AW: Morning Blog 65

I feel like these entries are rambling garbage about ninety eight percent of the time. It's been a challenge to make time for them every morning. For some reason, it is easier to sit down with a notebook and write first thing in the morning than it is to type this up. I have a long term Umbrel Chronicles project that I'm working on that is completely stalled. A story 'bible' is this thing I heard of a few years back where you put pretty much everything you have into a single notebook. All of your world building notes, plot outlines, and character sketches all get shoved into there. I thought it was an interesting concept that could help me stay organized with this series that I'm writing.

There is one small problem. I have so much backstory and related information piled up in notebooks and on scraps of paper shoved into a series of folders, it is a major undertaking to put all that into one notebook. My legendarium for this series is prolific. I am struggling to find the time to do this work that would make the actual work of writing the books easier. I have some of this material online and I don't want to go through the work of hand copying everything.

I don't know how the pros do it. How do they stay on top of everything? Do they have a murder wall with sticky notes and string? Do they have a story bible? Is it a pile of notes that they just hope and pray stay organized as they work? All I know is that I'm finding the books are wandering away from the general outline for the series that I set up years ago. Plot is going in weird directions and I am not sure how much of the old material I can use now.

A part of me says light it all on fire and just go with what I have written thus far. I am that frustrated with it. Another part of me says I should save all of the material I have ever written revolving around this stuff because I can use it somewhere and somehow in my novels.

AW: Morning Blog 64

My kids are playing in the other side of the room and they're noisy. It is very distracting and disheartening that I can't muster up the focus to write while they are being like this. I am tired. It is just shy of nine in the morning and I haven't had my first cup of coffee. I feel drained and exhausted from going out to Thanksgiving dinner with Beloved's parents and siblings. I am at a proverbial spoon deficit right now. I need rest and time to recover from going out and socializing. Mood drop from that is craptacular and does absolutely zero for my productivity.

I feel cold and I'm sitting here with a blanket on my lap. It doesn't do a whole lot to warm me up right now. I'm not sure why I feel so cold.

AW: Morning blog 63

While my NaNoWriMo project has been frustrating me, I am getting ideas for how to wrap up book seven of the Umbrel Chronicles. I am also considering editing my NaNoWriMo project to fit into the world of the Umbrel Chronicles. It wouldn't take too much tweaking. It would be a separate story from the major story arc of the series. Still, I think I can get it to fit as a part of the 'history' of the series. I have to talk to a few people before I do so, because I have some concepts in here that are rooted in their gaming system and I want to make sure they are ok if I take the supernatural elements and use them.

AW: Morning blog 62

I haven't been happy with my writing and I have been stuck creatively in this negative feedback loop. It goes like this:

• Get an idea for a project
• Crippling anxiety that the project won't be 'good enough'
• Try to work on project
• Make some progress on project (get roughly to the middle)
• Anxiety slams into me again that no one is going to read this
• Try to work on project
• Plot goes off the rails
• Get depressed that I can't manage to stick with my plot
• Try to work on project again.
• Eventually finish project
• Anxiety nails me that my work isn't good enough
• Shove project into proverbial drawer
• Proceed again from point one.

This doesn't just happen with my writing. I am currently working on knitting a scarf for someone's yule present. I am not even halfway done with it and I'm anxious that I picked yarn with the wrong colorway and a pattern that is all wrong for the yarn.

I fucking hate anxiety. I force myself to keep working but it gets really hard when the depression stage kicks in.

AW: Morning Blog 61

I am at 94k on my NaNoWriMo novel. I am frustrated with it because the story is turning out nothing like what I had intended. I wanted to write a romance novel. What I have is a romance plot buried under a fantasy plot which is beginning to gear up to get more weird going forward. Characters that I thought were going to last for a little bit fall by the wayside as others that were literally just background dressing for the scene are beginning to come to the fore. I have hit the first major plot point that I had planned, but it took me almost 100k words to get there. And the second plot point has been pushed off for an indefinite period while I deal with what was subplot mechanics that have turned into major plot elements.

This is not the story I had planned to write. I feel like it is a bit of garbage and a pile of politics with some actual story buried in it. I went from having two main characters to three. And it looks like the number of supporting characters is going to keep shifting as I write. It is infuriating because I had a distinct idea in my head as to what this was going to look like. It looks absolutely nothing like what I had planned except in the most vague of senses. I feel poorly about this because I wanted to write a love story that had fairy tale elements.

Now I'm writing a fantasy story that has love story elements. I know I can write is more than one genre, but this feels like I am stuck in just one genre right now. 94k and no idea how I am going to wrap this thing up. Just shameful.

AW: Morning Blog no. 60

They say that having children is nature's birth control. They say that kids are easy when they get old enough to reason. These random people who claim these things might be right about the first point, but the second point is a lie. I'm ready to scream and I'm only an hour and one cup of coffee into my day. The kids have been back-talking me and giving me attitude over things like "eat your breakfast" and "pick up your toys". The problem child is not the younger but the elder. He's hitting the leading edge of puberty and this is going to suck.

Friends tell me that it'll be easier because I have boys. There's been enough drama over the last week that I feel like I'm living in a Latin American tele-novella. We lock horns over the dumbest shit. I ask the boys to do their daily chores and there's a great wailing and gnashing of teeth. School tells me how well behaved they are and such. It'd be nice if it wasn't the opposite at home.

They used to just do their own thing and not fight. They'd play together well. They'd be helpful and stuff. Now, they fight and get in each other's faces. They throw fits over who gets to have alone time in their shared bedroom. And good grief, do they get into arguments about how much who knows what about a given topic. All of this chaotic background noise makes it impossible for me to write.

AW: Morning Blog 59

It's really disappointing to re-read The Artist's Way and find how much classism and ableism is in it. I have gone through the process of working through the book now once a year for the last five years, maybe a little longer. At first, I thought that I was just too busy to do it properly because I was working on it with two small children running around the house. Then I thought that I was struggling with the exercises because I was doing too much to keep up with it. Now, I realize that I had a couple of things working against me here.

First among them is the effects of my mental illness and disability. Second was the expectation that I could just sit down and get rid of the effects of these things on my creativity and my writing in specific by working through this book. I have come to realize that a good number of the exercises that Ms. Cameron has in her book puts me face to face with the long term effects of growing up in a traumatic household.

It is exceedingly frustrating to realize that my problem is not a creative block but rather repressed trauma. Why is it so hard for me to make sketches and not feel guilty about it? Because I was regularly punished for "wasting paper."Why do I feel inclined to hoard my art supplies instead of using them? Because I grew up poor and there was no certainty that they would be there if I needed them in the future. Why do I feel so anxious about just doing some coloring in a coloring book? Because if my work isn't "perfect" then I run the risk of "ruining" the whole book.When that happened as kid, the coloring book got taken away and thrown away because "what's the point if you can't even do this right?"