Creative Residency Plans (Or: The 2025 Goalpost)

I've been laid off my day job.

 

Since my body (and my mental health) can't handle the rigours of fast food, I will not be going back, even temporarily.

My employers anticipate they will call me back in late March/early April. This gives me just over three months to sit at home and think about life, for the first time since I graduated college.

I have a couple of side hustle ideas. Neither of them will likely replace a full-time income, but if they work out, they'll at least slow the financial bleeding.

That said, this is now a glorious opportunity to work on all those creative projects I keep saying I don't have time for. I've been thinking about my goals for 2025, and I want to front-load the year either hitting those goals or at least getting myself well set up to hit them later in the year (keeping in mind that the summer months from Hell in this town are usually pretty uninspired and dormant seasons for me).

I am trying to frame this as an artistic residency sponsored by God. (And for the record, God may work through other people or through my own efforts.)

So without further ado, here are the goals for 2025!

DANCE

- At least attempt teaching two (or more) dance sessions.

- Make two dance videos this year.

I made this goal in 2023 and got it. Made the same goal in 2024 and didn't even manage one.

- Create a long-form dance work.

The plan is to use Nachmo/National Choreography Month for this (post with more details forthcoming).

- Submit to at least two dance/choreography festivals.

Notice I said 'submit,' not 'appear in.' While obviously I would love to actually present work, I can only control how many festivals I apply to, not how many actually present my work. I always consciously choose goals that I personally can control -- that way if they don't happen, it's on me, and I'm not driving myself crazy trying to check off two 'presentations,' when that facet is out of my control. I want to focus on doing the work and showing up every day and leaving everything I can't control to God. If I submit to two festivals, I will have done my due diligence, and whether or not my work is accepted, I will consider myself happy with the fact that I put my name out there.

- Secure a practice studio.

I have two potential options at the moment. I really just need to gather my courage and send a couple of emails.

WRITING

- Write some short stories/poetry to submit.

Could be tricky, as I have been in a writing dry spell for YEARS at this point.

- Finish the current Kyrie rewrite.

 

 

PERSONAL GROWTH

 

- Go for a walk (or some kind of exercise) at least three times a week.

This is a goal my husband and I have set together.

 

- Become more comfortable with using that Instant Pot that has been sitting on the shelf literally since our wedding.

This is another goal for both my husband and I.

- Read more.

I've got probably like 70 books in my Kobo wish list, and even a few that I've already purchased that I haven't read yet. I got a Kobo gift card for Christmas, so time to put it to use (as soon as I figure out which Michael Card book I want).

I did make this goal last year and read about six books, which is definitely more than I've read since graduating college.

- More Bible reading and prayer.

I made this goal last year as well and I managed to be fairly consistent until about August.

FINANCIAL

- Save at least $500 for a house.

- Get in contact with at least two people about selling my crocheted items.

- Run at least two dance class sessions.

- Promote my Ko-fi page on social media somewhere at least once a month.

- Apply to at least one job per week.

The hardest thing here will be finding jobs to apply to that 1. are within like 200 km of where I live, 2. pay enough money to cover gas for my vehicle at the bare minimum, 3. won't re-injure my back or my ankle, and 4. won't make me want to drive off a cliff.

It's still early in the pre-New Year week, so I might still tweak these. But this is at least my starting point, and since I'm already off work, I guess the creative residency starts now.

November Without NaNoWriMo

We're four days into NaNo-less November. And honestly... I don't miss it.

 

I don't feel as if I'm missing anything. Without M, and with the pressures of married life, it had become a chore anyway.

At this point, I think it will be a good long time before I do a writing month challenge again. I probably will at some point in my life (because I'm completely incapable of finishing a rough draft without the pressure of a 30-day deadline), but I'm guessing that time is years into the future.

This isn't the first time since 2008 that I've sat November out. The first was in 2017, when I replaced NaNoWriMo with a dance-every-day challenge, and the second was in 2020, when I wrote 10k of a sequel to 2253 in less than a week before my brain just shut down completely and I could barely spell my own name. But this is the first time I have planned to not do the event well in advance AND not replaced it with some other challenge.

And... it honestly feels like I have an extra month in the year. I keep thinking Christmas is in like three weeks, because usually that's what happens -- I jump from 31 October to countdown-to-Christmas, with no sense of proper reality in between. Not doing NaNoWriMo has given me an extra four weeks to plan and buy Christmas gifts, to work on other creative projects that got pushed to the side during the unfathomable heat of summer. This year, I'm still in the midst of choreographing Grease for a fairly large theatre company and having this extra time available to work on that will be invaluable.

Although I do plan to work on Kyrie this month, I am expecting no more progress on it than I would any other month of the year. I have placed next to zero writing expectations on myself this month, and I am completely okay with that.

No judgment to those who are participating this year. Best of luck to you all, and enjoy the ride.

