Costcochondritis

 Well, basically out of nowhere, I decided to jump back into the short story submissions game, for as long as my mental health can take it at least. The thing that broke me out of my inactivity in the area was watching 1917, which poignantly reminded me of my vaguely WWI inspired story. It's like the realization, Oh, yeah, I'm sitting on like four short stories in various states of finality! Dang! hit me in the face. It came roughly alongside that it's probably not worth it to belabor the editing to the extent I have been, lest I edit any sense of naturalness out of my prose, probably. I feel like I can't tell the difference between good and bad in my writing any more, unless the bad is there in huge, grating quantities, so I guess I just have to hope it is any good.

So, just got the first rejection letter for the short story mentioned above and immediately re-submitted it elsewhere, then stared at the dark kitchen window for a while, dissociating for some reason. I'm trying Action and Commitment Therapy, which is all about not tuning in to the radio station of blithering self-hating BS that is always occupying at least part of my brain's wavelengths. It's been helping, I think, and it's a big reason why I'm writing this blog post. It's deliciously tempting to go off and hate myself right now, play Skyrim and watch crappy anime until it's suddenly 3 AM and my body is totally mummified with pain, but am I feeling that for any good reason? No, not really, I should expect like a thousand more rejection letters before I get any foothold here, and all I can do is be myself and do my best. So, best to do the directly opposite thing to my self hate, which is write a little however I can, such as by updating my blog. Then, go to bed.

I guess the most interesting personal development in my currently quite restricted life is I seem to have randomly developed costochondritis (which I am forever pronouncing incorrectly), an inflammation of the cartilage attaching ribs to sternum. Apparently it's super common for people with fibromyalgia to develop it, which makes intuitive sense to me, despite the fact that no one knows what fibromyalgia really is.

I bring it up not to complain, but because it's all been so weirdly hilarious to me. At first I thought I was having more pre-cordial catch moments then usual, then it settled into all this stinging pain at the center of my chest, clearly coming from my ribcage. Tim and I had to go to Costco that evening (we went super late to avoid people) and I remember trying to put together the shopping list, eat dinner, etc., and laughing a lot at how ridiculous the pain was, this melodrama of my body, which stacks on misfortunes like the plot of a Lemony Snicket book.

(A note on the pain, too -- it's not that it's ridiculously painful. I'd put it at like a 6 on the pain scale most times, though that first night it got quite intense. It's a perfect example of something I've been contemplating lately, which is how the quality of pain is so different from its number. This weird, 20-needles-in-my-cartilage-feeling is so hilariously awful, but simultaneously kind of pleasantly distracting, spicy, and fun compared to the dull ache that runs down my legs sometimes, which, while only being at like a 4 or 5, can wear me down over the course of a day like coarse sandpaper. I have no idea if this makes sense, it gets so hard to write about pain when you're in pain.)

Well, we went to Costco, I felt like my chest wanted to pop open like a cabinet, I took muscle relaxers and ibuprofen at bed time and since then the pain is generally not constant. It just flares up randomly, often making me laugh. The best part is that since I discovered what it probably after we came back Costco, it's Costcochondritis!

Okay, time to stop rambling about pain and remember this is a writing blog.

Other than the short story thing, I've started in on my worldbuilding project, using the template I posted below. Well, mostly using it. I've found a couple more categories were necessary, including who lives in an area. I also came up with the cool idea of listing the challenges an environment presents, then listing how they are addressed. So I'm doing this for a canyon/plateau area in my story, which necessitated a lot of research into the Grand Canyon, since that's the only canyon anyone cares enough about to provide much information on. I enjoyed that, I just have to move over a small hump now of deciding what domesticated plants are in the area. I might make up one or two, just because I can.

I've continued adding to my NaNoWriMo manuscript. It's hilariously bad, so the less said about it the better. We'll all look back on it some day and laugh.

I'm trying to let myself be bad at things. I picked up acrylic paints today and took another shot at a painting I hadn't been able to make work ages ago. The whole process felt god awful but I think the result is fine, at the very least. Maybe I will put up a picture if the finished result looks any good.

The actually good-looking thing I've been working on is a series of creatures I'm calling gnomes. I'm considering making them into stickers and selling them. I couldn't expect to turn a profit really, but it would be fun.

