Out of gas

When I was in the grips of creative construction earlier this week, I felt like I could work forever on my project. I felt like I had discovered the secret to reclaiming my old energy. I felt like all of my previous problems boiled down to “chronically bored.”

Today, I know better.

We are 98% finished in the cat room. We only need to apply one touch-up layer of silicone in some parts of the room, and we’re done, finally. Then we can move all the stuff back in, and not a moment too soon, considering that we accepted five bottle babies yesterday. But it’s a good thing that the silicone still needs about twelve hours more to dry, because I just don’t have the up-and-at-’ems needed to finish this project alone.

I am not complaining, I’m not feeling bad about myself. I’m just realizing that nothing is magic. There is a good chance that my capabilities are greater than I’ve been allowing myself to explore, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t still need to take it easy and keep an eye on my spoons throughout the day or week. It’s been a really nice visit back to the world of pseudo-normalcy this week, but the fact that it was only a vacation isn’t much of a surprise to me. Honestly, right now, it sorta feels like I improved my time on some kind of race: a success, not a failure. Which is a very nice change in my habitual thinking. I might actually be getting good at this.

So, today I am looking forward to knitting and watching NetFlix and feeding kittens every three hours. Everything else can wait.

•••Hey, did you know? I’m fostering kittens! Come follow my tribulations on my kitten blog! Paw-Purr-azzi•••

All the things!

I feel the weight of responsibility on my shoulders, and it makes me increasingly anxious.

Branden and I are hosting our weekly friend get-together this week, and I am maybe taking on too much. Maybe. Except a normal human could do it just fine before Thursday night, so obviously I will come very close to failing and have to spend Friday in bed doing nothing.

I have to make two giant loaves of bread, one less-giant loaf of bread, and roast some figs.

“What madness,” I hear you scream, and I agree.

That… will probably be fine. I’m hoping I can get my act together and tackle a couple of those tasks one at a time. The thing that’s actually stressing me out is: The Racing Snails.

MuckFest season is quickly coming. I haven’t assembled the whole team, done any fundraising, nor—and here’s the stressor—committed the shirt design to digital medium. That… really needs to get done, ASAP.

But it will probably take at least one whole day to do it. Which cuts into my writing time. I always think to myself, “Just do your writing first thing, and do the arting once you’ve hit your word goal,” and what a nice fantasy that is. But considering how I’ve yet to hit 2,500 words in a day (yesterday I managed 255), it just doesn’t seem realistic. I have to choose between them, and at some point, the Snails shirt has to be the one I choose.

It doesn’t help that by the time I’m done checking my internet (about 11am, today), I’m ready to go back to sleep for a couple of hours. Why am I always so tired, this is the worst. I could probably snap out of it if I got up and walked around a little, but the nature of being sleepy is that that’s the last thing I want to do.

Still, I suppose I shall do it. As nice as my naps were last week, I’m not willing to repeat them.

In the spirit of getting the body movin’, I’m gonna go do that now. We will talk again on Friday.

Word count: 4,768 (አ)

Because I said I'd blog more

So far, NaNo in May has been 100% unsuccessful. Naps struck me both Monday and Tuesday. Today I'm antsy and feel like I can't make my brain sit still, so I've written 54 words. Of course, my total is 2,328 so at least I'm not at the very beginning, but I do have mighty catching up to do. Maybe over the weekend. And just because I haven't written doesn't mean I wasn't productive. I worked on art resources for the P&C game my friends and I are percolating, and did some chores, and handled some money matters… not wasted time for the most part, but I still feel kinda irresponsible. Plus there are a couple of things that are in my to-do list that I'm dreading and thus haven't done: phone calls, obviously.

Six months ago I scheduled a Neurology appointment for April 21^st, which (unbeknownst to me at the time) was the same date as the Greeley Jazz festival that I go to every year. I had to cancel my appointment and have requested a new one via the website, twice. But I have heard nothing back, so I have to call them, ugh. Also my insurance decided to stop covering Adderall, which is straight crazy, so… another phone call. Both of these are relatively urgent, and I need to do them, so obviously I haven't.

