Some Bloody Chunks

I'm sitting here on my bed with the baby rats, having just done my stretches to limber myself up and ease myself into the notion of typing up something here. These silly rats are extremely loath to do anything but stare at me if I am not sitting on the bed with them. As soon as I am, they run around, explore the pile of blankets, lick me vigorously, etc.

Been feeling somewhat discouraged, to the point that I took a week off writing anything intensive basically under the advisement of my therapist. I've had to reflect on why I write at all. Beyond the sheer need to just do it, because my life becomes indefinably bad if I don't, it's clear that I literally have no sense of self worth and writing feels like the only skill I have with which I can prove myself. My internal life is a high-stakes world based off a histrionic variation of the Ingmar Bergman quote, "I don't create, I don't exist." Specifically, it's, "If I don't create, I don't have the right to exist!"

Even the motivation to succeed so I can say "That'll show them!" of the people who cut away at my self worth over the years -- sometimes coming away with whole, bloody chunks -- still grants them lawful possession over that worth.

This is all getting a bit difficult to write about in an almost hilariously literal sense. I guess I'm dissociating, and doing so bad enough that I keep getting paralyzed. It's genuinely difficult to be honest in public any more, at least where it involves the ruinous state of my mental health. I got roundly abused for it in the past by people who I thought were my friends, and the fear of either being told that my problems aren't that bad or, weirdly, having someone judge my writing style in a largely unedited blog post that I wrote in a mood of mental stress, are both overwhelming.

I must reclaim the right to be honest about myself. Openness on the subjects is my ideal. I know that I've been helped by people who were willing to talk openly about their experiences online (including this old blog, which I read back in high school), though lately, it feels like a huge presumption to even consider that I might be helpful to anyone.

To make it short, the period of time between the last blog post and today has been a mess of the usual crushing doubt, alternating with the blithe and inflated sense of feeling fine and not engaging with All That™, fighting my ADHD-related RSD (Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria) over all the rejection letters (yes, I know that's part of the industry, but try telling that my RSD. Also, try telling me that the industry is good for anyone's mental health), and then the like 2-3 day resurgences of outrageously intense self-harm urges that I have to actively resist whenever I am not blankly staring at a screenful of Farscape or Civilization 6 (my vice as of late). Those self harm urges can make doing the dishes really difficult, let me tell you.

I am planning on signing up to do some online classes through CSU, specifically their Master Gardener certification and their Landscape Design program. The best job I ever had was doing gardening, so the hope is that I can get back into that field some day (though Colorado Springs doesn't seem to be ripe with opportunity, and probably won't be for a while what with this economy!) rather than going back into the service industry.

I'm also trying to figure out which short story idea comes next. I've made several starts, but none of them feels quite right. Then I've got an inchoate mass of ideas floating around that can be separated into probably five or more short stories, one of which involves this thing:

(The writing on the facing page is unrelated, for a small roleplay I have been slowly doing with a friend).

Even the story that involves that monster, which is the sort of raw form of a deity, involves rooting through my trauma for inspiration, which is a double-edged sword that I'm struggling to approach lately. μέν, it can help me get a story done in a rush of inspiration, δέ, it's a bit rough on the mind to begin submitting that story to places. Besides, it's been a bit difficult to approach all that lately.

Well, I must eat lunch, and then I must spend some time editing today. I am planning on submitting to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction when they open submissions back up. I gotta get these rejection letters as fast as possible. Give me more, more, more!

Hello!

Well, I had to ditch Wix because its so arcane, unnavigable and totally designed to make you pay money for your site to show up on search engines. I'm partially using this blog to have something that isn't a decade old or information about my dad show up when someone Googles my name, so I can't have that! Besides, this background image turned out really cool. I made it from a photo I took of the fern by our patio in Perth back in 2011, when I was really depressed and could reliably cheer myself up by taking pictures of plants.

So, time for a new introductory post about what and how I've been doing. There is, of course, a more thorough/general introduction on my "About the Author" page. Rather, I mean that the other purpose of blogging is to hold myself somewhat accountable but also to detail what I've done so I actually feel like I've accomplished something (the lack of that feeling is weirdly persistent in my life).

Well, since the pandemic started, I've been out of work but been lucky enough to not have to return, yet. Not having to work has generally been good for my health. I'm a night owl to an absurd extent, so not having to try to sleep at 9 PM to be up at 5 AM has done away with a lot of my insomnia. I also used to often come out of work basically incoherent from pain and exhaustion. It's sort of hard to believe that I haven't dealt with that unpleasant physical state since March. I don't look forward to going back to it eventually, so I really must try my hardest to make use of this time while I have it. Of course, my mental health hasn't been great -- I think the reasons should be obvious because a lot of people are feeling the same.

