I Got My Wings,

 Full disclosure, it is not Friday the 5th when I'm writing this. I'm writing it at twenty to two in the morning because one of the dogs is stressed from the fireworks and it's taking a lot to try and get him to go to bed and get some sleep. I used to love fireworks, but as I have said countless times, I don't love the impact they have on my animals.

Anyway, onto what I was actually going to be writing about. It turns out I might actually be full of shit. Why am I full of shit? Well, because I said I'm not really a resolution person and I said I wasn't going to try and do any of these things of do X every day of January, but instead, I'm doing something... worse? Better? I guess that depends on your perspective. I'm going to be trying to write every day. I'm part of a writing website called 4 The Words, I've written about it a lot before and it's something that I get very passionate and overexcited about and have zero awareness of when other people's eyes glaze over about it (thank you ADHD) and I have a streak which has been live for a consecutive one thousand, four hundred and sixty days, which is four whole years. Technically, I joined at the end of November 2019, but I didn't keep my streak fully after the end of NaNoWriMo, so my consistent one has been since 7th January 2020, but it's calculated by number of days not calendar years. It was a very different time.

One thing about streaks is that if you log in on the day, you can 'fix' a streak even if you don't write, because at least you thought about writing, and there is the facility to 'book time off' with planning ahead of you can 'buy back' days onto your streak, but only for a very limited period. There's a theory that I thought was called nudge theory, but I believe that's actually something different, which states that doing something small towards your goal each day is the best way to achieve it, so actually even logging onto the website and clicking a button to say I can't write today, whether it's because I'm busy or I'm ill or because I just feel like an empty vessel, it's okay. To some degree, the system allows me to take that further, but something I'm aiming to do this year is to actually log in every day and write the small amount of words (four hundred and forty four) that I need per day to pass par for the site. By the way, I'm spelling the numbers out for two reasons. Yes, long hand the words are worth more than a number written as 444, but also because I have realised recently that even though I'm good at maths I do struggle reading numbers sometimes, mainly between 3s and 8s, but the words generally behave a bit better for me.

There are going to be days where that is not physically possible, so I'm planning to email myself my words on those days so I can make sure I am writing every day, even if it's only a small amount, and even if it's only essentially me dictating my own internal monologue to myself. I don't want to lose my love of writing again because I'm trying to force myself into it, but I cannot lose this part of myself because I categorically do not know who I am without it, and part of the reason I felt as bad as I did during November was because it felt as though this part of my personality was crumbling, based on the complete and total misconception that my identity as a writer started with NaNoWriMo and couldn't function outside of it. 

Today I, well, my avatar of a slightly different name (character restrictions on usernames so it's CharlieWrite, having been charlwrite for a number of years due to even tighter character restrictions) will get a set of gold wings as soon as I hit my four hundred and forty four words, and you better believe I will be putting them on that tiny, dweeby looking facsimile of me, because I am proud of the achievement. Even if it means I was full of shit when I said no resolutions, and no joining in on do something every day things, this is something I really want to do, and I sat with it for a while to see that it was that, rather than something like parkrun that I carried on with because I wanted to want to do it, which is not the same. And if it does make me full of shit, well, a lot of people are so I guess I can make my peace with that. Hopefully in four years time I will be sat here ready to get my 8 year wings that are the coolest pair (in my less than humble opinion) and this year will be one which I look back on as a time of peace and focus, though I realise that might be asking a lot of a brain that like shiny new things and behaves erratically. We'll just have to see.

Now That's Done,

 When NaNoWriMo wasn't quite here this year I was thinking, I know what I want to write. I want to re-write a novel I have been drafting and redrafting for quite a while and I'm still not happy with and then I also want another crack at drafting Butterflies (yes, the sequel to Fairies). In the end, I have started on neither. 

I started drafting something that I thought was going to be really cool and then it just kind of drifted off until I got bored and then the second was another redraft of something I've been trying to write for a while and getting nowhere with. It's a whole world I've been kind of living in for a while, stewing in because I enjoy it, but I've still not quite found where the story is in it at the moment, and that hasn't changed right now.

Anyway, today, on Day 8, partly with the help of the 4 The Words Multiplayer mode and partly because I was having a rare and lovely dopamine day, so I hammered through the last eight or so thousand words I needed to write and came to the end, but maybe that means that I can write what I want to now, because I don't need to be thinking about word count as much, though I am still thinking about getting through the quests I want to in 4 The Words, which is a good because if it keeps me writing then that would be amazing.

As much as the pressure of NaNoWriMo can be excellent, but I think it has also squashed my head a little bit. I have felt guilt about not writing like I haven't felt since, well, since last November. It hurts my head to be looking at the screen for as long as I've needed to in order to finish this quickly. It's hurt my hands, because it's gotten so cold recently and even when I put the heating on for an hour it doesn't make it feel warm enough for the amount of exercise my fingers get. 

I think this is getting ramble again because I do actually have a really bad headache, I'm looking forward to going to Starbucks tomorrow for my Eggnog Latte reward, and I'm considering getting the very patient shih tzu a steak to celebrate having done the worst of it. 