On the upside, I'm covered in kittens (who have had nearly-immaculate litter box etiquette for a change!), which is probably the best thing ever. Today was a great day, I went for a long drive in the afternoon that unfortunately coincided with rush hour, but it was gorgeous and warm and beautiful. The weather went, in the course of 3 days, from white-out blizzard to have-to-open-the-windows warm, and I'm loving that. I want to make the most of the long days. Days are getting longer until the middle of June, and I want to make sure I squeeze out every last drop of sun! I should swim this year. Swimming is good.

Well, that's all I've got for now. Ciao word nerds!

Backwards progress

This one’s gonna be short, faithful readers.

I have come to the realization that I need to get the gym back into my routine. There are things I can do to mitigate the paralysis that seems to come over me after the gym—but there’s no way to mitigate the stiffness, muscle loss, and declining energy levels except to start the body movin’.

In other news, I have been playing around with Blender. Although my current rendering of Jane Lane from Daria looks like a horrifying monkey-slash-nightmare demon, just doing it really strips away the terror related to trying something new. I’ve also finished all of the Christmas stockings for the spouses. Now I just need to do the chibis; but first I gotta decide on a design for them. Also I need to take a break from knitting for a while.

Gnar turned one whole year old yesterday. Little miracle kitty! So glad he picked me.

I’m actually making slow progress with my Cassidy outline again! The story keeps changing on me. How’s it ever going to hold still long enough for me to write it all down?!

Gonna hop on writing now. Else I’m wasting my time at Cafe 44 with my fellow writista Bridget. Buon viaggio!

The Inhibitor

I believe I have a piece of hardware installed in my brain. It’s called the Inhibitor. It plugs in between my want-tos and my can-dos, and effectively shorts the circuit with overwhelming gibber signal, mostly consisting of “but that would require you to…” and yawns. I’m not unique in this way. It seems that every writer (or otherwise creative person) is asking for advice on how to bypass their inhibitor. I’ve gotten sick of whining about it. But sometimes, it feels like a very physical thing.

And then, of course, there are the have-tos. From time to time, the have-tos are chores or errands, but the largest number of have-tos are literal necessities. Going to the bathroom, eating food, sleeping, that sort of thing. When my Inhibitor starts to fail, the have-tos are the redundant fail-safe. And the have-tos are hard to argue with. They seem to eat up my days.

Right now I have a conundrum. I’m finished with my have-tos. It’s barely 9am. I’ve bathed, eaten breakfast, checked the whole internet, and essentially run out of reasonable distractions. There are so many creative endeavors I’ve been dying to do, and inspired to do, and motivated to do… when I’m unable to do them, of course. Now that I have no have-tos between me and my goals, the Inhibitor is working overtime. “But you have three unfinished Christmas stockings to do! Those count as creative!” … true, but I’ve watched so much Netflix in the last couple of months that I’m about to run out of shows. Like, all shows. It’s getting boring. “You’re really sleepy! You know you are. Go lie down.” I’m never not sleepy. If I let that affect my activities, I’d never do anything. “You know you’re not supposed to force it…” Force it, sure, but I should really at least give myself a chance to do these creative things I’m so excited about.

I’ve had writing dates with my writer friends the last few weeks. On each of these, I’ve had some excuse not to write. The first one, I spent the time moving Cassidy into Scrivener, so at least it was tangentially related. The next time, I was writing emails to people. It was actually important, don’t get me wrong, but I sometimes feel so defeated. I’d really like to write with my girls, because it seems like the only time I actually get into it.

Well, at any rate, it seems like maybe my Inhibitor has leashed my blog into its dark service. I’ma cut that bitch out, for today anyway.

TTFN dear readers!

