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 spent most of election day stress-organizing my office, which was at least somewhat productive. I also had to replace all the covers on all the electrical wires, because my rabbit is a bully who likes to break my stuff. (RIP my cute pink Razer mouse.) Then I propagated and repotted some of my cooler carnivorous houseplants, had a few breakdowns while doomscrolling, and ate donuts for dinner. The donuts and stress have both continued into Thursday so far, because 2020 is an inescapable nightmare in pretty much every way and I’ll cope however I can.
I’m once again fighting with Facebook over some petty nonsense that apparently lead them to quietly revoke my ability to boost posts on my business page. Of course, they’ve also throttled the natural views that any page can get for any given post down to almost nothing, so that’s cool. I just love that there are absolutely no competitors for the massive position of power they’ve carved out for themselves in society. Unfettered capitalism sure is working out great!
But anyway, I gave Inktober a shot this year, and only lasted three days before I ran out of steam. That’s pretty much business as usual this year, but I did enjoy drawing these cute little koi on day one, so here they are in all their fishy glory.
I generally lucid dream. Even things that should be horrible nightmares usually aren’t much more than stressful for me, because I know that I’m dreaming and have some control. It doesn’t make being chased by zombies particularly fun, but it does take the edge off. There’s only one nightmare that I regularly have where I don’t know that I’m dreaming. I inevitably wake up from it tense and ready to run or fight, usually with a headache from clenching my jaw that lasts all day. I’ve been having it since I was a teenager.
The dream is pretty simple: A natural disaster of some sort has occurred, or is about to, and I can’t get my family to safety. We’re not blocked by a lava flow or anything. They just won’t listen. It’s worse than herding cats. I get my younger siblings into the car so we can drive away, and discover that my dad has wandered back into the house to look for a book or something. I physically drag him back out and my siblings have gone off on their own random side quests. I scream that there’s danger coming and they just don’t seem to understand, or they don’t believe me. Now that I’m an adult, my partners get added to the mix, always with the same results.
I usually have to spend some time in these dreams searching for and packing up supplies, only to discover that my loved ones have all scattered like confused chickens and I have to round them up again. It never works. We never get to a safe place. No one ever listens or acknowledges the danger that I can clearly see coming our way.
I am very literally living through my worst nightmare right now. This pandemic is a worldwide natural disaster, and people I love are not taking it seriously. My aunt flew home from a visit with my cousin and walked right into the house with my elderly grandmother after I repeatedly told her she needed to get a hotel room and quarantine for two weeks after going through several airports. My dad wouldn’t buy a chest freezer when I told him that he should be prepared to stock up on groceries for the family because he didn’t think there would be a stay at home order in their area. The order came about a week later. My grandmother is losing her memory and keeps going out on little errands. She won’t wear her mask. My dad won’t take her keys away. My siblings are adults now and are being much more realistic than their dream counterparts, but two of them work in essential businesses, so they’re still at risk.
Everywhere I look, folks seem to be finding their own level of “careful” and most of it falls far far short of the level that is recommended by experts. People I trusted seem to be bizarrely comfortable risking the lives of their friends and loved ones in order to not be bored or lonely. People whose intelligence I respected are of the opinion that this deadly and highly contagious virus probably won’t get them because… Well, just because.
I haven’t seen one of my two partners in months, and I don’t know when it will be safe to see him again. I haven’t seen my family since Christmas, and I don’t know when I’ll see any of them again. Every time someone in my local community group on Facebook proudly proclaims that they won’t wear a mask to the grocery store because they’re not a sheep, I see those hypothetical dates being pushed further away.
Pretty much the only way to keep all this off my mind is to focus as much as possible on other things. It’s best when I’m working hard in the garden, but I recently had a weird episode that drove me inside on a beautiful day. It was truly ridiculous.
