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Message
Scott Lynch updated us a month ago
Posted on 8/25/21 at 9:39 am
Posted on 8/25/21 at 9:39 am
I'm just now seeing this, as I had given up any hope of ever seeing Thorn of Emberlain. LINK
I feel for the guy - anxiety is a bitch - but we are never going to fricking see that novel.
quote:
We're Gonna Do Drugs, Folks
About ten years ago, I watched a video of filmmaker Kevin Smith discussing the time he was invited to Paisley Park to participate in an extremely loosely-defined collaboration with the late Prince. Although no actual project emerged from that strange brief interlude, Smith was able to spend some time talking with various members of Prince’s staff. One of them let slip that Prince had spent years writing and recording an entire body of hidden work— entire albums and cycles of music videos, all fully professionally produced, all locked straight away into Prince’s vault unreleased, for reasons of Prince’s own.
Smith didn’t know quite how to take this. Was it quirky disinformation, an exaggeration, a misunderstanding? I assumed it must have been something of that nature when I first heard the story— even for Prince, a man whose eccentricity could barely be measured by the metrics of planet Earth, it seemed too much. Then, in 2016, Prince passed away and the existence of his unreleased song vault was confirmed to the world (as of this writing, it’s still being catalogued, and to the best of my knowledge its true size and scope have not been revealed).
I bring this up, because it turns out I have been filling a tiny Prince vault of my own. Or, perhaps, my brain chemistry has been allowed to curate such a vault for too long without oversight.
I don’t have much experience of writer’s block. Other than the need for an ocasional break and some reasonable interludes of fallow brain time, I’ve never had sustained trouble with composition, even when wracked with anxiety and depression. Despite my generally fragile mental state during the pandemic, I have remained more or less steadily productive, writing and editing thousands of words on a weekly basis. Words which I have been completely unable to show anyone, thanks to the crushing goddamn chest-filling pressure-out-to-my fingertips sensations that herald another anxiety attack… sensations I am experiencing right now, and have been experiencing intermittently in the time it has taken me to write the current toal of five (5) paragraphs on display here. When did I begin this writing process? Four (4) days ago.
“There’s a very real chance this update, too, will go into the vault,” I just typed. If I actually manage to finish this and hit send, I presume I will put that sentence in quotation marks or something. How’s that for a glimpse of the writing process? I have not yet put the quotation marks in. The sentence starting with “I have not yet” was finished 17 hours after I typed “there’s a very real chance.” That is the rate of meaningful progress when anxiety is my co-pilot. This sentence, being written a mere 45 minutes after the last, is the first to be composed under the increasing influence of the anti-anxiety medication I took with dinner.
Because this nonsense has gone on long enough.
In my miniature Prince vault are, at a minimum, seven short stories, a novella, a novelette, a novel, and a number of essays for this newsletter. At the beginning of the pandemic I would occasionally joke with myself or my wife that “we dont’ want a Prince vault situation,” but here we are, having one. The plain fact is, my career as a writer is in danger at the moment, and the danger grows with every month I don’t get this under some measure of control, because while my existing books continue to perform very well there is a difference between being a working writer and a person who used to write, and there is only so much my patient editors and publishers and readers can be asked to wait for without clear answers. There is very little practical value in being a writer who falls over heaving and gasping every time he attempts to show people what he’s made. In short, there is very little practical value in me, as I presently am, and I am desperately tired of this, tired of it ruining my fun, tired of it confusing my audience, tired of it eating my self-respect, tired of it receding a little bit only to come roaring back stronger than ever.
So, we’re gonna take drugs, kids. I’ve already started. Ten years ago finally admitting that an antidepressant was necessary probably saved my life. In my usual fashion, since then I have resisted various pushes to take anti-anxiety medication as well, but I am through refusing. I need some answers. I need some goddamn changes. I need to be able to get this newsletter out on a non-geological timescale, among other things. I need to have an active social skill more in-depth than feigning approximately human functionality on Twitter. I’m forty-three, and I don’t want another fricking year to go by with several years of good work (though I say it myself) locked up tight in my stupid little vault of anxieties.
