About that depression post earlier ...

 I am depressed right now. It interferes with my functioning on a number of levels. It really messes with my ability to concentrate and come up with creative work. I know that I promised all y'all an update to the serial stories. I feel real bad that I can't even remember where I was going with the plot of any of them right now. I just have a blank in my head where that plotline was. I look at my notes and they just strike me as gibberish. They make no sense to me as I read them. Sure, there's an internal logic to them but my depressed brain just can't grasp that logic and take the bullet points to paragraphs.

I'm going to try, going forward, when I get caught in the grips of depressive spells or other mental health struggles due to my being disabled to blog about it here (and on my other blogs). It is less about the fact that I want to wave a flag and get attention and pity for my situation and more about I'm trying to keep you abreast of what is going on over on this end of the internet. I'm trying to grind my way through these spells and post content that's genuine and, hopefully, interesting.

You may have picked up from my Morning Pages posts that I have a lot of trauma that I'm working through. I've been in some form of therapy for most of my adult life. I've a diagnosis of complex-posttraumatic stress disorder and bipolar II, with a side of seasonal affective disorder. We're entering into the time of year that is really hard for me. There's a lot of trauma-versary dates coming up. There's the stress of being estranged from my toxic side of the family. I'm still mourning the deaths of my beloved grandparents who basically taught me how to be a decent person despite all the crap going down in my parents' house. Between those two facts, the holidays suck more than the fact that we're all basically forced to listen to Bing Crosby 24/7 whenever we go out in public until sometime around the middle of January.

This blog is not going to turn into a disgorging of trauma. I've got my therapy journals for that work. But it may come up from time to time because that's what's on my mind. I'm going to do my best to keep that rambling to the Morning Pages. My mental functioning right now is impaired. I'm exhausted despite a full night of sleep last night. I'm terrified that there's going to be horrible consequences for this post. And I feel like I should just give up on everything because I feel like nothing's ever going to get better. Depression is a beast. Medication helps, it keeps me from being at that place where I've got suicidal thoughts running around in my head. But 'happy pills' don't make you happy. They just take the edge off of the sword stuck in your heart. You're still pumping out emotional blood and wounded, but it doesn't cut deeper than it already has.

The esteemed Chuck Tingle calls this 'the call of the lonesome train'. It's a pretty good metaphor for this feeling. You feel alone and like there's no hope. Because I'm a fighter by nature, I just grimly put up my shield and push forward through the dragur of trauma memories and fucked up brain chemistry. Eventually, I'll get through this. It's just going to be ugly and painful in the process.

AW: Post No. 90 - Fuck Depression.

 Seasonal affective disorder sucks. It's got a shitty acronym: SAD. It screwed up your brain chemistry and strips you of your will to do anything. It's just part of the awful genetic grab bag that I got when I was born and I want to chuck it into the Sun. Right now, I want to just laydown and sleep until my brain is fixed, but it doesn't work that way. I feel like everything's rather hopeless. I kinda want to cry, even though I don't know if this is because of SAD or because the SAD is triggering emotional flashbacks to the abuse that I dealt with as a kid. Either way, it's bullshit.

I keep trying to cheer myself up. I keep failing. It's making me feel like Sisyphus. I can't eat my feelings because I have diabetes. I can't attempt to use the mood booster of any form of sex because when I'm depressed, sex triggers flashbacks to multiple sexual assaults that I've suffered. My hobbies feel like a waste of time and resources. I can practically hear my parents telling me that I should stop wasting my time of idle bullshit and get back to work. I can almost hear them telling me that my writing is a waste of resources and valuable time and I should get back to work.

When they realized that I managed to write my first novel while I was in high school they changed their damn tune from 'this is a waste of time, get back to work' to 'go publish and make us money.' When I went off to college, they were sure that it was going to land me a good job and I could write as a second job. They looked at me and saw a meal ticket. It wasn't the first time they objectified me.

Mom was trying to marry me off to people she met via telephone sales. The night before my wedding to Beloved, she was trying to convince me to call it all off because she had a rich Texan who was looking for a wife who could cook. I was a brood mare in their eyes that they wanted to auction off. My life had no meaning beyond that to them. They were furious that I left N-, though they put on a decent game face of being concerned when I told them what N- had done to me (for about 2 weeks). Then it turned into "You need to get over it." and "You need to stop saying these things about N-, that's slander. You're just doing it because you're mad at him."

Apparently rape and repeated sexual assault doesn't count as a legitimate reason to break up with someone and that you're not supposed to talk about it ever. As this is the time of year that most of those assaults happened, I've been dealing with flashbacks (mainly the emotional kind) and feeling horrible on top of the fact that SAD is screwing up my brain chemistry. So, I am depressed and anxious. I'm trying to do things that help but nothing seems to help.

I just feel like I should give up on it all. I don't have the spoons for the hustle culture of most indie authors. Being disabled makes that hard on a good day and all but impossible on a bad day. I don't even know what in hell I'm doing trying to convince people to buy  my books. I keep finding myself thinking about the Communications instructor I had at college who told me that I was the worst student she had ever seen at attempting to write ad-copy and nothing I could do was going to convince her other wise. She said that I should just give up on the idea of making a career out of writing because I was too academic in my work and that my audience was going to be lost after the first sentence.

Kinda hard to recover from that. Especially on the heels of another instructor telling me to stop imitating E.A. Poe and write my own work. When people you respected and were outside of the abusive environment you grew up in tell you that you should just give up and focus on something else, it's fucking painful. Now I'm disabled and I can't just force my way forward. I sit here and see others have success and I'm glad for them but I wonder if the problem is I can't write ad copy and my work is just too boring for the audience. It's depressing.