(silence)

As I mentioned in my previous post, lately I've been into smooth jazz. As in, instrumental music.

Up till this summer, I strongly disliked instrumental music. Where was the story? Where were the opinions? Where were the thoughts and the observations? One of the reasons I love Daniel Amos/Terry Scott Taylor SO much is because every lyric is a gemstone reflecting back at you a universe of observations, feelings, and experiences. I have always related to the written word, and that extended to the type of music I listened to.

But lately, good lyrics are losing their pull. I've been listening to a lot of synth/vapour/climate/retro-wave, and I've found myself actively skipping the songs with lyrics (I keep telling myself it's because I don't like the singers' voices, but I'm not sure I believe that). At the same time, my own love for and ability to communicate in the written word seems to be going downhill.

I think it started after I was banned from posting on Facebook by my in-laws (thus effectively murdering me in front of my primary audience), but that was in 2021 and the loss of the written word really only accelerated in the past year or so. Words suddenly don't mean anything to me anymore. Is it because I've believed and then been hurt by the words of one too many people? Is this part of my memory loss? Is this a normal part of aging? (Am I old enough to be 'aging?') Is this simple lack of energy from having every scrap of my soul siphoned out of me day in and day out at the fast food job as things happened too quickly to think... and my ability to think atrophied as a result?

I miss sitting by windows and looking out at trees and letting my mind wander and coming back with cool little intellectual trinkets. Sure, I'm still doing creative things, but without the written word, I feel like an imposter, like some mute alien took over my body and I don't recognise it anymore.

I'm not me without writing, just as I am not me without dance. I don't know who this other person is who is living in my body now, but I don't like her. She is not me. She's some namby-pamby watered-down butt-kissing wimp who has bought into all the things I used to rail against. The 9-to-5 job? She doesn't feel safe without it. The discipline of dance? She has put on an extra 30 pounds because she doesn't move around anymore. The contingency plans for every aspect of life? She melts my brain down trying to set them up, even though I know trusting God was so much easier (foolhardy, maybe, but at least my brain wasn't being eaten by acid every second of every day worrying about every possible potential problem the future might bring). The adventurous spirit that led her all over western Canada and created so many wonderful memories? She's pretending she's been buried alive in some hole in the ground where Satan cooks hot dogs in the summer heat.

I'm not sure how to banish this imposter living in my skin and get me back.

Reflections On Stories From The Incandescent Years

I miss this place and I want to write something here, but I'm not sure what.

I've been scrolling Facebook for two hours and am mostly writing this in an attempt to get myself to just stop and do something productive. Supper is in the oven already, but the dishes haven't been done in three days. I had dental surgery yesterday and they told me not to exercise, but what else is there to do?

I want to listen to music, but I want to buy more, as I'm getting bored with the variety I have (which sounds ridiculous even as I type that; I have over five thousand songs in my iTunes, which apparently equals over fifteen days).

Recently I've gotten into vapourwave, specifically climatewave (which is to say I've gotten into early '90s smooth jazz). It's the only thing besides dance that calms (or at least drowns out) the scream of static coursing through my brain every second of every day. That music transports me to when I was a child and everything was predictable and safe -- Mom was always in the kitchen making supper around 5pm, Dad would spin records well into the evening and then put on an instrumental CD for us after we were tucked in for the night, Grandma always had cartoons and 'coffee and cookies' for us whenever we went to visit, and we'd watch Grandpa slice apples in his chair with his little paring knife against his thumb while he watched the news. Church was on Sundays, and we'd go to Kosmos or Zambelli's afterwards. Incandescent light still cast a warm glow over everything (maybe the phasing out of incandescent has contributed to the phasing out of human warmth and connection). We were poor, but we were comfortable. We lived out on the exposed fields of the vast prairie, but we were safe.

When they say 'music is my drug,' maybe this is what they mean. I have always felt more comfortable thinking about the past than the future, but now I'm using the music of the past to actively block out the present. The present is filled with angry people and the AI takeover and 'we're moving forward with another candidate' emails and fluorescent lights and grey fast food restaurants and my brain screaming but not in words and the persistent feeling of time moving too fast. If black holes really do slow down time, somebody should install one by the moon so we can all catch our breath once in a while.

Maybe then I could see the stories again.

I used to write mundane little stories here, whole blog posts about computers crashing and construction delays and moments with friends. Stories that took maybe five minutes to live through, and would have been forgotten in a few weeks if I hadn't put them here.

That's what life is, isn't it? A thousand tiny stories that make up who we are.

My parents, though not artists, are both born storytellers. My dad is the unofficial keeper of the generational stories, the ones that he heard at his grandfather's knee and has passed on to us (and all the neighbours). I got my comedic timing from my mom, who has a one-liner for every occasion. Buying gas while running errands can become a hilarious encounter by the time she gets back home to tell us about it. To not be able to see the stories in my life the way I used to feels like losing myself as a person. Have I lost the stories because my memory doesn't work? or does my memory not work anymore because I lost the stories?

