Recent Events and the State of the Me

Weeks ago now, back at the start of December, our landlords told us that in a few days, their favored contractors would be coming to do necessary and long-delayed repairs on our roof. When they showed up, it turned out there had been a communication error somewhere. They weren’t just here to fix the roof, but to do multiple repairs inside and out that had similarly been put off.

Pro: They were, as I said, necessary. The plaster in my bathroom in particular had rendered it almost unusable, at least not without a hard hat. You certainly didn’t want to do anything that would put off a lot of steam. The dining room was not yet that bad, but it was still rapidly approaching a Sword-of-Damocles type situation.

Con: With no warning, we—here meaning Jack, who was the one caught by this particular broadside—had to scramble to clear out multiple rooms we use every day, including the dining room that Jack had just finished decorating for Christmas. We also had to pen the cats up in their “suite”, which is my office and bedroom, as Tommy has a history of making adventurous choices she later regrets when there’s unusual activity in the house.

The disruption was pretty substantial, but we were assured it would not last long. Two days was the quote, maybe three or four with padding.

It turns out they actually finished up this weekend… and yes, they came and worked over the weekend to finish up the job at long last. That’s more than two weeks and the vast majority of the month to date that the building I live and work in has been disrupted by the sound of hammering, clattering of ladders, loud conversations drifting down or through the windows.

I can’t say it’s been a pleasant couple of weeks, or that it’s been good for my often-shakes nerves or nascent resurgence of confidence as a writer. At first I kept up my Thing of the Day pretty well by doing bits of writing at night, when it was quiet… but after a while, I just wound up exhausted, mentally and physically.

This all came right on the heels of a long period of struggle with anxiety and depression, as well as complicated external factors. In some ways, I feel like I’m playing a roleplaying game with a jerk of GM who plays against the players. It feels like every time I try to do dig in my heels and get something done, get my writing and other projects back on track, there is something to counter my move and make it impossible, but it’s often something that’s not directly affecting me or isn’t objectively bad (like necessary home repairs!) so it feels petty to complain about or even mention it.

Despite that, I’m not feeling discouraged at the moment. I started the month resolute and enthusiastic and set on getting back to my writing roots, and I had some fairly impressive results even under adverse conditions. Since I wasn’t getting much done anyway, I took the opportunity to take some time off from my braining pills to try to limit my built-up tolerance for them… I’m going to start incorporating off-weeks into my regimen going forward. Judging by how downright perky I am today (first day back on), I’d say it makes a difference.

Of course, my sleep schedule is borked all the way to heck and back. My work habits are pretty much starting from scratch. And this week is going to end early on account of holiday. So… I’m not sure what to expect from the rest of this week.

I am going to be blogging every day, at least, and resuming my daily Thing of the Day posts. I’ll let you all know what’s going on more with specific things as specifics develop. I’m really eager to get things moving again, though… nothing counters a nagging feeling of inadequacy like doing stuff. And of course, having been effectively “out of work” for so long has put a serious dent in my finances right at the holidays… putting more stuff out there is the quickest and easiest way to make a little money.

Okay.

So.

I said yesterday that today I was going to talk about my plans. I kind of wish that I had just pressed on ahead and shared them yesterday. I was counting on the idea of another day of sleep to give them additional clarity, but instead I find them a lot less solid and coherent. Yesterday I was thinking that today, I’d just have a few simple bullet points, maybe a paragraph each, explaining the major things going on and what I’m doing with them. Today that kind of clarity escapes me.

So let’s talk about the big one:

Tales of MU… no, it’s not abandoned or over. I made a mistake this past summer when I decided to relax and just accept a slower pace for updating as a good thing instead of constantly striving to get a schedule more frequent than once a week. My reasoning was solid (people had a hard time keeping up with the story when it was multiple times a week, and I had a hard time keeping up that pace), but… I need to strive, man. I need that struggle. Not only should my reach exceed my grasp, but it must, almost axiomatically. If I reach only for what is in my grasp, I find my grasp shortening commensurately.

At the same time… man, is this a terrible time and place for me to be trying to kick anything into high gear. It’s the holidays. There’s work going on in our house. There’s personal stuff. And even if I know that easing up on the throttle doesn’t work, that doesn’t mean that the problems associated with opening her up have gone away. I need to do something different here.

And that brings me to another point: I do need to do something different, frequently. I need to juggle things around, try new things, write new things, do different things. Be a serial writer some time. Be a tabletop game developer sometimes. Be a poet sometime. Write short stories sometimes.

I’ve tried dividing my days up into segments, but it’s too hard to switch tracks creatively in the middle of the day from one thing to another. I’ve tried the same thing by dividing weeks up into days, but then I can’t predict where my good days and bad days will fall and I wind up abandoning the schedule to work around them. The truth is that I do my best work on Tales of MU—or anything else—when I’m totally immersed in it, living and breathing it. But I can’t do that all the time for anything.

So the new plan is to switch off not on an hourly or daily basis, but in larger chunks of time… big enough that I can have some momentum going, that it doesn’t matter if I have a bad brain day or if my office environment is disrupted or whatever.

My thought is I can spend a few weeks (or maybe a month) just utterly focused on Tales of MU… not posting every day, but writing every day. Not with the goal of writing X chapters in Y days, but writing as much of the story as I can.

I think this answers my need for urgency and immediacy in my writing without being in the “write and then publish immediately” trap which leads to sub-standard writing, odd pacing, and missed deadlines. It gives me the room I need to see the big picture and to polish things up without taking away from the urgency. It lets me be both reflective and quick.

And then? I’ll post the fruits, at the sedate pace of one chapter a week.

Say I spend four weeks writing the story. When I’m trying to do a chapter every week on top of other things, it’s stop and go. Every week I’m starting over, dipping myself back into the world, figuring out where I’m going, looking for traction and building speed. Instead of that, I just… keep going. Maybe I come up with 7 or 8 chapters. Maybe I come up with 10 or 12.

And when I’m done, I publish those chapters, one a week. While they’re first playing out this gives me time to do other things, be other things. Do game stuff. Be a poet for a while. Write some short stories. Take a creative break. I’ll know how many chapters I have, so I know at what point I have four of them left and then it’s time to start over.

If I somehow only get four chapters done in my four weeks of MU time, of course, I keep writing… but if that happens very often, then I’ll know that this system’s not working as intended and it’s time to try something else.

Now, this is something I just came up with this week as a plan of action, not something I’ve been doing all along. And I know “Tales of MU will resume in four weeks” is not the news that anyone wants to hear, but that’s where we are. Next week’s going to be a lot of family time, so it’s going to be more reflection and brain storming and getting back into the characters’ heads and the logic of the world and its plots than actual writing… this seems like a better use of my time than trying to hammer out a chapter. Subsequent MU Writing Blocks will not be coming after so long an interruption so they might need less of a lead-in time, but to be clear, this lead-in week is part of the four weeks.

That’s what’s going to happen with Tales of MU. For the next four weeks, Tales of MU is what I’m going to be doing, creatively. It’s not all I’m going to be doing, period, but I feel like at this point the other items on the agenda merit their own posts.

Now, four weeks from today—the point at which I wrap the first writing phase up—is December 18th. That means the week following it would be the first week of posting. I don’t really like having Friday as a posting day (as I’ve mentioned before, it’s often the most chaotic day in the house), and that following Friday just happens to be Christmas. We’ll make it Monday, the 21st… eve of the winter solstice. Seems like a fitting day for light to come back after a long period of rest.

That’s the big bullet point on this post for people who don’t care about reasons or process: Tales of MU returns December 21st, and if this goes to plan, it will continue posting once per week with some regularity.

Okay.

So.

I had a pretty decent weekend and was really ready to tackle this week head-on, but… things kept happening. First, website problems. Later, server migration to fix the website problems led to more website problems. Between those things, we found out that my boyfriend Jack’s job is ending. At the same time, we had a plumbing issue that rendered our kitchen sink unusable and necessitated a plumber visit, which we spent one day “on call for” in case they could fit us in (they couldn’t). Then I had a very worrying sore throat and drippy nose, a week before I’m visiting family with immune system and respiratory issues. Then the plumber came over along with our landlords, and when they left the back door and the door to the unfinished basement and root cellar were both wide open and we were minus one cat.

Everything else kind of paled in the face of the missing cat. We turned the house upside down and searched out every human accessible/visible nook and cranny of the unfinished, dirt floor basement and the “root cellar” which is just the hollow space under our back porch, accessible through a gap in the basement wall, and searched the obvious places for a scared cat to hunker down in the yard. We put out food, drink, and a warm bed in case she was outside and came home in the night, and then turned the house upside down again.

It turned out she was under the porch, up under the wall of the root cellar where we couldn’t reach. She was also scared out of her mind, hissing and growling at anyone’s approach. I suggested we leave her alone until she got more hungry than scared, but Sarah pointed out that a cat might be able to squeeze her way out from under the porch into the yard, and that other animals certainly could. We’d recently trapped a rat who got inside that way.