Friendly reminder to Indie Authors and Publishers

Lulu.com has a history of shady business practices. They’ve failed to deliver books and other goods while taking your money. They have completely decimated the interior format of books in the process of setting up the book to the point that it is just a hopeless mess. And they misrepresent themselves as having “good customer service”. They’re becoming notorious for this behavior.

I have stopped working with them because of the fact that they failed to deliver about $100 worth of product over the course of the several years that I was working with them. And they marked the product as delivered or pending *years* after the order was placed and *never arrived*. I strongly advise you to avoid Lulu.com to save yourself and your customers heartbreak down the road.

I am still searching for an alternative to publishing via Amazon because I find their business practices and culture to be questionable. But, Amazon doesn’t screw up your book and print it when your proofs looked fine. Amazon doesn’t eliminate entire sections from your work at random. And, most importantly, Amazon gets the books to readers.

As we’re coming up on the end of NaNoWriMo and I’m sure a bunch of hardy souls have books they want to get into print, don’t go through Lulu.com. They’re not the business they were five years ago, back when they actually were trustworthy and got things right for a good deal. Don’t be fooled by their slick looking front page. The process of uploading, formatting, and getting books done has changed and is far from user friendly. Look for another service, trust me, it’ll be a lot easier.

Craft of Writing: Using heated emotions to make a cool piece of work.

 Dear Reader,

We all have emotions. Some of them can get pretty intense. Instead of bottling those feelings up, grab a pen and a scrap of paper. Write down what comes to mind until you feel calm. By the end you might have a really gripping scene for a story, a powerful poem, or a pile or word vomit that you can just burn and feel better about. In any case, it's nifty to do this with these feelings because you're engaged in transmuting something that is purely in your head/heart into something physical.

You don't have to limit yourself to words. There are countless ways to express intense feelings through art. Some of my most active and intense paintings have come out of my trying to create my way out of a depressive funk and process psychological trauma. If your medium is clay, you can make some awesome sculptures. Heck, you could create a sculpture that represents the cause of your vexation and then destroy it. It's really cathartic to be honest.

The best thing about taking your emotions and creating things out of them is the fact that it's a safe way to express some things that society in general are squicked by. Intense anger is probably the biggest squick factor for a lot of people. Making art out of your feelings is cathartic and you end up with something pretty cool that you get to choose what happens with it. People can look at what you've made and have no idea what inspired it. They can debate until the cows come home just what your painting means, when all you were doing was throwing paint on the canvas until the urge to throw something finally went away. You don't have to tell them that was what was going on. You can just smile and keep it as your little secret.

AW: Morning Pages No. 88

 Last week was chaotic. I was able to steal some time for writing but when ever I went to do blog work the kids kept interrupting me. It was vexing. And then there was the cooking for turkey day. And the drama of turkey day. It all served to remind me that I am really coming to dislike this damn season. It seems to heighten the selfish sense of entitlement that people have. It brings out the gluttonous tendencies of people who preach diet culture, because it's the holidays and it would be rude to turn down every single dish offered to you. And then there are the damn bell ringers trying to guilt you into giving them money for what's actually a scam.

Salvation Army is anti-LGBT+ and pretty much against anyone who isn't their flavor of Christianity. If I had a penny for every time I've had the thought of putting a bell ringer who is telling me that I don't have the charitable spirit of the holidays because I didn't give them all my loose change into a wall, I'd be rich beyond my dreams. If I had a penny for every time I had gotten looks for not heaping my plate with something from every dish on the table, I would be almost as rich. And we won't get into how much money I'd theoretically have if I had decided to 'just make nice' with some of my relatives because 'it's the holidays and you only get one family.'

If you're no onboard the cheerful train, you're scorned and reviled. You're told that you are what's wrong with the holidays. You are told that you're the one bringing down everyone's spirits because you're not joyfully singing along with Bing Crosby. Gods help you if you actually announce that you hate this time of year. Then you get people trying to convert you to liking it by love bombing you and attempting to learn the prefect present to bribe you with.

And oh boy does it get messy if you're not Christian. The cultural attitude that Christianity is the default for the US makes me want to put people through walls. I'm not a violent person despite the violence that I write into my books. But that attitude though. I've had a lot of bad experiences with people who waved the flag of Christianity and I'm doing what I can to protect my kids from it. I don't want my sons to worry about some asshole trying to light them on fire because they're not Christian. (It happened to me, I got even. The guy didn't mess with me again or start randomly flipping switched on equipment in the physics lab. A little electricity goes a long ways.)

Why in fuck can't people just let others celebrate their holidays in peace? Why is it that between now and the end of the year, you will find some of the most aggressive conversion campaigns going on? I don't know. I do know, however, that between people actively telling me that I and my family are going to be tortured for eternity because we don't believe in their god and businesses saying that they're only recognizing the Christian and (occasionally) Jewish holidays that it's all bullshit. It is a season that is actively hostile to non-Christians.

Only Easter is worse. Because there is no focus on gift giving but you get all the rest of the guilt trip about family stuff and how you should 'forgive' people who have done you wrong in horrible ways because they're family. It doesn't matter if you are still wounded, making them feel better about it is more important. I hate that. I'm so sick of holiday music. I'm so tired of the pressure to give the fanciest things. I'm disgusted with the gluttony as a recovered anorexic who happens to have diabetes. And I'm furious with the people who want to act like everything's 'normal' when there's still a goddamn pandemic going on.

/rant

Craft of Writing: Stolen Moments.

