Friday, March 16, 2018

It's Been A Tough Week

I'm so glad to get to the end of this week.

Quick reminder: I did NaNo last year all by hand, and have spent the last three months transcribing those pages, researching, and editing - but I've had no new material (on that book at least). So I was excited to jump back in over my birthday mini-vacation... but no. And then not in the days after. I couldn't even get myself to try. Convinced I had nothing to offer and nothing I've written is in the direction I want to take it in anymore...

So this week I made myself start again. Just write something. Anything. For fifteen minutes at a time, that's all. I could do that, right?

Oh. my. God. So painful. It reminded me that writing truly is a muscle, one that has atrophied over the last three months, just as my running endurance has. But I made myself go on, moving pen over page. Dry, dull, though at least I ended each session knowing what was coming next... a series of sticky notes the breadcrumbs to get me started the next day. But nothing interesting or useful for a few days.

And then? Maybe a little glimmer of something interesting? Maybe only a marsh-light but still more than I had? I'll keep following it and see where I end up. But oh so daunting after having felt so sure of this in the fall.

And I need to read more of what I aspire to in my writing. Lately it's been a lot of escapist stuff (end of winter, y'all). I'm okay with that but it's not where my own writing lies.

My movement towards writing was interrupted a few days by a doozy of a migraine. Typically I get auras, maybe some pain - that's not too bad as I get older and especially not if I take something right at the start of the aura, and then a period of impaired thinking for a while after. Nothing horrible, I just can't focus well or think as easily or quickly as I'm used to. If it's a really bad one I might have some numbness around my mouth, but that hasn't happened in a while. Air pressure and hormones are the usual triggers for me, sometimes light. But seriously, my migraines are not usually a big disrupter in my life.

But Monday. Woah. Almost as soon as I woke up the aura was on me and I could tell it was going to be serious. I didn't realize it would be so trippy. Memories, memories of dreams, memories within dreams, random sense impressions all colliding together, even as I was getting myself and the kids dressed and moving towards school. As if my brain was bifurcated and all that was happening on a second level. I could focus on what needed doing immediately, but only that - no planning, thinking ahead, decision making. The kids were asking questions (and both talking at once, as usual) and I had to let them know I wasn't going to be able to explain anything to them or answer anything not relating to right in front of me, right now. Got them to school (did not drive, we took the train), and then came home to cancel phone meetings and let my boss know I would not be coming in, then spent the rest of the day on the couch reading - if I was going to be in an alternate head space I wanted it to at least be a cohesive world something one created, rather than the fragments of mine I was experiencing and didn't know if I could trust.

Things mostly cleared by mid-afternoon but I was wiped out by then and still not certain of my thinking. I went into work the next day but only lasted a couple of hours before another aura started and I headed back home, though it was nothing near as painful or strange as the day before. And the rest of the week has been trying to recover from all that, going to bed earlier, drinking more water, trying to eat well. I'm still feeling a little fragile though not horribly so.

I don't know what triggered this - it's been maybe twenty years since I've had a migraine this bad. But I'm not counting out the news that exploded in the queer romance world.

It's been awful. I suspect the majority of readers of this blog know nothing about this and I'm not going to try to explain. The rest of you either know all about it or are Russian bots, based on my stats. But it's just been... ugh. Vile behavior from an author exposed, which then led to the exposure of awful behavior from an editor and a publisher - all of whom had power in this corner of the writing world, the corner I consider home.

I have no skin in this - I'm just a little fangirl over on the sidelines who dreamed of maybe someday submitting something to that publisher because they were the first queer romance press I encountered back when I was all *starry eyed* THIS EXISTS?! Since then I'd heard enough murmurs about that publisher and encountered enough other presses to be over my hero-worship but it still feels rotten to see what's been exposed (and what's been unleashed afterwards as people find out and react all over the place). All the more so because an author I truly admire and had some exchanges with was at the center of exposing things, and my heart hurts for him and everyone else who has been hurt by Riptide and Sarah Lyons and the people going by the name Santino Hassell.

Some good is coming from this, thankfully, I've seen more lifting up of authors of color in the past week than before and there have been some amazing outpourings of generosity and effort across Romancelandia to the authors affected by all this, but... ugh. Shit shouldn't have had to happen for growth to occur.

But hey! Aren't our teenagers amazing! (Speaking of something else that shouldn't have had to happen...)

Sad and tired and wanting to put my arms around the world,
Annie


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