About Me

Facing Fear in Writing: Advancing Your Plot

Autumn

NaNoWriMo has made me realize that I’m terrified of advancing the plot.

The characters have been on a picnic that kind of keeps dragging along with small talk and tiny hints at bigger things, only instead of getting up and doing anything, they’re sitting around. It’s starting to feel like my characters are looking at me with expectations, asking, “Well … when are we allowed to do something important?”

And all I can reply is, “I don’t know, where is my life going?!”

While I know where I intended the story to progress, I don’t feel anchored in it yet. It feels more like a half-forgotten dream than a series of events. Instead of trying to move forward, I’m keeping the characters sitting around the same spot, because I’m scared of changing the status quo.

Much like my life.

I think I spent about 15 years feeling like nothing ever fundamentally changed — a sort of monotony in constant chaos. No matter what happened, there’d be a big ol’ reset button that would put us all back in the same place with the same problems day after day after day. Explosive argument? Reset. New career prospect? Reset. Emotional breakthroughs and new promises? Reset.

Then one day the reset button didn’t activate.

Progress and change stopped being a fantasy to write about — it became real.

And it’s terrifying.

Especially because it’s like some sort of existential switch was flipped, and here I am trying to hide out at home maintaining the status quo for long enough to catch my breath, while people I hadn’t spoken to in 10 years are randomly calling me up to offer a path forward. Seriously, what the heck is going on? It feels like I’m sliding helplessly towards change. Maybe that’s what life is supposed to feel like.

So on an emotional level, I’m scared of advancing the plot in my novel. The characters want to move forward, and here I am all, “Let’s spend 10,000 words on this picnic. I described the weather as being very lovely.”

The problem with being a writer is that sometimes your psychological issues have a voice and can (metaphorically) stare you in the eye. Especially when you’re trying to get as much writing done in a month as you can.

About Me

Empowerment through Honesty: Lessons from K-Pop Demon Hunters

Autumn

Over the weekend, the kids and I watched K-Pop Demon Hunters at grandma’s house. All of the sudden at the end of the movie, this song began (massive spoiler alert, btw):

“My voice without the lies, this is what it sounds like.”

For years I was a liar.

Before y’all gasp and clutch at your hearts with betrayal, I told the most lies to myself. Lies like, “This is normal”, “I don’t need more”, and “I’m fine”.

I repeated the lies that he told me, even when they didn’t feel right. Lies that protected his image, even when they cost me my happiness.

But the truth is …

I was always terrified of how he’d punish me if I outshined him. He knew how to criticize and nitpick. He knew how to start arguments when I needed to be at my top game. He knew how to casually drop, “You do have a big nose,” in the moments when I was feeling vulnerable. And I knew it. It didn’t matter that he’d say that he didn’t feel threatened by my success, because underneath the words in the spaces where real life clashed against dreams, I felt sabotaged. Not supported.

Deep inside I knew that he’d find a way to make me miserable if I was successful, which is why I never tried to push beyond my tiny bubble. I didn’t want to see what was behind that door.

I felt it when The Scion Suit was mildly popular on Reddit — a story that I began entirely on my own while he had been at work, and it gained recognition without his stamp of approval. Behind the scenes, he grew pushier about where he wanted the story to go, to the point where he wrote the ending himself. I edited it as heavily as I dared to, but I always hated it. I thought it was nauseatingly pretentious and not remotely on-brand for me. I even slipped in how much I hated the scene when I added the sentence, “She hated it when people gave roundabout answers to direct questions”. Yup, that was me commenting on the entire scene through the character, hur hur.

I broke into a million pieces, and I can’t go back
But now I’m seeing all the beauty in the broken glass
The scars are part of me, darkness and harmony
My voice without the lies, this is what it sounds like

K-Pop Demon Hunters: Come for the music, laughs, and popcorn, stay for the life changing affirmations.

Apparently.

