Back from the Void
Outstanding news: I’m not dead. I know it’s been a few months (the effort I’m making counts) and I cannot tell you exactly how or why I disappeared this time. I thought I was doing a pretty good job after the kidney infection, but then… gesticulates into the void. At some point, an “out of sight, out of mind” thing happens to me—not unlike my Kofi and Twitter. I can’t even tell you if I’d been making good headway with things behind the scenes like I had been before. There’s just a big great space between May to September? (There probably was health and social stuff I was worried about. Ah, yes. Car troubles. That was one of them.) September, of course, was dedicated to Wasteland Weekend, and October just kind of rolled through (like the start of my depression season usually does), but NOVEMBER… That’s where things got interesting. I challenged a mutual friend to NaNoWriMo—they are also a writer, they also have a BA and MFA in Creative Writing, and they’d been complaining about not having written enough post-graduation, despite me telling them that fact they were writing at all is a better step forward than not even writing. So, when they brought up NaNoWriMo I thought it was the PERFECT opportunity to kill multiple birds with one stone: get us both in the habit of writing regularly, allow both of us to get a chunk of work done on our respective works, and actually take part in something I had been meaning to do since… High School?
I was actually really excited. As I explained on my Instagram, I always had different priorities around November due to school and work (primarily school because it was that window of midterms and getting ready for finals), so I never got to participate. When I did finally have the time though, I was sort of neck-deep in the Bad Sads™, didn’t have community or support, and it was taking all my energy just to get by every day. So, 2021 was the first year ever where I went in, made a NaNoWriMo profile, and challenged myself. It went well until my Plottr app wiped some files and corrupted the backups. I lost a chunk of character and place information and notes. The outline survived, but the work I had been so proud of from the year before was lost. I was upset, understandably, and then it got worse. I logged on one Friday night, ran my computer through some much-needed updates, and one of those was a dreaded BIOS update. Biggest mistake ever. The computer crashed through the update and would not boot back up. I tried everything. My friends helped as much as they could. I even brought the tower to Geek Squad, and, after reaching out to a mysterious tech guru through email, decided it was better for me to get a new computer. I was salty (my computer at the time was only five years old, so it wasn’t even that old yet), but I took the opportunity to build a computer since it was something I wanted to do for… a couple of years now? Getting everything was a mild nightmare, and it definitely was/is on the expensive side, but so far, I still think and feel like it was a worthwhile investment. I was without a computer for practically two months and as a result, could not finish NaNoWriMo. Now we’re in January and I’m trying to pick up the pieces.
I never really thought about how much time I spend on the computer or the strenuous work I ask of it, but it felt good to give myself plenty of wiggle room for the tasks. In the past when asked what I used the computer for I would usually say “casual gaming and writing”, not realizing I actually do a lot of research on the computer for writing and that opening 20+ tabs was a bit much for it to handle. Now I can comfortably research and write with as many windows open as I need.
Between the end of that sentence and right now, I took a slight break and lost some of the initial steam I was using to propel myself through this entry. To talk about the work I’ve been trying to do since I lost those character notes for the novel, I’ve been trying to re-approach things and see what shakes out from memory. I’ve gone back to working in Google Docs and just hoping for the best. I feel hesitant to trust another program; campfire might have been a good choice, but it’s far too expensive and I’m very cranky about paying subscriptions on a monthly basis. As it is, all the streaming services might as well amount to cable TV again with how much it costs. So, I’ve started reading again for my enjoyment. Some of it was for research like checking out styles from independent authors. It spurred me into the idea of attempting another novella. There is a part of me that’s… a bit peeved at the fact I want to start/try a different project when I’ve already gotten so deep into one for the first time since graduate school. Comparatively, however, a novella asks a lot less from me and I have a clearer idea of what I want to cover in the novella itself; the story already exists in its entirety, I just have to write it down.
Silly enough, I want to… be extra about it? I had the fleeting thought about maybe trying my hand at a mixed epistolary novella. You know, a combination of letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings. I still want some parts of it to be in 3rd person POV, and I could just go for it, but I hesitate. It’s as though I want to impress an imaginary professor or advisor with all the knowledge I’ve accumulated, both historical and method. Writing that out, I don’t see why I can’t or shouldn’t. Clearly, I need something to inspire me and assuage my insecurity/imposter syndrome. Oh, that rattled something loose.
In between all of this very “important artistic work”, I’ve been looking for a day job. There are brief moments where I get so fiercely anxious about applying to more creative positions, I am beside myself and feel utterly worthless. I vacillate between knowing I am talented and feeling like an absolute failure. And that is because whenever my acquaintances ask for my artistic input (be it writing, photography, or acting), they never use what I offer. They decide to do it themselves, even though I’ve done it for free for them, and then I’m just left feeling absolutely rotten. As I understand, they might want to go in a different direction, or they use it as a jumping point to start something, but it has such a negative impact upon my self-esteem. I don’t know. I haven’t forgiven being asked if I could write a blurb for the vampire game I was a part of for the YouTube channel and then it not being used. Petty, I know, but months after the fact and it still cuts to the quick when I think about it. I am quickly devolving into wanting to write about how those people are really no longer my friends, but this isn’t the space for that.
Anyway, here is my attempt at getting back into the swing of running a blog. Hopefully, I will have more productive news to share regarding any writing for a novella or novel, now that I have a computer again.
Until then.
