I'm a fantasy and young adult fiction writer. Here, you'll find book reviews, writing tips, personal opinions, and updates on my work. New posts every Friday.
My birthday is coming up at the end of the month, so that’s exciting. I’ll be thirty one! I suspect it’ll feel very much like being thirty.
I finally got a treadmill last week, and I’m actually surprised by how much I love it. I really like walking, and I already spend a truly excessive amount of time listening to audiobooks and watching youtube videos about weird stuff, so now those activities can be combined. This makes me feel much less useless and floppy.
I’ve been iron deficient for quite a while, and I found out that the supplementation I’ve been doing hasn’t actually been working all that well, so that’s fun. Having shitty blood really saps energy and focus, and the things required to make me absorb iron better are all also things that throw my potentially very painful stomach issues into overdrive. It’s a wee bit frustrating.
On the bright side, though, I did some vital houseplant maintenance and drew some tropical fish.
A moorish idol (top) and banggai cardinalfish (bottom) that I got to see at the Seattle aquarium recently, drawn in black pen and colored pencils. Sorry about the lighting on this pic. It’s always hard to find enough light to show the colors without washing out the black a bit.One of my African violets was looking pretty sad, so I trimmed and repotted it.
Like most milestones that humans care about, the new year is pretty arbitrary, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad time to wipe our mental slates clean and look forward with a little extra hope.
A lot of people are probably already finding their new year’s resolutions to be a heavy burden, because we’re usually encouraged to set our sights way too high when crafting goals. If you picked something that’s making you miserable and burning you out, I hope you’ll consider stepping it down to a more reasonable level now rather than just dropping it when you run out of energy entirely. That’s not failure, it’s just good planning.
Restrictive diets don’t tend to work for the vast majority of people, but adding an extra vegetable source to one meal a day is pretty doable for many, and that can help build a long term habit that supports individual health. So can adding five or ten minutes of stretching or meditation at a convenient time of the day rather than committing to spend an hour at the gym five times a week when you haven’t gone in months or years. It doesn’t mean you can’t increase your goals as you go along, but keeping the increments ridiculously tiny means that it’s almost impossible to let yourself down. Small wins make a huge difference in confidence and self-image, while repeated failures are disheartening and typically lead to completely abandoning all effort.
This stuff is even more important to consider if you live with mental illness or are neurodivergent. There’s a huge amount of pressure to use that yearly boost of energy to DO ALL THE THINGS and be… better. And it works, but only for a few days, and then our actual limits come down even harder on us because we burn out all of our reserves. And then all that hope turns into just another thing that we feel bad about failing to live up to, and none of us needs more of that. Not a one. We need a bunch of little successes a hell of a lot more than we need a handful of new regrets.
So, please, give yourself the gift of some really small but consistent wins this year.
Some humble, slightly random suggestions for new moderated goals:
Go to bed just ten minutes earlier than you have been
Set your alarm for ten minutes earlier (but only if you went to bed earlier. Sleep is so important.)
Switch just your afternoon tea or coffee to decaf
Add a veggie you don’t hate to one meal a day
Stretch for a couple of minutes every morning
Walk around your block once a day at a convenient time
Write 50 words on a project every day, or even less if that’s too much
Spend fifteen minutes doodling if you’ve been missing your art
Spend ten minutes gardening and then go inside if it’s cold or raining
Clean or organize one part of your space for ten minutes and then let yourself stop for the day
Read a page or two of a book you’re interested in every day
Catch yourself when you start thinking negative things about yourself and practice redirecting to something more neutral whenever you can. Neutral is a much more achievable starter goal than positivity, and it’s still an improvement.
Adding something small to your day tends to be easier than eliminating something, and in the long run it can have the same effect by slowly edging out whatever it is that you think you should reduce. If you’re interested, the book Mini Habits by Stephen Guise is a pretty helpful guide for setting consistently achievable goals and he also explains why they work so well.
I signed myself up for NaNoWriMo (National novel writing month) this year. It’s probably the first time I’ve actually been in a position, mental and physical health-wise, to give it a more than half-hearted try. I’m not trying to write an entirely new novel this time, but I figured it would be a good time to pull together my new outline for Somnolence and do that full reworking of it that I’ve been planning. It gives me a start and end date, plus a little bit of outside support and encouragement. I’m on track so far, which is cool.
I’ve also been experimenting with different ways to make my days more consistent. So far the weirdest but most effective thing has just been eating the exact same breakfast every day. For the past few weeks it’s been cottage cheese with a whole cut up banana and a drizzle of raspberry syrup. It’s surprisingly delicious, filling, and it gives me a decent amount of energy. The other most effective thing has been making sure that the the kitchen is always useable and cleared up for the morning, even if that means I wind up doing dishes right before bed.
