I hate my book.

A creative crisis and ponderings on fake grit

I hate my book.

I don’t mean like “ugh, editing is hard” or “I’m just tired today”.
This a real, specific hatred.

I read my manuscript and tally the flaws daily.
There’s no escalation.
I unwrapped the twist too soon.
The main relationship goes against my personal values (which, as the person who wrote it, is a special kind of humiliation)

Every time I open it I oscillate between tears and low-grade anxiety, and I’ve started to dread the future version of me that will have to go online and say “yes, this is mine, I made it, please love it.”

Oh, and it was meant to come out this month… It obviously isn’t anymore.

I thought about hiring an editor, then decided against it. because of the money, but mostly because I know exactly what they’d say:
Take a sledgehammer to it. Start over.
my heart genuinely cannot take hearing that out loud from another human being when I already know it’s true.

Here’s the really embarassing part I haven’t dared tell anyone else: I finally get why authors use AI.

the temptation of uploading what I’ve been working on and get a robot to smooth over the sharp edges that are currently making me bleed (with no one having to witness me failing at the thing I love) is proving hard to resist.

The only thing standing between me and that decision is my ethics. which these days feel less like morals worth celebrating and more like a very inconvenient personality trait.

What makes it even worse is that I can’t hide behind “maybe it’s fine and I’m just being hard on myself”
I’m not. I know what I’ve written. I know the difference between doubt and diagnosis. This is the latter.

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The part I haven’t worked out yet, and why I’m still showing up anyway, is below. If you want the rest, upgrade and you get all the paid posts I’ve ever written as well :)

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The thing we call grit is often times just fear with better branding

What gets left out of every “keep going, believe in yourself” post you’ve ever read, is this: