Dear Reader,
The last year has had a good number of challenges. I am hoping that next year has less challenges, or at least more effective ways of dealing with them. I will continue my critical examination of The Artist's Way from Julia Cameron. It is a book that has helped me but it has some problematic elements. It's not perfect but it can be a very valuable tool for bolstering creativity during hard times. I am also going to be getting back into posting details about the world of the Umbrel Chronicles series. This will include things like folk lore / historical events. I hope to get so far as to be producing maps of locations but my cartography skills are terrible, so I don't think that will be happening immediately.
This year, I will be putting my library card to use and trying to get my hands on new and interesting books to read. As per usual, if you have any suggestions, let me know in the comments. I am putting on hold the serious push in posting until after the break is over and my kids are back at school. I will be using the time between now and then to plan out blog posts and related materials. In my craft of writing weekly posts, I am going to talk about things like bullet journals and book bibles this month. Namely because I will be working to get my writing bullet journal and my Umbrel Chronicle's book bible into good order. There will be pics posted to go along with it all.
I hope that your new year is happy, prosperous, and productive. ♥
Tuesday, December 31, 2019
Saturday, December 7, 2019
Technical difficulties
My laptop has been acting off kilter. This is making things challenging. If I vanish from the blogosphere for a little while, it is because my tech support (aka my husband) and I are trying to fix the damn thing. I may need an old priest and a young priest at the rate things are going.
Tuesday, December 3, 2019
Dear Hacker.
I honestly am amused and almost flattered that you attempted to hijack my account. Kindly go fuck yourself and may a plague of fleas infest your crotch.
AW: Morning Blog 68
I feel like I am heading into a mixed episode. I'm grumpy, irritable, and unable to sit still. I feel pressured to do all the things. I am both anxious about everything and not anxious at the same time. I hate mixed episodes almost as much as I hate depressive episodes. I have all this energy and zero focus. I am going to try to keep writing through this.
I am feeling angry with the universe. Part of that anger is irrational and generalized. Part of that anger is over the fact that I am disabled. Part of that anger is with the fact that my brain doesn't work as well as it used to. I feel like it is unfair that I got a college degree and started a career in education only to lose it because of the bipolar. I barely manage to hang on with the daily tasks of being a stay at home mom. It was a lot harder when the kids were smaller. Fortunately, we have a pretty good support network in Beloved's side of the family.
I still get filled with anger and spite when some algorithm decides to spit out a bunch of college advertisements at me. I would love to go back to school and get my master's degree. My plan was to get my masters in teaching after I finished off the few credits I was short for the dual English and Physics degree I was working on. I graduated with a liberal arts degree because I was a year short in both programs to graduate undergrad with that dual degree. And I wasn't able to put both down as my concentration in the liberal arts degree, never mind the fact that I was so evenly split either one could have been my concentration. I went with English as my concentration because I knew that my strengths were in using the written word.
I got out of college and after a spell found myself working in education. I fell in love with it. I tell you, there's nothing like watching some one light up as they grasp a concept they had been struggling with. I decided that I was going to somehow go back to school for a master's and my teaching certification. I figured it was something I could do in my free time before I had kids. Then I had kids. I figured that when they got older and were able to fend for themselves a bit, I could go back to work in education and maybe get that certification.
Then came postpartum depression and psychosis. Then came the bipolar diagnosis. Everything was severe enough that I was labeled as completely disabled due to mental illness by my psychiatrist. On one hand, this was a good thing because it allowed me to have my student loans forgiven. On the other hand, this was a bad thing because I truly am in that state. And the worst part is, inside me, I have the person I was fully aware that mental illness is the reason why I plunge into deep depression for months at a time and I am helpless to do anything about it.
