Several months ago, I got a sample of one of the most amazing teas I’ve ever had in my life. The sample was itself way too much money. The entire thing was way too much money. I had one pot of tea and despaired at how good it was.
Then I put the rest of the sample away for later.
Cue this last week. It’s the eve of lunar new year. My toe is healing. My dog is healing. Things are looking nice. I have a friend over for the very first time in a long time, and how better to proceed then to have a pot of celebratory tea? Naturally, I pulled out the rest of the sample.
OR DID I.
The thing is, I couldn’t actually remember the name of the tea I liked so much and I was in a tearing hurry, so I grabbed something that sounded right. The name was something kind of vague, right? The tea sample I found was called “The thing is” and that sounded right, so I brewed it up and it was… okay. Not my favorite. Pretty meh. Actually, aggressively meh. Just a little too bitter and chewy for my tastes. So I spent all the time between when I brewed the tea on Saturday up until right now wondering what the heck happened to the amazing tea that I had.
The thing is, my terrible memory for names struck again. I had remembered the wrong tea. Now that I’m writing this up, I remembered that “The thing is…” was the tea sample I got and was like “nah, not interested, not for me.”
Let’s pretend this has no predictive impact for the new lunar new year.
Happy year of the bread blob!
This weekend was lunar new year, and in honor of it being lunar new year, I made baked pork buns, and then, because I had more dough than filling, made the rest of the dough into a bunny.
This is my first time trying to make an animal out of dough, and I’m proud of the fact that if I tell you it’s a bunny, you can kind of tell that it’s a bunny. 😂 Since one of my goals this year is to do more things that I’m bad at, this is all just additional fun.
Also I was too excited and so I radically underproved my buns and everything split, but do we care? No, because it’s still delicious.
But also, I have been actively working on the sequel to this book and… okay, confession time.
One of the ways that my brain loves to torture me is that when good things happen, my brain convinces me that obviously, since I’ve shown I’m capable, from here on out I must do everything perfectly. Lots of people loved this book and it got all kind of awards and I have spent a lot of time writing beginnings to the sequel and then throwing them away in despair because they were not good enough and what was I doing, what was wrong with me, etc. etc. etc. I have done a lot of writing in the last year and a half but absolutely zero finishing. None. Null. Not even slightly.
This particular form of brain punishment made me forget how to write a book, because sometimes you will not know how to fix a beginning of a book until you fix the end. Writing nine separate beginnings and then giving up every single time is not in fact a way to write a book. It is a great way to not write a book, which is what I have been doing for the last twenty months.
What I needed to do was just write the middle. I finally realized this (very recently) (imagine me saying “oh hey I will never finish a book if I keep giving up in despair and starting over, maybe consider that?”) and made myself say “okay I will write words IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BOOK, any words, anywhere, it doesn’t matter” and it turns out that the best way to actually write a book is to continue writing a book after you’ve started? And not giving up after you’ve started?
I actually like what I’m writing now. This is a massive relief.
This very basic concept seems extremely obvious now that I have done it. I don’t want to promise anything about release dates because (angry gestures at brain) not all of us are apparently on board with the concept of completing books, but I do want to say that I am trying.
Buy The Duke Who Didn’t, which will hopefully have a sequel someday, on:
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