The long march of words

On August 21st, I turn in my novel manuscript to my writers' group for review on September 20th. I've resolved to be writing every day until I turn it in; I'd like to do a thousand words a day, (or draw a picture?) but I'm not in that gear yet. I spent time doing character background, finding out what teens can do in Vancouver in the summer. I ended up envying my characters.

If I can't write, such as if I have to do housework or I'm resting, I listen to an audiobook. Usually I use it to study the horror genre. Stephen King (of course), Dean R. Koontz, Joe Hill, Paul Tremblay, Laurell K. Hamilton and many others. For reasons unimportant now, I have a very thin reading background. I'm addressing that.

However, the most significant flaw I have, in writing and everything else, is an underconfidence. It's no ordinary, garden-variety dearth of assurance, but a self-destructive, self-abandoning vacuum of morale. This was caused by attention-deficit and anxiety problems in childhood that were never diagnosed and treated. Instead, my parents told me to try harder. The more I tried, the worse it got. They did the best they could when they had to care for a brother who was in every way more debilitated and disabled than I was. 

After a two-year wait, I'm finally in a form of therapy that should help my troubles specifically.  It already has.

Good health news

My foot isn't swelling anymore. I've had the problem chronically for over a decade. The solution appears to have been wrap it when it swells, even when it wasn't painful. It's a relief to be able to reach down and tap my finger on my ankle bone.

My back is even better, and I'm just about through with my antibiotics for the UTI.

Here recently, the writing has sucked. It's a little better today. Not much. 

When is there time?

I don't complain writing fiction is time-consuming, but I do cite it here as a fact. I've always been slow. People have complained about that with me in grade school, high school, and on the job.

Persons with ADHD are regarded as slow, never mind the several reasons why. It's a symptom. When I was thirteen, I should have known better than to query my Mom about it. Though it wasn't exactly eye-witness the confirmation I wanted. I already knew it as a constant, inexplicable fact of my life. However, at that age, I had trouble communicating. By asking her for my opinion was my lead-in to pleading with her for help.

She confirmed what I already knew by laughing in my face. "You are so slow." A lesson reiterated to me then was how unhelpful she would be: medically, emotionally and informatively.

I wish I could say that I reconciled with her before she died, but that wouldn't be true. We had too much baggage to unpack, and too much of it I couldn't open due to a combination of her temper and her fragility. I mourned her death, but the way I felt it most was in lost hope.

That doesn't really apply here, much. As I try to find time to write, I'm on the line between middle-age and senior years. I've always tried to ignore my growing years. However, now that I'm best organized for work, and ADHD and associated problems are treated, I'm finding that I'm getting slower, and time is going by faster.

At least I've been walking once an hour for ten minutes. I've been keeping up with grocery shopping, cooking my meals, dishes, laundry, vacuuming the floor, but I can't find the time to write. Last night I was wiped out by six o'clock. I'm mean catatonically tired. I hope I've got everything else done, but for how long?

  

Choices

I had a cavity that needs filling with an appointment on the 25th. However, then I discovered my cat had a fang missing. I could only afford one of us getting treatment.

I did what any other cat lover would do, I canceled my appointment so I could take my cat in next week and her teeth check. There's not really much I can do except buy her soft food. Why take her in? The major reason is the stupid beast doesn't let me examine it. I can't see if it's one tooth or the whole works on that side. If it's trauma on one tooth, then I expect it isn't degenerative. If it's the whole side, then that's more serious.

I just realized I could ask my sister for help. She could hold that cat while I have a look. Maybe tomorrow or Friday.

Odd, the cat doesn't show any signs that it even hurts. With a human, they'd show it.

I've been suffering for the last week with back pain. It hasn't responded to any of the analgesics I've been using. I'll be going to a chiropractor, but not until August. That was the earliest they could get me in. I expect this to get better by then.

I was worried about it because I'm going to therapy, and I have to take a bus. It was far easier today than I imagined. I'm finally in the kind of therapy that will help with the problem I have. I had to wait three years to get into it.