I’ve always felt a light inside of me, and I’ve always wanted to share it with others. So, this is me, giving it my all. No more lies. No more fear. No more holding back. I want the Truth in me to reach the Truth in you, and we’ll both find our voices.

I’m also going to include this song, because it’s just plain fun to dance to:

About Me

Overcoming Laptop Troubles: My Journey with AI Assistance

Autumn

I’ve been having plenty of laptop issues over the last couple of months.

I had two of them, and the first developed that issue where the battery swells up and it becomes an explodey fire hazard. Heck, for all I know, the battery started swelling awhile ago and it took me that long to realize it, given that I was under an enormous amount of stress. Since I lack the means to fix it, that laptop had to be retired.

Which brings me to my second laptop.

My second laptop turned into a diagnostic nightmare. You see, it was having a strange problem where some websites would load, and others wouldn’t – the ones that wouldn’t happened to be the important ones, naturally, which meant that my laptop wasn’t exactly usable. So, I turned to ChatGPT.

It took us days to figure it out, but we did. Part of it was because I was prone to feeling overwhelmed and flopping down in despair, so it’s a good thing that AI is infinitely patient and accommodating. Turns out my laptop was flagging my internet connection as an “unidentified network,” and ChatGPT walked me through a temporary fix that I have to do every time I use my laptop. One of these days I’m going to reinstall Windows for a permanent fix, but not yet. Right now, I’m still burnt out on that whole “fixing computers” thing (definitely not a future career choice for me 😝).

It feels good knowing that I was able to figure out what was wrong with my laptop, and I’m grateful that I’m a single mom in an era where AI exists. Not only can I solve problems that are well outside my sphere of knowledge, I have a voice that will reassure me, “You’ve got this!” when I’m flopping down in despair.

Some days I really need that voice.

But it is getting better.

I filed a maintenance report with the rental company, and lo and behold someone came out and fixed the issue. No drama. No complaints. Just … fixed. I almost don’t know how to process it. I guess that I was fairly normalized to everything being a big hullabaloo all the time. No wonder I was so exhausted for so long. No wonder that people are commenting that I look much better now.

I didn’t do any writing for NaNoWriMo during my time with my kids, as I anticipated. Instead, we reveled in music, drank hot cocoa, played with friends, and did our homework. I did dream about the future though, and I’ve decided that one of these days soon here, I’m going to pick up my old project of writing The Scion Suit as a visual novel. Heck if I know anything about programming, but I have ChatGPT in my corner! Besides, that was my last project before I started feeling sabotaged, and it’s a step towards the sort of writing projects that I’ve always secretly fantasized about.

Who knows, maybe it will turn out that script writing has been my undiscovered forte all along. For whatever reason, I’ve never tried my hand at it despite being so character oriented, and it might be nice to focus on the dialogue while letting my weak areas slide. Let’s give it a shot and see where it takes us.

About Me

Coping with Emotional Setbacks While Writing

Autumn

On Halloween, he sent me a picture of the kids out trick-or-treating with him and his new girlfriend. He’s also sent me random texts saying, “You’re old,” so I’ve come to expect this sort of thing from him and I just ignore it.

It’s strange when the performance drops and suddenly you feel like you’re dealing with a ten-year-old, instead of the person they pretended to be.

“Amicable” is not a word that I would use to describe us.

So here we are on November 4th, and I hate how foggy headed I am. In the past I always felt incredibly sharp when it came to my fiction writing, and I did a good job of holding details in my head to weave together and reference back to. Now I’m … dull. I can’t remember what I wrote yesterday. I find it enormously frustrating, and part of me is scared that this is my “new normal.” I’ll have a wall of post-it notes that the kids will knock down, play with, and destroy. Then we’ll all laugh about c’est la vie, though inside I’ll be crying about how much I lost of myself.

And for good measure, my phone will then chime with a text from him, reminding me, “You’re old.”