Learning new things =)

In the past, I have had bouts of feeling... extremely static. Like I have itchy feet—I don’t know what I want to do, but I know I want to stop doing nothing! These bouts can be really frustrating because most of the time, I’m not doing nothing. I’m just doing more of the same. I can’t put my finger on what I want to do; most things sound really unappetizing. What do I want‽ I yell at myself.

Finally, after much mental wiggling, I figured it out.

When I feel like that, I’m longing to learn something new. Something creative, preferably. A new craft, a new skill, a new technique. My brain is tired and wants to stretch its atrophied muscles.

In the spirit of learning new things, I’ve been going through the Python Codecademy course to learn how to program. I’m 90% of the way through it, apparently, and it’s come... fairly easy to me, so far, but the farther I get the more respect and awe I have for people who got a degree in this nonsense. You have to tie your brain up in corkscrew-knots to think through the logic, and once you have something that works, your brain unwinds and you don’t understand what you just did. But hey, it works, don’t look at it too closely!

I have been wanting to learn to program for a long time now. I learned PHP well enough to automate math problems, which was what I wanted it to do. But since I’ve been unemployed and struggling with being functional, there is a project that is near and dear to my heart that none of my code-savvy friends have the time or bandwidth to do for me: An Android app.

In its conception, Next is a to-do list, but it’s much more than that to me. It would be a time- and energy-management tool. It would help me keep things the right “size.” It would help me reclaim my agency.

Okay, I’ll go through why it would be special. (See, I’m having a hard time figuring out where to start, haha!)

1. User makes a list of what they need to do.
   1. User makes a short-term to-do list.
   2. User makes a long-term to-do list.
2. User arranges things in priority-order.
   1. User organizes things in terms of what is most important to them to get done.
   2. User organizes things in order of what has the closest deadline.
3. If there are explicit deadlines for a task, user assigns those deadlines.
   1. This can be used for appointments, too.
4. User customizes settings.
   1. What kind of encouragement does the user want to receive?
      1. Text messages, notifications, social media, calendar events.
      2. Message a friend/SO/family member to ask them to send encouragement.
   2. How frequently do they want to be “encouraged”?
   3. What escalation of encouragement do they want?
      1. User-written affirmations / encouraging messages.
      2. Developer-written affirmations / encouraging messages.
   4. What kind of recognition does the user want for completing a task?
      1. None, congratulatory message, social media integration.
   5. Choose the level of urgency for each item on to-do list.
      1. One task may require frequent, escalating encouragements, while another may require a more low-level reminder schedule.
   6. Specify down-time.
      1. After a specified time of day, notifications go away, encouragement messages stop, and the pressure is off.
5. When settings are finished, list is “finalized.”
   1. The list becomes a little obfuscated; at this point the user is passively discouraged from altering it.
6. The next thing on the list becomes a notification in the user’s notification bar.
   1. The notification cannot be swiped away; the user must consciously deactivate Next or complete their to-do list to vacate their notification bar.
   2. The notification can be interacted with via “snooze” or “mark as complete” buttons attached to the notification.
      1. “Snooze” will move the item in question below the subsequent item on the list.

Uh, so, that’s it in a nutshell. It’s enforced baby-stepping, but not as baby is it could be, which is a little unfortunate, but I suppose a user could get that kind of granularity by having user-written “encouragements” that read “Stand up,” then 30 seconds later, “Put on your shoes,” etc. It will hopefully stop a to-do list from looking overwhelming, because, well, you only have one thing to do!

But that kind of integration is the sort of thing I’m not going to be able to jump right into, not least because programming for mobile is kindof a bitch. Right now I’m a little bit beyond “Hello World” and about aeons before making a duck that won’t run into the side of the pool. (A digital duck, people. I’m not God, or a mother duck. Geez.)

And, if you were going to ask, yes, this is avoidance behavior. Shut up.

How about you, gentle readers? are you learning anything new? Let me know in the comments. Ciao for now!

Word count: 3,776 (ເ)

Tips for overcoming writers' paralysis and cultivating enthusiasm for your writing

Long title is long!