 Dear Reader,

It's a busy time of year right now. It's hard to find time to write, make art, or otherwise create something. This is where you have to get sneaky. Keep a mini-notebook with you to put down your ideas. Get a mini-sketchbook and one of those awesome pens that are 4 colors in one. (They make a 10 color variety but the barrel of the pen is HUGE.) When you have those odd idle moments that you are not working on something very important, indulge your creativity and sketch out a stick figure picture or write a silly limerick. Do things on a small scale in those stolen moment. Eventually, life will calm down and you can get back to your Great Work. You may find that the random bits you came up with in the stolen moments are useful and can be incorporated into it.

AW: Morning pages No. 87

 It's technically still morning so the title works, right? I'm not entirely sure what to write today. I feel badly that I didn't get pages done yesterday and Saturday. It was a rough weekend. I had to face some hard truths about life and I was emotionally done with the day about about noon. I'm still super upset about the fact that my vision issues (I have two astigmatisms in one eye and one in the other.) have rendered me a hazard on the road for night driving. The signs when the headlights hit them are so bright they temporarily blind me. When the headlights of other vehicles hit me, they temporarily blind me and I have to pull over to wait for a few minutes until I get my night vision back.

I asked the ophthalmologist I saw back at the beginning of the year if my progressively degrading night vision was somehow tied to the astigmatisms and they answered no. I went in for them to do an initial series of tests on my eyes to see if I have or am developing glaucoma. The night vision question is basically a matter of genetics and there isn't much that can be done about it. I'll be going back in to see this eye doctor sometime in February 2022. When I do, I'm going to ask if laser surgery can correct the astigmatism. I know that my aunt was developing cataracts in her eyes and had it done, the end result was just about complete 20/20 vision.

I'm depressed about the whole situation. I'm also kinda scared about the glaucoma thing. I've come to realize that I am terrified about the prospect of losing my vision. Way back about three years ago, my blood sugar numbers were real high and they had me functionally blind. Everything was blurry. Somehow, I managed to keep the household running. As my blood sugar got under control, the vision situation cleared up. But it was a terrifying experience. 

I now have a resurgence of that fear that I'm losing my vision because of the astigmatism stuff. It doesn't help that I have an anxiety disorder, either. But, I feel like my world has gotten smaller and more limited again because I can't drive after dark. It's not like I have a lot of places to go at night. But during this time of year, I can't just take the car for the day and go do stuff. Because when it's time to pick up Beloved from work, the sun is down and it's pretty awful to be driving at night. It's even worse if it's raining or snowing. I feel defeated and like there's nothing I can do.

AW: Morning Pages

 So, I sat down on the couch just to take a break because I had a stress headache. Next thing I know, I wake up two hours later and I'm two hours behind schedule after starting two hours ahead of schedule. This seems to be the theme of 2021. Sit down, work hard, and everything gets fucked up anyways. I am very frustrated and angry with myself. Which doesn't help anything at all.

I was raised in a household that taught me that self care was selfish, vanity, and morally bad for me to do. It was fine for other people but I was taking away from the collective good of the family by taking time to tend to my own needs. Same approach was taken towards food. If I wanted to eat, I ate last after everyone else at the table because my parents decided that I was a glutton. How much food I took was closely monitored and I'd be punished if I took more than a minimum amount (which seemed to get less as time went on). The line that I was told was that I was taking food out of my brothers' mouths and starving them every time I went to have a snack or eat more than that minimum amount I was allowed.

Bitterly, the rest of the family would get seconds and there'd be scraps left because my father would heap up his plate with dinner. I got that minimum first portion and that was it. The only exception was holidays and when we were eating somewhere aside from home. Even then, however, I got the evil eye if I took more than what I was usually allowed if we were at a restaurant. Then my parents wondered as I was in college why I had an eating disorder. They talked about how weird I was as a child that I would stand in the pantry and look at the food in the jars. When I started to finally learn how to eat properly, my parents talked about how I was getting fat. The commentary while I was pregnant was pretty awful too.

Now they wonder why I don't talk to them. When you're constantly being put down for just trying to meet your basic needs, you tend to not want to deal with the people who were giving you grief for it after you get away from them. When the line you hear constantly is that you're a bad person for having needs, you tend to want to run like hell from them at the first opportunities. Now, my family was poor as I was growing up and food was somewhat scarce. But, if my parents had swallowed their pride and actually got help, we'd have had more than enough food.

When the weather was nice, I took to sneaking out of the house to visit relatives who fed me. When it was harvest time, I'd wander the fields before they were brought in gleaning fresh peas to make my stomach stop growling. I'd go through the old apple orchard and eat wormy apples (cutting out the bad parts with my pocket knife). Or I'd liberate some of the produce from my grandparents' garden. My grandmother would joke that she knew that things were ripe when her 'rabbit' came visiting.

Diabetes has made food a fine line to walk. I struggle with the eating disorder again. I struggle with blood sugar numbers that climb high when I'm sick or stressed out. I've gotten bad advice from professionals that basically encouraged disordered eating. It makes it really hard to stick to the healthy eating habits that I was taught by Beloved over the course of a number of years before I could sit down with a sandwich and not feel guilty for eating all of it. I'm rambling and none of it is pleasant. I apologize. I've been stressed out over a number of things and am dreading lunch. That's why today's word vomit revolves around this. I'll try to come up with something more pleasant tomorrow.

Books Update!

 Dear Reader,

I am doing NaNoWriMo again this year. I'm up to 41k and my word count goal is 60k. My problem is that I am a little over half through my plot arc for the darn book. I don't think I can wrap it up in 19k. Not a bad problem to have, but it is exasperating.

