Many Tasks at Once

 So the past month has been more successful writing-wise than previous months. I think this in part is because I've trimmed back my writing to a minimum of 250 words and no more than 500 per session. Before, I was writing as much as I wanted. I blasted through scenes and would write for two, three, four days in a row, be dry for the next week. Keeping my wordcount to a low range helps me remain interested without burning me out.

Another thing I think that's helped is that I've added other writing tasks to my roster. 250-500 words a pop on one project wasn't really enough. It felt like a warm-up, so I added a second project. The second project, DOTSC01, has the same range of wordcount as the first, which works well. It also helps prevent bouncy brain where I hop from one project to another in an endless round of distracted writing. 

That worked so well that I decided that it may be a good idea to add another writing task to my list. Hence working on the handwritten story from years ago. This tale of yore is called, Front, or My First Completed Novel Evar!!!, and it has the seeds of my current writing in it. I'm transcribing it directly—not making any corrections—and adding commentary that makes me laugh at least.

And, as if that wasn't enough to have on my list of writing tasks, I decided to rework an old gay romance I wrote years ago. I think I wrote the original draft of this particular story in November of 2009. At the time, I was not participating in NaNo, but I managed to slam out just over 80k words in about 6 days, if I remember right. It's got some major issues. At the time, I didn't know how to handle conflict, hence this reworking of the story. I'm outlining it in Scapple right now. 

Having a number of tasks seems to be working well for me. My writing mind is calmer than it's been for years, and I feel like I'm making progress on everything. I'm having fun too, which is important to me. And, best of all, writing slow brings out detail I wouldn't otherwise be able to include. I'm quite pleased.

So that's where things stand in the writing world. My mental health is doing well with regular dosages of all my psych meds, which is good, and I'm very faithful with taking them at a regular time. I'm also looking into other ways of earning money, primarily by hawking my handcrafts that I make with sewing and crocheting. Things are going well!

A Wild Month

 It's been an interesting month-and-more here. My sleep schedule went haywire, and it threw off a whole lot of other things and I ended up falling into a depression.

Part of the past month, I've been working on the dreaded gay romances I love to hate. I think I'm noticing a pattern with these. Anytime I fall into a depression or struggle with my mood status, I turn to writing the gay romances. It's something I've only just realized happens. When I'm stable and not depressed, I find it easier to focus on my speculative fiction and rarely touch the gay romances.

Also over the past couple months, my wife and I entered into debt consolidation. We weren't horrendously deep in debt, but it would have taken a lot longer for us to crawl up out of it than it will be with the new—single—bill to pay off our debts. I'm looking forward to having this all taken care of within the next few years now. 

One of the things I'm looking into is starting up an Etsy store. I'm going to sit down with my wife, who has far more experience with businesses and such, and see about hammering out a business plan. This is in place of me getting a job with another company. Why? For several reasons, one of them being I need a more sedentary position because my body just can't handle me being on my feet all day. I'll keep y'all updated on progress here and provide more details in my Patreon posts. 

So that's where things stand right now. 

Big Depression Equals New Medication

I feel I owe y'all an explanation of my absence over the duration of July. I know I mentioned prior to July that I was experiencing a depressive phase that was more pronounced than usual. Well, it continued through most of July. It got to the point, in fact, where I spent most or all of some days in bed. Literally. I didn't feel like getting up to do more than use the bathroom and eat. Going to bed got difficult as well, and I was sitting up all night sometimes three nights out of the week every week. See, the depression made me afraid to go to bed, because I didn't want to end up spending the day in bed again. It was just a vicious cycle. But that's what depression does. It locks the person who has it into a vicious circle of tactics to avoid or deal with it, and rarely are they healthy methods.

When I had my video appointment with my psych doc a few weeks ago, I explained to him what was going on. He wanted to be cautious. Instead of replacing one of the psych meds I'm already on, he suggested introducing a new one, to which I agreed. The reasoning behind this is that my mood stabilizers were working fine before the big depressive drop, and he doesn't want to meddle too much with established meds. It's actually easier to add a different medication on top of what I'm taking than take me off of one of my current meds and run through a list of others until we find one that works. And, besides, he could assign a medication specifically to deal with the depression, and go from there. I don't know what other plans he may have for my medications, but I'm glad to say this first one worked.

My psych doc put me on Wellbutrin, whose generic name is bupropion, which is actually the name that appears on the bottle. We were hoping for some improvement in my depression, but this medication just totally wiped it out. Before the heat wave hit, I spent a week being productive. It was fantastic, and if not for the heat wave, I'd have spent the past two or three weeks on an all new schedule. Sleeping at night. Awake during the day. I loved it for the week I had it.

Oh, the heat wave is important, because it messed up my sleeping at night. When the daytime temps hit about 95°F and above—and for about a week and a half, most of our days were over 100°F—I have difficulty staying asleep. I get hot at night and wake up. The window unit air conditioner in the bedroom just could not keep up, and we had nothing in the living room to help it. At times, I woke up to wipe sweat off myself with my sheet. 

That's part of the reason why I spent last night up. I slept all day yesterday—or may as well have been all day, to catch up on missed sleep leftover from the heat wave. From about midnight the night before until 13:00 yesterday, then I laid down for a 2.5 hour nap at 15:00. Even taking my night meds last night didn't help. 

We're getting a new window unit that's supposed to be delivered today or tomorrow, for the living room. With that in place, things should get back on track. I'm looking forward to that! 

Moving Along Slowly

In the past few weeks, I've made some progress. There's about three or four drafts of the To Do list I planned on making, mostly adding things to it. I've also realized that with things going as they have been with Covid, my job hunt may never get started again. A lot of companies are moving their employees to home-based working, and that's not really feasible right now for me, even if I could qualify for the well-paying jobs I'm seeing. Not only that, I'm seeing light at the end of the tunnel with other methods of making money. Ideas I've had before, but never had the courage to consider doing seriously. So, if things work out, writing won't be my only income stream—and it really shouldn't be anyway. 

About that To Do list. I think I have it finalized at last. My attempts at starting on obeying it have failed previously, in part I think because of the depression that is still very much with me, but also in part because I didn't really give myself time to mentally prepare for starting to align myself to it. This week, though, I finalized the list and started on a "schedule" for it starting Sunday of next week. One of the things I'm doing is listing minimum times to do the things on it, usually an hour-range, but sometimes something like a wordcount (for writing) or minimum chapters (for reading). I'm not going to be working on a couple-odd things on it for the first while or so, because I need to get better equipment for the work, and I won't be able to do that until I get all the fabric I need for the quilting projects I'm planning. Writing is definitely on it, though, even if the goal count won't be very high, mainly because if I throw myself into high wordcounts right away I'll burn out and end up not writing at all for a few weeks.

I'm happy to say I'm getting some ideas on how to handle DH03 now. Suffice it to say that some major plot points may change. Beyond that, I'm not going to go any deeper into detail. Overall, I'm enjoying writing and am excited to get back into doing it regularly, so I'm hoping the next several days of psyching myself up for getting into my new "schedule" will work. 

Yes, I'm up awfully early. I slept until around 16:30 yesterday. Was just so tired. I'm probably going to take a nap today, then go to bed at a decent hour. Whatever I do, I'll be setting an alarm for Thursday and getting up when it goes off. I can't get myself on a decent schedule unless I organize my sleeping hours into a much better nightly habit than it has been up to this point. Whatever else happens today, I intend to do some housecleaning and perhaps some quilting—as well as reading through what I have of Géta's scenes so I can figure out how his next scene should go. 

And that is all!

Depression Sucks

Nuff said.