I was at the gym yesterday and I was finishing up my stretches. After stretches, I do ab workout—situps, crunches, leg-lifts, or jackknifes, depending on the day. Yesterday was jackknifes. After that, weights, then a half-hour of cardio. And I was lying on my back, looking at the wasp nest in the highest tippy-top of the cathedral-vaulted ceiling and dreading every single step of it with my whole self.

I probably don’t need to tell you, but dread is one of those ingredients in a workout (or any other chore) that really dominates the flavor and ruins the dish.

So I thought to myself, “Self, stop it! Why do you dread this so hard? You know it exactly. You have done it so many times you could do it in your sleep. Dreading it only makes it take longer; and when that’s not true, it sure makes it seem to take longer!”

“But, Self,” I protested, “What should I do to dispel this awful funk? You make it sound easy. I assure you, it is not.”

“Fear not, Self,” I laughed, “There is a solution! Behold!” I flourished my cape. “When you started coming to the gym, you were infused with feelings of accomplishment, pride, and self-power. These feelings have waned as the gym routine has become mundane, but in truth, the fact that the gym routine has lasted long enough to become mundane is an indication of exactly how accomplished, proud, and powerful you should feel!

“In short, do not focus on the mundanity, the sloggishness. Focus on the things that made you start coming in the first place! The way it draws into focus the ways in which your body is succeeding at being strong, beautiful, bendy—what have you. After all, what are you anxious for? Have you elsewhere to be? I think not. Now is your time. Enjoy it.”

Well, it got me through the rest of the workout, and I realized that the same technique can be applied to most things we dread. Staring at the blank page, fingers poised over the keyboard, thinking, “I know I was gonna say something… what was it again?” we have started looking at our writing as an obligation, a chore. What if we spent a few minutes right before we start writing to remember exactly why we write? If we can recapture the feeling of the joy of creation, the freedom of crafting a world to our own specifications, the way it used to be an escape rather than a prison, then writing will be a breeze.

Yesterday, after my workout, I was victim to a sustained headache and stomach ache and did not return to the world of creation, but I’m going to try out this technique today and see if it works as well for writing as it did for finishing my gym routine. Happy writing, everyone!

Word count: 2,778 (૚)

I'm gonna talk about it now.

I promised myself when I started this blog that it was not going to become mopey mopey Emoville. So I’m writing this post in the spirit of grabbing my demon by its horns and showing it to the world. Maybe doing that will help me fight it. Or maybe it’ll just get me a little leeway with my gentle readers when I don’t blog every single M/W/F or write as many words as I should.

I’ve mentioned my fatigue and my MS before. I’ve tried to downplay it, or to only give it a glancing blow on my way to more upbeat things. But I think the result of that is to make myself look like I’m failing to achieve (or even approach) my goals for… no reason. And I don’t like giving it power over me, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t already have it.

Fatigue is a lot like depression. So much so that I don’t think I can safely say I don’t have a certain amount of depression. Fatigue is different from being tired. There are days when I feel like I have energy; I have no desire to nap, but I simply cannot bring myself to do anything productive, be it chores, errands, or writing. For chores, even the first, smallest baby step seems like a mountain, or a sheer rock face. For writing, I open my document and I read the last thing I wrote and I put my fingers on the keyboard, and then… nothing comes. I do what they tell you to do: I write nonsense or I write journal-style just to get the words flowing, but the heart isn’t beating. I can squeeze out a few drops but that doesn’t make it flow.

Fatigue is present in most people with MS even if they have no neurological symptoms or lesions, like me. For me, fatigue is crippling. I fail to fulfill social and familial obligations. I have to cancel activities that I was really looking forward to. Almost everything I do, I have to force myself to do. Except on days when that’s not true. Some days, I feel almost normal. I can do three or four whole things (or, alternatively, write a couple of thousand words) before crawling into a deep dark hole. If I’m not careful, I can spend all the energy that I have that day and overspend into the next day’s energy, leaving me twice as wrecked as I would otherwise be.

