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.
I’ve been missing my favorite hiking places ever since we moved to Seattle from the bay area. I’d been hiking in the same spots since I was a little kid, and they were so safe and comforting for me, and provided a really great way to relax and get into a more creative frame of mind. The night I finished my rough draft of Somnolence, I called it done done around dawn and then went for a hike with my dogs as the sun came up. Moving was hard, and I still haven’t found a place around here where it’s so easy and comfortable for me to just go out and walk a trail. I still visit all those same places whenever I go down to see my family in California, but I really want to try to find places around here that fulfill that need.
To that end, yesterday I just googled some nearby trails, picked one kind of at random, and drove over there with the pups. It was absolutely gorgeous and so peaceful. Totally worth it.
Unpacking is going well, for the most part. It feels a little frustrating to have to take apart all our work from just a few days ago. We spent all that time and energy packing, but now it must be undone. Still, it’s moving along.
I started sanding down my old desk, because it’s been a mess for years and I’d actually like to be able to work at it instead of on the edge of the couch. Couches are not considered particularly well suited for extended typing sessions. That’s how you mess up your wrists. It’s gonna be an ongoing project, most likely, but it’s satisfying to work on.
I managed to keep track of all my writing stuff during the move, and even organized it more when I packed it up, so that’s kind of a relief. My sketchbook was also tucked in with all my notes and stuff, so here’s another dinosaur.
I drew him right before the move. He’s just a little bitty dinosaur, singing his little bitty dinosaur song. I was inspired by that cool amber-encased dinosaur tail that was found a while ago. They said it was about the size of a sparrow, but it kind of reminded me of a little wren for some reason.
I found a ton of strawberry plants on clearance at my local home depot, so now I have all the berry plants for my new yard.
The pups are settling into the new house really nicely, but they still don’t like being left alone here, so I’ve been dragging them along on a lot of errands. Toci gets bored and tries to clamber onto my lap all the time, even when I’m just kneeling down for a second and she has to settle for perching on one of my knees. She is my super weird little unicorn beast.
I’ve been driving for about two days straight and just got to my dad’s place this evening. After some recuperative tea and chatter with my siblings, I realized that I had forgotten to write the post. Then, I kept chattering, and remembered again and forgot again many times. It is now about 3am, because this is what I do to myself.
Here are some highlights from Friday’s drive. Sadly, I have no pictures of the minor snowstorm I drove through around Mt. Shasta, but it was exciting.
I’ve written/edited every day this past week, because deadlines are still the only thing that can really force me into full gear. Unfortunately, that means I don’t have much a post to offer, because I need to finish this round of editing by Sunday. I worked all night a few days ago and then went for a pre-dawn ramble with the pups, which is always weirdly refreshing. The market is a little weird before all the people arrive, but my batman beast loves it there, and will put her entire twenty pounds into pulling me up the hill so she can trot around, sniff everything, and eat god-knows-what off the ground.
Toci’s happy place. You can’t see it, but the fish stall is up ahead and she was very intent on getting closer to those buckets and boxes. Her brother is behind me wishing that he was still at home under his blankies.Yeah, it’s basically as creepy as it looks, but at least there were friendly fruit vendors setting up shop nearby.
As I’ve mentioned previously, balance is not something that comes easily to me, and I’m not just talking about my tendency to tip right over whenever I’m distracted from important stuff like where my feet are and how gravity works. It sometimes feels like I’m either ignoring all my other responsibilities to focus on work, doing all the things except work, or taking a mental and/or physical health day that stretches into a week of feeling guilty and frustrated. If it were possible to make a three way see-saw, that’s what it’d be like in my head.
Still, I think I’m in a better place than I was a few months ago. I’m sleeping consistently, instead of every other night, and running a little closer to normal person time in terms of appointments and deadlines. Work is happening.
I’m getting better at being kind to myself instead of breaking down when I feel like I’ve failed, but I still need to learn how to be tough on myself without the breakdown. When I’ve been hard on myself in the past, it was pretty much just self-bullying. It had no purpose, it certainly didn’t motivate me, and it was absurdly out of proportion to anything I had actually done or not done. That was no good, but without any internal structure I tend to lose track of important things and miss out on opportunities to move toward my goals.
Self care has been discussed to death lately, but what I really appreciate are the posts that remind me that self care isn’t just bubble baths and scented candles and wine with breakfast. (Or whatever you do with wine. I don’t really know.)
Practical self care is taking care of yourself the way you’d care for a friend or a child. Or, as one person put it, like a demon taking care of its host body so that it won’t fall apart. Whatever works. There’s being your own personal bully, which absolutely sucks, and there’s being your own coach, which seems pretty valuable to me.
Till I get better at this, Toci has been appointed my temporary coach. So far, she has ordered me to sit in multiple uncomfortable positions so she can use me as a throne. I assume this is some sort of wax-on wax-off, hidden wisdom type shit. Probably to teach me endurance or something.
