update on novel

i’ve always had a deep-rooted compulsion to create (specifically to write, more specifically to write original stories, scenes, or characters), but i’ve also always had an equally-powerful (probably more powerful) reluctance to declare the things i create completed and ready to share with people. in fact i’ve never — still, as of right now — shared any of my fiction with a stranger or published any of it anywhere. in 2016, i shot a low-budget feature film (which i self-financed), and i’ve never shared it either; it doesn’t feel complete, because it’s “not good enough” to share. and look, if you’re an artist, there’s a 99.9% chance you’ve felt this feeling at some point. but that’s not how art works; that’s not what art is. art is meant to be vulnerable, imperfect. there are obviously once-in-a-generation, once-in-a-century works of art that exist, and maybe some of the artists who’ve created them thought they were perfect, but probably not; and it’s probable that at the time those artists released those works, they were in the mastery phase of their craft, not the infancy of it.