Maybe all I have to do is re-cultivate my eye for story. The only thing is I'm not sure how to do that.

Things I Did At Thirty

I never thought I'd make it to thirty. And then when I did get to my thirtieth birthday, I mostly felt washed-up and useless.

If you are coming up an thirty and are feeling the same way, let me tell you that your life is NOT over yet.

After my thirtieth birthday, I...

- Choreographed my first full musical production.

- Submitted a dance film to a major film festival.

- Finally made a sorely-needed career change.

- Made yet another dance film -- my favourite so far.

- Auditioned for four things -- the most since the pandemic, and impressive when you consider the real lack of art in my general area. Was offered a role for two of them.

- Got into a different show without an audition.

- Almost finished rewriting the first half of my novel for the second time.

- Got two crochet commissions.

- Started streaming.

- Started drawing (mostly pencil crayons).

- Injured my back to the point where I could not walk... and then rehabilitated it to the point where I can dance again.

- Acquired three more houseplants (that have survived. There was also a lavender tree that died a very dramatic death almost immediately after purchase).

The Drafts Of Yester-Decade

Recently I went way back into my blog drafts folder... and I mean way back. I often scroll back about 2-3 years, but this time I went all the way back to the very beginning, to the first couple of posts I wrote back in 2010 and never published... probably for the first time since I wrote them.

There was a lot of little stories of my life written there that I had forgotten about. And in a way those made me sad. I knew I was a brighter, happier person then, but reading these posts has put into sharp contrast just how much Brittney's and my cousin's deaths destroyed who I used to be... and who I wanted to be.

I still miss that person.

The other day I contacted an old college friend who I haven't spoken to since 2020, when I was banned by my in-laws from anything I used to do or to be. I've been getting tired of being locked in the prison of my own mind, and I'm starting to rebel. I've volunteered for a local theatre. I'm starting to listen to music again. I'm starting to text people back. I'm starting to read the Bible and watch church services again.

I want my life back.

That may never happen. In September, I sustained a back injury at work, and seven months later, it is causing more issues than it did the week it first happened.

I have not yet brought up the subject of future dance endeavours with my physiotherapist. They know I have a history of dance, but they haven't asked for details, and I haven't mentioned it. I haven't needed to -- there are still no dance opportunities here anyway.

I am a different person now than I was fourteen years ago, but I'm not convinced it's a good thing. Perhaps I made some decisions that looked stupid -- but honestly, I made those decisions from a place of deep trust, and I never felt more free and 'whole' than I did back when I was living out on a limb every day of my life.

The freedom and joy in those old posts are palpable, even after sitting on a dusty server somewhere for well over a decade. I have not felt that since before my uncle left my aunt in January 2015. I was 21 years old.

All these tragedies I never asked for ate up all the best years of my life. My body was a well-oiled machine, and my mind was sharp and quick. But it was all wasted as I spent those years drowning in an endless ocean of grief. Now the grief has dulled, but both my body and my mind are no longer what they were. I wasted all of that potential, all those years... on something that wasn't even my fault and was completely beyond my control. It's so unfair. It's so unfair.

I'll never be able to get those years back.

My Lack Of Social Skills Screws Me Over Yet Again

I'm stuck on Kyrie again, so I'm writing about it here because somehow writing stuff on my blog helps me process things (even more than writing them in my literal journal sometimes).

To recap: in February/March, I redid the entire timeline for Act I. I added subplots, I moved stuff around, I added quite a few scenes. (I am largely happy with Act II as-is, but Act I was... awful. I had trouble slogging through it during re-reading, and I wrote it.)

This weekend I finally made some real progress on the thing for the first time in ages. I wrote three whole scenes, which amounted to just over five thousand words of (hopefully) new and improved storytelling.

But now we are in a scene where multiple characters (as in more than three) have to socialise, and I am freezing up.

Before I was diagnosed with ADHD, this wouldn't have been a problem. I would probably have just made something up and assumed that was exactly how people socialise. But now -- after years of merely feeling vaguely out of place in social situations while trying to convince myself it was probably nothing -- I know that my brain is broken and that I am Not Like Other People.

This means I Do Not Know how Other People actually socialise.

At this moment, this scene feels like the literal scariest thing I will ever write. It's still early in the book, so readers might not be invested and willing to forgive mistakes yet. But here is where any semblance of normalcy will end, where my inability to be a Normal Person will be revealed in all its cringy starkness. This feels like no matter what I do, all the neurotypicals (you know, the people who can focus on reading books for any length of time) will feel all the awkwardness and feel immediately that this is not a 'normal' situation, and it's off-putting, and that I am not Like Them and am no longer worth their time, energy, or attention. Just like in real life.

Can I tell myself I will revise it later? Sure, but I won't believe myself. This is the second rewrite, and I know if I suck at writing this social situation now, odds are good that I'm still going to suck at it in a years' time.