I got scared of the wind. The weather was pleasant but windy, and I had the overwhelming sense that the wind itself was dangerous. The world felt dreamlike and unreal and I couldn’t keep my thoughts together. I couldn’t get anything done, and I wound up crying on my front steps because I didn’t want to go inside, but I couldn’t handle being out there. Clearly, spending months in my worst nightmare with no end in sight, even under pretty much the best possible conditions, is not doing wonders for my mental health.
There’s no particular point to this post, really. Except, perhaps, to beg you to wear your mask in the grocery store so that my only remaining grandparent is a little bit less likely to die before I get to see her again.
This is Steven. He thinks freckles are food. Don’t be like Steven. Practice social distancing.
This is all very weird and scary, and it is definitely messing with my head. I spent the whole week thinking it was Thursday, right up until Friday when I thought that it was already Saturday. I’m focusing on the garden a lot as the weather in Seattle finally warms up. Making some food and adding extra color to the world seems like a very good thing right now.
Please be safe and, wherever possible, take care of the people, animals, and plants around you.
Pineberry blossoms. They’re a white strawberry that tastes slightly of pineapple.Morning glory seedlings and baby strawberries, because there will be flowers and eventually fresh fruits. Spring is here.Cherry blossoms from our ornamental cherry tree. It doesn’t make much in the way of cherries, but it does look beautiful.More cherry blossomsSome new narcissus flowers that we added to the garden a week or two back. They’re almost in full bloom now.
There’s nothing like the looming threat of quarantine to make a person want to get out of the house, so I tried out a new hiking spot, since that’s a pretty low human contact activity. It was very pretty and soothing.
A little bridge over a tiny creek
The forest floor eating a fallen tree
New growth on wild blackberry vines
Pretty white blossoms
Flowering currant, I’m pretty sure
More flowering currant
Hellebore flowers. These weren’t growing wild, but they were near the start of the trail.
The schedule I’ve been using for a few months is still working well for me, overall. It’s gone through some adjustments, and I’ve had some pretty rough days where things just fell apart, but it’s good to be in a place where those unproductive days don’t snowball into whole weeks of frustration and self-recrimination.
The dogs and the bunny have even gotten on board. They each get a quick training session every morning before I sit down to work. Their increased biddability does not hurt my focus, even though it probably is just an act they’re keeping up while they plot my doom. I’ve also been managing to regularly fit in yard work like raking, weeding, and planting beautiful flower bulbs for the squirrels to dig up and throw around like tiny beach balls. I’ve read/listened my way through more than a few books already this year, and I’ve even been doing a little bit of freelance writing.
There’s still always that impulse to think everything is going well, so I might as well add, like, ten or fifteen new things to my list this week. I remind myself that I can only manage a little bit more at a time, but then it all seems equally important, so I tell myself that a lot more will just have to be fine. (Spoiler: it wasn’t. It never is.)Â
I’ve never managed to run at my full capacity without immediately going over the red line and into rapid burnout levels of stress. Part of the problem is that it’s genuinely challenging for me to tell the difference between the two sides of that line, having had so little experience with balancing near it for any length of time. Consistent effort of any kind is tiring in a different way from a sprint or a last minute scramble before a looming deadline, and gauging its effects probably takes practice.
Some things that happened over the last couple of months:
We had an unexpected houseguest who stayed with us for a month and some change.
My dogs consequently developed the delightful habit of baying almost constantly at any hint of someone walking by the house, instead of just barking their heads off at the odd squirrel or package delivery. It was not great for my nerves.
I adopted a little rabbit in need. His name is Frodo. He has some special needs that he’ll hopefully grow out of, so I occasionally get to stay up until 4am nursing him. It’s okay, though. He gives me cute bunny kisses to make up for it.
Some of the African violets my friend gave me finally bloomed for the first time, and they were lovely. For a couple of days.
Frodo ate all the flowers off of the African violets, dug up a fern, and then decimated my windowbox basil, making himself temporarily ill and living up to his hobbit name.
The beautiful fish pond that came with our house quit working for real and several solid weekends of work haven’t managed to get it up and running yet. Our fish are not happy about this, but the mosquitos are.
