The Care and Feeding of An Actual Mess of a Person

When this year started, I had huge, wonderful plans for this blog.

Post three times a week, minimum.

Participate in every free-write flash fiction compilation I could find.

Discuss current submissions out for publication at least once a month.

Maybe even bring some life things into play.

 

Something about best laid plans should go here, I think.

 

It’s July 1 now.

Half the year is over.

Lots has happened.

Much of life has been eaten away by being lost in the dark clouds of depression and anxiety.

It’s still less than optimal, really.

But the theoretical clouds do seem to be lessening a bit.

I’m not sure if it’s a temporary lift or something more permanent.

May as well take the opportunity while it’s here.

I’ll work on it.

Attempting to Reboot

There’s a chance this will fail marvelously again.

Then again, there’s a chance I’ll actually succeed in posting and writing here.

Also, NaNoWriMo is starting again this Sunday, so I have a reason.

I’m going to try. I can’t promise. But I’m going to try.

Adventures are coming up.

Watch this space.

This Is Real Life

I didn’t do last week’s Friday Fictioneers. I will admit, I was too caught up in other projects. Which is a shame; the prompt picture was quite lovely. But life had to take precedence.

Life has changed quite a bit in the last five months. The move was just the tip of the iceberg.

A Fresh Start

So much has changed, just from the beginning of the year.

I haven’t forgotten about this tiny corner of the internet. I’ve been working on projects. Working on family. Life. Writing, always.

We’ve left the bustle of a major metropolis in the valley for a tiny (to me) town, half a mile away from the California coast.   I’ve wanted to live here my whole life. It still feels like a dream.

I felt burned out. At the end of my line. For so long.

Now, I feel my wings coming back. Unfurling.

Like a phoenix. I shall rise.

 

New neighborhood

 

Ambulance Rides

You think about a lot of things when your heart is pounding at 234 beats per minute.

For no reason.

For half an hour straight.

I thought about my daughter. I thought about my husband. I thought about my cats. I thought about my friends.

I was strapped in the back of an ambulance, trying not to absolutely lose my shit as it took three tries toset up an IV, three tries of increasing dosage of Adenosine to slow my pulse to something less deadly.

I wondered if the last thing I would see would be the bags of saline, set up for easy grabbing by the EMTs.

Life Lists

I’m slowly starting to come back to surface levels of normalcy instead of fighting to keep my head above water. Here’s a brief rundown of the last month, in handy dandy list form.

Resolute

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. Instead, I make lists of goals. Resolutions are too easy to ignore; tiny promises left abandoned as the calendar turns. Goals give you something to work toward; something to look back upon when it’s all through and say “Hell yeah, I did that!”

So my goals, so far, for 2014.

(In no particular order)

2013: ‘K, Bye.

I had plans, you see.

I was going to have all these beautiful short stories, and maybe snippets from BookThing and pictures of Holiday Cheer And Goodwill And Festivities.

This blog was going to rock the month of December, ending this mediocre year in style.

2013 had other plans.

Resurfacing

This has been an interesting month. In reverse order…

I met the word count goal for NaNoWriMo with three days to spare; the story is nowhere near finished, either. It’ll be interesting to see how it turns out.

I ended up in the hospital emergency room this past Monday, hallucinating after becoming so dehydrated from a GI bug that appeared so rapidly and so violently I had no time to prepare. The whole family is still sick; lucky for me, I seem to have been taken out the worst.

This is Halloween…

And this is Charlotte, dressed up as a Pteradon. I remember them as Pteradactyls, but apparently dinosaurs have changed a lot since I was a kid. I was highly disappointed in the number of houses that did not participate in the time-honored tradition of carving pumpkins and giving out wee candy bars. I firmly believe that the horrible Trunk or Treat phenomenon is ruining Halloween. That, however, is a totally separate rant for some other time.

This is the second year in a row that Charlotte has been a dinosaur for Halloween – last year there was a Triceratops costume – and I may have a bit of smug parent attitude that I’ve managed to keep her away from the “all princess, all the time” route so far. I’m sure that one will come back to bite me in the ass soon enough.

In just under four hours, I’ll be cracking open NaNoWriMo 2013.  There will be a word count tracker over in the sidebar somewhere, and if I come up with something superbly brilliant (don’t hold your breath) I’ll be sure to post a wee excerpt here. I’m still collecting donations for The Office of Letters and Light, the non-profit that organizes NaNoWriMo every year.

Now I’m going to go raid the candy bucket, dig out my copy of The Crow for some late-night viewing, and take some deep breaths. This is going to be a madhouse of a month.