And those days are almost worse than the others, because they make me feel like I’m failing all the rest of the time.

I have a problem moderating myself, separate from MS. As long as I can remember, I’ve been inclined to follow rules that I set for myself as though they were set in stone. I think that’s because I went through a phase where having no rules resulted in me failing out of college. So, if I “break the rules,” I have no safety net. I eat a bag of Doritos, drink a 2-liter of Mountain Dew, and play Don’t Starve while Law & Order: SVU plays in the background. My therapist tells me that sometimes I can’t be productive, because, uh, I have MS. But “being kind to myself” looks, to me, a lot like breaking the rules. And the more I break the rules, the easier it is, and the harder it is to “be good.” So, being kind to myself may actually result in me losing all the good habits I’ve made over the past eight years. Can you blame me for getting mad at myself for backsliding? There are only so many things I’m proud of—I’m not going to forgive myself for losing all of them.

So, I have no energy. So I turn into a person-sized slug on the couch, incapable of doing anything else. So I get mad at myself for slugging. And that sucks more energy out of me, because (just like kids whose parents say “no” more than “yes” end up feeling like they can’t do things,) if I don’t have my own support, I’m not going to feel empowered to accomplish anything. So the next day I have even less energy. So I can’t write, or do anything else. So I get mad at myself. At a certain point, I can’t even sleep anymore, I’m too busy being pissed at myself. So, guess what? No energy. And on and on it goes.

It’s bad enough knowing that I could never support myself anymore. If Branden were to upgrade to a newer model, I’d be up a creek. It feels like I was robbed, since I was aimed at a master’s degree in architecture when I had to admit defeat to the fatigue and confusion and the lack of balance, sensation, and coordination—like the weeping angels touched me, my potential was stolen from me, and I am doomed to whatever scraps I can get now, from my tiny cage lined with wood chips. But I feel like my brain is my enemy. And when your brain is your enemy, what could an ally possibly offer?

I am trying to learn brainhax to trick myself into moderation. Make good habits of self-regulation. But when even that feels mountainous and unattainable… I feel like I’m in Inception, just falling deeper and deeper into limbo.

So… that’s where I’ve been for the last few weeks. Please stay with me. I can’t do this alone.

Reading complete!

I finished The Big Sleep last night. It’s a wonderful book and I’m certainly going to be reading more Raymond Chandler from now on (in fact, I have just now checked out Farewell, My Lovely from the library). He is where all the awesome hardboiled tropes come from. He warms my guts.

I feel like I am armed and armored, where before I was naked and wielded only a stick. Yes, I survived the wilderness, but I wasn’t pretty at the end.

My metaphor isn’t holding up too well. That’s okay.

I am very excited to begin writing again. Given the changes I feel are necessary to make my book not just good but great, I’m going to have to start by outlining—again. Yes, I’m starting completely over once more. But this time, I’m keeping all the same characters and they’re playing the same roles, if in different ways. This means that I will almost certainly need at least one more draft between this one and the final draft, but hey, what else am I gonna be doing? Might as well write something worth reading.

As with the first day of anything, I start out excited and quickly become overwhelmed and terrified. (Not to mention that I’m tired as balls.) My brain is trying to tell me that it’s okay to play some Don’t Starve before getting started. My brain is wrong. The metaphor for my feels about writing is, if I were to have five energetic kittens fighting each other in my lap, playing with my hair, pulling on my earrings, that’s about how focused I feel. This may be at least partially because this is actually happening to me right now. I need to put myself into an environment where I control the stimuli. It doesn’t have to be quiet but the noise and tumult should be present by my will.

I wish I had more to say about writing right now. Being at the very beginning of a new draft makes for thought storm but word drought. So I will talk about other things.

My friend and Writers’ Group cohort Becky has been participating in Twitter pitch contests, and that is most excellent! She actually has a finished book to pitch. I’m a little jealous, not gonna lie. But it’s been making me think that I could really use a community. Blogs I follow, comment on, and/or contribute to. Twitter banter. Forum friends. Self-promotion would probably be a lot easier if I felt like less of an internet spectator and more of an internet participant.

