Tag: mental health

Failing, better.

So a thing that’s been on my mind a bit lately; I wrote a very small game, and it’s not very good.

I’m figuring out how to be okay with this. It’s not as hard as I expected it to be (the coming to terms, I mean, not the writing).

I don’t know how to fix it, exactly – I have fetched up hard against the taste gap, and knowing it’s not as good as I want doesn’t mean I can tell how to make it as good as I want. And I’m not sure I have the time to learn how to fix it. I mean, I could read up and study and analyze and fix it (or make a new one that was better), but I only have so much time to spend on making things , and ultimately, there are things I want to do more than I want to figure out how to make the game better.

(This feels like a very old-person post, in some ways. The finite amount of time.)

And it was a fun game to make, too. So I guess I’ll give it another pass to polish it, and call it good. It’s useful to know that I can still just do something to play around, and enjoy that.

Well, it’s been busy.

I’m trying to get up early in the mornings so that I can write before work, and it’s starting to take, although it’s still a little rough. A lot of what I’ve been doing lately is going through older pieces that were never finished and deciding whether there’s enough there to make them worth polishing. It’s a little exhausting, but I’m making progress.

The weather seems to have broken early; we’ve had maple syrup weather for at least a week, which is nice.

I’m tired a lot. I’m hoping it’s a temporary thing.

Words and dust

I used to sew. And for years I’ve had a subscription to Threads, which I find to be a lovely magazine (perfect-bound, too!).

For a lot of years. My mom got a subscription when it started up, you see, and I got one when I moved out, and… Oh dear. I might actually have, give or take, two decades worth of the magazine, here.

On paper.

I’m ballparking that at about 12,000 pages, and no, there is not an extra zero in there.

I mentioned that I used to sew, right?

So I’ve recently come to terms with the fact that there is actually no-one who wants these things (no, libraries don’t usually take old magazines), and I have no use for them, and they are taking up a kind of ridiculous amount of shelf-space, and…

And I feel guilty for not having kept up with them. I feel guilty for not still liking them, as if I owe it to the person I was a decade ago to not change. I feel guilty for not being able to go through them and use them up to produce a brilliant and trenchant collage that is both a commentary on modern society and a funny and uplifting story (although with 12,000 pages, quite frankly, I am not sure where the hell such a collage could be stored and also I’m now imagining glue in all the cat fur help this is out of control).

But the magazines are meant to be something I enjoy. If they’re making me feel unhappy and vaguely anxious, they are defective and the situation needs to be corrected. I think I’ve finally managed to get through the guilt and figure this out, and that’s a good feeling.

(I’d still love it if sometime in the future magazines became edible. Then they would be easy and economical to dispose of, instead of quite this fraught.)

Books, spaced and sorted.

I’ve gotten a total of 58 inches of shelf space cleared over the last two weekends–and I’ve just realized that while if that was stacked up it would not be quite as tall as I am, it would still be pretty impressive–and I am thinking that I might need to change how I organize my books. Usually I sort fiction into anthologies, collections, and novels[1], but lately I’m thinking it might make more sense to subdivide the anthologies.

I’m starting to feel like the ones I have fall into two general groups; some are reference works (most of the annual “Year’s Best”, for example) and some are themed works (many one-shot anthologies, and my goodness I have a lot of post-apocalyptically themed ones). And organizing them that way–splitting the collections of ones selected for notability away from the ones selected for theme–might start to make it a little easier to get a handle on the… well, the general flood.

(I have over two hundred books that I own and haven’t finished. This doesn’t really make me very happy.)

I have also just realized (because I was updating Goodreads while sorting the culled books out) that I have finished one book this month. One. And it was a fairly slim graphic novel loaned to me by a friend.

(I am, for the record, in the habit of finishing between five and eight books a month. The higher numbers do usually include graphic novels and e-novelettes, both of which are quite fast reads, but still. So I feel a little bit better having evidence that I’ve actually been ridiculously busy, but at the same time I little disconcerted to realize how busy I’ve been.)
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[1] Well, usually I sort them first by hardcover/paperback/mass-market format, and then by anthology/collection/novel within that format, with the caveat that certain authors–Terry Pratchett springs to mind–get their own section by virtue of being who they are. Graphic novels, RPGs, and non-fiction are grouped by subject. The favourites shelf and the Mythos shelf (both of which are expanding past the “single shelf” category) may both ignore all these restrictions.

More air, less pulp

I’ve been cleaning things out lately; not even decluttering (which suggests to me either putting things away or disposing of casually accumulated things), but actually revisiting what I do and don’t want to keep. Things that I decided yes to a couple of years ago have been re-evaluated, and some are being kept, and some are being gotten rid of.

(The paper recycling is going to be heavy as hell this week, for the record. I feel a little bad about that, which is probably not reasonable.)

There are several more square feet of space in the room I am focussing on, and the impromptu cat bed has been replaced by a promptu one (surely not the correct word, surely a comprehensible incorrect one). It really does make a huge difference to how clear I find myself feeling when I’m in the room.

I’m hoping to get a chance to work on my office a little this weekend. At some point, I’ll need to comb through my physical books again, but that’s never an easy step to take. However, we’re at the point where we need another bookshelf to keep all the books we have[1], so something needs to change. I figure I’ll look at it once the rest of the house is better sorted.
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[1] We already have thirteen.