I made myself an elaborate New Years' resolution, which involves keeping up my writing quota from last year (writing 6x a week at least), adding in reading 5x a week, drawing 3x a week, and working my way up to meditating 3x a week for 10 minutes or more at a time.

As a result, I'm moving through books a little faster. I finished Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat before the 2020 ended, actually, and absolutely loved it. All I'll say about it for now is that white people should really read it, even if it hurts. Sure can't hurt as much as the pain of people who have been oppressed by a settler colonialist state for centuries.

I started something much lighter after this: Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women, which is a piecemeal history of entertainers through Western history. So far I've read about the titular learned pigs, as well as horses of knowledge, people who would write with their feet, Matthew Buckinger, Malini, and so on. It's fun, but Ricky Jay is using some terribly outdated language in some places, which is unpleasant and jarring. Even though the author doesn't seem to be deliberately contemplating it, this book has me thinking about how often these entertainments are people commodifying/being commodified for their disability/different ability. I've definitely deeper thoughts about this, but most of them while trying to sleep. Maybe I will come back with more some day.

I also started reading Roots of Strategy, which is a collection of historical war manuals. I'm reading Vegetius at the moment. It's dreadfully boring, but necessary stuff to know for worldbuilding purposes, as well as the fact that I plan on writing about war a whole bunch.

I finished The Fellowship of the Ring and am on The Two Towers. I haven't much to say about it except that I just read the scene where Grima Wormtongue gets thrown out, and there's this hilarious moment where I guess he just lies on the floor for a while.

Tim and I got some Christmas money from a relative, so I used my portion of it to order myself a little perfume (Womanity, which is a cisnormative name for a perfume that smells like vagina, Seminalis, which smells like semen, and Stercus, which smells like feces. Team with the theme.), and three books, all non-fiction. I'm excited about all of them. There's Tommy Boys, Male Lesbians and Ancestral Wives which is about lesbian practices in Africa (unfortunately written by white women, but I'll take what I can get). I also got a copy of I Am The Grand Canyon, which is about the Havusupai people, and a copy of Regine Pernoud's Joan of Arc. I'll probably read the Grand Canyon one first, but I so badly just want to read them all at once some how.

Well, I should go the heck to sleep. I feel a little less randomly and pointlessly defeated. With any luck, I'll be back at it again at Krispy Kreme tomorrow.

Scrabble Score: 348-235

 I meant to have just a couple days to recover from NaNoWriMo, then stressful things happened, so I meant to give myself time to recover, then stressful things kept happening, and then half the month had disappeared. I wouldn't want to get into a lot of it, but the most accessible event which typifies the kind of events we've been dealing with was our water heater broke, which revealed other issues with our plumbing and the whole thing cost us almost $2k. SO THAT WAS FUN!!!

Still, despite all this expensiveness, Tim and I were able to retreat to a cabin, partially because we'd already paid for it, so what can you do. It was up in the mountains, and we mostly spent the time stewing in the hot tub, watching the wind sweep snow off the roof and carry crows across the sky.

Of course, there was a Scrabble board at the cabin, and so Tim and I started playing and simply had to get ourselves a set after that. So I've been spending a fair bit of time doing that, and am currently writing this while Tim takes his turns.

I'm trying not to feel too bad about the general lack of productivity. I figure this extended executive dysfunction is a sign of my needing recovery. There's been a little movement regardless -- a little actual writing here and there, then some administrative stuff.

One thing that happened is that, as we'd been planning for ages, Tim and I got ourselves a printer for Christmas. As soon as we set it up, I printed out all my plot outlines, character development sheets, and worldbuilding. The thick wad of what I printed (double-sided, mind you) is below. I've written a lot of that since quarantine started, so honestly, not bad. I sure have quite a bit to show for all this.

This is just a step in what I've been realizing is a sort of arms race against my own brain. As detailed in my last post, fibromyalgia has affected my memory (and the question is, how much is some inherent quality of fibromyalgia and how much is just the effect of being in pain 24/7?). Having all this information stored in Google Docs, which is woefully clunky, and which I must navigate on a tiny Chromebook screen, really didn't help. So, hopefully this helps. Plus, it'll be much easier to edit the plots this way. Something about screen cast this glowing obfuscation over everything. I much prefer to go in with a red pen.

(Hah! I just won our game of Scrabble by over 100 points! I've normally been losing terribly).