I don't know to get through this. Even if I go work on something else first, at some point I am GOING to have to write this scene.

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.

The Annual Goalpost

I love and hate making these posts.

On one hand, I love dreaming up all the possibilities. But on the other hand, I hate trying to guess what kind of goals are reasonable and what aren't. After probably close to seven years of making these annual posts, I still feel that I don't know what I'm doing.

Anyway, here goes. It might look a little different this year.

- At least two new dance films.

I think I know which two. I just have to DO them (this includes memorising!).

- Create a long-ish (15+ minute) dance show.

- Audition for three shows.

- Make a plan of attack to rewrite Kyrie again.

First step is to reread the thing and make lots of notes. I already know Act I has severe pacing issues. I might try adding a subplot or something... I'm actually not quite sure how to fix it.

- Start pitching to magazines.

- Write at least four articles/stories a week.

- Enter a writing contest.

- At least one date night every two weeks.

- Read more (soft goal of nine books in 2024).

- More watercolour painting. I am deliberately not putting a number here.

- Sustainably cut back hours at the day job.

I am so burnt out with my current job it is not even funny. The management has been restructured, and now the workplace culture is so bad that I would literally rather die than work one more day there. I'm also not making nearly enough money there to cover our living expenses so every day I work there I feel I get farther behind. I'm really trying to grow my dance/writing network so maybe I can at least freelance enough to cut my hours at my current job even if I can't quit outright.

- Save $1000 for a house.

STRETCH GOALS:

- Apply for at least one festival (ideally with above longer dance show).

- Take at least three dance classes (or courses of some kind).

- Crochet myself a sweater.

- Make a third dance film.

This year's list is deliberately much shorter than previous years. It turns out it's just not possible to sustain the kind of creative output I was expecting from myself while also holding down an extremely emotionally draining full time job and being married.

The other thing is, the projects I'm undertaking now are a step up from the things I used to do. Ten years ago I was building a portfolio. I was making dances and honing my creative voice on small projects. But now I'm building on that experience to make bigger things. My goals used to be 'choreograph X amount of dances' -- small things that I could easily knock out in a week if I wanted to. But now the goals are more like 'make two dance films.' And learning, shooting, and editing a dance film is a lot more time-intensive than simply choreographing one on paper. Sottovoce took me 58 days -- nearly two months (granted, I am including the choreography time in this), and that was very much a speedrun. Inside Of You -- a much shorter and smaller-scale piece -- was still a solid month of editing even though I only filmed for an hour, and I'm not even counting the astronomical amount of time it takes me to memorise a dance piece nowadays. I'm looking to take some serious steps in this coming year -- bigger, more time-intensive steps, and those take up less space on the page.

This is exactly what I've spent the last ten years or so working towards. Last year I took some big steps. This year I'm looking to build on those steps and take bigger ones.

A Search for Fulfilling Work

I'm still job-hunting and every day at my current job kills my soul a little bit more. I feel like I'm spinning my wheels. I'm in limbo as far as my training for the next 'level' in the company, so to speak, and even though it comes with a slight (very slight) pay raise, I feel no excitement for it. I'm really just doing it for the money, and I need more than just money to feel that my job -- that my time -- is worth it. I'm not feeling fulfilled at all, and the rush I used to get in making X amount of drinks or burgers in a certain timeframe just isn't doing it for me anymore. The thrill of accomplishment is wearing off, especially now that I'm being more consistent with finishing dance films and I have Kyrie fully rewritten. Those are huge, complex, creative, challenging projects, and burgers are just... burgers.

However, I currently live in a tiny town with no real, fulfilling jobs. I've been applying for remote online 'virtual assistant' and copywriting jobs, but so far I'm striking out.

I've been looking into being a freelance writer more seriously. Until recently, I've been so overwhelmed by even the idea of looking it up that I haven't even Googled it. But I'm started to do some research, and... it actually looks pretty fun. Even some of the lower-end pay rates I've seen would pay many times more per week than my current job. It would definitely be enough to cut my hours at least, if I can get some consistent work. I'm testing out how consistently I can generate ideas and write articles through the month of December, and in the early part of next year my plan is to start actually pitching.

Freelance writing would be the ultimate dream... to wake up at a decent hour of the morning, sit in front of my computer and type for a few hours while listening to fun music, then spend the rest of the day spending time with my husband or working on dance projects. If I'm able to land a dance teaching gig, so much the better -- that's more consistent, something I actually am passionate about, and doesn't require me to get up at 6am and walk to work in the freezing cold and stand on an awful concrete floor all day with managers treating me like I don't know how to do my job and then go to bed at some boring early hour just to do it all over again. And again. And again.