Here's the list of writing projects I'm engaged in currently:
1. I'm working on outlining the plot for the books I'd like to write. The gist here is a well-researched and diverse fantasy series about teens tasked with responsibilities far beyond their age because of their status as descendants from a line of people who can turn into dragons who have been historically deigned as justiciars and political figures. They, in essence, inherit a war from their parents, similar to how World War II was the direct fallout of World War I. It's an attempt to emotionally and metaphorically capture my own turbulent years as a teen, which had such psychological peaks and valleys, unique states of unreason, and coincidental foreshadowing and symbolism. My hope is that this attempt to process everything that happened might help some people process and help others avoid the sorts of mistakes and traps I fell into.
I'm approaching the end of the outline for the second book. It's a bit slow-going right now, sometimes because I'm too hard on myself to even try and I don't give myself the leniency I should for a plot outline that's totally changeable. Otherwise it's just an issue of trying how to figure out where characters need to be emotionally for the plot to develop where I expect it to go and how to thus give that the most emotional impact. Not that this isn't a substantially character-driven story most of the time, it's just a matter of how to make the battle sequences emotionally inveigled, if that makes sense.
2. I've been trying to get hone my short story game. I have one, "The Golden Oil," that is as final a draft as I can get it for the moment. I've edited it so many times at this point that I know it almost too well to know how to edit it any more, though I did overhaul it substantially after a really helpful diversity read. There's another one, "To Crave an Empty Chest," that I need to edit after having let it rest awhile, and one that's pretty fresh and needs to be restructured a fair bit. I've got quite a few ideas for what to write next. Some of the stories are going to be...therapeutic, let's say, hopefully in a fulfilling way (I'm a poet and wasn't even aware of the fact!).
3. I've been working very slowly -- for over a year now -- at taking notes on and analyzing the books I wrote in middle school. The books I wish to write first (the ones for which I am plotting) have their roots in those old, weird stories. I'm rather jealous of my younger self because I wrote so unabashedly, without any consideration for what's marketable and I unintentionally portrayed my psychology without the filter and deliberate construction that comes with self-knowledge.
4. Back in 2017, I got to bring back all my old notebooks from Australia, where they'd been biding their time in my parent's closet. I've been reading through them to better understand myself, making notes of my observations and writing about it to help me put things together. The truth is that things got really bad for me in Australia, bad enough that I forgot a lot of what happened there after I left. What I do remember has proved to be unreliable and wildly out of order, but going through these journals has helped me clarify what exactly happened when. I just started in on a journal that's really depressing. I don't want to go into why because I don't want to have to put a content warning on my very first post on this blog, but suffice to say that I went from filling an 5"x8.25" Moleskin with writing and art in three months to only using a handful of pages in a tiny one in the entire month of August. The art from that particular Moleskine isn't really fun to look at, but here's a picture of a pleasing spread from a Moleskine (which I tore up in a fit of violent self-effacement before filling it up):

5. I have a secret dream blog which I put entries into whenever I have a dream worth recording. Of course, I've let two dreams languish in note format over the past few days, and I'm fast approaching the point of being unable to transfer them into prose...a job for tomorrow, I think. I have been slowly compiling an index of all the objects, situations, settings, people, anomalies, etc. that have featured in my dreams (some of which go back to 2008). I enjoy making lists, perhaps too much for my own good, but I think this will be useful to me in analyzing my own dream symbology which, like everything I do, will certainly feed into my writing.
6. I have been loosely planning and contemplating a post I'd like to make about the movie Midsommar. I saw the film around this time last year and have seen it like four times total, so I have a lot of thoughts about it. There's a couple veins of thought I want to analyze, but the most important one is understanding Dani's story as one of being swept under the wing of a white supremacist cult and why that happened. I haven't seen nearly enough takes on that, and the ones I have seen don't comprehend the situation to my satisfaction, so I better do it myself. Of course, my brain disappeared for like a week or more there, so I have to pick up the pieces I left lying around to be able to approach this, so it'll take a while to put together.