My muscles aren’t used to handwriting, so I’ve been wearing one o’ them wrist compression/support glove deal-ios when I write. It’s really helped to tighten up my penmanship, closer to how it was when I was in high school. One of my quirks is that I hold my pen “wrong” and I was never able to learn better, so I had a callus on my pinkie through all of my childhood. It’s disappeared since my school days, but sometimes now I look down at my pinkie and wonder how much handwriting it would take to get that callus back. More than three days worth, I know that much.

I think that it was good that I decided to go back to my roots with handwriting for NaNoWriMo. Heck, if I wanted to get really authentically me, I could get a burgundy marker. The very first novel I ever started was written with burgundy marker. 😂

So … I’m trying out something new with this story, and I have three characters interacting with each other instead of my usual two… or sometimes just one character alone with their thoughts. Maybe one day in the distant future, I’ll make it all the way up to four characters in a room. But that seems like a lot so maybe not.

Sometimes the introvert goes right through. I’m secretly proud of the fact that The Scion Suit functionally has only three characters.

Heck, on my child-free days, I’m so accustomed to the silence that my robot vacuum sometimes freaks me out. Like, “OMG WHAT’S BANGING AROUND? Oh it’s just you, Roomba.” I have yet to feel lonely — I’m still establishing my sense of safety.

The downside of NaNoWriMo is that waking up my creative side is also waking up my emotional side, because you can have frequent anxiety attacks and still be thoroughly numb inside. I cry at dog food commercials. I watched Flowers in the Attic and cried. Then I watched Stephen King’s Misery with Kathy Bates, because while I’ve heard rumors of her amazing performance, I haven’t actually seen it before … and Misery was the Stephen King novel that convinced me of his genius as a writer. But I did not cry. I was rather disappointed that the end of the movie didn’t include the publication of the final Misery novel, since I thought that was a nice touch in the book.

Anyway, that’s probably enough rambling from me for now. I’m surviving, one day at a time.

I’m also not anticipating that I’ll do any writing when I have the kids.

About Me

Finding Passion in Creativity and Writing

Autumn

I don’t have to be a new person.

Maybe that’s an odd epiphany to have, but I was forced into a “fresh start”, and figuring out how to move forward has been … difficult. Part of me felt like I should reject everything about who I was and be a totally different person, to protect myself in the future. More pragmatic, less vulnerable.

But there are a lot of things about me that I like.

I like that I’m a writer, for one. It’s a deep passion that I keep coming back to, no matter what life throws at me — a calling that I’m lucky to have as an anchor.

I like that I’m a fiber artist. I like creating beautiful things out of fabric, thread, and yarn, and the way the kids love the items I make for them. Heck, I even love the “Did you make that?” attention that I get in public.

So maybe I don’t need to jump into a new education to build a new career as a new person. Maybe I can stay exactly who I am and peddle the skills I already have.

Despite what I’ve been told, my skills are valid.

I am valid.

I don’t have to reject me just because he did.

So here we are on day two of NaNoWriMo. I’ve decided to handwrite my first draft for now, and I like working with the TV playing in the background. It feels cozy to be curled up in my recliner with my favorite blanket and a notebook propped against the armrest. I have yet to feel a deep connection with the story and characters, but I am making progress in the words.

I over-prepared with the Halloween candy and didn’t get many trick-or-treaters, so now I’m left wondering how much I should give to my kids versus how much I should hoard for myself. You know the stereotype of writers who smoke while typing away? For me it’s candy.

If I hoard the leftovers for myself, I’ll certainly be well stocked for NaNoWriMo.

(I wrote this yesterday, and forgot to hit ‘publish’ 😅)

About Me

Reclaiming My Writing Dreams with NaNoWriMo

Autumn

I’ve decided to do NaNoWriMo this year.

Since I now have joint custody, I have tons and tons of child-free time for myself, and my house is probably a little excessively clean these days (do I really need to scrub down the walls every week?). I want to kick myself back into the writing habit, and the timing lines up perfectly for NaNoWriMo! Yay!