Another step I'm taking is I made myself a pretty collaged notebook for my worldbuilding (I may put up a picture another time), and I'm going to start consolidating worldbuilding information in there. I started by diving into the miserably technical work of figuring out What's The Deal With These Two Moons?! I'm not so great at like, math theory, so I tend to wind up spending a lot of time building extensive charts when there's probably an easier way to do it. Whatever, I don't have the money (FOR SOME REASON!!) to pay to consult someone at this stage, so I just hope I'm doing a decent enough job.

Where the worldbuilding notebook goes from here, I don't know. I don't know if I want it to be structured, or just me compiling notions that are scattered across my various notebooks across the years. It probably would be good to start worldbuilding cultures in a organized fashion.

I did actually come up with a potential template for worldbuilding which caters to my ground-up approach. It only covers part of what would be necessary, but I think the results would give me something to work with.

As I've gotten older and more tired, I have been less of a vision-first kind of person and prefer to "procedurally generate" things. Throw together the plate tectonics and from there the pieces fall where they may, from ocean currents to the movements of people and the growth of their cultures.

I was contemplating it one night and came up with something like this:

1. ENVIRONMENT

2. RESPONSE TO THE ENVIRONMENT

Shelter, Food, Water, Fire, Protection

3. SOCIETY

Values, Religion, Law, Hierarchy

4. LIFE IN SOCIETY

Life, Birth, Growth, Death

Now, this is by no means meant to suggest that ALL aspects of society are a direct result of environment. But some of them are, which is how I'd like to construct things. If anyone has any thoughts on this, I'd love to hear them. I'm contemplating running it across a worldbuilding group I'm in on Facebook, but the mansplaining there can be a lot sometimes (seriously, the group is like 80% white men, a lot of whom are into military sci fi. Yikes!!)

Well, dinner will be ready soon, and I'm one hungry hippo. Be well, y'all!

NaNoWriMo: What I Learned

 Well, I did NaNoWriMo, all 50k words (in fact, I hit that goal 2 days early), wrote 1,667 words a day, every day for the month of November etc. Here's my badges from the website to prove it, though the one for hitting par every single day didn't light up. Very annoying, considering I did hit par every single day. I think I misentered a number somewhere along the way, smh.

That one irksome detail aside, I guess I'd say I'm pretty proud of myself, to the extent that I'm capable of -- namely, in the I'm-A-Black-Hole way where I say I'm proud of myself to remind me to feel anything about it because I otherwise have no feelings about it whatsoever because I'm weirdly dissociated from my own accomplishments.

I decided pretty early on -- I don't remember if it was before I started writing, or shortly after I started -- that what I was working on was lower even than a rough draft. It is a document that I hope shall never see human eyes, unless I somehow become famous and want to show aspiring writers just how bad of a job I did.

In any case, the reason for this decision is that I'm in a weird stage in the process in general -- I have plot outlines into Book 3, but my worldbuilding is fairly minimal and sketchy and partly reliant on things I came up with when I was 16-17 years old, so basic things like how dragons fight and what people eat where just aren't there. So this became a dry run, an experiment to find out what I didn't know I needed to know.

The result? I have 50,000 words of me faffing about somewhere along the lines of my plot outline, but winding up nowhere near as far into the story as I would've liked...literally I'm less than 50% through the plot outline. I forgot to emphasize certain important character traits, the language is fairly bland, there's filler words everywhere, the themes I want to be there just aren't there at all, certain important objects and concepts appear when I need them rather than being mentioned when they should've been, my exposition is skimpy and what there is of it is a mess, and I don't know if I really like where I started the story or not. Even so, I plan to continue working on this mess of a dry run of a rough draft, and see where it takes me.

What I mean to say is: I've learned a lot! I thought it would be fun to write a post about what I learned. I don't know what purpose it serves, except that of documenting posterity for my sake. I try not to have any illusions about anyone else caring about it. Well, I guess I ought to do the listicle subheading thing?

The Brain and the Page

I used to think, back when I was a teen and simultaneously full of myself while hinging the escape from my self loathing on my ability to write, that I had thought about the story enough to know how to write it well without much struggle. I didn't really hold onto that notion so much as I didn't do anything to counter it (but get off my back about it, I've had to do a lot of unlearning in other, more important areas). Truthfully, it's like drawing: you can look at the shoe you're drawing all you want, pick apart which line you'd draw where, but getting the lines to connect on the page is a completely different skill. Turning what you see in your brain into something on paper (or on a glowing screen) is a hurdle all on its own.