Now, since I love lists so much, and since I think I should take the time to codify my experience of books more often (primarily as an exercise in expression), I'd like to note the books I am currently reading.
1. I'm in a little book club with some St. John's alumni, and the second book that the group democratically voted to read was Emma by Jane Austen. I'm currently about 100 pages in and I'm not gonna lie -- it keeps putting me to sleep. Literally I fell asleep reading it earlier this evening. I get the satire of it, I get the constant power plays and attempts at control going on in the conversations, but it just doesn't naturally appeal to me as much as George Eliot does. People generally seems to agree that Emma has less of a driving plot than Pride and Prejudice (which we read at St. John's) and that the latter is better for people who aren't really into Austen's style. So, since I'm not a huge fan of Austen, as much as I can appreciate her in an objective sense, I'm just kind of plodding through this and hoping that discussing this with my friends will make it more interesting to me.
2. Similar but totally different to Jane Austen's work is Sei Shōnagon's The Pillow Book. For those who don't know, it's basically a collection of observations and musings from a court lady of Heian era Japan. I tried to read it a few years ago, but it just wasn't the right time. I glad I picked it up now because I feel like I'm getting a better grip on who Sei Shōnagon was this time. Now I'm a little less inclined to romanticize her pedantry about how people should behave. That being said, she has such a lovely style (or at least the translator does), and all her observations, anecdotes, and complaints are more revealing than history books often are. I definitely am working myself up to read The Tale of Genji at some point. It's basically my mother's favorite book and everything she's told me about it excites me.
3. Since I haven't read the whole of The Lord of the Rings since 5th grade, and since I haven't tried to read them since junior year of college, I figured it's about time I get the most influential series on fantasy well under my belt. Funnily enough, my sister absolutely adores Tolkien's books, so I guess I'm doing a bit of a family tour right now. Maybe I should get a recommendation from my dad next. In any case, I'm on The Fellowship of the Ring right now. It's funny that it's such a chill thing for me to read now. I barely understood it in 5th grade (I don't know why people continually recommend this series to your average preteen. I saw this happening on a Facebook group recently. Just let your kid read something they'll understand for its own sake, they can get into the crusty old white men later, if they want) and in junior year my brain was so addled by Kant and Hume that I barely knew what words were. I'm not very far in so I haven't much else to say on the subject that hasn't been said before.
4. I am slowly picking my way through The Illustrated Guide to Rocks & Minerals, mostly while I eat breakfast. It got good reviews online and had what I was looking for, namely some basic information on geology and descriptions of how rocks and minerals form. I've always enjoyed this sort of thing, and being friends with Lauren, who is a rock hounder and works with minerals in her jewelry-making, has only increased my interest. However, the impetus for getting this was the difficulty of finding any actionable information on how various ores and minerals form on the internet. I want to know about that so I can basically procedurally generate parts of my worldbuilding -- so I can put the lapis lazuli and obsidian and iron in the right places, you know.
5. My absolute favorite book that I am reading right now is Investigating Farscape: Uncharted Territories in Sex and Science Fiction by Jes Battis. If you've talked to me in like the past year, then you might have picked up that I am absolutely in love with the early-2000s sci-fi show Farscape. It definitely has its problems as a show, both in terms of being problematic but also in terms of being super cheesy sometimes (often in a good way). All media is problematic, however, and Farscape does better than most and is generally about being anti-imperialist and in favor of accepting people in all their weirdness. I first fully watched the show last summer, when I had just started therapy and was constantly reeling from revelations about myself (including the confirmation that yes, I have C-PTSD and I can stop gaslighting myself about it). The wholesomeness, love, and support between the characters gave me the feeling of a warm hug whenever I needed it. I have managed to get Tim to watch the series with me, so we're in the middle of Season 2 right now. It's kind of even better on a rewatch, honestly.
Enough rambling about the show of course. I saw a post on Tumblr that mentioned the book and I got it pretty much right away, thinking that this would be a lot of fun to read, helpful to how I construct themes in my writing, and teach me a bit about sex and gender theories on the way. Boy howdy was I right about that, especially the last one. I finished the second chapter today, which was about Moya and Pilot and including a long rundown of theories surrounding New Reproductive Technology (NRT) and how they apply to Moya's pregnancy. All this really lateral, mind-blowing stuff about how, societally speaking, NRT is an attempt to quantify and control the pregnant body and make the fetus the primary patient, rather than the person bearing it, all for the sake of preservation of masculine identity formation. Namely, the pre-conscious state of the fetus makes the uncomfortable implication that there is a period of one's life where there is no identity, hence there can be no separate masculine identity in the circumstance of pregnancy, which inherently raises philosophical questions about the distinction between self and other.

Well, it is getting quite late and I still have things to do. I am sitting with my sweet rats, allowing the two younger ones and the two older ones to might. They aren't quite getting along -- namely one of my fat old rats is picking fights, but they are fighting less and less and I hope they may be able to live together soon. Thunder started earlier, without rain, and now a gentle rain has come without thunder.