I would love to have shorter stories to share, so that people might read my work and enjoy it, and maybe long for more. I have shared a few things on deviantArt, but have never gotten any feedback. Does anyone have suggestions about where to share short fiction with a community? I’m not a writer of fanfic, though I sort of wish I were; that comes with some built-in exposure.

Later today I’m going up to the city park to sign a petition to recall all members of the Jefferson County school board, because reasons. Though I do not and will not have a child in any school district, I still believe that education is basically the most important thing when it comes to bettering one’s life, becoming a creative person, and becoming a good neighbor. Having a school board dominated by people who prioritize money and “patriotism” over quality of education will simply perpetuate the problems that exist in society today.

Anyway. I’m gonna wrap this up, I feel I may be participating in avoidance behavior at this point. Wish me luck, and happy writing, all!

Mondays are the absolute worst

You know why? I’m guessing you probably do, but let me tell you anyway.

For me, Mondays are the worst because I haven’t been online at all over the weekend. I have all my comics, deviantArt, and all of Tumblr to catch up on. So, even though I technically have time for all of that since I’m on hiatus, it takes fucking forever. I have to leave here in an hour and I haven’t even had lunch yet. (It’s 4:22.)

Balls on that.

So, May On Hiatus is going well so far. I’m coveting my free time and rolling it up into balls and then baking those balls into cookies and loving it. I’m not having literary thoughts, for which I apologize. I’m drinking lots of Starbucks. I just wish I had anything entertaining to blog about. I suppose I could talk about my kittens, but if I were going to do that I should have started back in April when I got them. Now I’m all talked out.

My teacher, Mr. Byrne, died recently. I’m so thankful that I got to say goodbye to him, and I am pretty confident that by the time he went, he knew what a huge impact he’d had on the eager young minds he had educated over his life. Buonviaggio, caro mio.

Snow and rain are finally making room for nice weather, but that may not save my tomato plants. Stay tuned on that.

I’ve been trying to “be good” about getting to the gym during my hiatus month. So far I went three times last week and twice this week, but my goal is four times per week… but it’s very hard to motivate to do that, since all I really want to do is play video games with the TV on in the background and eat Doritos. (Resisting the Doritos. So far, anyway.)

My brothers had a nice mothers’ day with my mom and “forgot” to tell me about it, so now I’m the bad kid. Thanks, guys!

Uhhhh. Got nothing. Come back Wednesday for more drivel!

And on the sixth month, I rested

Yes, yes, yes, I did it. I finished my second draft, also known as Cassidy1, on April 30 at 9:00pm, having written 5,767 words that day in order to finish. I’m not 100% happy with the end, but so what‽ that’ll be a Third Draft Problem. And now, I put it in a drawer for a month, to be reread and revisited on June 1.

In the meantime, what will I do?

Branden and I made a date yesterday to write with some of the Writers’ Group girls. I forgot, when I made the date, that by the time it happened, I wouldn’t have anything I was working on anymore. I still planned to write something, if only just to develop a few of the ideas I’ve had for other NaNo projects, or maybe 1-page short stories, but instead I caught up on Tumblr. And really, that was fine. I think I want to take this month to give my creative plumbing a small break. It has been a solidly long time since I was able to play Don’t Starve—especially without guilt.

Now I’m looking down the barrel of my actual-second-draft, let’s call it Cassidy2, and I’m quite nervous. I’ve never done an edit like this before. On the one hand, it’s much smaller scale than Cassidy1, but on the other hand… I know how to rewrite. I’ve never tried to restructure what I’ve already got. I expect it’ll take a much shorter time, because it won’t have the agonizing hair-pulling angst of creating something from nothing, but on the other hand, I am in the habit of looking at my work as “right the first time.” It’s not that I’m necessarily convinced that it couldn’t possibly be better, it’s just that once I’ve written/drawn/designed a thing, it’s very hard for me to imagine it being any other way than exactly how I made it. So, I have a tendency to resist even very helpful suggestions, and coming up with them myself is practically impossible.