This means that I don’t have to think at all when I get up. I just roll out of bed, turn on the kettle for tea, make the bed, make the tea, give the rabbit his morning salad and let him out of his pen, thaw the dog food, cut up my banana, give the rabbit the end piece of the banana so he won’t try to hop onto the table to steal it, then actually put together and eat my breakfast and drink the tea. Oh, and somewhere in there I usually shower and get dressed, too. It’s possible that part of the reason I need consistency so badly is because I have very spoiled animals, but it definitely helps to cut down on general friction in my mornings. It also cuts down completely on those super un-fun days I used to have occasionally where I would totally fail to eat any breakfast because the kitchen was a mess and/or nothing sounded edible to me, which meant I didn’t take my meds, which meant I couldn’t sort out how to fix the breakfast problem, which usually led to an eventual meltdown of sadness and starvation, and nobody wants that.
I think the next step might be to add a short after-breakfast walk for me and the dogs. Frodo seems interested in the concept, too, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t stand for a bunny leash. I’ve been trying and failing recently to keep up with my longer walks, but a quick daily walk before work would probably have more of an effect on my everyday energy levels anyway, and even a short bout of exercise is supposed to help with concentration. We’ll see how that goes.
Pretty succulents growing out of a cement wall, because plants are hardcore.
This is definitely my new favorite place to walk with the dogs. It’s so peaceful, and there are so many different paths to take.
Beautifully arranged rocks among the greeneryMossy branches and emerald green leavesA cool plant with broad leaves next to a pond covered in floating duckweedA mossy tree trunkA well disguised salamander larva lurking in the mud at the bottom of one of the pondsAnother baby salamander hanging out under the duckweedOne of the beautiful calm pools around the arboretum. I love that they don’t keep fish in any of them, which means that amphibians can use them safely for breeding.A pretty pink flower in the undergrowthCute little brown mushrooms on a mossy log
I’m still doing my best to keep up my walking habit. It got harder over the winter, but there’s tons of beautiful scenery to enjoy now. There are longer gaps than I’d prefer between my proper long walks, but I also try not to let it turn into a source of guilt, because guilt is like ADHD kryptonite. Even if I forget or get busy for a week, I’ll always come back to it because it’s fun and it makes me feel good. Plus, I find all sorts of cool things to take pictures of.
White mushrooms on a logPink bleeding heart flowers in front of a mossy logA fern frondCute yellow wildflowersA little slug enjoying a nice mossy patchThese might be salmonberry blossoms. I vaguely remember them from last year.
And I’m still mostly fine, strangely enough. I was kind of snowed/iced in on the hill by myself for most of the weekend, but it wasn’t too bad. I kept warm, cuddled my dogs, and focused on writing and other indoor projects. I am getting a little sick of being cooped up, though, and there’s another cold front heading for us, so that might be a little frustrating. I’m just gonna try to make the most of it.
I have gotten outside a little bit for walks the last couple days, but I’m thinking I need to find a treadmill for our basement, because I don’t want to let the weather make me quit that routine and I really am a complete wimp about the cold. My nose and hands start to hurt after about a minute of being out there right now, but I am determined to keep up the activity as much as I can because it helps so much with my focus and mood. Some days that means just chasing the dogs around the house and running up and down the stairs, but whatever works.
I really love my office. Image: Some orchids and succulents on a windowsill, with snowy trees outside.
It’s been a busy week. I managed to get a few pretty pictures to share, but otherwise I’ve mostly been focused on writing and personal tasks. I finally got my ADHD medication situation sorted out last week, so I feel like I’m able to focus much more effectively, and at the right times. I’m still learning how to utilize it best, but it’s a huge relief.
I’m also sleeping better, and I think the medication is helping with that as well. As long as I don’t take it too late in the day, it helps me stay productive and active at the right times, which means I’m actually tired at night and not just stressed about all the things I should have done. It’s a very nice change. Keeping up with my meditation every day also helps with stress and sleep, so I’m still doing that regularly, as well as making sure I get out for walks several times a week. I’d like to be doing more walking, but still haven’t figured out how to not have it eat up a huge chunk of my productive time during the day, since it quickly gets too dark out for me to walk alone in the evenings. I seriously can’t wait for summer, or at least spring.
I did get to enjoy the beautiful fully eclipsed moon on Sunday night, but sadly it is far beyond my skill level to get decent photos of celestial bodies on a smartphone, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. It was very cool, though.
Anyway, I’m going to get back to the editing for a bit longer and then go chill with my dog who is currently very mad that I’m still at my desk. I hope everyone has a good weekend coming up. Mine looks like it’s gonna be pretty quiet and focused, hopefully with at least one nice long walk in there somewhere.
Image: A crow looking down from a bare oak tree against a gray sky.Image: A hummingbird sitting in a mostly bare crabapple tree, silhouetted against a gray sky.
Jasmine Collins 