It's not even like I would slave over the computer all day. I can totally put out an 800-1k word article in a half hour and edit it in a day or so. Fifteen years of NaNoWriMo and a five-year college degree have trained me well on that point. I would love my work a lot more, I would be far less tired, and maybe our marriage would improve with the additional time and energy I would have for my husband because it's not being drained out of me at a soulless job that demands so much but has nothing to offer.

Time is precious. I don't want to spend my precious time making burgers that people eat in ten minutes and forget about. I want to spend as much of my time feeling fulfilled as I possibly can. For me, that means writing about things -- helping readers make sense of the world. That means dancing -- the only way I have found any modicum of true peace. That means making crochet projects and paintings -- things that make our world and the worlds of my loved ones just a little bit brighter. Thirty-two hours a week at a job where you're just a cog in a machine is too much time out of such a short life. I could be doing so much with that time and I'm just standing there asking people what they want in their coffee. There's got to be more to life than that. I know there is... I've seen it.

The arts impact people. People carry art with them for the rest of their lives. I want to be a part of that.

NaNoWriMo, Day 26 - An Announcement

I'm into the final 7k of what may be my final NaNoWriMo event. At least for a while.

It's been a solid run. I've written twenty novels out of this contest since 2008. Only a few of them are really beyond redemption (or at least would take more work than I'm willing to put in). Kyrie (2014) is obviously my favourite, but there are definitely others I will be revisiting when Kyrie is closer to true completion.

This farewell to NaNoWriMo would not be complete without a huge nod to Chris Baty, the founder, and his book No Plot? No Problem! which I borrowed from the library at age 14 -- not knowing it would change my life forever.

Chris Baty made writing accessible for those of us with ADHD. He made writing seem like madcap fun, not a tedious chore. He made it exciting. He gave it a deadline (and you know how great deadlines are for ADHDers). He made it a social activity.

Chris Baty revolutionised what writing was. He unlocked the gate of writing so the ADHDers, with all our whimsy and colour and verve, could have a seat at the table too. He gave writing ADHDers a voice. And I am so grateful for that. Without that zany book, and without that deadline, I would never have written anything. I would still be spinning my wheels, wondering what could have been if I had only managed to try writing just once.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not quitting writing altogether. I intend to rewrite Kyrie again starting in 2024. As mentioned above, there are other drafts lined up for once Kyrie is 'done.' I am so excited to actually work towards publication for some of these stories. I still intend to write blog posts and maybe the odd short story.

Maybe in a few years I'll revisit the possibility of NaNoWriMo. But I'll be taking an indefinite, likely multi-year, hiatus. Up till now, the only years I sat out were 2017 and 2020. But my job, my marriage, and my mental health have all suffered during the past few Novembers and I have decided it's time to recharge. The annual hit to my marriage especially is just not worth it.

Is it sad? Definitely. I loved this event and the madcap fun it brought into my life. I loved writing alongside M and then writing to keep her memory alive. But as much as I love M and will never forget her, 'keeping her memory alive' can't be the only reason to subject my marriage to this substantial strain every year. I have other art pieces dedicated to her that accomplish the same thing. And NaNoWriMo just isn't the same without her actually in it. Every year since her death has been a huge struggle, and I think at this point, five years later, I have to accept that NaNoWriMo will never again be the same amount of fun. Time does not heal all wounds. Not completely.

For the time being, I think I have gotten what I need to get out of this event. Maybe one day I'll return. Maybe I never will.

But for now, I will try to savour these last 7k as much as I can.

NaNoWriMo, Day 18

I am struggling HARD this year.

I'm exactly at par right now. I'm getting hundreds -- not thousands -- of words done on work days, and have written maybe five words today -- my day off. I had hoped to write 3k today, but I just don't have the mental energy.

I keep going back to LinkedIn, looking for jobs, looking for connections, looking for anything that will get me out of this hellhole job that I'm currently trapped in. This is quite literally eating my life. My marriage is failing and I am almost convinced it's work stress that's making me an ineffective marriage partner.

On top of that, somebody tipped off the NaNoWriMo Board about the moderation drama that's been going on all year THIS month, of all months, and got all the forums shut down for all users during the LITERAL ANNUAL EVENT THAT THE FORUMS ARE THERE FOR. I've never been a huge forum presence, but I have a couple threads that I'm active in and not having the forums there for support and encouragement has almost killed my writerly will to live. I understand why they did it, I do. Moderation is, apparently, a dumpster fire (I have not witnessed any of this, but I've been hearing others complain about it all year) so in order to 'suspend' mod activities and sort out the allegations, they had to also suspend the forums lest it become the Wild West. But in an already-difficult time in my life where I am feeling extremely unsupported and unheard both personally and professionally, this is the straw that has broken this camel's back. Even if everything is sorted out, I really don't know if I will do NaNoWriMo next year. I understand the Board is doing their best and I do appreciate their efforts to sort it out and make it right as best they can but I'm just done having all my support systems taken away from me and this has left a really bad taste in my mouth. NaNoWriMo made me a writer and for that I will always be grateful. I have nothing bad to say about the event. But I don't know if I have the strength to put myself through this again, and that breaks my heart. I loved this place. But I feel it didn't love us back.