Book Seven is parked on the editing bench because I have to completely rewrite a few major sections. This is vexing but not as bad as when it looked like I had lost a third of the book (if not more). The plot went off the rails as I was working on it and now I have to trim back the story and try to get the major points of the plot back into line because the next book depends on it. I figure in a month or two, I will be at the line edits stage on this book.

I am in the planning stages of Book Eight. I don't think I am going to get it done next year if this year's shenanigans is any indication of how next year is going to go. The goal I am shooting for is 2023 holiday season as the release date for Book Eight. I don't have a title yet for Book Eight, but I'm not going to worry about that until I have the rough draft done.

Aside from the work that I have been doing on my fiction, a new non-fiction book just dropped this week. It is under my pen name Lady Brythwen Sinclair. It is a devotional guide for people who are devotees of the Norse god Loki. I have several other non-fiction books of a religious nature up on Amazon under that pen name. I also have another blog under that pen name that I'm trying to get back to updating on a daily basis again. 

Here's the link to the devotional if you're curious: 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09LGWWS9N

And here's a link to the religious blog that I have under my pen name:

http://veiledwitch.blogspot.com/

Serial Stories on Hold.

 Dear Reader,

Because I'm participating in NaNoWriMo, I am putting the three serial stories that are on here on hold until December. I know that it's been a long wait for more about the adventures of Halthor and more about just what Lady Al-Uzza is going to find when she reaches Acidavia. My poor health and ton of life getting in the way over the last several months made it really hard to work on this stuff. Even the pulpy science fiction story got lost in the shuffle. (I did, however, find when I was cleaning the original story of Angel and Dregan that dates back to 1998. Don't let Elon Musk fool you, I came up with the Neuralink as part of that story long before he started talking about the technology. I just have rephrased it as neural-link because I can't afford a lawyer if that guy decides to get snippy. I'll drop in bits of that original story as flashbacks in the current story as it goes forward.)

When December hits, I'm going to put the NaNoWriMo projects to bed and get back to work on here. It'll be a bit rough at first, but as I hit my groove it should even out.

New Settings Section. :)

 Dear Reader,

I mentioned a while back that I was going to be combining the Flora & Fauna feature with the Settings feature in my weekly topics. What does this mean for you? Well, I hope to be hitting the following points going forward (provided life doesn't screw with me like it has over the last 48 hours):

• Descriptions of flora and fauna that can be found in this world, along with their uses (This will include pictures as I can get organized enough to sketch them.)
  
  
• Details of the Poisoner's Notebook - a subsection of the flora and fauna stuff that focuses exclusively on poisoning and nefarious things. 
  
  
• Place descriptions that are relevant to the plot of various books as well as just interesting locations (I will attempt to make maps but right now my cartography skills are hideously bad.)
  
  
• Character sketches of major characters in the series and occasional random ones that are just fun to write (I am still debating if I am going to work up a character sheet for each in the style of old school D&D.)

While I am enjoying creating this material (because it helps me brainstorm things to put into the books), I am super excited about the concept of people taking things that I have created here and using them to create their own fanfiction, fantasy gaming campaigns, or artwork. I feel that my books are an open-world experience. As I add to the series, you are following the main plotline of the story. There will be side stories (like the serial stories on here) that will come out to cover supporting characters or just be adventures through the world. 

I am issuing a formal invitation to you to join me in creating this dynamic world. It is as much yours as it is mine once the books are in your hands.

AW: Morning Pages No. 85

 I don't know what to put down here. I feel like I failed yesterday because I didn't really get any writing done. I got some of my journal work finished but only about half over the course of the entire day. I was running on about 4 hours of sleep yesterday. Every time I tried to rest, construction noises were coming from the trailer park next door as contractors were fixing a busted bay window or working on other random stuff. My brain just was so scattered I couldn't focus.

At the same time, my anxiety wasn't doing so great. I've some relatives who are struggling with some really hard stuff and all I can do is stand on the sidelines and hope my advice is helpful. And then there's the thing that really has my anxiety going full bore. The man who sexually assaulted me back in 2003-2004 got out of prison. He's on parole. This means that I know he's being monitored seriously. At the same time, I'm terrified that he's going to come find me and hurt me again. It is bubbling at the back of my mind, this terror that C- is going to show up on my doorstep, force his way in, and assault me again.

Mind you, I have moved multiple times since then and I have a different phone number. Hell, I got married and have a new last name. Doesn't stop the irrational fear that he's going to use one of those websites to look people up and try to come after me. I keep telling myself that I'm safe but it feels like a lie. I keep telling myself he has no idea where I live or how to get ahold of me.

At the same time, I feel like on some level I'm morally complicit in the crime he committed to land himself in prison and the assaults that went unreported because I didn't break his neck when I had the opportunity. I feel like I bear some of the responsibility of his actions because I didn't report him to the police when he assaulted me. I feel like I bear some of the responsibility of his actions because I didn't put a butcher's knife into his chest when he raped me.

I know these feelings are irrational. I know that they're survivor's guilt. I can't shake them, though. I can repress feelings like a pro but when something like this comes along, they all fly out of the box like a Jack-in-the-Box from hell. The worst part of it all is the tremendous amount of shame that I feel over that whole deal. I feel like I should have known he was going to do it. I am a survivor of sexual assault multiple times over. I should have recognized the warning signs.