Honestly, I've calmed down a lot since high school. Back then when something didn't come out the way I wanted it to, I was at serious risk for a total breakdown and subsequent self-harm. I had no other means of generating self-worth, so creation felt so life or death at the time. This is what therapy is for! I have a little more faith in the long term vision of the project anymore, at least when I'm in my right mind. It's so much easier for me to recognize that this attempt benefits me the most when it's bad.

I Love Being Unemployed

I seriously think that the main reason I was able to write 1,667 words a day without any sort of mental breakdown (I seriously only had one brief mental breakdown this month, and it was unrelated to writing! Well, that's other than the election stress, ofc) was that I am currently not working. What a blessing it is! I still have other things to do, like attending to the house, the rats, and my relationships, but to have time enough to write for a few hours is honestly glorious. The excuse to write a few hours is also glorious.

The other big thing is that not working means I actually have the energy. When I was at my last job, I stumbled through the day like a zombie because I could almost never get enough sleep. I was also just so emotionally drained all the time because of that honestly fairly abusive workplace that I struggled to do anything creatively.

It can't last forever, unfortunately, and I don't look forward to the day, however distant, when I have to get a job again. But I'll do my best to use my time well.

Writing Can Make Me Happy???

I think it's something about the word count goal. Shocker, goals help people. I know, I know...I've been somewhat resistant to goals because of how they, like some many things, can lead to me attacking myself. Still, it's a small and, for an unemployed person, a fairly achievable goal.

The unexpected thing that I totally should've expected is that having that concrete goal provided a sort of work-life separation for me. I could do the work and clock out, so to speak. Of course, my therapist tried to tell me to take this approach some time ago. But I preferred, for a while, to endlessly torment myself in every single spare moment by either sitting down (or standing, as I am now, due to joint pain) to write or agonizing about how I should be sitting down to write. To be fair, I continued to try to figure out how to utilize every spare moment to some end, but there was less pressure towards it than usual.

The other thing that used to stress me out was this project, which I've had in my mind literally for sixteen years at this point, in various forms, was so amorphous I couldn't engage with it. What should I do next? What steps did I need to take? When would I finally be ready to start writing it?

Well, I tore off the band-aid and started writing it. Surprisingly, I feel better just writing it, even when it's terrible. On one level, it's nice to engage with these characters and with this world, especially seeing the ways in which I love and hate these characters and wish they would get their act together while rooting for them at the same time. On another level, finding the issues that I still need to work out is clarifying my next steps a little more.

It's also just cool knowing that I can make 1,667 words happen in a pinch, sometimes in just two or so hours. They're not always good words, but also I sometimes surprise myself.

Burnout

All that being said, by the end of the month, I was so over the 1,667 words a day. It was unpleasant and uncomfortable and I wanted a break, but I could still get into the groove most of the time. The writing gets worse when I work myself to that point.

Of course, if you know anything about me, then you know that this isn't the first time I've written every day for a month. My calendar, which I mark with symbols about the day's events, shows that much. Somehow it would still be a novelty to me when I'd take a day off, or even just a morning off, and the desire to write and think about writing came back. Wow! Go figure! I'd feel more like a dummy if I didn't know precisely where all this dysfunction came from.

The issue is that I hardly know what to do when I'm not writing, or cleaning the house, or cooking, or engaged in various "productive" activities. After dinner tonight, Tim was like "What do you want to do?" and I of course didn't know. Considered coming to my desk to work on this or some other writerly thing. Wound up starting a game of Skyrim as a hard-bitten elder butch wood elf woman named Buttons. No matter how much I hone the skill, however, chilling feels so weird.

How I will partition my work and life balance and what I do in the life part remains a mystery.

 I Have a Lot of Worldbuilding to Do

This is sort of alluded to at the beginning, but the extent of the issue is truly massive. I realized that, if I force myself to come up with some worldbuilding detail in a pinch, I will just fall back on whatever I know best -- which, due to the social programming I try daily to overcome, is Western history. Yawn. Not that everyone's mind works this way -- I hear Garth Nix, for example, worldbuilt the Abhorsen series on the fly -- but it's small wonder so much fantasy is so standard.

Still, I came up with some cool things by pantsing it, though of course I can't remember off the top of my head what they were right now. Which brings me to my last, and most personal, point.