I'm so tired. I've had a headache for *checks notes* eighteen days now.

Even my story feels dead. I guess it matches my soul right now. I loved the concept of it, but I'm struggling with execution, as I did with last year's story. Both years I've had amazing ideas that I really loved, but was completely bored of the story as I wrote it. I don't remember feeling this before with any of the previous eighteen NaNo-related works I've written.

Is it a sign that I need to pause writing rough drafts and focus on editing these into actual published works? Maybe. I have easily five drafts that are very workable candidates for eventual publication. But I do want to finish this one. Only 20k left to go. It's still very doable, but only if work and marriage stress don't drown me first.

I hate that this is the NaNoWriMo experience I'm having. Even before the forum shutdown, I was struggling mightily. I'm so tired. I'm so done. Even with an outline, I can't seem to get from point A to point B. I honestly wonder if I would have been better off not making an outline at all. It's not stifling me, per se... I think the outline itself is just not interesting enough to me at the moment, especially with everything else draining me of hope. Writing used to be a welcome escape for me, but it's not working anymore. And that hurts a lot.

NaNoWriMo, Day 12

I have never been so prepared for NaNoWriMo.

I actually outlined this year. I used to mentally lock up at the mere mention of an outline, but the fact that I finished a full rewrite of Kyrie in large part due to an outline has made me rethink my process a little bit.

Mind you, I haven't done a full outline. I only plotted about three-quarters of the way, and I'm okay with that. I don't want to know where exactly this is going to end up, but since I have so little writing time nowadays, I'm finding I need to have a clear idea of what's coming next every day so I'm not just wasting hours filibustering. Don't get me wrong, I liked the filibustering -- that's part of the fun -- but between the full-time job, hunting for a job that will pay me a living wage/not demonize me for being injured and in severe pain, trying to keep ahead of my husband's multiple health issues, and trying to not ruin our marriage by being so burnt out by work, I simply do not have time to filibuster now. (That's also why I don't post here as much. I want to, but I'm so burnt out by work that half the time I come home and literally stare at the wall for hours, trying to even begin to recover.)

Day 1 started out surprisingly well. I managed to rack up 2,252 words, the overwhelming majority of them on Lila, my Neo (the second iteration) while waiting for supper to cook.

Day 2 started rough (overslept and also spent almost 45 minutes on hold with Amazon customer service because they screwed up my order), but managed to make up the word count in the evening.

Day 3 was the first time (of many) I struggled to make the word count. There's definitely a logistical flaw in my story, and I'm still partly in revision mode from the Kyrie rewrite so it was hard to me to let it go and continue the story without solving the problem.

However, I did rediscover Margaret Becker's music and have been playing the heck out of it. Every song is a straight up banger and I feel like I can conquer the universe after listening to this stuff. How have I not fangirled over her work before? Now I understand why my mother had her music on repeat all the time when I was a kid.

Week 2 was basically a write-off (not in a good way). More marital problems (it seems these always crop up whenever I'm trying to do something creative), and work problems conspired to make this week one of the worst NaNoWriMo weeks I have EVER experienced. I say this as a fourteen-year veteran of the sport with nearly 20 NaNoWriMo-born rough drafts in my folders. There were several days that I didn't even make 1,000 words, and I don't think I have EVER done that during NaNoWriMo before.

After one of the worst writing weeks in my entire writing life, I decided that since the work problems are likely to continue (they are mostly management related and not likely to improve anytime soon) and marital problems happen at the most inopportune times, I would build up a massive lead this weekend. 

It's going well so far. Day 11 (yesterday), I racked up 4,187 words, bringing the novel's total to 22,006. So far today I've gotten to 25,128 words and might poke at it a bit more tonight. I do have tomorrow off as well, but we've got some errands to run so the numbers may not be as big. But I want to get as close to 30k as possible before I go back to work on Tuesday.

I'm not feeling the story yet, but I've had a couple of small bursts of inspiration and the outline has definitely helped a lot. I've had to remind myself that exposition is okay right now (there was a metric ton of exposition in Kyrie, and I've spent the better part of two years trying to convert those long swaths of many-weeks-compressed-into-two-paragraphs into actual scenes with motives and tensions and resolutions and foreshadowing -- but all of that takes days, if not weeks, at a time).

Lila has been indispensable this year. I'm pretty sure this is the most I've worked with Lila since before I went to college. Even at home, I've been using her to write, and of course she comes to work for writing on my break (I usually manage about 300 words or so on break, which is 300 words less that I have to write after work when I'm so angry and frustrated at my job that I'm literally crying).

TL;DR: Still not fully 'into' my story, work sucks and is profoundly affecting my writing (more than college ever did), but I'm spending this weekend building a word count cushion, Lila is awesome, and I love Margaret Becker.