There’s a lot of debate about the merits of daily writing. It’s definitely good to write regularly, and writing every day basically guarantees more rapid improvement than if you only rarely make time for it. There are some ableism issues if it’s framed as the best or only way, since many people literally cannot write every day. Lots of the arguments against it sort of boil down to “but then it’ll feel like work.” If you’re trying to make writing a career, then letting it feel like work is probably a necessary part of that. If not, then it’s probably just fine for it to be a fun hobby that you only do when you feel like it. I think a lot of the time the issue is when people don’t want writing to feel like work, but do want to improve dramatically and be “successful” without putting in the effort.
I’m kind of stuck in a weird middle place. I struggle to finish projects, and I always have. Finishing my first, first draft was one of the biggest accomplishments of my life. It took a huge amount of dedication, and I’m proud of it when I remind myself to be, but I still didn’t work consistently and I constantly got down on myself for that. It took a lot longer than it could have. Feeling guilty about not writing consistently made me want to quit, pretty much every day. I was probably more consistent about berating myself for not writing than I was about writing, which I would not recommend as a motivation strategy. It is less than effective.
I’ve always had really nasty drops in mood because of depression and they randomly knock me on my ass. I used to (and still sometimes do) fantasize about not bothering to get back up because it’s just exhausting to know that it’ll happen again and again, but I always do get up. The weight just lifts, or the right person says the right thing, or the right song comes on, and I manage to tweak my mental state back into something functional. I’ve developed tricks that help, if I remember them when I need them which is never guaranteed. My dogs help, because the imminent threat of floor wetting and canine starvation is motivating in a way that kind of sidesteps my emotional issues and gets me into pants and a shirt and usually shoes.
One shitty thing about mental illness is that it makes things impossible, but they never feel like they should be impossible. I don’t sit in front of the laptop scrolling mindlessly through Facebook for hours because I know for a fact that I can’t write. I always feel like I’m just on the cusp of working. It might be executive dysfunction stopping me, but physically I could do it. My hands are on the keyboard. The manuscript is there. The fact that looking at it for a few seconds made me feel sick and panicky doesn’t register as anything other than weakness. I have no perfect or even consistent solution for this problem, really.
Building a habit helps, because it lowers the initiation energy required to get moving. It’s hard to build a habit, though, and easy to break it. Building a habit requires consistent effort in the first place, which is unbelievably draining if you’re already dealing with mental illness.
Sometimes I can just push through it, usually around 3am, and then I’m often surprised by how easy it feels once I get into the zone. Then, the next day, I’m shocked by how hard it is when the flow doesn’t come.
Prioritizing writing over basically all my other tasks feels impossible, but it seems to be one of the biggest barriers I’m facing right now. It’s a little easier to take out the trash and do the dishes than write a challenging scene, but if I try to do all three in a day, writing is almost always the thing that gets bumped off the list when I run out of energy. If I have to socialize, that burns me out, but I don’t want to admit that or disappoint people.
The only really solid advice I can offer to anyone who wants to write but is dealing with something like this is not to let it stop you from picking the story back up again, no matter how long you stall, or how bad you think it is, or how disappointed you are in yourself for missing those days or weeks or months in between. I’d love to be able to write every day. Maybe someday I will, because I have been slowly improving my skills and reorganizing my life and I have supportive partners who encourage me, for which I’m really grateful. But for now, just picking it up again after a week of feeling miserable about it is more important than doing it every day. It’s been a while since I went a month without working, and I think part of the reason for that is I don’t spiral quite as hard into all the guilt and feeling bad about it. I’ve made a conscious effort to prioritize something over perfect or even good, even though that idea feels like nails on a chalkboard to my brain.
I wasted a whole day on Minecraft and laundry, but Somnolence is sitting there at the bottom of my to-do list, do I:
A. Tell myself I’m garbage and stay up super late to punish myself?
B. Promise myself I’ll do it tomorrow and write today off as a lost cause?
C. Literally open it for five minutes and rewrite one sentence so I can cross it off my list?
It’s silly, but C is usually the most daunting option for me because it means facing that scary mountain of stuff I need to do and just doing this one tiny, inadequate, little thing and every part of my personality rebells at that. A sentence is still better than nothing, though. I don’t write every day, but I have managed to produce a blog post, albeit often an embarrassing full day late, every week for a few months now. Late is better than nothing, too. The only way to guarantee that it never gets done is to put it down and never pick it up again, but every day is another chance to try again. If I pick it up again enough times it will eventually be complete, and that is truly the best I can do right now.
If they were good enough for Frida Kahlo, they’re pretty darn awesome. Hers were the Mexican Xoloitzcuintli and mine are Peruvians, but still. Something, something, artist goals.
P.S. I did not feel like I had any thoughts to share when I opened the page to write this. I thought it would just be crap, but damnit, I showed up with my crap anyway and I’m proud of that.
P.P.S. The breed history in that Frida Kahlo link is totally wrong, but it has cute pictures of her and her pups.
Jasmine Collins 