Fibromyalgia Has Done a Number on My Brain

Even without taking into account fibromyalgia's symptom of brain fog, chronic pain has been scientifically proven to have effects on your memory. At times, this fact has been a motivation towards frenetic activity, because I know that it will only impair me more and more with time. It has, at times, felt like a race against my own inevitable deterioration. Fantasy is a genre that involves juggling a lot of made-up names and facts, which makes this prospect even more daunting.

I guess I hadn't fully realized the extent to which I am already cognitively impaired. To be fair, I was able to recreate most of the stuff from my plot outline without even looking at it, but a lot of the things I'd tell myself to remember would simply evaporate. Important points went missing, ones that I can't even access right now. I'd create someone or something, then forget it. Words and letters I meant to put in just disappear, leaving me with agrammatical nonsense. Literally at one point I made a note about the song "Ready, Able," in my notebook, and since there's no spellcheck for pen and paper, I looked back to discover that all I'd managed  to write was "Read, Abl." It's so bizarre, like someone else is blundering about in my life, making inexplicable mistakes.

It feels like my mind is divided, split up into modes, and it's hard to get those memories about what needs to be done, what I just did, what happened a long time ago, to travel between those modes. One of the highest compliments I've ever received is that I have "a mind like a steel trap," but I'm having to come to terms with the fact that this is only the case sometimes, and there will be substantial portions of time when I am unable to retain something I just read, or reach basic facts like plot points, made up names, made up cultural practices, and, for some reason, especially what age my characters are supposed to be.

I have, at times in my life, felt tempted to give up. But one thing that's become clear is that even though my brain is as holey as Swiss cheese at times, I still really can write through the pain. Again, it might not be good, but again, sometimes I surprise myself.

Something I'll have to figure out, alongside the worldbuilding and how to insert exposition and themes, is how I'll overcome this. Fixing my brain is probably out of the question. I'm meditating, which theoretically should help, and maybe someday in the future I'll get to try neurofeedback. The best I can do for myself, however, is figure out my crutches. Probably put my character's ages up on the wall above my desk, along with whatever basic facts continually elude me. Good news is we're ourselves a printer this Christmas, so I'll be able to print out the probable hundreds of pages of plot outline and character histories and worldbuilding I have trapped in my Google Drive. I think that'll help a lot.

And Now -- Some Non-NaNoWriMo Miscellany!

I happened to actually finish Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book today, so that's two things rounded off at the same time. I love the book, even if it involves Sei Shōnagon being horrible to/about poor people and being unnecessarily prissy about everything. It's such a human glimpse into a life lived long ago. My favorite part is the piece where she talks about first entering into Empress Sadako's service -- she was so relatably nervous, even though Sadako was like, 14 at the time, and Shōnagon was, I think, 35? It read like how I feel on my first day at a new job.

I have no idea what I'll read next in the realm of history/non-fiction. Most of those sorts of books that I intend to read are out in my shed and I have to work up the grit to go out in the cold and sort through them. I really wish I had a copy of The Tale of Genji to follow this up with, but I just haven't gotten around to getting one/being gifted one yet. 

I've also been in this interesting place of re-watching two shows that have been with me for a long time: Twin Peaks and Battlestar Galactica (the early 2000s reboot, naturally). My dad showed me Twin Peaks when I was in 8th grade, and my sister showed me Battlestar some months later. Somehow, Twin Peaks has never lost its shine for me, while Battlestar, with all its fun condoning of regressive and even fascist notions (the episode 'Dirty Hands' is especially bad), sometimes really galls me. Both shows and their soundtracks affected me equally, in terms of aesthetic, humor, taste, etc., but I guess Battlestar trying to make remarks on politics really falls disastrously short of the mark in places. (Farscape is better. It's consistently anti-imperialist, anti-military, and 99% of the time pro-diversity. I love it so much.)

The other thing that's been looming large in my mind lately is a friend of mine turned me onto Pathologic 2, a video game that defies usual classification. I guess it's survival horror, but cast aside all notions of being chased by monsters in the dark -- you just have to make sure you get enough food and sleep in a town that is being ravaged by plague and haunted by supernatural entities from the steppe and goodness-knows where. It's more than a bit stressful but I'm so in love with the aesthetic and story so far that I can't get it out of my mind. I had to deliberately not play any today because, the night before last, I had a haunting, plague-threatened dream about being in the world of the game, and last night, I kept waking up thinking about it and what I wanted to do next in the game.

