Lexical Gap No. 61: Borborygmus
March 2025 summary
March was spent in a deadline fugue state.
It feels strange and sometimes pointless to be writing books when *gestures vaguely* the world is on fire, but sometimes, it is an escape. Never have I been more grateful to be off social media for most of it because looking at the news afterward felt like this.
My brain hurts. From both the writing and the state of my country.
Still, I managed to keep some semblance of balance. I’m testing for my second degree black belt soon, so time was spent in the dojang perfecting my form and board breaks. Bear and I took Castor and Pollux for hikes on weekends. We started a new tabletop RPG where I came up with a character who was useless absolutely at everything except charming people. I took a lot of naps and walks with the boys. I managed to keep living through the flood of horrendous news, and even managed to harangue my elected representatives by phone. (The 5 Calls app is a life-changer.) The future sometimes seems too big, too vast to comprehend, so I focus on what I can.
And through it all, I managed to write the last book of the Guardians of Dawn series.
It feels strange to come to the end of something that has been a part of my life for the past 5 years. I learned so much throughout the journey — about craft (like plot), about my process, but most of all, about myself as a storyteller. What matters to me. What brings me joy. The things that are crucial for me to create.
I think about something I wrote in Zhara once: I don’t want to survive; I want to thrive. It is easier to thrive in easier times, but alas, those are not times in which we are currently living. I’m terrified of what is ahead for the most vulnerable among us. But every instance of joy — even in the midst of darkness — is resistance. I try to keep my eyes on the light.
In this issue
1. JJ’s magical world
2. Lexical gap
3. Events and appearances
4. This creative life
5. What I’m reading
6. What I’m watching
7. Other things of note
lexical gap: borborygmus 🧩
I love words that have very specific usage. Like defenestrate. I have personally never thrown someone through a window, but I have experienced borborygmi.
events and appearances 🗓️
If any of y’all are in the Winston-Salem, NC area, come see me and Renée Ahdieh chat with Alwyn Hamilton for the release of her new book, The Notorious Virtues! The event is free, but registered.
WHERE: Bookmarks Bookstore, Winston-Salem, NC
WHEN: Tuesday, April 1st, 2025 at 6:30PM
Register here!
this creative life ✨
Every deadline I tell myself, this is the time I will do it right, this is the time I will somehow make it easy for myself by writing at a steady pace, little by little, everyday until the book is done.
Friends, this was not that deadline.
I wrote over 100,000 words in 25 days.
Yet, despite that, I think I managed to write what I think might be my cleanest first draft yet? And I don’t feel burned out?
I wrote Wintersong in a burst of mania and Shadowsong in a fugue state, but the writing of the entire Guardians of Dawn series was a crash course in how to make this entire writing thing sustainable. I learned something different about my process with each book. With Zhara, I learned that I needed a Point in order to finish something. With Ami, I learned how to conceptualize a plot where things happen instead of bumbling along a narrative. With Yuli, I learned that good sleep was crucial to my ability to work. And with GUARDIANS 4, I learned that the more I knew about my story before I wrote it, the better the drafting would go.
I’ve always written what I call the “long, shitty synopsis” before drafting, mostly as a way to figure out if there was anything to the story idea, i.e. if I could finish it. I found synopses easier to manage than outlines — I never could stick to an outline — because the vagueness of them allowed me the freedom to discover and surprise myself along the way, something I thought (and still believe) is crucial to my process. I dislike tedium; at least surprises are fun.
But I would always max out at around 2500 words per day, and frequently have to take several days off in between sessions. It wasn’t until GUARDIANS 4 that I realized I was perhaps trying to do too much during the drafting stage. Every time I sat down to write, I would have to figure out 1. the Point of the scene, 2. what happens next, and 3. how to not make the writing terrible. I usually had to cheerlead myself along for points 1 and 2 by writing in my journal, which made writing a very slow, very agonizing process.