The problem is that he managed to hit my c-ptsd buttons and I spaced out. Memories of what happen come back to me in pieces. I have things that scare me for no 'real' reason. I know it's because my brain is protecting me from the violence he perpetrated on me. At the same time, I feel like I should have stabbed him to death when he crawled into my bed to assault me when he thought I was asleep. (At the time, I knew something wasn't right and was having flashbacks to the assaults that happened when I was in high school. The only way that I was able to fall asleep was with a knife under my pillow. When he assaulted me, I laid there gripping the knife frozen with fear, unable to bring myself to draw the blade and defend myself. On the flip side, he physically overpowered me a number of times, so that might have put me into greater danger. Either way, I still feel like I should have killed him when I had the opportunity.)

Craft of Writing: Timed Free Writing.

 Dear Reader,

I've moved the Craft of Writing segment to Mondays because the weekends are just too full of family business for me to find time to type much of anything up. The best I manage is a grocery list most weekends. I'm trying to carve out time to get other things going but it's not working so well. Preamble made, let's move on to the planned elements of this post.

Free writing is a big thing for me. Some people call it a 'brain dump' and use it as a time to put down all the things running around in their mind. Other people don't exactly have a name for it but they use free writing to lay the ground work of future projects and develop nuggets of gold that will be dropped into future stories. It's a combination of the two in my case.

It is pretty easy to get caught up in the process and lose about an hour of time to just rambling on the page. To prevent that, I bought myself a little sand timer. It's got bright pink sand in it (why not get the one with my favorite color in it, right?) and the time it runs for is ten minutes. I'm still getting the hang of writing out things like blog posts in ten minutes. My typing speed is slowly creeping up. So is the number of typos that I have to edit out. But, using the sand timer to keep me on task really helps.

I force myself to keep working as much as I may want to dive into a research rabbit hole to learn everything the internet has to offer about some obscure thing. It restricts how long I have to work and, as such, opens up time for me to get other writing projects done or at least making some headway on them. It also helps me get a bit more control over my schedule. Timed free writing is some days the easiest bit of timed writing. Other days, I feel like I should just write "I hate this." for the entire time limit because I can't think of anything. (Usually, those days, I'm not fully awake and am still on my first cup of coffee.)

On the whole, I highly recommend free writing as a tool to get ideas out on the page. And I really strongly encourage timed free writing (it doesn't have to be ten minutes) to help you focus on what you're working on and avoid losing time for other projects and responsibilities. After all, you don't want to be in the position I was last week when I wasn't using my timer and the kids were asking me when I was going to do the dishes. That was a little awkward.

AW: Morning Pages No. 83

 I do not have enough coffee in my body to make my brain work at 100%. I might be a bit dependent on it now. Coffee is a comfort 'food' for me. At college, I suppose we drank it by the gallon. Good coffee, bad coffee, instant coffee ... it didn't matter, we drank it to power our way through all night study sessions, wake up after said sessions, and keep moving through the day. I supplemented my prodigious coffee intake with soda as well. It was a common sight to see me bolting across campus to class with a bottle of soda in hand and my backpack bouncing on my shoulder.

You'd think that I had a number of bottles of soda explode when I opened them after such treatment but it only happened once. And the situation was so ridiculous that my instructor was laughing too hard to continue lecture for a moment. There I was, sliding into my usual seat in the front row on the extreme right about five minutes late for lecture. I had slept through my morning alarm and missed breakfast. So, on my way through the building to class, I paused at the campus book shop to buy a bottle of soda and a big ol' bag of gummy bears. I then ran up three flights of stairs. (It was a minor miracle that I didn't trip and die.)

I got to the classroom during a pause in instruction as the professor was writing stuff on the blackboard. I snuck in and slid into my seat. As I did so, I attempted to be stealthy about opening my morning wake up beverage. The bottle hissed for a bit. Thinking it was safe, I then fully opened the bottle. A plume of soda went up into the air and landed in the open bag of gummy bears instead of hitting the floor or going all over me. The instructor had turned at the sound of my releasing the pressure off of the soda bottle to say something to me about it. She watched the minor drama unfold and my look of utter dismay at the cola soaked gummy bears. Then she started laughing. A few of my classmates looked at me in confusion. 

Once lecture resumed, I thought I was safe. On my way out of the classroom, the instructor stopped me and said, "You really need a more nutritious breakfast than candy and soda." I blushed and stammered something about not having time to stop at the dormitory's cafeteria. Then she said, "Well, next time, make it a smaller bottle of soda this way you can drink it from the bag if it happens again." I regularly had similar mishaps and I think I got a reputation among the faculty and staff of where I attended college as the one to watch for a chuckle. The times where my clumsiness made me into a bit of a buffoon were plenty. The times where I narrowly avoided disaster despite my clumsiness were equally frequent.

AW: Morning Pages No. 82

 I am attempting to complete this page in ten minutes. I have this nifty little sand timer that is exactly ten minutes long. It's got bright pink sand inside it and the kids want to play with it all the time. I keep it up on a higher shelf so that it doesn't go missing when I'm looking to use it. They are, however, getting taller and that tactic isn't going to work for much longer.

I'm really not sure what to write about here today. I feel badly that I haven't blogged in so long. I fell guilty about it, to be honest. I don't feel like these morning pages really count. Still, I'm trying so that has to count for something.

I'm still working on NaNoWriMo. My word count is currently 33k and change. I'm at about the halfway mark for my goal. I will confess that I am cheating a little bit because I started this project last month. That, however is my work-around for the chaos that losing a week around Thanksgiving is going to cause. My kids were off from school yesterday so I didn't get much writing or anything else that I wanted to do done. Now that they're at school, I'm forcing myself to stick to my damn schedule that I put together way back in January to try to hit all of my writing goals for the day.

