/lit/ - Literature

I'm stuck in a loop, and with each lap I get slower and slower, feeling my engine approaching failure.

I've written a novel. 80,000 words. Not terrible, either. Some really good prose here and there, some philosophy without naval-gazing, some emotionally charged dialogue and some depictions of violence that seem to transcend disgust.

But I can't send it out. I can't find an agent. I keep going through and rewriting, and its making me sick. There's always a new feather sticking out of the pillow that I feel I need to pull out
>These characters are flat and uninteresting, I need to bring them to life
>Does this plotline actually have relevance to the theme I'm trying to portray?
>This section's prose sounds too much like filler, it needs to be made beautiful
>Am I being too hamfisted with my metaphors?
>Are my framing devices too cliched?
>What's the fucking point of this book?
Over and over I go through, but each time is slower than the last. Sometimes now it takes a week to edit and reforge a few thousand words. I spend so much time gazing at the ceiling, or listening to music, or browsing 4chan, but a lot of the time I can't even bring myself to think about sitting in front of the computer to type. I'm at Oxford for the year, which truly has an inspiring air to it, but the way classes work here gives me so much free time, which I inevitably squander. In my most productive moods in days past, I'd sit at a cafe for 6 hours straight and bang out a chapter or two. If I had that steam now, I could have written five novels since I arrived here in last month.

It's all made me so anxious. My diet has tanked, I'm losing muscle mass. I've been shitting what feels like battery acid for the past week because all I've eaten has been Serrano ham and chilli sauce drenched popcorn chicken, and all I've drank is gin, red bull, and coffee. I know I need to make a change, but it's so hard to focus on things when it feels like there's work to be done. I know if I could just get the first 50 pages to the point where I'm happy with them, then I'd send it off to an agent and an editor could do the rest, and I'd finally be able to move on.

My father tells me I should start a new novel, but that might be even harder of a task to wrap my head around than finding an agent for my first one. How could I leave such a large project on the back burner? What if I get stuck in the same garbage that I'm in now? Then I'll have two headaches to deal with, and what then, would I start a third?

There are few feelings worse than wasted potential. I'm still young but I've lost so much time. My inability to tie a pretty bow on this project makes me feel physically ill. On top of it all, I can't even be sure if my writing is any good. Friends, family and professors all nod their heads like yes men and encourage me onward when they read my drafts, but I can't seem to pass my own vote of confidence.

This has been cathartic. Thank you guys.