I know a piece of media is good when it messes with my sleep. Maybe, someday, I'll be able to do that to other people.

(Note: this post was over 2,000 words long. Sorry! I promise I'll try to take an actual break tomorrow.)

It Begins

 I looked back at the last post to see how long it'd been since I'd posted, and, seeing the date September 18, I thought something like "Huh, well it's only the 1st so it's been less than a month since I remembered to attend to this. Not bad." Then I remembered that there's a whole month between September and November and it's called October. So, that's how things are going in the time department.

The writing department has been...it's hazy to remember. A good part of September was taken up with a health issue that prevented me from writing much due to intense brain fog. For a while after, I think I mostly made progress on my plot outline -- I am now outlining book 3, though I'm currently hung up on what one character should be doing while some of the more obvious stuff goes on. I finished another short story draft, and somewhere in there I spontaneously produced my first ever bit of flash fiction that I keep forgetting to edit. Then I edited another short story and put a happier ending on it. Now I just have to decide which ending to gamble on when I send it to magazines.

The actually big thing that's about to be going on is that I've decided to participate in NaNoWriMo. I do have the outlines ready after all, so I might as well try to bang out the worst draft ever in attempt to get something happening in my brain. That being said, depending on how things go, I might let it be a two month thing, for a multitude of reasons.

I honestly don't know why they chose November to be The Month, since it's basically the worst month ever, at least in the US and the northern hemisphere, especially this year, between the end of daylight savings and the election. Those are definitely two extenuating circumstances, especially the daylight savings issue because I have SAD, which instantly gets about 10 times worse when the clocks jump back. Maybe I can use writing and a world of fantasy to coast through the hours of dread-panic when the sun sets.

Also, between fibromyalgia and my mental disorder(s), I have entire days where I basically have the computing power of the potato and also other days where if I try too hard I run the risk of literally attacking myself before I even know what's happening. I guess the pain isn't an issue so much any more. I have to spend my life alternating between sitting and standing because both hurt, but I have a standing desk so that helps. I've also gotten good at ignoring it, and being on Low Dose Naltrexone has helped, along with not busting my ass in hot kitchen serving bacon to Texans.

Well, it's already getting quite late and I am finally recovered from the intense overstimulation of a busy day. Tomorrow (or technically today), It Begins. Wish me luck, imaginary readers!

And, for the sake of making my blog pretty, here's a random doodle as portrayed by my super high quality phone camera:

Look Out the Window

It's been a while since my last post. Truth is, I haven't been well enough for this outward projection of personality, mentally or physically. Of course, looking back on it, it's hard to piece together what was happening and why. Today I've felt like I exited it a little, at least for a day, so I've tried to make the most of that momentum because, as I've been graphing my emotions (something my therapist has me doing, to determine if there's any pathology to it all), the probable outcome is I won't feel as great in a day or two.

One of the things that went down is we recently had to put down one of our beloved rats, Dorothea. It was a relatively unexpected event, such that I woke up last Saturday expecting a relatively chill day, then next thing I knew, I had to call the vet and turned up to have her euthanized an hour later. She'd been sick for a long while, but her condition deteriorated rapidly overnight -- that's sometimes how rats are. But, the night before, she'd cuddled me for an hour while I watched a movie, puddling under my touch. It's a high compliment from a rat who wouldn't let any humans touch her when we got her. She knew she was reaching the end of her rope before I did.

Here's a picture of her from when she was well, looking out the window of my writing shed.

Perhaps I am merely projecting, but I think she liked windows. When we first got her, we set her cage by the window and she'd often sleep facing it. Because she had a minor case of bumblefoot, I had to apply Blu Kote to her feet twice a day and sit with her in the bath tub -- partially so she wouldn't stain the carpet, but also because she actually deigned to cuddle with me so long as we were there. This is how I have spent the past six months with her, with the window open just above us. I hope she liked listening to the birds and passing cars in the day and the crickets and clicking katydids at night. 

Writing Progress and Some Thoughts on Editing

So I've spent most of this time editing short stories I've already written. I'm having trouble gaining any foothold on writing any short story ideas, even though they're there. Surely it'll come eventually.

