Insomniac Nightmares

From the title, you might think there’s actual progress to be seen.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. Chrysanthemum Graves sits at around 3,700 words as of the last session, which is around 8,700 words short of where it should be to meet the goal of 50k in the month.

There’s a lot of reasons for that. I’ve been sicker than usual (strep throat), I’ve been moving and managed to pull almost every muscle on my right side from my waist to the neck, my mental health symptoms have been getting worse and the shrink can’t see me until the end of the month, I’ve been spending a lot of time arguing on the phone with assorted individuals relating to my medical care, my disability, and bill collectors who are getting rabid. But none of those are the real reason. I don’t sleep much for assorted reasons, so there’s about 20 usable hours in the day most of the time.

It’s motivation. Some of that is tied to the depression, of course, but mostly it’s just a sense of pointlessness to the whole thing. It’s what has been beating me back from trying to write for two years now, and every day it only seems to get worse. It’s a sense of “why write it down? I pretty much know how the story goes, and nobody else is likely to read it anyway. Lots of effort for no gain.” There’s the part that looks at garbage like Onision’s books and starts festering. Some folks would go “I can do better than that,” and set out to do it; I say “I have done better than that, multiple times, and nobody cared.” Meanwhile, Stones to Abbigale sits happily at 3.5 stars with 800 reviews (mostly only drug down by the hate-readers, from what I see.) I’m aware comparison is bad form and a quick route to self-defeating thought, but part of me can’t help it. (I suspect it’s the part that was told again and again that I wasn’t good enough and someone else was always better, or the part who was told his accomplishments meant nothing while others benefitted from them, claimed them as their own or were celebrated for hitting far less impressive milestones. Some scars don’t heal.) There’s the part that still remembers my mom saying “Nobody wants to read that crap,” despite not having read a word of what I had written, and chucking the sheets I’d printed into the trash. There’s the part that remembers a coworker who asked what my hobbies were; when I told them I write, their response was “Git gud.” That individual also writes; primarily gender-swapped and trans-centric Ms. Peregrine fan fiction that has never seen a spell-checker, let alone an editor or even a pass through Grammarly. It does very well on Wattpad, from what I’ve seen. (Certainly leagues better than anything I’ve posted there.)

I know I’m a petty bitch.  Even the Grammarly plugin is giving me a frowny face. I just seem to be lacking the knowledge of how not to be.

Hopefully some of the rest of you writers out there are doing better, both in the great NaNoWriMo race to 50k and in general.