memories from 5 yrs ago

 Five years ago today (15 Aug 2019) I wrote this on my Facebook page:

"Three days ago I finished the first draft of a novel that I've been working on since early this year. This was supposed to be the sequel to Not A Virgin. When I started and conceived the idea, I had the self-assurance that this was already in my bag and it's going to be easy. Eight months later it's completed, fiuh, and it was a five-minute of celebration. I decided to show it to someone who understand. To my surprise, the response was quite unfavourable. Said it was not as good as the predecessor. Hearing this I was not happy. I disagree. I thought the draft was funny and serious at the same time, and my writing is improving.

Having the plan to set aside the draft for a while, I decided to look at it and read it from the start (things that I haven't done, because what I had in mind was just to finish it first--that’s just my way of writing). Took only an hour to comprehend that it is undeniably 70K words of utter garbage. The story is spiralling down without telling anything, just ideas scrambling here and there, bland with no characters to be remembered at all. Clutters, clutters, clutters, cringy conversation, poor plotting, so much telling, and everything else that falls into the category of bad writing, you name it. I couldn’t believe myself I had done that. Nobody is ever will be as disappointed in me as myself. I just wasted this year thinking I was doing something marvellous, in fact, I was just feeding my arrogance. "This is good, this is funny, important, brilliant. Excellent novel. Interesting story." What a joke... Wish I could tell my mediocre self to f off. Thought I'm going to be proud and happy, I felt very depressed for the past couple of days. God, I just don’t know anymore, time is very limited and I'm starving, and I just wasted everything!!!!"

Two years later the draft was published under "Gula, Gula, Gula" in Indonesia, and translated into Malay the year after. And currently I have some English translation for the sample. I ended up feeling quite happy with the novel and the reviews are decent.

Not sure why I was quite neurotic after finishing a draft, but maybe I'm having trouble in loving myself or maybe a good writing is just a rewriting and editing.