But for GUARDIANS 4, I decided to remove myself from the internet and allow myself to get bored, and to fill my boredom with my thoughts in my journal. During that time, I talked to myself about my stories, characters, plot, and structure. I found myself having fun thinking about the book (to be fair, thinking about story is always more fun than actually WRITING it). Once I had the shape of a book, I would think of the structure. Once I had the structure, I would think of the Point of each section. Once I had the Point, I would think of scenes. And once I had the scenes, I would quickly sketch them out before sitting down at my computer to add to my long, shitty synopsis, allowing myself to get detailed about what would happen in said scene (including dialogue).
In the end, my long, shitty synopsis became a Zero Draft at 23,000 words.
The Zero Draft was written in third person present, the voice and tense we often use to tell stories to each other in person. I didn’t worry about the prose; I only focused on what happened. For my previous books, my first drafts were usually where I had to figure out what happened, but this time, I did all that work beforehand.
And then I sat down to draft.
For the first time, writing became fun. Because I no longer had to multi-task, I could focus on the things I enjoyed: characterization, little sensory details, dialogue, etc. And because writing was no longer tedious, I was suddenly writing 3000, 4000, and sometimes even 5000 words per day. And I didn’t feel as though I had wrung every last brain cell from my skull by the end of it.
There are things I would like to do differently for my next book. For some reason, GUARDIANS 4 didn’t want to be written until after 5PM, which meant I didn’t finish work until 10PM or so. I had learned with Yuli that my brain needs a few hours to decompress between the end of work and bed, so this meant I often couldn’t fall asleep until 1AM or so. As someone who is usually awake by 6AM, this was torture and meant that I had to take another nap in the mid-afternoon for a few hours before starting work again in the evening, thus perpetuating this horrid sleep schedule.
But I’m definitely keeping the Zero Draft.
what i’m reading 📖
Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins. I normally can’t read while I’m drafting (and especially the way I had been drafting all month), but I couldn’t wait. I yeeted everything else off my TBR to get to this first and read it in one two-hour sitting. I think that my favorite of the books is actually The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (an unpopular opinion, I know), so when Sunrise on the Reaping felt a bit closer to the original trilogy, I was a little disappointed. As always, Collins’ writing is a little too timely, and with these new books, it really drives home the fact that Katniss is the dumbest of all the protagonists (affectionately).
what i’m watching 📺
Also nothing. Except Severance. I might have been writing 4000+ words a day, but I always made damned sure to hit my word count before 9PM on Thursdays so I could watch guilt-free. I will admit to having fun browsing Reddit for theories about the show as it was airing, but for me, Severance was never about the mysteries as much as it was about the meaning. I don’t need to “solve” the question of Lumon — it’s enough for me that it’s a corporate satire — because ultimately, the point of the show is about identity and personhood. The very first line of the show is “Who are you?” and it continually complicates that question by presenting deeply compelling characters and scenarios. This is precisely the sort of science-fiction I like, the sort that asks big questions and uses a speculative premise to explore them.
Anyway, if it takes another three years before we get Season 3, I will personally find Ben Stiller and threaten to sever myself.
other things of note 💾
McMahan, Trevor. “Cats (2019) is Transcendent.” Media Processing, YouTube, Feb 2025.
Fisher-Quan, Rayne. “Anora’s American Dream.” internet princess, Substack, Mar 2025.
Hamilton, Jenny. “Let Them Eat Tropes: Why Romantasy Needs to Grow Beyond Trends.” Reactor Mag, Mar 2025.
Earl, Jessie. “The Cultural Stories White Supremacy Tells.” Jessie Gender, YouTube, Mar 2025.
Franceso, Clare. “I don’t care about AI.” Famous and Beloved Newsletter, Substack, Mar 2025.
Embers, Ashley. “How Gen Z protected their peace too hard and now has no one.” Ashley Embers, YouTube, Mar 2025.
Wynn, Natalie. “Conspiracy.” Contrapoints, YouTube, Mar 2025.
Yours entire,