The medication, it has been taken, and will be taken again, and we’ll see what it can do for me. I am feeling very strange as I write this… a different sort of strung-out and nauseated than usual. It’s like someone has taken a hot towel to my usual tense anxiety attack, massaged the knots out of it, turned it into bizarre brain-drifting lassitude. My fingers are not exactly adroit upon the keys this evening, and I apologize for misspellings. I wonder if I might have been wiser to cut the pill I took in half… ah well. It already kowabunga’d its way down to the lightless water park of my innards, where it celebrated its last few moments of existence before being taken apart by my trusty acids, so the molecules of power could be stripped and shipped directly to my nervous system, where they are now doing… something.
It has to be this way. I’m tired of hiding my work and hiding from the pain of getting it back out into the world. So, drugs. Drugs and ongoing therapy.
I just put quotation marks around “There’s a very real chance this update, too, will go into the vault.” That’s a good sign. But now can I actually hit send and get this thing out the door? You’re about to find out. We both are.
I feel for the guy - anxiety is a bitch - but we are never going to fricking see that novel.
3
Posted on 8/25/21 at 9:47 am to boxcarbarney
I've given up all hope on this series as well as Rothfuss.
I think it was over 2 years ago that Lynch says he turned in the manuscript for Thorn. Apparently, his editor tore it to shreds and he had to rewrite large sections.
And then he got me too'd to a small degree and already has a bunch of issues.
at least with him, he has legit mental health reasons why this will never be finished.
Rothfuss is just a fricking cockjob.
I think it was over 2 years ago that Lynch says he turned in the manuscript for Thorn. Apparently, his editor tore it to shreds and he had to rewrite large sections.
And then he got me too'd to a small degree and already has a bunch of issues.
at least with him, he has legit mental health reasons why this will never be finished.
Rothfuss is just a fricking cockjob.
Posted on 8/25/21 at 10:39 am to Fun Bunch
quote:
Rothfuss is just a fricking cockjob
Posted on 8/25/21 at 12:14 pm to Fun Bunch
quote:
I've given up all hope on this series as well as Rothfuss.
If he ever did finish it I wouldn't even read it. I frickin hated his second book.
Posted on 8/25/21 at 12:37 pm to Fun Bunch
Sure seems like there are a lot of fantasy authors that can't finish a fricking series.
Posted on 8/25/21 at 7:24 pm to boxcarbarney
quote:
I feel for the guy - anxiety is a bitch - but we are never going to fricking see that novel
GRRM will finish A Song of Ice and Fire before Lynch finishes the next Bastards book
Posted on 8/25/21 at 7:26 pm to Dubosed
quote:
If he ever did finish it I wouldn't even read it. I frickin hated his second book.
Yeah the second book was a huge drop of after Lies and I almost quit then. But I read Republic of Thieves and thought he got the series back on track.
It wasn’t as good as Lies, but it will be very hard for him to replicate that.
This post was edited on 8/25/21 at 7:27 pm
Posted on 8/26/21 at 11:17 am to memphis tiger
He's referring to Rothfuss/Kingkiller Chronicles not Lynch in that post
Posted on 8/26/21 at 9:10 pm to Fun Bunch
quote:
He's referring to Rothfuss/Kingkiller Chronicles not Lynch in that post
Yeah exactly.
As shitty as it is that lynch hasn’t been able to produce anything for years, what he has produced has been good to excellent. Rothfuss has made one good book that is derivative of Harry Potter. And he’s a cocky twat.
Posted on 8/30/21 at 8:39 am to boxcarbarney
If you follow his twitter feed, the dude's got a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Rothfuss too. Both are a couple of weenies who can't be relied upon to do anything for their fans. frick 'em.
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