But learning how to do this is part of being a responsible artist. I feel that anyone participating in art will get better unless they are actively resisting it—and even if they are, it will probably happen anyway. But something like editing is a thing you can fail to ever learn to do, because it is a defined activity that is separate from creating. It is by no means a requisite to writing. But it is a requisite to writing things you want other people to read and enjoy. Recognizing your own imperfections and being willing to revisit and refine your work… well, I don’t really have to tell you why it’s a good thing. You already know. Even if you’re like me and you always do everything right the first time.

Final word count: 56,603 (�)

Writing hygiene

As my deadline nears (thirty four hours, thirty four minutes) and the words pile up (“not as quickly as I’d like,” she thought, her forehead wrinkling with worry), I’m made to think about writing hygiene, which is a term I just made up, derived from sleep hygiene. Sleep hygiene refers to making good habits to increase your likelihood of having a good night’s sleep, such as turning off screens an hour before bedtime, going to bed at the same time every night, preceding bedtime with the same approximate routine (like brushing teeth, reading, etc) so that your body gets trained to expect sleep to follow.

Similarly, I think that having good writing hygiene would help me write more consistently. Currently, I do have a routine, but it’s not consistent enough to train me. I start whenever I want to, by checking my comics and deviantArt and Tumblr, then (allegedly) I start writing. However, Tumblr frequently segues into Facebook and even if it doesn’t, following Tumblr link chains can be an endless activity (and I’m not exaggerating). As a result, I end up being ready to start writing right around lunch time, and then I have to eat, and while I eat, I like to watch a show, which is, I know, a bottomless pit of unproductivity. Meaning, I can’t watch a show during lunch if I have any expectation of writing afterwards. But it’s a very hard thing to resist, when you’ve got nothing else occupying your eyes.

Long story short (“too late!” she cackled, rubbing her hands together gleefully), I need better writing hygiene. It is true that my comics, Tumblr and deviantArt are all inspirational to me and help me get into the headspace of writing, but Tumblr just doesn’t have any convenient early-exit points. It makes me think that maybe I should save Tumblr as a post-writing reward rather than a pre-writing requisite. In addition, I should have a set time of day that I begin this routine—and perhaps, a set time that I end it, though I hesitate to stop myself if I’m on a roll.

But if I write 2,500 words and let the spirit take me until Branden gets home, the next day I feel the letdown of not having done anything to reward my hard work, of simply jumping back into the fray and putting my raw, abused nose right back against the grindstone. I always promise myself, “if you write today, you can play Don’t Starve afterwards!” (“she does, you know,” she griped. “I’m starting to think she never planned to let me go.”) But there’s never time afterwards, and then the cycle begins again.

It’s possible that changing venues might help me with both staying on task and choosing to stop; but all of the appealing venues are ones where it’d be at least a little rude not to buy something. Branden has suggested the library, and it’s a very good idea, but the image in my head of a library includes hard plastic chairs, MDF desks, and a distinct lack of beverages. I think I’m probably mistaken in at least some of these assumptions, but, so far, laziness has won out, and I’m home-bound for writing. Primarily, I write while sitting on the floor of the unbelievably smelly room which houses three five-week-old kittens who think that me and my computer are the hottest ride in the whole park. (“Gee, I wonder why it’s so hard to get anything done,” she sneered, lighting a cigarette.) It’s how I multitask: kittens get quality Elly time and I get quality kitten time and I compose my masterpiece and Everything Is Just Great. Right?

Of course right. Or so I keep telling myself. And I could be right, it’s just a matter of discipline. So, here I sit, in Smelly Kittenville, preparing to write something that looks like Philip K Dick and Raymond Chandler had a hideous mutated Frankenstein baby. Wish me luck!

Word count: 47,372 (뤌)