Brain Dump/Goal Update

Really lacking motivation, as usual. I keep trying to power through it, but I'm running out of reasons why I should be powering through. I'm trying to tell myself it's because I've been sick all month (had COVID immediately after Christmas, and now have long COVID symptoms so yay for that), but I know that I wouldn't be any more motivated if I wasn't sick. How on earth did I ever manage to focus long enough to get a Bachelor's degree?

So I thought I'd write a blog post, since nothing else is working. Maybe blogging about my problems will help me find the solution.

There's a scriptwriting contest nearby that closes on the 30th, and I'm trying to write something for it, if only to get my name out there (but hey, getting it produced would be a nice bonus). I came up with a theme, but it's supposed to be a one-act play. I've never even watched a one-act play in all my years of theatre, let alone written one. When you Google what a one-act play consists of, you get WILDLY different answers. Like literal opposite-ends-of-the-spectrum answers. So I just picked one and am hoping it's right. Self-doubt is not a great companion to have in a situation like this. I have no real pretensions of winning but -- man, wouldn't it be great if I did? It would look amazing in my portfolio.

I wanted to be writing articles and getting to a point where I would write an article draft one day and then editing older ones the next and repeat. I haven't written (or edited) a single thing in at least two weeks, despite really only working half-days due to ALL of the health issues. I just have absolutely no motivation and absolutely no ideas. How do I think I'm going to do this full-time when this happens all the time? It's so frustrating. I'm the only person in this household able-bodied enough to work (or at least I was before my back injury in September), and that's slipping away from me fast. I have always wanted to be self-employed and here's my chance and I'm just... doing nothing. I'm so frustrated with myself. Everyone else can do this. Why can't I? I know, I know, it's the ADHD. But that makes it worse. This only reinforces the idea that I am a dysfunctional human being and I'm too broken to bother being fixed. It's hard to want to try when you just feel so broken and forgotten.

I've submitted two pieces -- one to a magazine, and one to a flash fiction publication -- and haven't heard anything back. The magazine said it could be 9-12 months (yes, months), and the flash fiction should be announced in the next week or two. I have a half-decent draft I wanted to send to an online culture publisher, but I can't seem to pull the trigger on it. I'm so terrified they'll think my idea is stupid.

I have a vague idea of what needs to happen in Kyrie to fix the very-bad pacing issues in Act I, but I haven't figured out how to actually implement that... it's just a vague idea in my head at this point, but to actually write it into scenes? Pffft. No clue. No idea what those scenes would look like.

I've done some fine art -- mostly pencil crayon, actually, and I've almost finished a piece in marker. Those are fun and they've turned out decent. My main problem here is lack of ideas. I usually think in words (writer) and feelings (dancer), not easily-drawable images. The images I do think of are WAY above my skill level and I know it would just be an exercise in frustration to even try.

I haven't even touched dance. Not one dance thing. I want to make a trailer for Sottovoce so I can submit it to MDFF, but I just... can't, somehow. I want to type up the choreography so far for my (hopefully) next tap dance film to see where I'm at and what's left to choreograph, but again, I just... can't. I'm afraid I'll struggle with memorizing as much as I did with Inside Of You -- it turned out all right, but I've GOT to stop going into filming knowing literally none of the choreography. It just makes shooting take a thousand times longer and it makes editing so much harder than it needs to be. I dread starting memorization. I really do. I think me not typing up this choreography is me trying to avoid starting memorization -- which, of course, will make the problem even worse because then I'll have less time to memorise. I know this. I've always known this. But I can't seem to just DO it.

The one goal I've actually made a good start on is the reading. I've finished one book and read another cover-to-cover last night (it was a beta read, actually, and it was SO good. Will probably be talking about that book here a good bit when it's released -- the author accidentally hit all my special interests and it was really well-crafted).

Rehearsals for my show are going well so far. The cast seem friendly, but it's hard for this broken human to initiate conversations with them. They're a good group, and there's always laughter at rehearsal. It's also really nice to go on long drives again (it's a forty-minute drive one way -- about what I used to do four days a week for dance before I got married).

I still don't have any motivation or ideas (well, maybe one, but it's a baby idea and it needs to incubate a little bit), but it did feel nice to actually type for a while and have my thoughts organized like this.

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading.

Tired

I'm tired of being a failure.

I'm tired of being broken.

I'm tired of everything I do being wrong.

I'm tired of being yelled at.

I'm tired of being told I don't know how to do anything.

I'm tired of waking up in the morning.

I'm tired of the same old, same old.

I'm tired of having nothing left to give.