So I lured her out as far as I could with a plate of dinner and then grabbed her and carried her upstairs. We have two cats. One of them doesn’t mind being picked up and occasionally enjoys being carried around the house like a baby. This wasn’t that cat. She associates any holding with having her mouth forced open and pills shoved down her throat, and always fights. I couldn’t let go of her, because if I did she’d run back for what seemed like the safest place, and it would be that much harder to get her out of it.

Mark Twain said that in carrying a cat by the tail, you learn something that can be learned in no other way. I wasn’t carrying Tommy by the tail, of course, and I’m not sure what I learned from it, except that you can endure quite a bit doing something for the sole reason that it has to be done, which is something I knew but that perhaps I needed a refresher on. I’m grateful that it was winter and so I was wearing long sleeves. I bled in a lot of different places, but none of them deeply.

Tommy was missing long enough for me to have gone through all the likely scenarios and figured out what I would do in the event that they became necessary. It seemed impossible to me that she was in the house proper and very unlikely she was beneath it. (I did not realize how extensive the nooks back up under the porch were, as Sarah did. She’s lived in this house far longer than anyone else.) I made the back porch as welcoming as I could, even providing a pan of litter, making a bed out of her cat carrier and covering it with a blanket and putting one of my worn t-shirts in it. I was preparing to start calling shelters the next day, make flyers, and even go so far as to talk to my neighbors.

But then she was found, and then she was back in the house. She was as scared as I’d ever seen her when I carried her up, and a scared cat is an awful lot like an angry cat only angrier. I let her go as soon as we were clear of the basement and the door was mostly closed, and her tail was big and bushy like a raccoon’s, she was so on edge. I thought it would probably be more than a week before she would come near any of us, and a long time after that before she’d trust me in particular.

Five minutes later, though, she wasn’t just back to normal, she was sweeter and cuddlier and more trusting than she’s ever been.

It was the place that had scared her, and the experience of finding herself in a place full of strange sounds and strange smells. Once we brought her out of the cold, dark place, there was nothing left for her to be scared over. She nuzzled me and snuggled up to me like I was her new personal superhero.

I would have said “after finding herself trapped”, but we didn’t close the basement door the whole time she was down there. She felt trapped, evidently. Probably she found herself down there while the plumber was working and ran for cover, then didn’t trust that the coast was clear. The racket we made looking for her probably made her more anxious, and then I repeatedly stood on the back porch—inches over her head!—calling her name and holding food, sprinkling cat nip. I kind of felt like a jerk when I realized that.

When I started this post, I hadn’t intended to tell the full story of Tommy’s catabasis (Get it? Cat-abasis?) or any particular detail of the week, just mention the low-lights, but I apparently needed to get this out. It was a very emotional day. As I said, I was already making crisis plans when Sarah took a deeper look in the high, dark corners of the root cellar and found her. When I woke up Wednesday, I had a hard time believing that I didn’t need them, but I was ready to get back in and tackle the rest of the week.

…and then I found that my website was unusable.

So it goes.

Internet, I have had a heck of a week, which has been part of a heck of a few months, which has been part of a heck of a year. You know parts of it. Others aren’t mine to tell, or aren’t things I’d like to share. But I appreciate the goodwill and patience you have shown me, and all the messages asking me how I’m doing and making sure I’m alright, even when I’m not able to respond to them.

I’ve been making plans, in between dealing with the crises of the moment. Tomorrow I’m going to share them.

Mostly because of the hurried holiday shenanigans at the end of last week, I started this behind where I wanted to be on Angels of the Meanwhile, and have been in a deepening pit of depression over what seemed like yet another inevitable failure to deliver until I happened to look back at the last post on the subject just now and realized I had built a week’s padding/fallback date into it. I could wish I’d remembered that or seen it sooner so I wouldn’t have lost so much time this week to anxiety and despair.

One of the most perverse things about mood disorders is the way they make everything harder, everything worse. I have not only gotten very little done this week, but I was surprised when I looked back at my blog and realized that last week was Halloween week and I posted a bunch of creepy stories and poems, including that “Minotaur” song I’m very proud of and that creepy trick-or-treating story which I actually wrote just over a week ago. Yet I started this week literally feeling like I hadn’t done anything for weeks, and the feeling has only deepened and lengthened over time, and the less I felt like I’ve done, the less able to do anything I felt.

Weirdly, the phony feeling that I didn’t accomplish anything last week paralyzed me this week, but realizing it’s the end of this week and I haven’t actually accomplished much with it doesn’t faze me. Nothing like cycling through depression to make you realize how subjective reality is, and how much of that subjectiveness is down to chemicals and the physical state of your brain. Experiments with rats show that the level of dopamine in the brain directly impacts that brain’s ability to see effort as being fundamentally Worth It, which impacts the ability of the brain to choose it in the first place. That’s not the only thing that goes on with depression, but it’s not a small thing.

