhaps I crossed a threshold, and trying to return to the way things were before is only hindering my ability to create new things. Maybe this is completely obvious. In fact, I know that this conclusion is obvious, and that I ought to have arrived at it years ago, but somehow I am only now beginning to grapple with it.

I have written a lot since the summer of 2017. In fact, I have probably written more since then than I ever had before that point. And yet none of it has felt really real. This block, I think, is within myself. And I don’t know why it feels so immovable.

I want to start writing again. For real. For people to read. For me to feel like I’m a writer again. In fact, if I’m honest, that’s almost certainly the problem: the need to feel a certain way, to evade imposter syndrome and feel like how it must feel in the movies, notebook and laptop and button down and “Dark Academia” aesthetic, how it feels to be a writer. I do not feel like a writer, which is ironic because I own a used bookstore and often wear “aesthetic” clothes and do all the things that the internet tells you writers do. And I am. I am a writer. I have been writing. I am writing. I must keep writing. But I don’t feel like it.

I was correct; the feeling of writing that I craved, that made me avoid writing because it seemed I could no longer feel it, is, for the most part, gone. I often wonder if it ever existed in the first place, or if it was a kind of nostalgia for childhood, for the hours I spent absorbed in my brick-shaped, chuggy old laptop typing out a lot of nonsense and enjoying every second of it. Ideas seemed to flow so easily then, to be caught from the air and downloaded straight to the page, even though I know that was never the case. I struggled, abandoned stories, rewrote some of them dozens of times, never fully satisfied with the work, because it was bad. I got many of my “million bad words” out during that time, and I have gotten more out since. But in the interim, when I finally gave up on chasing the halcyon feeling of “writing” or “being a writer,” something changed. Some of the words that came out started to be kind of good.

Writing is work, at least for me. My husband and co-author David claims that for him, it is play. But that’s why he writes the first drafts and I come behind to clean up and polish and build something from all the sand he has poured into the sandbox. I struggle to lift the sand on my own, struggle to move more than a few handfuls into the box, but once it is there I can shape it, mold it into something closer to a book, and then closer still on the next pass, until finally it starts to get good.

And once I quit social media, once I started taking the writing seriously again and pushing myself to finish Hope, something happened. I started to love writing again. I started to want to write. Part of the reason Hope has taken so long in the drafting process is that much of the time, I simply didn’t want to work on it, so I didn’t. I was tired, or I wasn’t feeling well, or I wanted to watch a show, or whatever, so I did that instead. I missed the feeling that drove me to spend hours hunched over my laptop as a child and teenager, and so I kept waiting for that feeling, but it never came.

Sometime last year, I saw a Note from somebody on Substack (it may have been the inimitable Esther Berry) about virtue ethics, and the idea that you have the power to just choose to emulate a virtue and become a better person. You don’t have to wait for a feeling or a force from outside; you can, today, choose to do something hard and become a better person in the process. That idea seized me and knocked around in my head for a long time, and slowly my life began to change. I stopped chasing the feeling and started taking the actions, and then the feelings followed. Sometimes, it took a very long time. Sometimes, there was nearly instant feedback. But I have never since let go of that idea, that you can choose to be a better person right now. It sounds very trite, but that idea has genuinely changed my life for the better.

The days are just packed right now, and that’s exactly how I like them. Sometimes it is a lot, almost too much, but there’s also nothing I would give up. The writing, the reading, the cooking, the cleaning (I like cleaning, sue me. I do hate laundry), the bookbinding, the kiddos, the gardening, the making, the small adventures, the big celebrations… There’s so much to do in life, none of which involves a screen (okay, technically my writing practice does but that doesn’t count!) Sometimes I miss being more active on social media; when I log in on my laptop every few weeks, it can feel like I’ve missed years of people’s lives. I know that as an author, I can’t fully abandon social media or the internet, but I think that limiting my access has done nothing but good for my writing process, and my life.

Now that the Hope draft is finished and we’re giving it a couple of weeks to “marinate” before edits begin, I will probably be spending my daily writing time working on this website, blogging, and yes, maybe some posting on social media. But if you want to keep in touch and follow what we’re up to, I would highly recommend subscribing to our email list. Social media posts can get buried or hidden by the algorithm until they’re past their relevance; accounts can get hacked or blocked or deleted by overzealous platforms. Email is still the most direct way authors have to communicate with their readers. So please consider subscribing if you’d like to keep up with our work!

If you’re interested in a swashbuckling steampunk tale of adventure, revenge, and rebellion, check out The Heart of Resistance wherever books are sold, or buy a paperback or hardcover directly from our distributor.

We’ll be in touch soon.

Sincerely,
Aria Griffey