I'm was going to my political blog, but I'm drowsy. I'm going have to rest before I do anything else.

Writing troubles

I missed a few days of work with the back trouble, and the related sleep trouble. When that was done, I slept almost all yesterday afternoon. My body demanded payback.

Today I managed to "process" 500 words. Part of it was mark-up, taking the writer's group critiques and entering them on the manuscript. This is monotonous and feels unrewarding. I got one page done on that. Then I did some rewrite, an existing scene that needed rethinking and adjustment. I got about a page done of that (with a few ideas to follow). Then I got into some initial creation, these are scenes that are seeing the light of day for the first time.

Unfortunately, that's where I wore out. I got exhausted, confused, surly, low-mood and exhausted. I had to lie down until it passed. I lost a whole ninety minutes before being able to move again. It was the evening by then.

Tomorrow I don't have any time to make this up. There's too much non-writing stuff to do, like vacuuming and laundry, then for the evening, ironically, I have the writers' group. That's the whole evening.

Bad Curve

I wondered what to call this entry. I thought of "Curves," but then a reader would think it's some misogynist screed about the proper role of women. No, it's only about one curve, the congenital one in my spine that can't be corrected at my late stage in life, but at which it causes the most trouble. I stretched on Thursday morning right as I got up, and nearly fainted. Then after I sat typing for another hour, I got up and felt severe pain in my lower back. This pain impaired my work until today. I might have been tempted by opiates, because the naproxen and acetamen weren't helping, or they only dialed it down from "lay down and scream" to "lay down and moan in a bad way." Not the right way to get laid.

I couldn't sit, and the pain was a constant detraction from any work. Also, I couldn't sleep from all that getting laid. Finally, I was able to sleep last night. And I did for about ten hours. Today, I'm left with only a shadow of the previous three days of pain (has it been that long)? I'm ready to start work again for full days. That is while I try to clean my apartment which needed some chores before that became impossible.

In other news: after waiting for two years, I finally got into Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. I have high hopes for this. It should take away a lot of the barriers I've made for myself before I knew what I was doing. I might have used this long ago and had a better life, but better now than never.  

Excuse me(ow)

(Blog written at 5 p.m., but scheduled to go live at 11 p.m.)

What a day! I writer's group tonight. I always enjoy it whether I have anything to read or not. And I do have an installment tonight that I'm very proud of.

However, it can cramp my time during the day. I wanted to get some writing done, about an hour in the morning and a few hours this afternoon. Due to my own bungling and a lot of interruptions, I never got down to it.

If you follow this blog, you know I schedue my day, morning-to-evening, minute-to-minute. Since I'm employed, (hoping to sell writing) it's important that I do this. But if something interrupts, then I have to reschedule. It works out better than you're probably thinking.

To start out, I got up late. That happens sometimes. I rescheduled it easily. I got twenty minutes of writing in. By the way, that was my total writing time for the whole day. Then I had to add something to the list, and for the life of me, I don't remember what it was. As soon as I started writing again, my cat wanted attenion. I mean it was right as I typed a few letters.

I know some people reading this blog hate cats or hate reading about them, but I didn't get the animal to ignore her. I knew, at most, she would want to play or be combed for a half-hour. So, I combed her for twenty minutes, and she sauntered into the front closet for her eight hour nap.

Perfect! I thought. Then I saw that with necesseties (software chiming in needing essential updates, I never ignore those. Ice cubes for tea, yes a necessity) I discovered my writing time was gone. All morning I only had time to write up a synopsis for tonight's reading.

Things went similarly in the afternoon, with time pirhaunnas taking small bites out of my work period, until I had only an hour left for work. I decided I needed a rest and lay down, play Sudoku, while listing to a book: Don Quixote.

Why didn't I work on the novel rather than do this? My rule is I blog every day now, and this blog and my political blog (An Arch Liberal).

