This question is beyond his remit. It’s hard to admit just how long I’ve been tussling with this manuscript. How hard I’ve been fighting it, while words trip me up as they fall into the enormous gap between how I imagine it could be, if it was any good, and how it really is. “If you don’t tell people about it, the writing dream stays untested,” my grief counselor once told me. “It stays intact.” She went on to pronounce my relationship with words and literary rejection as “toxic.” “It’s gaslighting you,” she told me bluntly. “All this ‘What’s wrong with me? Am I really this bad?’ It’s not
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