Still thinking about @dongwon's excellent thread on the lie of authenticity, & I wanted to talk a little about the pressure to perform authenticity in your work as a writer. Spoiler alert: it's all bullshit. When people come to your work looking for "authenticity," they're looking for something that will fulfill the expectations they're dragging in behind them.

What are those expectations? Who knows! They're actually not your problem!

It's easy to say, "Write for yourself," & much harder to do it.
But I think it's so important. When you lose sight of what you want, your writing suffers. I've always written my stories for myself & had a strong sense of what I liked. But the two times where I really struggled were after my first SFF short story was published, & while I was doing my MFA.

I've been thinking a lot about writing process & how individual it is. It's easy to get anxious about measuring up or feel like you're not doing it right.

But your process is your process. It's figuring out what works for you, not what works for your friends or other authors. It takes me a long time to write a story. I used to think there was something wrong with me & my process bc I couldn't write fast. (It always looks so easy on the outside.)

Dropping toxic friends is one of the best things you can do for yourself. If that person always makes you upset, unhappy, uneasy, angry, & likes to rile you up? If you’re scared of them? Listen to your gut. That’s some bad shit. Toxic friendships take many forms. They can be addictive & exhilarating until they turn bad. They can be codependent, where you feel like if you leave them, they’ll spiral out of control. They’re about control & abuse.

I wanna talk real quick about something that’s really important to me—believing in yourself & your work When I went to Clarion, I was 21 & fresh out of college. I was really shy about my writing & didn’t show it to anyone; my partner didn’t even know I wrote, period