2d10 Psychic Damge

[ghoulmouse]

You ever read a sex scene that's so bad it causes you actual psychological problems?

I'm exaggerating a little, but on the other hand I'm not. I won't name names or titles, but I started working on editing my first webnovel/light novel/etc that has explicit content in it (I've done explicit manga before, this is my first prose project though).

And god, is it ever bad.

I was in the middle of slogging through absolutely the worst sex scene I've ever read -- not just "worst in a published book" but I think worst I've read ever in my whole life -- and I just got like...overwhelmed? By the fact that this sucked SO BAD and multiple parties paid money to publish this in two different languages and now someone was paying ME money to try to make it as readable as possible (a tall order let me fucking tell you). And I think this must have set off some kind of chain reaction in my brain because I spent the next week or so just catastrophically depressed and stewing over my own failure to accomplish...well, much of anything, really.

With a little more perspective I can say that there are actually things I'm EXTREMELY proud of (hell, I was the editor on a manga that won an Eisner for best foreign language adaptation), but there's still... I dunno.

I guess 20 years ago...30 years ago...I thought I'd have done more by now. In particular, I thought I'd have some kind of big artistic project, a book or a comic or video game or I dunno, depends on when you asked me.

Here I was polishing up the most bottom-of-the-barrel shit I'd ever seen and I couldn't stop thinking, man...even the bottom of the barrel is still IN the barrel, you know? What am I missing that the author of this nonsense has? Is it persistence? Dedication? Work ethic? Do I just not CARE as much as he did? Clearly it's not TALENT that's the problem and that honestly makes it worse. Talent is neutral; what I've got is a failure of personality, clearly.

I've been trying to channel this into something a little more productive, maybe try writing something I can throw up on Amazon/Smashwords because if this can make its creator a bit of money then goddammit I can do better, right? But I dunno. It's hard to face up to another goal I might very well fumble yet again.

Guess we'll see how things go.

Anyway, that's the story of how I had an existential breakdown over anime boobs. Thank you, good night.

Comments

[lassarina]

I don't know if this is helpful, but it seems to me that, as a society, we have internalized this idea that everyone who's Going To Make It does so at like age 23 and if you don't have your first Hugo award (or whatever) before 40 you're doomed to die in obscurity and just. Statistically that isn't true. When we're 20 we have a lot more time to waste on a creation binge that just isn't there when we're 40 or 50 - but we have so much more life experience, and creation experience, when we hit mid-life, and later. So I guess, in the same way that "what would I have changed about myself at 22?" is a meaningless question because the things I would know to change are things I only know about because of the mistakes I made--it wasn't the right time, or the right brain space, or whatever. But that just means you go to the opportunities ahead with a different richness of experience to draw upon (and many more years of porn in fandom.)

...that said, comparing oneself to others and ones' youthful dreams is ass, hate it actually.