Before one Chick-In meeting, I forced myself to work through some of my shame. I picked up a pencil and wrote, “Main character, played by me . . . Codex. Real name Cyd Sherman. Shy. Neurotic. Gaming addict.” Then another few weeks went by, coasting on that feeling of You did some writing! Go reward yourself!, until it petered away into guilt again. Rinse, repeat. Despite that dismal pace, I DID get some work done on the pilot, but it took the whole fall season just to write down descriptions of the main characters. I thought, Don’t worry. Chick-In, I’ll complete this thing by 2050, for sure!
One positive thing through that agonizing, limping process was that I created the kernel of something . . . not sucky. The clichéd mantra when you start writing is, “Write what you know,” so I brainstormed all the kinds of people I’d encountered during my life of online friendships. I wrote down ideas and incidents that made me laugh and wince, and it congealed into a set of six characters (like Friends!) who seemed to go well together. No one was based on one person entirely (my old raid leader Autumna was the closest in the acid-tongued Asian college girl, Tinkerballa), but they all fell into categories of people from my experiences. Clara, “The Mom.” Vork, “The Rules Master.” Bladezz, “The Douchey Teen.” Puck (later renamed Zaboo), the “Overly Enthusiastic and Doesn’t Recognize Personal Boundaries” dude. Building fake people brought me snippets of joy, even though the creative process was absolute torture. And at the end, I looked at the six main characters I’d created and thought, I want to see these people do things together! That was in October. Annnnnnd then I stalled again. I might have started playing WoW. I’m not telling.
I didn’t tell the ladies at Chick-In, either. I glossed over that part at our meetings. They seemed happy when I told them about all the fake progress I was making, so I just kept saying, “It’s going great!” I didn’t want to derail THEIR progress with my backwards momentum. I was thinking about them with my lies. Yeah, that’s it.
Cut to December 20. I went to our last Chick-In meeting of the year. I faced the other ladies in the circular booth (Trina was finally pregnant, yay!), and I decided I had to come clean.
“I’m sorry, but I have to tell you guys something. I haven’t been writing for the last two months. I’ve . . . been . . . playing . . . video games again.” I pulled the tears back into my eyes with sheer brain-suction willpower as I admitted what a jerk I was to the supportive, no-one’s-a-failure-here environment.
“We understand!” “You didn’t have to lie, it’s okay!” “Why did you feel the need to lie? We wouldn’t have judged you!” They were all so nice about it.
Which only made it worse.
“It’s just hard. I start to write something, then I look at it and think, ‘This is gross and stupid,’ so I stop. I can’t write two words down without erasing it.”
“You’re great at writing sketches; think of each scene as a sketch,” said Kim.
“But there are so many of them, and I don’t know what happens next. I can’t think of anything for the characters to do . . .” Okay, there was the breakdown. HI, TEARS! It got estrogen awkward at that point with a lot of hugging.
“You should take the holiday off. Don’t write, try to enjoy yourself.” Jane was so nice, like a Mother Earth priestess. But as wonderful as she and all the supportive ladies were, I left the meeting disgusted at myself. My fears had made me a liar. My friends deserved more from me. I deserved more.
I don’t know if it was a cumulative effect of the breakfast trauma, or a mini aneurysm, but in the middle of the night something inside me snapped. I woke up at 3:54 a.m. with a full-on panic attack and a huge epiphany:
I was going to die someday. I was going to END.
And I know you can say that to yourself a million times, Live for the now!—I mean, it’s the message of half the Ben Stiller movies ever made—but you can’t understand something unless you FEEL it. Deep in your bones.
For some reason that night, I felt it.
A vivid terror gripped me. I was mortal, and I was going to die. I was twenty-eight years old. Old. Near death, in 1557 terms. Every sleep was bringing me closer to the grave, and if I didn’t do something with my life RIGHT NOW, the totality of “Felicia Day” would add up to nothing.
This might sound extreme, but that voice is my day-to-day inner dialogue to myself anyway, just magnified a healthy percent. A milder version accompanies me everywhere I go. It always has. I’ve never been in a car accident, because on every street (especially skinny neighborhood ones) I always picture a child or animal dashing out in front of my car, trying to commit suicide on my front grill.
Anyway, as the cat started to cough up a hair ball in the next room, at 4:00 a.m. on December 21, 2006, I decided that if I didn’t accomplish something huge by the end of the year, I would die a failure.
The next morning, I sat down at my computer and took a deep breath. “I will write a TV pilot before January 1. It may be the worst script ever written, but I will finish it, or . . . there isn’t any ‘or,’ stupid girl. It will happen. This pilot will happen.” And I started typing.
I would love to say that given my resolve, the muses flowed through my fingertips to produce a script of utter perfection. That once I put pressure on myself, I rose to the occasion and found joy in every bit of dialogue I gave my characters.