Writing When You Feel Like the Monster That Lives Under Your Bed

Writing is a peculiar kind of magic.

Sometimes it looks like dragging your laptop or notebooks under the shelter of a pile of throw blankets, and other times you’re sitting at your desk in the cold, dark hours of a wintry morning, where sleep has evaded you because you have a story that needs to be told now. “Sleep is for the weak” is the mantra of a creative writer who knows the opposite is true, but is also acutely aware that if they don’t document what the muse has espoused, it will be lost to the ether.

So the writer clutches their cup of tea like a lifeline (coffee is probably more accurate for most, but that stuff puts me to sleep), and they persevere while resembling some sort of Victorian ghost. Or the monster that lives under your bed. Whichever is more fitting for the mood of the task.

This has been my writing process lately: equal parts hopeful, exhausted, and vaguely feral.

(Okay, perhaps it’s been completely feral.)

I used to romanticise writing like it was supposed to be this graceful, serene, candlelit affair. I’d be sitting at a sturdy desk in a study, with book-laden shelves wrapped around the entirety of the room. There’d be a large window overlooking a garden, with the trees of a nearby forest bending and creaking while the wind howled and raindrops rippled against the glass panes. There’d be an open fire too. Whether it’s to keep me warm or purely for aesthetic, I really never cared—it was just there in all it’s majestic glory for me to admire and be grateful for.

… okay, graceful and serene might be a stretch. Perhaps I have always been a little book goblin.

None of that has eventuated, of course (but hey, maybe one day it will and I’ll be able to share it on Instagram and launch my side-hustle talking about manifestation).

The reality of writing tends to look a little more like an ever-growing floordrobe and a long-forgotten pile of dishes, while I curl up in my Oodie and mutter about—and growl at—my imaginary friends who are refusing to bend to my will.

Does anyone know why imaginary friends are so non-compliant?

Of course, the flipside to that is not writing at all. It’s just thinking about writing, thinking about all that you’ve created, and how you want to write but the words are playing hide and seek.

The Creative Goblin Era

For so long I’ve been stuck in a loop. Unable to truly move forward with my writing, or even pick up a book to read. Recently though, I took a much-needed break from streaming and I found myself devouring a few books (The Hurricane Wars, and the first three books in the A Court of Thorns and Roses series, and I’ve recently picked up The Love Hypothesis) and it has been nothing short of delightful to be reading again. So much so that my own writing has once again begun consuming me.

I will admit that I’ve often wondered if my re-writing The Last King and The Gem of Orithian has been the pain point in my stunted creative writing journey. It seems likely, but there’s just so much I desperately wanted to change. So much I am changing. I have completed one re-write of The Last King, and it felt like a vast improvement, but I still have some crinkles to iron out.

March of next year marks ten years since I first self-published The Last King, and that’s wild for me to think about. I was hoping to get the re-release done and published before then, but it’s looking unlikely. Regardless, I will be keeping you all updated on the journey and the behind-the-scenes process going forward.

Strangely enough, it’s also been about ten years since I deleted all my old blog content with the intention of starting somewhat fresh, with a different focus and angle on all things bookish. Yet this decision (and perhaps my own fear of failure) has significantly hindered this plan.

Hence I’m writing this, I guess. It doesn’t feel like anything important, or like it’s somehow bringing any value. It’s just writing for writings sake. Yet, insight into the mind of a creative is often something people go seeking after they discover the individual’s body of work. As much as this feels like drivel to me (and realistically, it is), to someone else in the future, this may provide interesting insight that even I myself cannot garner or fathom about who I am as an individual.

Despite being the monster under the bed, I kind of hope I’m likeable enough and not perceived as an actual monster by others.

At the moment, I’m in the stage where all I desperately want to do is create, but everything feels kind of heavy right now. So instead I play Stardew Valley like it’s my full-time job while daydreaming about my characters. About little jokes that Anastasia and Dara might share. How Michael and Justin’s reunion could play out if that were to happen. About how Warren would be an absolute master at running a multi-million dollar farm in Stardew Valley, but Eli would lament how he wished he could just animation cancel the crop harvesting in real life.

Sometimes the writing journey has to go backwards before it can go forwards—much like anything else in life, I guess—and this is where I’m at right now. Two completed novels—the first half of a tetralogy—that need to be re-written for the story to progress.

Some days though, you just need to give yourself permission to be stuck in these in-between spaces. No one’s journey is linear. Some of us scribble around the map that is our lives more than others. Some of us are slow, disorganised, and inconsistent in our creative journey.

And that’s okay.

For now, I’m probably going to continue being fully immersed in Stardew Valley, because I already have access to this entirely valid form of therapy. I’ll continue to voice-memo ideas with the most cursed audio quality imaginable. I’ll continue opening my manuscript just to stare at prose that conveys what I need it to convey, but does it so poorly (much like this sentence here to be honest).

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go upgrade my barn and buy some pigs while I speech-to-text the random ideas I have along the way.