Which, admittedly, I probably won’t follow the way it’s intended. I am still a mom, and I still have plenty of days of childcare on my plate. Maybe I’ll take 2 months to make up for the 50-50 time division.

Participating in NaNoWriMo also feels like coming full circle, since the last time I gave it a shot I ended up meeting my now-ex-husband, and never finished that story. It’s time for me to reclaim the path I had wanted to journey so many years ago, after all those broken promises and surrendered dreams.

It’s hard to explain the sort of relief I feel, at the thought of planning out an entire month knowing that each day should be more-or-less predictable … or how terrified I am that they won’t be. However, I can’t let fear of what may or may not happen dictate my choices for me, so I might as well plow ahead like everything is going to be boring and stable.

So let’s jump right into the action plan:

I’m going to be continuing Runemaster, rather than coming up with anything new. Maybe it’s cheating that I already have a portion written, but I’m working with the limitations here — what I went through this year is not the sort of stuff that one just “moves on” from. So, rather than inventing anything new from my poor exhausted brain, I’m sticking with characters that are already familiar. Deeply familiar, in this case, considering that I originally created these characters about 20 years ago. Writing this novel will be very emotionally comforting for a number of reasons.

What I can’t decide right now is whether I want to type the story, or handwrite it. I used to always handwrite the first draft with the most colorful pens I own, but who knows if I’m going to want to go through the trouble of typing it up later. Choices, right? LOL

Part of me kind of wishes that my only responsibility was to scrub walls and wash laundry, but I can’t hide behind chores forever. I still have dreams to pursue, goals to accomplish, and a life to rebuild.

NaNoWriMo Day 1: I will write 1000 words.

It will be terrible, rusty, and full of self-doubt, but it will be writing.

That’s the important part.

About Me

Navigating Life Changes: Embracing Creativity Without AI

Autumn

My divorce came with the sense of being excommunicated for falling from grace. There’s something romantic about that, as if I were the servant of a petty god who found disfavor with me and cast me out to tread upon mortal ground, and now here I am picking my way along a rocky hiking trail as a warm October wind smacks me in the nose with dead leaves. Not every moment can be cinematic.

I hiked until my fear of heights kicked in, and while I’m logically certain that my feet were solidly planted on the ground, I couldn’t stop the light-headed notion that every footstep was perpetually sliding towards the edge and my inevitable death, so I turned around and headed home, much to my dog’s relief. He’s not a fan of windy heights either.

The thing is …

My AI art set up was dependent on that grace from which I have fallen. Unfortunately, my posts about how to generate AI art are the most popular, go figure.

The depressing part is that it’s not like AI art even meaningfully existed until a couple of years ago, yet now I feel the loss of it deeply. No more character portraits. No more setting the scene. No more visual supplements for my writing. At least not the same way that I used to.

I could download Stable Diffusion et al, but at the moment it doesn’t feel right. I’m too busy relearning how to be mortal … free from the gaze of my petty god.

Perhaps instead I’ll go back to my roots. I’ll channel the energy of that 17-year-old who’s Creative Writing teacher advised her to express all of her emotions through writing, and all she needed was a gel pen and a notebook.

We can save the fancy technology for the editing phase.

Meanwhile, I’ll have to figure out how to draw traffic to my blog without all the fancy keywords and visuals.

About Me

The Long Road to Healing from Psychological Trauma

Autumn

How does one put into words how bad it was?

I want to try, so that I don’t inadvertently paint the picture that you just move on and live ever after. So, how do I explain how the demands and criticisms pushed me well past the point of discomfort, and landed me in crisis counseling? How does one describe the injuries of abuse that never left any bruises?

Psychological sadism.

I once sat hidden in a car and tearfully told a complete stranger, “I’ve realized that I will never be broken enough.” There was no end goal. No stopping point. It was only ever going to get worse. I couldn’t eat or sleep, and I was fading away. My body couldn’t carry on in that situation.