I'm tired of looking into my future and seeing only pain.

I'm tired of trying solutions and having them fail -- often spectacularly.

I'm tired of trying to find purpose and meaning.

I'm tired of trying to find a reason to fight for anything.

I'm tired of losing those who are supposed to love me.

I'm tired of being somehow simultaneously 'too much' and 'too little.'

I'm tired of crying.

I'm tired of trying.

I'm tired FROM trying.

I'm tired of being broken.

I'm tired of being the black sheep

I'm tired of having nowhere to put this pain.

I'm tired of scrimping and scraping for every penny.

I'm tired of fighting.

I'm tired of having my 'friends' abandon me.

I'm tired of not being able to afford to get the help I need.

I'm tired of having to be strong all the time.

I'm tired of living.

Rewrite Update

I'm currently rewriting the MC's death scene.

It's a weird experience. I first wrote this novel, this scene, in November 2014. Even then, I was no stranger to writing death scenes, but that's not what's weird.

What's weird is all the losses, the deaths that happened to me in real life -- all happened after I wrote that rough draft. This character dies of asthma. I wrote this scene in November and lost my best friend to lung failure three months later. My cousin died of asthma five months after I first wrote this scene. I didn't even know she had asthma until the night she died.

It's also weird that this doesn't really trigger me or raise my anxiety levels (I don't have an anxiety disorder -- one of the few mental illnesses I've managed to dodge so far. My fear levels are normal, but my sadness and self-hatred levels are off the charts). Maybe I've accepted defeat and am just assuming bad things will always happen no matter what and there are absolutely zero ways to get out of it. Maybe I've been successful as separating fact from fiction. Maybe not really remembering writing the initial scenes in the first place is helping me be more objective -- there's not much emotional connection as far as 'I wrote this scene on this day while sitting in this place at this time of day' so I haven't had the 'I wrote this and then it happened' thought. Maybe the writing and the real life happened far enough apart that I was able to keep them separate.

Maybe I just knew that this is what had to happen for this book to work, and I have to do what I have to do. This book has no point if she survives. She's already had a near-death experience and the character's lives just continued on for the most part (as it does at college -- if you're not actively dead, you aren't sick enough. At least not at my college). For the MMC to learn what he needs to learn, he has to lose her. And it has to be severe and sudden, with absolutely no recourse. She's not the type of person to willy-nilly end a friendship, especially not one as precious as what they have.

Honestly, her leaving this particular friend character was the initial seed of the idea. At first the scene in my head was her driving away, never to return, but somewhere between initial idea and NaNoWriMo that year it morphed into what it is now, and I think that's a much stronger climax with more interesting repercussions. If she doesn't die, he never gets mad enough to stand up to the villain character -- at the cost of everything he's worked for. If she doesn't die, he never learns to live, really live, and to value people and experiences over money and 'proving people wrong.'

I guess this novel is kind of a synthesis of what was going in my own life at the time -- I was still very much dealing with implications of my own near-death experience several years before and I was in the beginning stages of learning those very same lessons. The main character was who I was striving to become, and the MMC was me in that moment, trying to figure out how to get from here to there.

In some ways I think I've regressed in my goals there. And that's what making this rewrite in general so hard -- because I shut down hard when my cousin died. Suddenly life was not beautiful and life was not worth living. I never fully had the chance to learn those lessons. They have never taken root in my own life. And because this character doesn't die until very near the end of book, that means I spend 97% of the book building her up into this Mary Poppins sort of magical figure (while somehow not being a Mary Sue) with which I am very unfamiliar, and only the final 3% of the book is MMC consciously learning the lessons (which I actually am familiar with). Since the novel is 'written' by him after her death, there are elements of him picking up threads that he missed while he was living them... but that's a tough line to toe, though, because I very much want a 'no spoilers' approach. He, our narrator, doesn't mention that she dies until she does, right in front of him, barely a year after he meets her.

I do intend to send this draft out to a couple of beta readers, though I can think of a couple of things I might need to rewrite after this. This time I did a straight-through, top to bottom rewrite with absolutely no jumping around (partly so I wouldn't forget to write 'smaller' scenes, partly so I wouldn't have to completely reassemble the book potentially multiple times only to find parts still missing -- in short, to stave off mind-melting, brain-burning overwhelm). I started in April 2022 and I am on pace to finish this month. I'm currently at 77,000 words. I've never written anything this long before (you'd better believe I'm backing this thing up on an external drive every other day).

I'm just so proud that I've gotten this far. Even if nobody pays money for this book, I'm proud that I have given it a fair shot at life.