NaNoWriMo Teaser

I had almost decided not to do NaNoWriMo this year. Not because I had a bad experience or anything, but because I'm so weary. I'm tired of fighting for every scrap of creative time and energy. I've accomplished such big creative things in the past year and a half or so, but I still feel disconnected from the act of creating. I don't get to sit and enjoy it for hours on end like I used to. I have to sneak it in behind closed doors and on work breaks, only seconds at a time, maybe ten minutes if I'm lucky. I don't get to lean into it and really explore the way I used to. And I guess to me, that was the part I liked most. Finishing projects is great and all, but I loved the process of sitting down and just disappearing into another world for hours and then emerging with something tangible.

Somewhere along the line I decided to leverage that weariness.

So I'm writing essentially an autobiography set in a video game world. All the bosses are the people and situations that broke me.

Of course, I have no idea how it ends, since I'm still in the middle of three boss battles simultaneously.

Novel Achievement Unlocked!

 I have completed my first-ever novel rewrite.

I literally never thought this would happen. This is a bigger rush than I’ve EVER had finishing NaNoWriMo. I have completed a second draft of a book. It’s just over 85,000 words. Is it perfect? No. But it stands up better than its predecessor and gives me something coherent to send to beta readers.

After nine years of my brain melting every time I thought about rewriting, I did it. I seriously just did it. I wrote a coherent novel before I turned thirty. After nine years of putting ‘revise Kyrie’ on my annual goal list, I did it.

I only wish M was here to share my excitement.

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.

One Year - Novel Rewrite Update

One year ago today, I officially started rewriting Kyrie.

I'm well into the 'midpoint' section now. This is the part where the villain begins to show his true colours. This villain is based on some of the villains of my own story, and that, coupled with (yet another) domestic spat and my worsening asthma, is causing a lot of havoc in my body.

I tend to approach my writing as an actress. I place myself in the scene and act out all the characters in the scene. I think this is why people often say that reading my writing reminds them of watching films -- I write what I see in 'real time.' This means that I share in every character's emotions and reactions, and having mined some of the darkest times in my life for this midpoint, those can be very intense, very visceral reactions.

I had planned to write two scenes today. I've written one and my heart rate is already 92 (my resting rate is around 70 and I've been sitting all morning) and I needed my rescue inhaler. I don't know if I'm physically capable of writing the other scene, as it will hit even more of those 'triggers' for me.

On one hand, I'm hoping that the audience will feel the same anger I'm feeling at this character. But on the other hand, it's forcing me to unpack some stuff that I haven't yet regarding some of the people in my own life who treated me this way. I don't really know how to deal with these things in a way that won't ruin my life now. A lot of those villains are no longer a part of my life... but they're now in my head. And I don't know how to get them out of my head.

I am very proud of the progress I'm making in the novel, though. This midpoint scared me a lot and now I would say I'm over the hump and running downhill from here. I've already faced and worked through a lot of blockages and fears in (re)creating this work and I'm so proud of being able to look back on such a substantial document. I would say I'm just past the halfway point of the story, and most of the plot points that scared/overwhelmed me the most have already been written. I have forty-some scenes left in this novel. If I wrote one per day, I could finish before July. If (more realistically) I wrote one scene every day off of work, I will be done before September. Of this year.

I never, EVER even dreamed I would actually experience being so close to finishing a full rewrite/revision of any of my novels, even my best ones.

Two big things that have helped me get this far are: 1. framing it as a 'rewrite' rather than a 'revision,' and 2. making a timeline.

As long as I thought about it as 'revision,' I thought I had to completely restructure the book. 'Revision' implies 'moving stuff around,' but I couldn't find stuff to move around. I liked the structure and timing of the book exactly the way it was and couldn't find another way I thought was better. It was like trying to make a puzzle when the pieces were two different sizes. But as I soon as I started calling it a 'rewrite,' I didn't have to re-order anything. I could keep the general idea exactly the same and simply make it stronger.

This was where the timeline came in. I already had a pretty strong idea of the timeline in my head, but I pulled up a calendar from the year in which the story was set, and wrote out a day-to-day timeline of every single thing that happens to the two main characters of the book. Some of the things don't make it in the book at all but are referenced as things that happened off-screen, or are simply there for my own orientation (grad weekend, for instance -- I don't mention grad at all in the story, but it lets me know that I can't have the characters going to classes or doing homework anymore). Some events did get rearranged here, but not nearly on the level I thought they would have to be.
I colour-coded certain recurring themes and printed off this timeline (all six pages of it) and have had it at my desk ever since. It's been my lifeline and has done wonders for my poor overtaxed brain. The acid-melting-my-brain-whenever-I-try-to-revise feeling completely disappeared once I did this.

I'm so close and so proud and so happy and so relieved and I'm feeling so accomplished. Here's to the second half of the story.

