Over at SFNovelists.com, Catherynne Valente has written her future self some notes about how she works, having just completed a novel and so it is all painfully fresh in her mind. While they’re not universally applicable, I can almost guarantee you’ll find one or two that do apply to you and your own methods and/or habits, if you write anything. There are little gems such as “you can only type at the rate your brain can create” scattered throughout the whole piece, too.

For example, the ones that resonate for me are:

3. You need about 40,000 words under your belt before you feel like you have a handle on how to write this book (I fully agree with Gaiman that you never learn how to write a novel, only how to write this novel). You don’t have a handle on it, not really, but you’ll feel more confident that the shape of things is clear and solid. At this point, you will panic and think that you will overshoot your contracted wordcount by at least a million words. You won’t. It is a small superpower that your initial estimated wordcounts are always within 2 or 3k of actual final count. You are very good at guessing the size of your babies. You ought to work at the fair. So calm down. You do this because you think your ideas are too big for the book you’ve given them. They aren’t. It’ll be ok. You made these things up–trust that they are not bigger than you are.

and

6. You will, at more than one point, hate this novel above all others and want nothing more than to forget it ever existed. Specifically, you will be worried that it is fragmented and nonsensical and does not hang together as a novel qua novel. You always think this and it is never (rarely) true. Never fear, you have the ability to write truly crappy things, but they usually hurt you like a kidney stone until you go back and fix them. Listen to the kidney stone feeling and fix it if it isn’t metal and then move on. But have faith that the novel as a whole will come as it is meant to, at the rate it is meant to, and that you have a lot of time to fix everything in post-production.

and also

7. When writing a book, you will feel uglier and lower and more worthless than at any other time in your wee mad psychic cycle. You will be cranky and fragile and all kinds of friable. This is because you are a bad shamany thing, and everything is pouring through you into the book. All the good things in you, beauty and faith and patience and tenderness and love, are going onto the page and that means there isn’t much left to make you feel like anything but a slimy bug thing. This is ok. It is the price you pay for what you do and how you do it. Understand that it will pass, and that there are people who love you, and that you are not slimy or a bug. You will recover. You will feel as though you deserve to be seen in the daylight again. This usually takes about three weeks post-deadline. Do not rush it, do not beat yourself up for not feeling better than you do. If you had had a real baby, it would be called post-partum depression. Just be thankful yours does not involve uncomfortable stitches.