My inconsistency blogging is because of my struggle with depression. On my bad days, it is a struggle to get out of bed and take care of things. It is especially hard when it is during a time that the kids are off from school. I forget about things like self-care. It isn't that I can't be bothered, I just forget that I am a priority in the brain fog of trying to stay on top of everything. Blogging and writing, even my therapy focused writing, gets lost in the shuffle. I feel guilty about being sick like this. Beloved tells me that he knows that I'm not doing this for fun. I still feel guilt for not being able to perform my daily tasks and manage my life as I had before the bipolar hit me like a freight train.
I am feeling angry with the universe. Part of that anger is irrational and generalized. Part of that anger is over the fact that I am disabled. Part of that anger is with the fact that my brain doesn't work as well as it used to. I feel like it is unfair that I got a college degree and started a career in education only to lose it because of the bipolar. I barely manage to hang on with the daily tasks of being a stay at home mom. It was a lot harder when the kids were smaller. Fortunately, we have a pretty good support network in Beloved's side of the family.
I still get filled with anger and spite when some algorithm decides to spit out a bunch of college advertisements at me. I would love to go back to school and get my master's degree. My plan was to get my masters in teaching after I finished off the few credits I was short for the dual English and Physics degree I was working on. I graduated with a liberal arts degree because I was a year short in both programs to graduate undergrad with that dual degree. And I wasn't able to put both down as my concentration in the liberal arts degree, never mind the fact that I was so evenly split either one could have been my concentration. I went with English as my concentration because I knew that my strengths were in using the written word.
I got out of college and after a spell found myself working in education. I fell in love with it. I tell you, there's nothing like watching some one light up as they grasp a concept they had been struggling with. I decided that I was going to somehow go back to school for a master's and my teaching certification. I figured it was something I could do in my free time before I had kids. Then I had kids. I figured that when they got older and were able to fend for themselves a bit, I could go back to work in education and maybe get that certification.
Then came postpartum depression and psychosis. Then came the bipolar diagnosis. Everything was severe enough that I was labeled as completely disabled due to mental illness by my psychiatrist. On one hand, this was a good thing because it allowed me to have my student loans forgiven. On the other hand, this was a bad thing because I truly am in that state. And the worst part is, inside me, I have the person I was fully aware that mental illness is the reason why I plunge into deep depression for months at a time and I am helpless to do anything about it.
My inconsistency blogging is because of my struggle with depression. On my bad days, it is a struggle to get out of bed and take care of things. It is especially hard when it is during a time that the kids are off from school. I forget about things like self-care. It isn't that I can't be bothered, I just forget that I am a priority in the brain fog of trying to stay on top of everything. Blogging and writing, even my therapy focused writing, gets lost in the shuffle. I feel guilty about being sick like this. Beloved tells me that he knows that I'm not doing this for fun. I still feel guilt for not being able to perform my daily tasks and manage my life as I had before the bipolar hit me like a freight train.
Monday, December 2, 2019
AW: Morning Blog 67
It is disgusting the number of plot holes that I have hanging out in my serial stories. Seriously, Swiss cheese has less holes in it. I am kinda frustrated because in the process of cleaning things up, I have misplaced my notes for how I was going to fix those. Which means, I am either going to continue writing these serial stories by the seat of my pants or I have to sit down and make an outline based off of all of the previous posts.
Dacia's War probably has the least number of plot holes. No, that's not entirely accurate. My science fiction short series would. But that thing is being drawn off of a whole long term series of short fiction pieces that I have been writing in bursts over the last twenty years. I'm thinking about taking all of those short pieces and slapping them together into a single book. The problem is I have parts of the story on the computer, in notebooks, and scattered across my journals. Basically, the same problem that I have trying to put together the Umbrel Chronicles book bible.
I started laughing when I discovered that Xenogen is a real company. They incorporated five years after I had started writing my short stories. Their mission statement isn't too far off from what I predicted. I highly doubt that they are a shadow government bent on world domination through genetic manipulation and general bastardy. I kinda wonder if somebody read one of my shorts and decided the company name sounded cool. This was back when Triond was a thing and I was posting up the science fiction serial up there.