I can't spend all day working on my NaNoWriMo project when I have blogs to update, other books to finish, and housework to do. I'd like to just sit and write on my NaNoWriMo project until the story is complete but it's not going to happen. I'm still debating taking my laptop with me to Thanksgiving dinner. The polite side of me says that would be a terrible idea and very rude. The rest of me says that it's away to get more work done.

I'm probably going to discuss it with Beloved and get his thoughts on it. I finished the non-fiction project that I was stuck on for a few weeks. It's currently churning its way through the publishing process at KDP. When I reviewed it on-line, it looked good. I ordered a proof copy to stick on my shelf. I will be ordering another copy of a different non-fiction book that I wrote because my proof copy has gone MIA. I just want this little book I wrote to be helpful to people. There's a lot of confusion on how to worship and work with Loki (one of the deities that I am heavily involved with in my spiritual life) and I wrote a devotional to help clear up some of the confusion and give people a starting point in forging their own devotional path.

I don't know how well it is going to be received. I'm going to just hope it works out well. I'm not going to hang my hat on it being a great big success. If I sell a few copies, I'll be happy. The hard part is getting back into my tarot reading stuff. Everything's been so up in the air, that my side project of reading tarot cards for cash has been on hold for literally months. Beloved says that it counts as my losing money when it comes to considering the income questions around it. I just don't know. It feels like an excuse to say that my brain is too screwed up right now to play around with pretty painted cards and tell people what they show me. I, however, have been feeling that way about my brain being screwed up and keeping me from writing.

Mental illness sucks.

AW: Morning Pages No. 81

 I hate being disabled. My brain doesn't want to work right half the time. I'm tired because of my medications and the fact that I haven't slept well in years. (The sleep situation has been particularly bad for the last few months and I can't figure out why.) I've lived through so much traumatic crap that I've been told by a forensic psychologist that I read as a person who has come out of a warzone. It didn't do me much good to hear that. Especially considering that I was holding stuff back when I was doing some of the testing because I was afraid there were going to be problems.

Here I am, a little over a decade later, still disabled and still miserable. Sure, I've got medication to even out my bipolar and to control my panic attacks. Happy pills, however, is a misnomer for what this shit does. It just clamps down on the feelings and lets you get through the day. Sometimes people I used to be friends with made jokes about how I must be having a good time because I was on so many psychoactive medications. I smiled, I nodded, and restrained the urge to punch them in the face.

Then the diabetes hit because I was on the psychoactive drugs long enough that it popped up. Yeah, there was a genetic predisposition towards it but I wasn't on track for developing it until after I was on Seroquel and Geodon for almost seven years. Diabetes is a side effect of antipsychotic medications. Antipsychotic medications are what they use to stabilize the mood of people with bipolar disorder. I was fucked from the word go on this situation. So, now, I take handfuls of medication at various times of the day because of my brain chemistry being screwed up and my pancreas slowly degrading. It's scary and depressing because when ever I have to get my medications tweaked, I get afraid that there's going to be some kind of awful side effect.

My old psychologist was a "nice" person. Who didn't listen to me when I said that I was having problems because of the medications. The solution wasn't to investigate other options but to pump more of the antipsychotics into my system. By the time I had gotten to my current psychologist I was on a combo of the maximum dose of Seroquel and Geodon. I was a walking zombie barely able to function because of all the side effects. Fortunately, my current psychologist took one look at the situation and said "Hell no" and switched me over to a different medication regimen that really improved my quality of life. Unlike the last people I was seeking, this guy takes what I have to say about the situation going on and listens to me, then explains what options there are for solving the problem. 

It's still hard living with invisible chronic illnesses. I have people who forget that I'm a social phobe and will randomly be like "Hey, let's go do something." at the drop of a hat. I have people who forget that I am diabetic and try to feed me stuff that I can't eat for fear of making my blood sugar run too high. It's really exasperating when people forget that my bipolar can incapacitate me with depression and they get kinda mad that I'm not 'better' yet. I've gradually moved away from the people who actively expect me to perform like I'm not disabled. I worry at times that my invisible illnesses coupled with my efforts here to write leads to the false impression that I'm lazy when I go radio silent.

I know that's my emotional baggage talking. Growing up in a trumatizing household where there's all kinds of fuckery going on, you come away with it with some challenges and emotional wounds. Writing these morning pages is flying in the face of the garbage that I had literally beaten into me. It's raw, it's scary, and it's honest. I try to just put down what I have on my mind and hope that my readership base doesn't get too annoyed with the regular sob stories. I've got a lot of trauma I am working through and it influences all of my writing. I just hope that these morning pages reaches someone who is struggling like I was, feeling like a freak and all alone in their misery. I hope that they bring someone some little piece of comfort.

Some of the reasons for the morning pages is selfish. It's to get this garbage out of my head so I can function for the day. But, the bigger reason, is the hope that it could help someone in some fashion. Because if I can help someone by describing the crap I lived through and how I'm doing my best to cope with it, maybe it makes all of that garbage worth something.

AW: Morning Pages no. 80?

 It's NaNoWriMo and I've been hyper focused on my book project. As a result I have found myself within striking distance of 30k words but it has been at the expense of things like blogging, housework, and a few other things. So, I'm forcing myself to slow down and only work on it for an hour each day. I want to get my blog writing back in gear. (I feel like these morning pages don't really count as blog writing, just a brain dump/rambling in the morning.) I do have another problem with my blogging right now that goes beyond the issue with my forgetting to do it because I'm sucked into a novel.