Not everything going on in my life is neurological or chemical in nature, of course (except insofar as everything about life is chemical), but the depression makes it harder to deal with the other things or work through them. Just before I started this update post, I made an emotional processing post. In the past I’ve wound up in cycles of repression because I was actively censoring myself from processing in public, which is an important coping mechanism for me. This time it wasn’t an active decision, just the same bleak pit that was stopping me from doing much of anything else.

Anyway! All is not gloom and despair in my life right now. One bright point: after years of frustration with the design trend away from physical keyboards in smart phones, I got myself a tiny handheld USB keyboard that is small enough to slide into the pocket of my cellphone case. What little I’ve accomplished this week writing-wise happened because I can now comfortably write at a reasonable pace using my phone, whether I’m lying on the floor or in the bathtub or sitting around somewhere waiting.

It’s not always convenient to have my phone propped up somewhere that I can see the screen as I’m doing this (though I’m fortunate to have an exceptional ability for reading small text far away), but I don’t always need to see what I’m writing in order to write. In fact, sometimes it’s better if I don’t. Which brings me to the other great thing about the tiny keyboard: it allows me to use ilys.com from my phone. The immediately previous blog post was written entirely there and then copied and pasted as-is into the blog as a formal test run.

So, to sum up: I’m a week behind where I wanted to be on Angels but not where I need to be to deliver by when I said I would. I haven’t written much, but I’m well situated for writing way more words way more often from here on out.

The Daily Report

Been a while, but we’re back. A few different things happened in the past few weeks that I’m not about to get into with the public, but the end result is that I’m doing better than I have been in just about every way, probably since before I moved.

I’m going to be resuming posting a creative Thing of the Day immediately. Tales of MU will resume this week and be posted towards the end of it. There will be a major update/announcement on the long-awaited Angels of the Meanwhile anthology this afternoon. I am putting the finishing touches on a “Sad Puppies Review Books” compilation e-book with some additional material (including several not previously published reviews).

The State of the Me

Best sleep last night in weeks. I did not get up early enough this morning to do my walk before work… I’m going to take a walk in the afternoon instead, and try to pick that up as part of my routine tomorrow.

Plans For Today

This morning I’m noodling around with ebooks. In the afternoon I’m going to be alternating brainstorming and writing.

…so the people who follow what’s going on solely through my blog will know that my travel went well and I arrived safely: my travel went well and arrived safely. One silver lining to this particular tropical storm system: because I arrived ahead of schedule, I’ve had more time to spend with my father.

My father describes himself as the worst writer in the family. This might be an instance of a person blessed with faint condemnation—he is certainly a masterful storyteller—but it’s certainly not a thing he feels called to do. He’s more in the business of business. The interesting thing is how much I find that the things he says about it translates to both the business side of art, and to creativity.

I told him last night I love reading his advice to his clients. If the making piles of money for himself and his customers thing he’s got going on doesn’t work out for him, he could seriously turn out some impressive motivational posters and advice books.

Between last night and this morning, our conversations have helped some things that were pretty shapeless in my mind to gel up quite a bit, and given me more confidence about some of the directions I’ve been moving in.

So that was a huge positive note to end a stressful and tumultuous time.

With most of two work days already lost and my typical post-travel fatigue and spaciness, I’m just declaring this week a casualty of the storm. I’m going to spend the day relaxing with my parents, dinking around creatively in the presence of fresh air and sunshine, and figure out what’s happening next week next week.

Quick Update

Well, the crisis I reported yesterday is past. You know, every time I rattle the cup, whether it’s for an emergency situation or not, some rando (as they say dans la belle internet) is bound to pop up with a snide comment about “e-begging” or “hipster welfare”, but 9 times out of 10, the biggest contributions come with notes attached saying things like, “I’ve been reading your work for years and it’s time I paid something back.”

The people who criticize these kinds of transactions often claim to be proponents of the free market, but they love to argue with the specific results the market provides.

But enough dwelling…

The Daily Report

So, I had been planning to announce a decision regarding my plans for next week today, but things are a bit up in the air for me right now in a very literal sense, as these plans currently hinge on the behavior of a massive weather system that’s hanging out off the eastern seaboard. Next week might end up being a light one where I’m focusing my energy elsewhere, or it might be a normal week, or it might be a mix of both. Can’t tell you.

