April is Camp NaNoWriMo: Will I participate?

Current embroidery project

 Dear Reader,

So, April is one of the two sessions of Camp NaNoWriMo. It is the more convenient one because it has 30 days in it like the official NaNoWriMo in November which makes planning word count goals a bit easier. I don't know if I will be participating in Camp NaNoWriMo this April. I'm still having lots of anxiety problems and I'm not coping very well. 

It is likely that I will continue pouring a great deal of effort into my therapy writing. I don't feel comfortable about setting word count goals for that. Some days I can manage to write up to 1k but most days I'm lucky if I get a few hundred words out before I start freaking out over the trauma content in it. This business in Ukraine (and it's Ukraine not 'the Ukraine' which was a Soviet propaganda effort to delegitimize Ukraine's status as a nation, I only recently learned this fact, so I'm sharing it) is triggering a lot of stuff that I thought I had dealt with.

I am part of Gen X and I grew up under the threat of the Cold War for most of my youth. My parents had insane things to say about life during that period. They talked about inhumane things that we would 'have' to do to survive, like cannibalism, if Russia dropped The Bomb. I was frequently told my only value would be as meat for the pot, a laborer to keep my brothers alive (stack rocks outside the place they could shelter if a Bomb got dropped and wait for the adults to show up, not go into the shelter myself), or someone that could be traded off as chattel if someone was looking for something out of us.

My parents were not the most stable or in touch with reality at that period of time, to be honest. It was brutal and ugly. A lot of my childhood trauma goes back to that era of my life. With this war in Ukraine happening, I've been having flashbacks and struggling to cope. I don't really know what to do with this stuff that's coming up. I've been doing embroidery to keep me from freaking out. But, it's not working so great.

But all this trauma stuff is making it hard to write fiction. I don't know if I'll participate in Camp NaNoWriMo or if I'm going to skip it this year.

It's going to be a rocky re-start.

 Dear Friends,

It's been quite a while since I have posted. I want to apologize for that. It was not because I didn't want to or because I simply had given up on this blog. Way back last August, I started having health problems due to my C-PTSD, namely sleep issues. These issues got really bad and started me having problems with my bipolar disorder (on top of the issues of seasonal affective disorder). To say the least, I was working with my doctor to get it all sorted out. Things really came to a head in January, when I decided that I had to take a step back and do some focused therapy work.

I had initially thought that it was going to be two weeks. It turned out to be much longer and much harder than I expected. I am finally getting to a place where I have a measure of equilibrium again and I can resume my writing work. I am going to attempt to jump back in on topics that have been languishing. I also am going to try to bring some new material to the table. It is, however, going to be challenging and I may not be able to hit all my goals initially. 

I appreciate your readership. I appreciate your patience and support. And most of all, I appreciate your encouragement. Thank you for waiting for me to come back and I will do my best to bring you the best of my work over the coming weeks as I work on getting back into the saddle.