My notebook that I was using as a writing focused bullet journal is literally falling apart. I'm having difficulty keeping track of my notes for projects and outlines for blog posts. This is what I get for buying a cheap notebook to really first give the bullet journal an attempt. I am about halfway through my pile of notebooks but I don't have any the right size to use for bullet journaling. I am stumped as to how to solve this problem with out going and buying another notebook. I told Beloved that I wasn't going to go pick up more notebooks until I had used up most of the ones that I have.

I've been trying to incorporate some of this planning into my daily planner but that just makes it a confusing mess. I am trying to come up with content but my brain is stuck in book mode. It's making writing for different topics difficult. I realized that being stuck in book mode is a problem when my kids asked me this morning when I was going to be doing the dishes. On Monday, I added 12 pages to my manuscript. Yesterday, in an effort to restrain myself, it was four. But it was difficult to stop and go work on housework. I want to see how the scenes I've been writing are going to unfold but I have to write them to do that.

The perils of NaNoWriMo. I was going to do NaBloPoMo but I'm close to two weeks behind. I honestly don't know if I can accomplish that. Not with multiple blogs. I don't know what I'm going to do on that front. I may save the NaBloPoMo effort for December and just focus on writing a novel in November. I am seriously contemplating bringing my laptop to Thanksgiving dinner this year so that I can get more work in on the book. The way I see it, it's not too different from sitting there knitting as people are talking about subjects that I have zero interest in. I'm going to consult Beloved and get his thoughts as to if this is beyond the pale. I did bring a NaNoWriMo project to Thanksgiving one year but that was a book I was writing out by hand in a notebook. It wasn't quite as obvious that I was working on something then. A5 sized notebooks are great to hide in a bag of knitting projects.

AW: Morning pages No. 79

 I am undecided as to how long I am going to do these Morning Pages. One part of me says it is a useful free-writing exercise and I get only good things out of writing it. Another part of me says that my rambling, raw words are just a waste of electrons and that no one really wants to hear another sob story or about the mundane details of my life. It's a tough debate. I am tired and that doesn't help much either.

My tiredness isn't a result of a lack of sleep. I actually slept fairly well last night, though I would have appreciated not having recurring dreams of being short on time to get everything I needed to do done. It was ... unpleasant. It wasn't a full on nightmare because there was no real terror involved, just a great deal of exasperation and frustration. Also, I would have slept better if my new sleep medication didn't have the side effect of causing chills during the first few hours it hits your system. I kept waking up and adding blankets. Then I got overheated and had to put a few away. It was really irritating.

I am tired of being stuck. Emotionally, I am not at a great place right now. There's some troubles happening on a couple fronts for the extended family and I functionally can't do a damn thing to help anybody. As much as I want to say damn them all, there are some members of the family that I am involved with and I care very deeply for (the ones who got screwed by the rest of the family, basically). It's hard being estranged from your birth family for the most part. 

When things get challenging, you don't have that resource for advice, guidance, or possible fiscal assistance to turn to. You have to figure out how to make it work on your own. For the family members that I'm involved with, I'm basically it for the people on this side of the family for them to turn to. I wish I had enough money and resources that I could help all of them out. I wish I was smart enough to say "Here's the solution to this problem." or at least had the ability to do something more than give advice that as I look at it just looks even more shaky as time goes on.

I'm not the matriarch of the family. There is no matriarch of the family. And the family of my birth is disintegrating due to internecine conflict. My grandparents were the ones who held that family together and when they died, things started to unravel. Relatives started behaving badly and showing their true colors after years of keeping their real feelings under their hat for fear of angering my grandparents. It's disgusting and disappointing. As a result, the younger generation has walked away like I did.

I have no idea how to help these young women navigate young adulthood. I've got some suggestions based on my own screwed up life experiences. I can spot relationship red flags a mile away, usually. But there's a lot that they have going on that I just can only say, "We love you. We support you. And if you need us, we're here for you." Those words feel pretty empty right now because I can't do anything more than that.

It's pure torture. I was raised in a household where I had to help parent my brothers at a young age. The expectation was because I was the eldest child, I naturally had to do so and it was my training to be a mother and a wife when I grew up. The age gap between my brothers and I is less than a decade. I wasn't qualified or even remotely old enough to supervise them. Still, there I was a few years out of diapers changing diapers on my baby brother instead of a baby doll. There I was, just shy of being old enough to be in elementary school and I was monitoring my younger brothers' behavior to make sure that our violently unpredictable mother didn't fly off the handle because some arbitrary (yet mutable on the basis of her mood that day) rule was broken. And I got into trouble for doing it even as I was expected to do so. I grew up with this deep seated feeling that I was personally responsible for the welfare of the youngest members of the family.

Here we are, approaching my forty-third year on this rock, and I can't shake that feeling. I can't shake the feeling that I failed my brothers because I went off to college and didn't stay home to intervene when things got crazy in my parents' house. I can't shake the feeling that I somehow failed my brothers because they grew up to have serious issues themselves and have proven to be unreliable and toxic people. I look at my sons and somedays I see my brothers. I flashback to being a kid and terrified that we're going to collectively be punished for some whim that went awry of my mother's that we had nothing to do with but being in the physical proximity of her when it happened.

PTSD is a bear, y'all. It's been making it really hard to write. I've got the old fear that someone is going to punish me for writing down 'lies' and the newer fear that someone is going to use my journal entries against me to try to destroy my family. I try to write. Then terror grips me and I delete entries. It doesn't matter if it's fiction or not. This has been happening for months. It's why my blog entries have been so few across the multiple blogs that I run. (Except for the reading blog, that's just got nothing because I haven't read a book in about a year. Again, trauma colliding with stress. Hard to relax with a book when memories of people throwing stuff at your head to get your attention while you were reading roll over you. And it was things like shoes and slippers. There was a reason why I'd take my books with me when I went hiking and hid in the woods to read a chapter or two as a kid.)

