Craft of Writing: Keep more than one iron in the fire

Dear Reader,

It's hard to work when you are depressed and anxious. The main project becomes a source of minor panic every time I sit down to work on it. Book seven is that source of anxiety. Editing book five is tedium but not a source of panic. Still, I have more than one creative writing project going on at the time. This way if I can't even bear to look at things relating to the Umbrel Chronicles, I have something else to fall back on to and still get some work done on.

I am behind on my poetry project because I misplaced the notebook and because I started to get extremely anxious about my poetry. (Thanks professor X for your words of 'encouragement'. Fuck you again.) Sometimes you can't just push through the psychological blocks that come up. You have to make an end-run around them. So, I have more than one project going on at a time at various stages. This way I can still work despite how I am feeling.

I like writing by hand. I have a long history of writing by hand. Some of my work is done by hand. It's waiting to be transferred to digital media. I have several files that are incomplete that are stories that I started and the abandoned. It's not because I lost the thread of the story as much as it became too much in the moment to work on.

As an author who is struggling with an anxiety disorder and depressive episodes, it gives me the flexibility to continue working despite these problems.