I can't really blame the cat. I slept in because I couldn't fall asleep last night until very late. Maybe I should take my sleep medicine with melatonin. There's always tomorrow, even though it looks like it might be as challenging as today.








 

Decades

A thought struck me the other day. I was reflecting on the fact that World War I ended a century ago this year. When I was a child and learned about it, that war seemed like ancient history. Before I had high school history, it was wholly lost in shadows and still old. For my earlier childhood, even the very notion of a year 1918 was strange. Who would give a year a number like that? The last two numbers are always greater than the previous two. That was my arbitrary law of twentieth century years. (I had similar resistant thoughts to my native tongue. Whenever I'd encounter a homonym, I would think, "Who invented this defective language.)

Then it hit me: for anyone coming of age this year, their view of the 1970s is like mine of the 1910s-1920s. They're ancient history. They're was even a Soviet Union then, that's how primitive it was. Hell, the other decade that shaped my life, the '60s are like the 1900s to them. I remember in the tragic year of 1916, how shocking it was to lose celebrities who seemed ageless. Carrie Fisher, Prince, David Bowie . . . just starting that list shocks me. Raquel Welch, the pinup star teen boys' fantasy of the '60s is close to eight-years-old. Jane Fonda has reached that age. Harrison Ford is 76. Even Patti Smith is 71.

I guess it's the fact that, with modern technology, we can freeze people and events in time. It becomes harder to fathom so much time passing when I spend a lot of it in subworlds where time is by use of technology frozen or modular.

The only good news about that is I don't feel my age. That's probably why the ages to timeless celebrities are unbelievable.  


 

Ready for an uphill climb

Though I only got 250 words done, this was a day for finishing text, and I polished 2000 words. I'm ready for my reading on Monday.

I'm feeling so good and I'm so focused every day that I think I can get 4,000 words done a week. That will let me meet my deadline for the novel in August. That'll put it at 80,000 words, a perfect length, provided, of course, the story is that done within that frame. It should be. I see no problems in the structure.

The only thing I don't know is what I'm going to write tomorrow, but I know what I'm going to write if I don't know what to write by tomorrow.

During the day if I have any times where I have to wash dishes, I listen to books. I think I've listen-read more books this year than I have in the rest of my life doing only visual reading. It's a real advance.

I've got to hear some classics: The Illiad, Dante's Inferno, Don Quixote, which I'm enjoying now.

Sheesh! I got my blogging done too, today.

A drop in tension

I'm an anxiety-ridden person. Crowds and family events are stressful for me. Crowds, because they're noisy. Family because I don't know why. Unless it's partially because I'm seeing a cousin for the first time in a year or two and I can't remember their names. Then I spend the entire night, hoping that I'll remember if "tested" again.

One wouldn't think a medication would help with that, by way of either placebo or pharma. The tension, not the memory, that is. My psychiatrist signed for an antidepressant for sleep difficulties. Amazingly, I didn't feel any anxiety last night. Yes, there were a few awkward moments when I called somebody by the wrong name (always worse than merely forgetting). I didn't mind them. My brother yelling didn't even rattle me. Now, I can recall everybody's name today. Though last night, I wondered if the new meds didn't make my memory for names worse. What I need is a family album.


Trouble sleeping was the main recent problem. Usually, I trust sleep to take me out of depression. It stops the spiral, almost as though sleep resets it. This is, worthless however, if I can't sleep. Then melancholy thoughts continue to cascade, making me more unable to drift off, which then gives me more time to stress about things, and that in turn reduces my chance of sleeping even further.

It got so bad that last week, I called my psychiatrist and told him I was going to have to go into the hospital if the trend continued. He prescribed a sleep inducing anti-depressant, the best of both worlds. It's been a miracle. I got more writing done in the last two days than I got done in the three weeks prior.

I'm going to hit my deadline. In other good news, I'm probably going to be able to take on some paid gigs in the meantime. I don't know for sure yet. That's what I would like to do.