April Saturday

Saturday morning.

My asthma is acting up the worst I think it ever has. I've doubled my meds for the last two days (as my doctor advised), but I still feel like an elephant is sitting on my chest and I'm breathing through a straw. It has not escaped my attention that the anniversary of my cousin's death from this same disease is this coming Friday.

At one time (late college), I would have welcomed this -- oncoming death? No more dealing with the world and all its neurotypical BS? Sign me up.

But now, I sit on my couch with a half-finished painting beside me, half a rewritten novel in front of me, and a crochet project that's almost done nearby, and now I think, I can't go now... I'll never see how these turn out.

The painting in particular stands out to me. I really don't like how it looks so far. I would consider it the first failure of my fledgling watercolour hobby. But I want to finish it, to see if maybe the finished project doesn't look so bad after all. My husband likes it so far and knew what it was without me having to explain it, so it's at least recognisable. If I die now, I will never know if it'll turn out all right in the end.

The novel... there was a time when I would have been okay leaving it unfinished. I made several attempts on my life between drafting it and now. But now I'm around the halfway point of a proper rewrite, and I'm invested. I want to know that I can finish it, even if the 'final' rewrite still needs some touching up. I want to send this out to beta readers. I want to send this to an editor. I want to publish it. I want other people to get invested in this story too.

The crochet project is a small one. I've made two others like it this week. But I used less stitches and a thinner yarn for this one, and I want to see how the final product changes with those variables altered.

I'm still stuck in the desert with no real hope of getting out on the horizon, and it's still beyond my ability to explain just how suffocating it is to wake up to this drab, soul-draining view every morning of my life. But if I can still be creative here, then I can be creative anywhere. Right now my main goal is to fill this dead brown place with colour -- and given how vast and stubbornly brown this desert is, that means I have a LOT of work to do.

So I have to finish this painting, this novel, this crochet project. And that means I have to take care of my health -- something I've never properly done before.

2022 Goals Retrospective

I feel more satisfied about 2022 than I have about any year since 2018. I would not yet say I'm in top form yet, but I'm closer than I was.

This year, I...

- choreographed 24 pieces. My goal for 2022 was 14. I literally doubled my output from 2021.

- got 35k into revising Kyrie. The thing I'm most glad about here is how not-overwhelmed I feel about it. For eight years, I would try to revise this novel but my brain would go into nuclear-meltdown mode within literally ten minutes. This year I spent three months making a timeline, then started rewriting entirely from scratch. And we're still going.

- made a Ko-fi page for artistic income... and got my first donation.

- wrote my first poem since before my cousin died in early 2015.

- took an online tap class in which I learned some historical repertoire AND took a summer dance intensive.

- did live improv tap dance for the first time ever and loved it.

- wrote a 50k novel in November.

- performed in two theatre shows.

- got my first paid acting gig.

In many ways, I feel like I didn't do much of anything this year. These were all small changes that (aside from the dance classes) took maybe twenty minutes out of my day, but that was the point. I knew I didn't yet have the mental strength to overhaul my entire life, so I dedicated myself to shoehorning artmaking into my days as they already were, just enough so that I wouldn't lose my skills. It really doesn't feel like I've done much, but I look at this list of things I accomplished in just 365 days and I'm surprised at how big some of these things really are. A full novel? A paid gig? 35k into a project that stymied me for nearly a decade? Twenty-four pieces -- over an hour and a half -- of choreography? At least half of the things I accomplished here were not on my original list of goals for 2022, and all of the rest -- save NaNoWriMo -- were achieved in ways or to an extent I very much had not expected.

All I hope for is for this to double again in 2023. I would be completely happy with that.

NaNoWriMo - Day 15

I'm really surprised how much I'm struggling with the novel this year. The setting, the genre, and the theme are all things I'm really passionate about, but I'm just lacking spark this year. I worked on the first, so I wasn't able to get the big head start that I usually do and that's come back to bite me in the butt. If I'm lucky, I'm closing one day ahead. I know most people would rejoice at even a one-day lead, but I've finished by this point multiple times in the past.

My plot feels slow. I didn't know what was going to happen when MMC got outside of the oxygen dome, but I wasn't too worried about it -- I figured my pantsing brain would just figure it out like it usually does. I've been here almost a week now and it just... hasn't. I spent three days with two characters in a circular theological argument that bored even me but multiplied the word count. I've even cited lengthy passages of Scripture (in said theological argument). I need to figure out what the next big plot point is, and I need to get my character there, emotionally. But I sit down to write and my brain just gives me static. I don't even feel despair about it, just apathy. There's just nothing in my brain, and it makes me sad. I had thought that doing little to no art for the better part of two years would have given my brain time to replenish its imaginative stores, but apparently this is not the case.

Anyway, I'd better get back to poking away at the story. Hopefully this blows over as Week Two wraps up and we head into Week Three.

Current word count: 26,340.