LONG TIME NO SEE, BLOG. Figuring out my new job and whipping werewolf story into shape have left me with little time for literally anything else. I’m trying to nail down the whole work-life balance thing, I swear. I’m just . . . not very good at it yet. I’m assuming I’ll get it right just about the time my AmeriCorps term ends. Although I have gone swimming (and introduced a friend to ~the Atlantic Ocean~) so I haven’t taken my beach-side location totally for granted. (Beach writing is still the best.)

Meanwhile, I’m a third of the way into The Readable Draft of werewolf story (so far, it’s still worthy of that title), and I’m looking forward to finally sharing this work with some people. Werewolf story doesn’t really have a romantic origin story; I just needed a new project to work on for school. I needed to write a proposal and I didn’t have any ideas yet. I sat down in the living room of my Cambridge apartment with a sketchbook, stared at the wall, and thought, “Well, what are things that I like?” The obvious and immediate answer was “werewolves.” I began to meditate on the concept of lycanthropy while I drew random things in my sketchbook. Before long, I had two pictures of two very different girls, and I knew that they were both werewolves. (Artistically, both of these pictures are super ugly. I’m pretty decent at drawing from life, but awful at sketching from my head. But that’s not the point.)

I immediately wrote down two pages of intro material in a voice that is hilariously different from what I wound up with. But I had two characters and the barest foundation of world-building. By the time I wrote my proposal, I had not much else (though I pretended I did, and luckily that paid off in being paired with a great mentor). The first draft, naturally, was horrific. I guess about 1.5 scenes have sort of remained from then, albeit still heavily altered? That seems to be my average for that sort of thing. But in that one draft, werewolf story had gone from a project I needed for my degree to a book-to-be that I loved.

Werewolf story and story are so technically different that I really didn’t get to coast much on what I’d learned from writing story. Instead, werewolf story has sort of been “Teach Yourself to Write a Novel: Take Two.” But I’ve been thinking a lot how, for all their differences, they’re both super, super obviously from the pen of an American millennial. Story has always been my way of working through questions I had when I myself was a teenager, whereas werewolf story is clearly a product of the concerns of my mid-twenties. (Or at least it’ll definitely be obvious to the people who know me; sometimes when I’m revising, I can’t help but think at myself, “oh, YOU WOULD.”) I’ve realized that a central question in both of them (though I approach it in very different ways) is “can I still do good if I’m a product of a bad system?”

Spoiler alert: I believe the answer is yes. I wouldn’t write about it if I didn’t.

So I shall continue being exhausted and worried and confused like a proper millennial, but I will remind myself that even though I don’t really feel in charge of my own life very often these days, I am in charge of the stories I tell. Which, to me, is sort of the same thing.