How To Eat Your Heart: Intro

It was the year 2019, and what a year it was. I was younger then. Fresher. Less jaded. Filled with possibilites.

And I had never successfully written a book before. Not even close really.

So as a sign of my commitment to writing, I decided to join a site where people could post chapters of their novels-in-progress and swap critiques.

The site (which shall remain nameless) ended up being a weird bigoted watering-hole filled with incels and old white men with very important things to say so I pretty quickly got the fuck out. But I did manage to start, and consequently not finish, about a million projects during my tenure there.

How to Eat Your Heart is one of those projects.

Recently while cleaning out my google drive, I stumbled upon this manuscript. I vaguely recalled writing it long, long ago…but couldn’t recall many details.

I opened it, expecting it to be five or six thousand words in length because back in 2019 I was queen of not finishing a thing, and I wouldn’t go on to finish my first novel until 2021 (Partner Track). But imagine my surpise to find the story was over thirty thousand words.

Why would I abandon my work at 30k? That’s, like, a third of a novel.

Anyway, I read it on my phone before bed and I was genuinely surprised.

Past me quit the story because I thought it was stupid. Silly. A dead end. And terribly written.

In fact, I remember quitting so many projects because of those very same thoughts.

But current me, was actually kind of giddy while reading. All I could think was…wow, I kinda like this? I don’t remember writing a goddamn word of it.

It definitely has the raw edge of a new writer. And, let’s be clear, it’s not the most perfect polished flawless poetic writing ever put to paper. At the time, I wasn’t even labeling chapters. I would just use scene breaks and go on and on and on for all eternity. But it’s a piece of writing that feels genuine to me. And that alone makes it a piece of work that’s worthwhile.

So, what am I supposed to do with it? The story itself is unfinished, unedited, unusable, unsellabe. It has no intrinsic capitalist value. And no inherent practical application.

Am I expected to just throw it away? Keep it locked up in the dusty closet of my google docs forever?

Sharing work is hard to do. And can feel way too vulnerable sometimes.

But leaving it hidden feels dystopian. And sad.

And that’s why I’m posting it one part at a time (because there are no chapters) to my website, and posting in it’s found state—a silly little messy little rought draft.

Because it’s less about only sharing work that’s completely publishable and perfect and good and the best representation of my very best self and more about sharing something that reminds me of who I used to be as a person, before the hours of time and tragedy changed me.

It’s a piece of writing that I like, but that I don’t know what else to do with. And I’m not going to let it rot into nothingness.

I have a million of these random unfinished stories sitting in my google docs. It’s an unfinished novel graveyard in there—poor one out.

And some of them, sure, are maybe worthy of publishing by publishing standards.

But this particular WIP is so incredibly frozen in time, so incredibly specific to who I was in the moment, I just don’t think I want to rewrite it.

I’m a totally different person now than I when I conceived of this story.

Not to mention, there are tons of outdated references like Twitter and Breadtube (remember Breadtube?)

And there’s a love triangle as well—which let’s just say, I’ve learned my lesson about writing love triangles (don’t do it unless you write YA/Fantasy/Romantasy). I don’t even think I considered being a full-blown romance writer back then.

Okay, and there are more serious topics too that I wouldn’t handle now the way I handled in this particular text: particularly regarding eating disorders and disordered eating.

My main female character is struggling with what some might describe as an eating disorder, or at the very least a bad relationship with food and her body.

At the time, I myself was in the middle of recovering from my own very disordered eating (and orthorexia). And I was deconstructing all the false information I had learned about bodies and health and thinness and fatness, and I was replacing it with new information that entirely reshaped my consciousness.

(Shout out in particular to Sabrina Strings and her work in Fearing the Black Body for opening my eyes to the intrinsic connection between America’s fatphobia and white supremacy.)

Needless to say, that deconstruction came out in my writing. But we begin the story with a main character who hasn’t yet embarked on that journey. That’s really her main arc, so you can see why this is a potentially trigger filled story.

So, without further ado: HERE ARE YOUR CONTENT WARNINGS in case I wasn’t clear enough:

Disordered Eating

Negative Self Body Talk

Use of the word fat as a negative descriptor (towards the main character)

Disordered relationship with exercise

Binge eating

Talk of weight loss and the desire to lose weight

Descriptions of bodies in relation to size