I only got out because people helped me.

I didn’t put the TV in the front room with the big window of my new place. It feels too exposed and unsafe. I hate how frequently the motion sensor of my doorbell camera goes off, because I don’t like how it makes me feel. I like feeling hidden when I’m at home.

Sometimes I just want to sit and binge watch random shows while doing nothing. Sometimes I don’t have the energy to get up or think. Sometimes ordinary tasks feel like a big accomplishment.

As I’ve been healing, I’ve been realizing how bad it was, and that hurts in a totally different sort of way.

One doesn’t just move on.

About Me

Overcoming Anxiety: My Journey to Healing

Autumn

It’s difficult to start.

I was so stressed out that I was vomiting and I ended up losing 20lbs in two months. I also spent a month in crisis counseling.

I also learned how to reach out and open up, to tell the people around me about what was going on. I discovered that people are a lot more supportive than I expected … and that the truth of my situation was a lot more visible than I had been led to believe.

And now here I am, in a better place. Quite literally, too. I have a great view of the sunset from my new home, and I’m in walking distance of nature — I like to take my dog out and have small chats with strangers.

I also still have anxiety when my doorbell sensor goes off. The occasional bad dream. Triggers that lead to quiet meltdowns … in a nutshell, PTSD.

Not exactly the life I dreamed of. I keep going round and round in my head, asking, “Can one person really cause this much damage?” It seems so unbelievable, that a person can hurt someone this much without it being a crime. Yet it happened. I know it every time I step on the scale and see how much weight I have yet to gain back.

The far more important question now is, “Where do I go from here?”

I often wonder if my fantasy life — the way I imagine myself getting up and spending the days if everything was perfect — is achievable or not. I have a clean house now, with white walls. Day-to-day life is running more smoothly than it has in a long, long time, and my thoughts are feeling more alive than they have in years. So maybe, just maybe, I can achieve my dreams.

I’m definitely not getting bombarded with criticism and demands the way I was not too long ago.

Let’s work on baby steps.

I want to be a writer. I’ve always wanted to be a writer. So let’s write. Casual. Small. No pressure sort of writing. Free writes. Story snippets. Totally random stuff that has nothing to do with anything.

Then one day, I’ll pick my bigger projects back up and start self-publishing novels again.

You ready?

I’m not sure if I am.

But I can’t spend my life always waiting for the next crisis to hit. I want to take charge and make my dreams come true.

About Me

Navigating Uncertainty: Finding Your Future Amidst Change

Autumn

It’s hard to imagine what sort of future I want, especially because the premises of my circumstances keep changing and throwing me for a loop. There are other factors as well, like what I think is realistic, what I can handle, and what I think I deserve.

I don’t think that I have a good grasp of reality. Maybe I am that talented, driven, and lucky. Maybe I’m more like everyone else. I don’t know.

Is there something that I’m meant to be doing?

The weird thing is, I stayed strong in my faith until I had a miracle happen. The sort of, “Whoa, I did not see this coming, and this really helps everything,” sort of miracle. Instead of feeling bolstered, it was like the rug had been pulled out from underneath me. I guess it’s one thing to have faith in complete darkness, but when I started moving towards light with no idea where it was coming from … that’s when it got scary. False hope? A brighter future? I have no idea.

Why would that sort of miracle happen to me anyway?

My body couldn’t take the stress though. I couldn’t sleep or eat, and I lost nearly 20lbs in two months. It left me feeling forced into the next step I took.

Not that I know what I should and shouldn’t share about what’s going on.

As it stands right now in my tiny corner of the world, I need a future. I need to figure out what future I’m aiming for. I need to stop feeling like a 17-year-old staring at high school graduation without the foggiest clue of what’s supposed to come next, especially considering that I’m 20 years past that.

I want to be a writer, but between betrayal trauma and living expenses, I’m just not sure anymore … it seems so unrealistic now.

After all, how many miracles can I expect to get me through?