An unexplained fly invasion of almost biblical proportions. The lizard and our small, bouncy dog enjoyed this more than I did.
Several meltdowns on my part, or possibly one slow and prolonged meltdown that lasted for about a month and some change.
I eventually stopped banging my head against a brick wall in my Somnolence manuscript and decided to work on something lighter for a while, so I’m currently writing the second draft of a young adult book that’s been waiting in my project list for years. It is cute and it has dragons. Jumping between projects usually isn’t recommended, but if it’s between less than ideal practice and another month of being too stressed and up in my own head to actually get words on the page, I’ll take it. Some words written, even on what’s technically the wrong project, are infinitely better than no words written at all.
I learned how to make pizza without garlic or dairy, so my husband and I can both eat it, and it is really awesome.
I completely reworked my scheduling practices and managed to wrench my sleeping patterns back to mostly normal and almost enough rest each night.
I got a couple of very cute pink plants today, partially as a reward to myself for pulling my shit back together after letting myself get pretty thoroughly derailed, and partially as a bribe to myself to get back into writing blog posts even though it’s embarrassing to have just vanished for two months. So, I’m back now.
There’s soothing classical music playing in my office, but both of my dogs are being disruptive in their own special ways tonight. Toci has been doing her delightful little war scream at random intervals all evening because she believes there are raccoon invaders in the yard. (Possible, I’ll grant, but what does she actually propose to do about it? The average raccoon outweighs her by quite a bit, and she has, like, five teeth.) Tupac is just contentedly chewing a marrow bone and ignoring all the fuss, but that chomping sound can get a bit distracting after a while.
The dogs are definitely not the problem; they’re just where my focus gets most easily shunted off to when it slides off the invisible barrier surrounding my writing work. Writing a paragraph, even when I’m completely inspired, feels like lifting weights with my brain. This post has taken most of the day, and I keep getting into what feels like a little bit of a groove only to be pulled away by my body reminding me that food, drink, and bathroom breaks are all non-negotiable.
I’m pretty frustrated about my medication situation. I had something that kinda worked, but it started making me sick to the point that it didn’t matter if it helped or not, since I couldn’t focus through the nausea. My current psychiatrist doesn’t feel confident tweaking my prescription any more, so I’m being sent off to find someone new. In the meantime, I can use the drugs that make me feel ill, or I can do my best without meds. My best without meds is only marginally worse than my best with meds and nausea, so it’s a difficult trade-off.
I did a home sleep study a while ago, but have yet to actually review the results with a sleep doctor. I’m not really sure how helpful any answers there will be, but that could just be my general pessimism about medical stuff speaking. I’m open to being surprised, at least. I’m also tired, and sleeping ten or twelve hours a night doesn’t do as much to fix that as you’d think. It’s better than not sleeping, though, for sure. I’ve stopped pulling all-nighters and have been getting to bed much earlier than I used to. That means that even though I sleep longer than normal, I still have plenty of daytime to work with, and I think that alone helps a lot with my mood.
I’m taking steps to improve everything that’s slowing me down, and I’m still making progress. It’s hard not to be discouraged, but the progress is real, and I’m holding on to that as much as possible.
I’m also making homemade chai again, because Fall is good for at least one thing.
A lot of people say that writer’s block doesn’t exist. I’ve heard it compared to having doctor’s block, or plumber’s block. Obviously, people in other professions get stuck, and frustrated, and aren’t always feeling it, but they don’t get to claim they’re simply incapable of working because of some mysterious force. If they did, they certainly wouldn’t be encouraged to sit around for a while and wait for the inspiration to return.
Writer’s block is pretty much a catch-all term for a handful of common creative problems, and refusing to name those problems doesn’t generally help anyone. I get stuck a lot, but there’s always a reason. It’s not that the words have abandoned me, it’s often that I legit can’t picture what I meant to do next, so my brain is refusing to move forward. If I identify that internal resistance and work out a plan of attack, I can often move past it. If I just called it writer’s block, I might be more inclined to wait it out, which in that particular case would be the exact wrong move. The plan won’t get any clearer if I stop working entirely, only if I shift my focus to where the actual issue is.
