I’m not having the best time of my life. I would say September was the worst month of the year, if things don’t get worse than they are. The issues touch upon the personal, the professional, and the family life—all of it exploding in the exact same week.
There is no need to go into details. On the good side, I am being counseled and aided by wonderful people, so the predicament doesn’t feel isolated.
When we don’t feel good, we crave for instant gratification no matter what it takes. Most people turn to alcohol, or a vice, overspending, or desperately fetching booty online.
Maybe I’m a masochist who prefers feeling overcome by internal misery and a sense of worthlessness as a way of paying for my bad decisions. “I love hating myself,” is a way of describing it.
I’m aware this isn’t the appropriate way to respond to a personal crisis, and I shouldn’t rely on agonizing guilt as a means of long-term punishment. I left Catholicism too long ago.
However, every time this happens, something miraculous occurs. My unconscious brain pesters me with something I cannot ignore:
“Write. Get that story out. It is time.”
Perhaps this is how my mind automatically finds solace. I don’t know when it started, but this isn’t the first time.
The process itself bestows two things: the need to lock myself away like a monk, and make something that brings satisfaction if it is completed.
The story I’m tackling is a post-apocalyptic tale I have been developing for nearly twenty years. The funny thing is that I have had the entire story mapped from beginning to end all this time.
Why has it taken me this long to pick time and finish it? Because, like I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m an idiot. Read about it HERE.
Maybe I’m trying to make sense of the chaos, both in my life and the hectic world we live in. Fiction, whether reading, or in my case writing, has always provided an opportunity to do precisely that.
2025 hasn’t been easy for many, especially for people obsessed with social media. The rest of us are doing our best to survive and keep things moving. “Survival” is at the core of After Revelation, and maybe this is why it keeps calling me to give it closure.
If I had written After Revelation then, or perhaps five years ago, it would have been an entirely different manuscript, and it probably would have not worked. This version isn’t suffering from the issues I once faced. In this one, I’m able to feel the fear of my characters. In many ways, those fears resemble mine.
Does this mean this draft is “the one?” Writing to publish a story in any format is just another gamble like we do in every-day life. Based on my experience, the best you can hope for is to click that “publish now” button and expect nothing afterwards.
The only guarantee you will have is the decision to finish something that, at best, can make you feel at ease that you have one less regret to face. With half of my life over, that is if I make it to old age, I would like to get this piece out in the open before whatever comes next.
After Revelation looks like it will be a novella-length book, meaning it will be longer than a short story, but shorter than a novel, somewhere between twenty-thousand to forty-thousand words, at most.
My goal is to finish a draft before the end of October. By working on it a few hours every day, I can scribe somewhere between five-hundred to a thousand words per day. I’m over eight-thousand, so I still have plenty to write.
Soon, I may share the first chapter in a post. Stay tuned.
Books, videos, and audio stories:
Don Luis Zavala 