I suppose I wrote something on this blog for today. I didn't want it to be ugly or depressing. But, this is what's been worrying at my mind for months. And as I learn more about what's going on in the lives of people I love, it just gets more intense. At least I am sort of sleeping now. At least I'm only mildly depressed. I'm sure that this awfulness will pass. I just have to hang in there like a kitten on a window screen, all claws deployed.

AW: Morning Pages No. 78?

 Well, I'm no longer flat on my back with bronchitis and a sinus infection. I have a lingering cough and a bit of sinus drainage but it's a lot better than when I last posted. Yesterday, I felt well enough (and the kids were healthy enough) that we went out trick-or-treating for the first time in about ten years. Over the last long period of time, somebody was sick or the weather was down right awful. We lucked out yesterday. It was a strange experience to go trick-or-treating during a pandemic. 

There were several bowls of candy set outside of doors for children to collect from. They were mostly full by the time we got there. We only saw one other set of children out collecting candy, they were coming home. I honestly thought we missed all the other kids out trick or treating (which the CDC said was a relatively safe activity as long as people maintained social distancing). The kids, however, weren't aware of the weirdness of virtually no one out. They were too happy to wish every possible person they met, regardless of if they were giving out candy or not, a happy Halloween. They decided that the doors with no candy were the 'trick' doors and the ones with candy were the 'treat' doors. They had a pretty good time, despite a minor scare with a little dog that was freaked out by smaller than adult humans.

The kids decided that they had a good time because we got to get away from some of the street lights and do a little star gazing despite the patchy clouds and, hey, there was candy. For my part, I was recollecting the times where I went out trick or treating as a kid and how just about every house along the street in the town next door (I grew up on a farm just outside of town, no sense trick or treating at fields full of cows.) was lit up and people were at the door giving out handfuls of candy. We even had gone out in a blizzard to go trick or treating (my brothers insisted, I was freezing and got the least candy because I was too busy trying to keep warm). Despite the snow and blowing wind, people were still just as warm and good hearted about throwing candy into pillow cases and plastic bags.

This year, people were peaking out their windows and only opening the door up a few inches to either hand out offerings or tell us they had no candy. We stayed back a good distance to keep everyone safe. It was surreal. So many people around my neighborhood are clamoring to unmask kids at school and insisting that the vaccine is enough to protect us from the covid-19 variants out there. And yet, they were hiding indoors and basically throwing candy out from the safety of their home to the kids looking for it. My family were practicing safety measures as per usual for going out in public. The boys insisted that their covid-19 masks were keeping their faces warm despite the chill breeze, so there were no complaints. 

I have a feeling that there's going to be a sea change in how people look at this pandemic. The school district is operating on a 'substantial transmission threat' status, despite the fact that there is no evidence of covid-19 spreading in the school. This is because of a combination of the fact that our county is in the 'high transmission threat' status and the fact that there is a cluster of students that are sick with covid-19. No evidence via contact tracing that they caught it at school. All signs point towards parents refusing the mask up and taking their kids maskless out in public as if the pandemic ended last year.

We're entering the beginning of cold and flu season. A nasty cold (which gave me the damn bronchitis and the stupid sinus infection) blew through the school at the same time that cohort of students came down with covid-19. It's going to be a long winter. I'm trying to figure out how to schedule the flu vaccine shots for the family. It's challenging right now because we're in a position of waiting for our car to get fixed. A damn deer decided to use the hood and the windshield as a trampoline a few weeks back. It's at the repair shop right now and theoretically it'll be fixed sometime around the end of this week or the beginning of next week. They're waiting on a windshield and a hood to come in. In the meantime, we're borrowing a car from a generous family member so that Beloved can go to work. It's been a bit crunch here.

If Halloween is any evidence of how people's attitudes are changing, I think we're going to see more people wearing masks again. Over the last few months, while the weather was warm, there were a lot of people running around with out masks despite the high transmission status of the county. Meanwhile, we've been getting dirty looks for our masks. We've taught our kids to keep their heads held high and wear their masks with pride because they're keeping themselves and their family safe. When school pictures came along, the kids had the option of taking off their masks and they kept them on. I have a feeling there's going to be some grumbling by some family members over the fact that they can't see the kids' smiling faces behind the masks. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to say if that happens. I can't exactly be sure that it's going to be something tender and coddling their outraged feelings about how masks are 'oppression'. 

We make a point of not discussing this stuff with them. And yet, Thanksgiving is coming up and I know, down deep in my bones, they're going to be ranting about this. I'm going to have a hard time keeping my tongue in check. It's been grating on me over the last year or so to listen to people bitch about how they can't go to church because of Covid-19, how they have to wear a mask, and they can't get right up close to people in stores when they're in line to check out. I swear, if that plague doctor mask fit me properly, I'd be wearing that thing everywhere. I would be the specter of death on the street. Because apparently they need a visceral reminder that this shit is killing people. This is the new normal. There is no going back to pre-Covid-19 life.

I've accepted it. A lot of my neighbors and a good number of relatives haven't. There's a reason why I don't talk to a bunch of them. They claim oppression and then fuss about the people who are involved in BLM, insisting that their mask oppresses them more than a systemic policing problem that is killing black people and people of color way out of proportion of the rest of the population. But, you know, they can't breathe comfortably in their mask and their glasses fog up so the inconvenience is more important and immediate than some black man who got murdered in police custody. /rant