I am very excited about a couple of different things, including a brand new story and one that I think has been percolating for well over a decade now, that I’d even written drafts of before. I’m also excited about A Wilder World. I feel like I have a game but organizing it is tricky, and that’s coming together. The morning walk is really helping me gel creatively in a way that I haven’t been.

The State of the Me

I’m feeling great… better today than I did yesterday morning, and that was pretty darn good, flu shot side effects and all.  I’m more or less back where I thought I was financially… a little surplus-y at the moment, but ending the month of October in the black and stable. Brain firing on all cylinders. Body performing adequately.

Plans For Today

I’m doing the writing equivalent of doodling until lunch. After lunch, I’m going to spend some time on A Wilder World before settling into Tales of MU at the end of the day.

The Daily Report

Big thank you to everybody who sent me items on my wishlist and/or tips in the past week. I have a good supply of the pills I need for now, which puts me on firmer ground for dealing with the other issue, which is the money.

I thought I was going to be on fairly stable ground going into October, until I checked my bank statement a moment ago… I screwed up the timing of payments during a period where depression and anxiety kept me from keeping a close eye on my bank statement, and now the balance is negative enough that it’ll swallow half of my Patreon payout for the month.

So I’ve got to keep rattling the cup. If you’ve been thinking about buying any of my ebooks, you can help out by buying them directly. Joining me on Patreon doesn’t do anything immediately, but will help out in the next few days, and it’s especially appropriate if you’ve been enjoying my Thing of the Day posts and wish for me to keep making them.

This is the serious danger of scraping by month to month, and why I’ve been holding out for when I start seeing larger Amazon payouts for at least a few months starting with the end of October. I have reason to hope that there will be an enduring lift even after the surge has died down (as this is how it’s gone in the past, with smaller surges), but even without that, just having extra money sitting in my account so I don’t have to choose between late fees/outages or overdraft charges will make a huge difference.

But that’s the future, and I have to make it there. I’ve got a couple of things on the cusp of being ready for sale that I’m going to try to push through ASAP now (like MU Omnibus VI, the last part of the first volume) in the hopes of getting more of a boost. But right now, what I really need is $200-300 in a hurry.

If you’ve particularly enjoyed my bits of poetry or stories like “The Hoard Most Precious” or you got a chuckle out of my Sad Puppy Book Reviews, please show it and chuck something in the jar.

The State of the Me

Believe it or not, I’m having a pretty good day otherwise? I got out the door on time, started work at time… I didn’t make a status post until now because I found myself with more creative momentum than (non-fictional) things to say. I’ve got enough of my daily braining pills that I can afford to brain fully on a daily basis.

Plans For Today

See above.

The Daily Report

Another exciting week of doing things creatively. I find myself with not a lot to say at the start of this week, in terms of specific goals. I’ve been thinking more in terms of priorities and obstacles/inhibitions, but it’s not very cogent yet.

The State of the Me

Today I came very close to getting out the door at 9, which is what I need to do for my “commute” to bring me back to the office at 10. I would have made it if I hadn’t managed to cut myself while getting ready. As it is, I’m at my desk at 10:30.

The walk itself went pretty well, after three days off from it. Today I celebrated my progress by buying myself a colorful new skirt on clearance at the Family Dollar. It’s a small thing, but it symbolizes that the walking isn’t just exercise but reclaimed independence.

Plans For Today

Monday is my “mental palate cleanser” day. Today, I’m devoting it to A Wilder World, which has been coming together pretty well lately albeit not in a very organized fashion.

The Daily Report

Had a small panic yesterday afternoon when all three of my active WordPress sites had similar (though ultimately separate) backend issues… before I got it sorted out, I thought there was something much deeper and scarier going on. That’s why I ended up breaking out a short for the Thing of the Day instead of the MU chapter. We’re in good shape for today, though.

I’m very pleased with the feedback some of my Things of the Day have been getting. I’ve been posting a mix of old stuff I’ve been sitting on and new stuff I’m writing, but it’s mostly stuff I feel like I’d have a hard time finding a home for but also stuff that I really enjoy writing (and reading). I know it’s not impossible to get a less-traditional story accepted for publication… I’d just rather keep creating than spend a lot of time pounding the virtual pavement.

The State of the Me

My legs started feeling really worn down early on in my walks the past few days, so I stopped and thought a bit and realized that even at my peak of activity I never took miles-long walks 7 days a week without break, but only 4-5 times a week. So I’m giving myself a break today and then through the weekend, and starting on Monday I’ll just do it weekdays. This should help me

Plans For Today

Well… there might be two things going up today, as I had a plan to unveil something today and I don’t really want to wait until next week, but I’ve also got a chapter I want to get wrapped and posted. We’ll see what happens.