It gets more complicated, though. There is always a reason when I get stuck, but sometimes that reason actually is a mysterious force that grips me and refuses to let me work. I know, I know. That sounds a lot like writer’s block. Bear with me, because it’s really not.
Most creative advice assumes that the audience is neurotypical, and that’s pretty unrealistic, especially given the high percentage of artists and writers who struggle with mental illness and/or have neurodivergent conditions like autism or ADHD. Conventional wisdom assumes that everyone is working with, more or less, the same mental and physical toolset, which just isn’t the case. There is a weird and unpredictable force that strikes some people, but it isn’t the fault of any muse (probably.) It’s called executive dysfunction, and it sucks hard.
Executive dysfunction is like a glitch in the brain’s programming. It’s that feeling when you click on an icon, and you can see it acknowledge that you clicked it, but nothing happens. So, you click it again, and nothing happens. This happens twenty more times, and then you have to stop before you throw the phone at the nearest wall, because it is infuriating. You had the thought, tried to initiate the process, but nothing happened. No error message pops up to tell you what’s wrong. It just. Won’t. Do.
This is not the same as procrastination. Stalling and procrastination are behaviors that a person can generally control, even if it’s hard. They’re not always conscious choices, but they’re avoidance habits, not an actual inability. It’s the difference between “I really really don’t want to do my homework, so I’m doing the dishes and watching this episode of Friends for the fiftieth time” and “I physically can’t seem to reach over and open my laptop, even though I’ve just been sitting on the couch and scrolling through Facebook on my phone for two hours hating every moment of it because I desperately want to be getting my work done. Now I’m hungry, but I still can’t move or take my eyes off the screen. Send help.”
There isn’t an easy solution to executive dysfunction, but some of the advice for dealing with writer’s block can help a little:
“Switch environments.” Go to a friend’s house, or work in a coffee shop, or just go for a walk and then come back to it. Light a pretty candle or put on music. Changing something around you can sometimes help break through the mental barrier.
“Set yourself up to succeed.” Make your office or work-station a comfy place to be. Make sure your computer is always charged. Stick a water bottle and a granola bar near your work area, so you have them in case you’re having trouble switching tasks later. Tidy up your supplies when you’re done with them, and make sure there’s never anything physically stopping you from doing your most important tasks, because even one additional step between you and that work might be the thing that trips you up. Use the energy, when you have it, to be your own parent and take care of future you.
“Remove social media from your list of options.” This goes with the previous item, but it deserves its own section. Block Facebook, Youtube, or whatever other sites you tend to get sucked into on your computer, uninstall them from your phone, hide the icons, or just be really sure not to open them when you need to do something else, even for a second. Don’t sit down for a short break anywhere near the TV. Hide the remote. Whatever makes it harder to get trapped. It’s not a willpower problem. It’s not being weak. It’s taking care of yourself.
“Downgrade your expectations to lower the pressure.” It really doesn’t have to be good. You can’t edit a blank page, and any words that you write really are better than the ones you don’t. A practice sketch still represents valuable experience, even if it isn’t something you’ll want to show anyone.
“Review the steps in front of you.” Do you have a plan, or has the task become an amorphous blob of stress in your head? Have you written down each step you need to take, or at least gone through them in your mind? Can you break them down into more detail, or do some research about the process? Not being able to picture what’s next can trigger genuine dysfunction.
“Stop trying to do this thing, and see if it’s possible to do a different thing.” This sounds like procrastination, but it can be really good advice if you’re dealing with executive dysfunction. Can’t do the art, but you can maybe manage doing the dishes? Great! Can you feed yourself? Take a shower? Walk your dog? Write in your journal? How about a blog post? Try anything that will help you get out of the rut and into motion, because building up a little momentum is often at least half the battle. Executive dysfunction is mostly a starting problem, so see if you can sneak up on the task by going around it.