It's Been 10 Years, But I Just

Over the last few weeks, I have been itching to have another crack at writing the sequel to Fairies, because it's been ten years (almost) since I wrote it, I'm back in the place I wrote it (mostly) and I feel like it's about time. As in, it's about time I wrote it, the novel isn't about time. That would add a whole other level of complicated I can't deal with right now. 

4thewords is continuing to be a helpful beastie, because it makes me write at least 444 words a day, and sometimes the hurdle is just starting and putting pen to paper... well, fingers to keys. Once I get going, I'm not anywhere near NaNoWriMo personal bests of 20k days or writing 100k in a month, but I can crack through between 1.5-5k words a day without it interrupting my day too much, so where is the problem? 

Part of the problem is the characters. **If you haven't read Fairies, this is going to contain spoilers, so please consider this your alert.**

Fairies finished with Nate, Adamson, Louie, and, I want to say Felix, but who knows at this point!, returning to the fairy world because an eternal life as a fairy was better than a limited human life. They could make an impact on the lives of humans and they were important there. Seemingly simple? 

It's really not simple. 

Following on from their return to the fairy world, things change around quite a bit, so there's some of the sequel which is about them, some which is about Frank as my favourite person who was left behind in the human world (and someone who crops up into another novel I've been writing for just next to forever but needs a bit of character development in between the two!) and two new characters. One of the new characters is 'evil' and in league with the imps and the other is the one causing me the most problems, as she's Felix's (he's definitely called Felix - I checked) daughter. Originally I intended the story to be just about her, but every time I start writing about her, she seems to find some sort of tangent to go on and finding the way to make the actual storyline (and the reason I'm writing the book in the first place) to happen seems to be beyond me at the moment. 

Ah well - I've had a moan about it, and now I can get back to writing it, even though it's been at least five years since I read Fairies over again (only cringing most of the way through it) so the details are a little hazy and I have no idea where either the .pdf file or the proof copies are, but that's just a bit tough, isn't it?

Just Let Me Take a Nap First,

Last time I wrote a blog I admitted that I had been struggling. Admitted it. I should probably change the language around that, but it's what it feels like. I finally confessed to not feeling well as though not feeling well is something I need to feel bad about. It's really not. 

Since last writing here, I went for an assessment because my moods seemed to be cycling pretty dramatically, and it causes other worries than anxiety. It's when you start talking about personality disorders and bi-polar, and quite frankly, I was really scared. It's a strange thing to be scared of, because knowing what it is doesn't change your experience of the thing, but what it does change is the stigma. I know there is a big difference between saying I have an anxiety disorder and having bipolar. I was relieved when the doctor told me she doesn't believe it's personality disorder of bipolar, because as much as it didn't change my diagnosis and it didn't change the fact that previous therapies hadn't necessarily worked, things weren't as bad as they could have been, and she was able to offer me different options than what my GP had offered, so that's progress! 

Unfortunately, though everything in mental health treatment takes a lot of time. Between the time when I spoke to my doctors about having an assessment and the time the assessment appointment came was probably about three weeks. Three weeks doesn't sound like so long, but it was enough time for me to start feeling like I was approaching a more even keel again. At other times in my life, I would have simply said, oh, I don't actually need this right now. I'll cancel it. The good thing was I was uncertain about that recovery; I didn't trust it. I wasn't fully back to normal, I didn't truly feel like myself and like I was actually okay, so I knew that looking at treatment options was still the best thing for me, but the fear of that appointment was something else which made me start to cycle downwards (along with a few other things that were going on at the time). I had a couple of days, maybe less, of relief when they told me that they didn't think it was anything worse than my current diagnosis, but then I found that downwards slope again without even actively looking for it. I should point out, I never actively look for it...

The problem was when I tried to get an appointment with my GP, two things happened. The report wasn't with them and I didn't know if it had even been written yet, and the next thing was that the receptionist I spoke to wasn't the one I have spoken to before. I say Mental Health issues with sleep disturbance to the other one and she unblocks an emergency appointment for me that I would normally have to call at 8am for because she knows I won't be able to call at 8am and she knows I'm really not well. This receptionist was adamant I had to call at 8am. I get that people are different, she might be new, she might be more junior, but it was another barrier to me trying to feel better. 


The upshot of it all was I started taking Citalopram earlier this week. I have been warned before that it's evil, that it makes you feel worse, that it steals your soul and feeds it to Satan's pet donkey... I've heard a lot of bad about it, but I've also heard a lot of good, and quite frankly, I needed to try something. Whilst I wait for therapy, whilst I wait for therapy to work, whilst I try and get back to the things which I know help me to feel better, I needed something to act as a crutch so I can get to do all of those things. I was exhausted, I felt lost and scared and in some ways beaten. Granted, taking the Citalopram I am more exhausted, but I know that that is temporary, and actually some rest is good for me. Granted, I am trying really hard to get back to a sleeping pattern that normal people recognise and not that is attributed to small winged creatures who hang out with Dracula, but I'll take what I can get at the moment. 

In all of this though, I know this is not my lowest, and part of the reason I know that is because I'm still using 4thewords and I've just hit a 60 day streak. And that means a whole lot to me.