I'm still annoyed that I never got my money from Triond before they went under. I was at 49.95, .05 beneath the $50 cut off for getting a check. I'm trying to decide how aggressively I want to blog on Keen when my blogging on Keen doesn't really get me any callers or chat clients. Keen, however, seems to be going the way of Triond in a slow fashion. I'm not sure how to fund my book production efforts. I thought that Triond was going to do it. Then Google's analytics thing called Panda got rolled out and Triond took a dirt nap. Keen isn't really a place for blogging for money as much as hoping that your blog post drives traffic to your listing as a psychic reader. I haven't produced as much material over there because I am frustrated with how poorly that performs. At least here with Blogger, I can write whatever I want and talk about the other projects I am working on. Keen nukes posts that take you away from Keen's site and posts that try to promote non-Keen projects you have in the works.
Dacia's War probably has the least number of plot holes. No, that's not entirely accurate. My science fiction short series would. But that thing is being drawn off of a whole long term series of short fiction pieces that I have been writing in bursts over the last twenty years. I'm thinking about taking all of those short pieces and slapping them together into a single book. The problem is I have parts of the story on the computer, in notebooks, and scattered across my journals. Basically, the same problem that I have trying to put together the Umbrel Chronicles book bible.
I started laughing when I discovered that Xenogen is a real company. They incorporated five years after I had started writing my short stories. Their mission statement isn't too far off from what I predicted. I highly doubt that they are a shadow government bent on world domination through genetic manipulation and general bastardy. I kinda wonder if somebody read one of my shorts and decided the company name sounded cool. This was back when Triond was a thing and I was posting up the science fiction serial up there.
I'm still annoyed that I never got my money from Triond before they went under. I was at 49.95, .05 beneath the $50 cut off for getting a check. I'm trying to decide how aggressively I want to blog on Keen when my blogging on Keen doesn't really get me any callers or chat clients. Keen, however, seems to be going the way of Triond in a slow fashion. I'm not sure how to fund my book production efforts. I thought that Triond was going to do it. Then Google's analytics thing called Panda got rolled out and Triond took a dirt nap. Keen isn't really a place for blogging for money as much as hoping that your blog post drives traffic to your listing as a psychic reader. I haven't produced as much material over there because I am frustrated with how poorly that performs. At least here with Blogger, I can write whatever I want and talk about the other projects I am working on. Keen nukes posts that take you away from Keen's site and posts that try to promote non-Keen projects you have in the works.
Sunday, December 1, 2019
AW: Morning Blog 66
I am feeling pretty discouraged. I thought that my NaNoWriMo project was going to wrap up at 30k, then at 50k, and then at 100k. It's the day after the end of NaNoWriMo and I am 101k words into this project with no sign of end in sight. I'm frustrated because I WANTED to write something like a romance story / fairytale. What I've got is a mess of an adventure story with politics and a romance theme in the background.
It is bitterly ironic that when I have been trying to write over the last month, my kids were especially distracting. But right now, they're just wrapped up in blankets hanging out on the couch listening to train sound effects. Why couldn't they just calm down and let me write over the last few weeks? Ugh.
The weather sucks today. We're under a winter storm advisory right now. It was posted last night as starting from 4 am to 3 pm. It is now extended to 7 pm tomorrow. It has just transitioned from rain to snow. I suspect that there is a fine layer of ice over everything right now. Maybe we won't have to worry about losing power.
It is bitterly ironic that when I have been trying to write over the last month, my kids were especially distracting. But right now, they're just wrapped up in blankets hanging out on the couch listening to train sound effects. Why couldn't they just calm down and let me write over the last few weeks? Ugh.
The weather sucks today. We're under a winter storm advisory right now. It was posted last night as starting from 4 am to 3 pm. It is now extended to 7 pm tomorrow. It has just transitioned from rain to snow. I suspect that there is a fine layer of ice over everything right now. Maybe we won't have to worry about losing power.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)