“Be patient, and wait it out.” Try not to be angry with yourself if you’re just stuck. Try to stay hydrated. As soon as the spell lifts, even if it’s right before bed, try to get a tiny bit of something done just so you can feel some sense of progress to combat the frustration, even if all you produce is a really crappy drawing of your cat, or a few sentences on a page. It’s still something. Try again tomorrow, but don’t stay up all night trying to catch up. Sleep deprivation makes everyone’s executive function worse, across the board. It snowballs.
Conventional advice you might want to avoid:
“Just do it.” Um, yeah. This generally won’t work if you’re dealing with executive dysfunction. That’s why it’s called dysfunction, not mild reluctance.
“Write/draw every day.” Maybe just modify this to write/draw/other creative pursuits every day you’re able. The idea is not to make yourself feel awful or burn yourself out, just to build up experience and skill as consistently as possible.
“Get an artistic buddy and keep each other accountable!” This can really backfire. It might work for you, but if you experience a lot of guilt and anxiety, do not let your relationship with this friend be poisoned by it. You don’t want to wind up avoiding the friend because you feel like you’ve let them down every time your brain isn’t working.
Encourage each other, absolutely, but accountability is for people who are procrastinating, not for people dealing with a disability or illness.
Here’s a suggestion that isn’t usually given for writer’s block: Seek help. Not just from a buddy, but from a professional. Mental health is physical health, and there are medications and therapies that may be able to help. If that glitchy brain is screwing up your life, get thee to a brain doctor.
I was sicker than I thought, but I’m finally getting over it. It was just an annoying flu-like virus, but it left me super tired, and that forced me to deal with the fact that I was also making myself super stressed out, which definitely wasn’t helping my immune system. (Seriously, I caught that damn thing and developed noticeable symptoms in like eight hours. Not great.)
I’ve never been able to do enough, in my life. I’ve always been functioning at way less than normal capacity, so I’m honestly kind of unable to think of myself as overworked, because the primary message I’ve always gotten is that I should be doing a lot more than I am. I never had a reason for the fact that I did less than other people, so it makes sense that I never learned to recognize my personal limits. They weren’t legitimate limits, they were just me not trying hard enough.
I’m still frustrated as all hell that I can’t magically leap from undiagnosed ADHD and years of totally unhelpful conditioning to being a medicated and functional professional, but I should probably acknowledge how impractical that expectation is. I should also probably be working harder to change the weird coping mechanisms I’ve developed, because they mostly suck.
In the past, being stressed was pretty much my way of showing that I cared. I felt guilty and anxious about not being able to do all the stuff I was supposed to do, and that seemed like a necessary form of penance. Like, if I was gonna be useless, the least I could do was feel bad about it, and then hopefully the people around me would see that I was trying. I also just figured that feeling bad enough about it might eventually motivate me to stop sucking at everything, but this was not the case, because that’s not how it works.
Basically, I spent a long time assuming that the problem with me was that I didn’t feel bad enough to change, or that I wasn’t throwing enough pure effort into things. I have been stressed and upset and anxious a lot over the years, but I’ve never been working too hard. I was just lazy. Working too hard is reserved for people who get results.
Being stressed has never made me consistently productive, but it was usually enough to boost me through those last-minute procrastination sessions where I’d finish something in one night that should have taken me weeks. That was the only way I could get any results at all. Unfortunately, now that I can actually do more on a regular basis, it’s also wearing me out more. Being in that guilt and adrenaline mode every day just doesn’t work.
It does, in fact, make everything much harder, and it also makes me catch every germ that so much as glances my way. So, I’ve been sleeping a lot this past week, and eating semi-regular meals, and not doing very much else. I’m gonna try again next week. I’m also going to try not to see being slightly more “legitimately” stressed as a sign that I’m finally doing something right, but I think that’s gonna take some time to shift.
Time for the stressed Toci picture again, I guess.
Jasmine Collins 