Manuscripnosis: A Vexing Tale of Self-Sabotage

I suffer from a humiliating literary affliction: when I’m not trying to write a book—when I’m simply crafting loose, witty blog posts—my prose sings. It breathes. It struts across the page like it owns the place. In those moments, I’m not an “author,” I’m just a clever diarist with decent rhythm and a nose for irony.

But then comes the fatal whiff—that intoxicating scent of a book deal drifting in from the distance like a mouth-watering freshly-baked coconut macaroon. Suddenly, I begin to try. I sit up straighter. I structure. I strategize. I lean into “craft.” And that’s when my prose, once alive and sinewy, collapses like a soufflé that sensed it was being watched. Gone is the energy, the voice, the mischievous verve. What remains is a flaccid husk of what could have been—something that reads less like a potential bestseller and more like a workshop handout no one asked for.

This, dear reader, is the vicious, looping paradox I call Unintended Book Syndrome. The moment I stop writing and start authorshipping, my words die on the vine.

The clinical term, I believe, is Manuscripnosis: a trance-like state in which blog-worthy brilliance is transfigured into joyless literary taxidermy the moment the idea of a “real book” enters the room. I have lived with this disorder for decades. I’ve tried everything—lowering expectations, denying ambition, even faking indifference. Nothing works. The moment I think this could be a book, the prose curls up and dies like a Victorian heroine too delicate for publication.

Sometimes I fantasize about quitting writing altogether. But abstinence only makes it worse. The despair of not writing eclipses even the misery of writing badly. Which means I am doomed to live forever in this creative purgatory—hovering between genius and garbage, blog post and book, dopamine and dread.