In July or so (who knows what time is any more?), I spent an exorbitant amount of time -- like two days' worth of just sitting there for hours -- fine-combing through one story. It started out as an effort to pick out filler words then just evolved from there. I totally messed up my back doing it but I suppose I learned  and speculated over some valuable things, eg.

• Weak language is often marked by equivocating. Imagery is more vivid if you just decide what on earth you are trying to say and edit out any wishy-washiness.
• I abuse the word "that" and it's so often a junk word that means nothing. Also, doing a word search for "that" will ruin "that" for you forever. It sounds so awful and weird and...brown?
• So many words are junk and trash and can be avoided.
• All that being said, I began to speculate about whether filler words could be used with impact. Like, if you reserve them, hold them back, then use them in the right place, they could have their own special effect, like any word. I'm not sure -- I was a bit delirious at that point.
• Hours deep into this process, I began to seriously question things like why "light bulb" isn't one word -- please, for the sake of my word count? Also, what if "maybe" were a verb? 
• Language melted and I had a sort of Tetris effect where I tried to talk with utmost verbal efficiency. Hyperfocus is a necessity sometimes, one of those ADHD super powers, but it definitely comes with a toll afterwards.
• Drafting is just the awkward process of trying to fumble thoughts into words and editing is how you make it seem effortless.

All this editing couldn't produce a story that I felt fine with it, for reasons I don't want to get into. I'm honestly considering trunking it. I put a lot of work into that particular story so it's been something of a blow. I got a diversity read on it and everything, because I was drawing from Chinese history and don't want to do anything wrong. I'm still glad I got the diversity read because I learned a lot -- it's just a bummer, I guess. That story feels un-wrangle-able anymore. Perhaps it's just a problem of my perception, but I currently can't imagine anyone wanting to publish it.

That's okay, though. Writing pieces that you trunk is all part of the process.

I turned my attention to another short story, but couldn't produce the same hyperfocused editing. To be fair, I didn't try drinking gingko tea, which generally casts that spell for me, but I was afraid to. I couldn't engage for long out of fear of myself. Then a bunch of stuff happened and I was forced to let myself take a break.

That's the actually tough part: letting myself stop, letting myself put aside some ideas indefinitely.

Books

Since I was feeling well today, I finally got around to doing some Goodreads reviews, which are mostly fun as practices in expression. A good excuse to get some words out in a low stakes situation.

Since I last discussed books, I've finished two of the ones on my list. One of them was Investigating Farscape. I'm so glad I got that book. It's made re-watching Farscape with Tim even more fun, even though the chapter on linguistics mostly went over my head. Still, there was some cool stuff I managed to vaguely get from it, like language as the only true shared and created experience which in turn shapes perceptions of reality...or something. It's a book I'll definitely revisit, maybe next time I re-watch Farscape...which might be sooner than I'd re-watch any other show. We've just started season 4 and I'm already trying to comprehend the notion that I won't be watching Farscape at some point in the future. I truly am a hopeless case.

The other book I finished is Emma. I honestly hated it up right until the end, then hated it even more after the end. The long and short of it is that I don't know much how of the silliness of these ridiculous rich people was actually intended as a joke -- I don't think much of it. That just rubs me the wrong way. I have yet to be sold on Austen qua progressive or revolutionary figure. At the end of the day, it seems to me she was pretty status quo. Viewed from the present, she is extremely status quo.

This leaves me feeling skeptical of at least portions of the Jane Austen fandom. Of course, no fandom is a monolith, and I definitely heard a good episode of something (Rough Translation?) about Pakistani Janeites. Sometimes, however, it feels like the obsession centers on the idyllic and uninterrupted whiteness of it all, as well as the fantasy of wealth and propriety. I can see the draw of her humor, the subtle social navigating, the happy endings -- but I personally struggle with the rest of the baggage.

That's all a nice segue into the book I recently started: Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai. Tim's parents got it for him for his birthday, at his request, but he wanted to start on a different book (George Clinton's autobiography) so I snatched up this one. It feels like a good time to read this.

My understanding of it thus far is that it as book investigating the mythology and hidden motivations of white/American-European society. In the introduction, Sakai describes the book as "a reconnaissance into enemy territory." I am enjoying it so far, even if it tends towards dense (a bit difficult with my fogginess as of late). The book boasts such titles as "The Heart of Whiteness" and "'Klass, Kulture & Kommunity.'" Honestly, I am here for it and I hope it tears my face off.

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.