Tuesday

It’s been a bit hectic recently and the notes I was getting ready for a couple of posts aren’t in finished shape, and I can’t pull them together tonight. I’ve actually got some pretty awesome news, and want to post about it in a day or so, but right now I’m pretty sure I’d make a terrible botch of it.

That said: I aten’t ded! And will be back, hopefully after some sleep helps.

Well that was a fortnight and change.

I have learned several things in the last couple of weeks.

  1. I get a bit sad when I can’t be at home for Hallowe’en. I’m not saying I won’t ever go to a convention on Hallowe’en again, but I’m definitely going to keep it in mind when planning stuff in the future.
  2. A weekend away with nothing to do, minimal internet access, smart kind people, good food, lovely scenery, silly or good movies, makeup, and a bottle of wine is kind of lovely. I want to do it again.
  3. Nonetheless, two weekends away from home at once throws me for a loop. I think if I do something like that again, I definitely need to look at booking a day off to get back into
  4. Fallout 4 is making me happy. It’s good to be back.
  5. For NaNoWriMo: discounting the two days I didn’t write, I’m averaging 1739 words a day; discounting the three I was sick, I’m averaging 2011. I’m behind where I’d like to be, but if I keep up my pace, I should be able to finish on time.
  6. Knitting is still not happening. This was pretty upsetting to me, but I’m hoping it changes in the future.
  7. I have found Cat Rambo’s post on preparing for NaNoWriMo to be really helpful, actually. I did not do so well with #2, clearing the decks, but I’ve known for a several months that not playing Fallout 4 in November was not going to be an option.
  8. Related to this: Novels are hard. Novelettes are a thing that I’ve accidentally committed a couple of times, because I write long, but novels? Novels are a whole different beast. It’s like the difference between knitting in the round (a fiddly act which involves double-pointed needles that are, nonetheless, usually held pretty firmly in place by yarn) and trying to juggle a handful of spaghetti. There are ends and connections everywhere.
  9. Yes, this is with an outline. Admittedly not a super-complete one.

That’s about the state of the month so far. If I don’t manage to update a bit more often, I’ll be back in December. Right now, though, I have managed to gouge out enough time to catch up on The Flash and I am by-god going to do that.

(Cisco isn’t naming people. It’s so wrong.)

Different kinds of inertia

I don’t generally talk about writing on here (on the general theory that (1) lots of people have already done that, (2) I’m not exactly in a position of particular thoughtfulness or authority, and (3) there is only so much that can be said about adjectives).

But I have noticed something recently. I haven’t been writing much over the last fortnight, due to some very bad sleep and some unrelated stress (not knitting for the immediate foreseeable; if you don’t knit or know knitters, you are unlikely to believe how much freakin’ yarn I have to find a place to store), and it feels bad in a rather distinctive way.

When I don’t do other things I ‘should’ do, I feel bad for not doing them, but I feel good about getting to do something else. (Cf.: housework Fallout.)

When I don’t write, I feel bad for not doing it.

So I’m probably doing something right. With this penscratch-keyboard thing. Probably. (And I’ve managed to get back into the words-on-paper habit, so there’s that.)

Getting sorted.

Not entirely comfortable with how quiet I’ve been this month; going to try and work on that.

Things I’ve been thinking about, and will probably attempt to ramble about in a more coherent fashion over the next month:

  • Superheroic powers as magical realism.
  • Uplifting TV shows. (This is mostly me trying to figure out what exactly it takes to make a show qualify as one. Being funny isn’t enough, and being constructive isn’t enough.)
  • Timing and scheduling, I guess? I’ve started work, and it seems to be going well, but I need to get back on top of my time schedule.
  • Cracked. It’s a police procedural that has a unit where police officers (one of whom is dealing with PTSD-related issues) are teamed with mental health professionals. It’s sort of ridiculously kind. (I was extremely suspicious of this as a conceit, and its execution has kinda smit me.)
  • Days. I actually haven’t talked at all about James Lovegrove’s Days ever here, I think. It is a lovely, strange, funny, and rather weird novel about a day in Days, the world’s first and (provisionally) foremost megastore.
  • Which might actually let me cycle back to “Evening Primrose”, and assorted other fiction with the conceit of “let’s all go live in the shopping mall”.

A simple enquiry into what he has been eating or drinking…

Among the many lovely thing Roald Dahl wrote was Matilda, and among the many lovely scenes in that book is one where the evil principal finds out that a boy has stolen a slice of her cake and forces him to eat an entire chocolate cake. It is an amount of cake which should cause him to explode. (It’s Roald Dahl, so this might not have been purely figurative.)

But he doesn’t explode. He eats the cake. He eats the whole cake, and when the Principal loses her temper and smashes the platter over his head, he just shakes it off and keeps grinning. The line that describes him is something along the lines of “by now, he was so full of cake that he couldn’t have been hurt with a sledgehammer.”

The light of my life made a dinner tonight, modifying an existing recipe to be cooked in a crockpot. The end result is about as awesome as you might expect anything to be when it contains that much butter, cream, bacon, and cheese.

And having had dinner, I am really feeling very… equanamous. I mean really calm. Sedate. I feel mellow enough to catch up on some of the things I’ve seen online in the last couple of days[1], and the thought of reorganizing my office is considerably less tension-inducing than it has been for the last few days.

I recognize this isn’t a method that always works to ground a mood, but right now, I’m having a good night.
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[1] Which have been fairly ugly in some cases. Moving on!