Answers I Don't Quite Like

New stickers arrived! They’re so pretty. Except what’s with this custom stickers getting less and less space for letters. I don’t care for this new font. Ah well, still overall pretty and functional and I needed that.

Reading Clean Coder for work. My devs don’t do the whole tweak code every time, because yeah, code is already rigid and risky in the biggest areas of opportunity and the oldest code is affected by changes to new code. We keep breaking stuff when touching supposedly low scope stuff. So aspirational.

Listening to Dynasty by MIIA on repeat. I love this song, despite the everything lost vibe of it. Very evocative for fiction.

There are so many stories tumbling through my head all the time, all the lost, unforgotten, unfinished stories; all the new, bright and complicated new ones—I can’t write them all. It’s hard because I could write any. It freezes me up a lot. I owe so much fiction though everyone’s been nice enough to treat me as having gone bankrupt and expect nothing. I feel that. I feel the want to finish all these stories. They’re still there, this mighty shadow of the iceberg beneath stories written, “complete”. They aren’t all complete. So many need more. I’m going to expand “The Legendary”, but the truth is, most of Kingdoms and Thorn still demands the linchpin stories or more on any of the ficlets. And that’s the best developed of all my worlds.

I haven’t lost interest. I don’t lose interest when I write something short and move on. I’m so full up and I contain each bit as fast and tight as I can so I don’t lose it.

To say nothing of fanfic. Will I ever finish all these half-written pieces, some of which I love sooooo much? History says no. I don’t like that answer. I don’t know how to change it.

I’ve been watching so much anime, so much, an odd change of pace for me in a way, but seriously, it’s many flaws don’t bother me as much as the flaws in my old live action western tv/movie stomping grounds, and there’s this thing called arcs that are definitely used in western tv, but they’re kind of a lot clearer to me as I’m watching anime. I’m thinking I’m going to try writing down the arcs of all my different storyworlds and maybe I can get bigger pieces moving on a more regular basis. Which would require cutting back exchanges dramatically.

Gift exchanges keep me writing fiction when little else does, but they take a particular production schedule mindset which interferes with the way I write longer fiction. I only write in a focused drilled down way on one piece of longer fiction at a time, and right now I have the working novel I started so long ago to relearn how to write long and a book my family can read (they would not approve of my SFF / “what terrible things I have done” backstory proclivities) and a major exchange fic. I like writing longer works for exchanges. It has helped me relearn how to write long(er) despite my lack of finishing working title: canaf. Even so. There are a lot of original pieces I want done more than the exchange ones that aren’t going to happen if I don’t curtail my love of exchange fandom quite a bit.

I don’t like that answer either. But I really cannot change it.

Most interesting to me is my inability to fully prioritize publishing any of this stuff right now, though I have Patreoned up (for original fiction, fanfic will ever remain free) to at least attempt to maximize my efforts. Because publishing takes a lot of effort. I’ve been cleaning up the typesetting, adding optional hyphens and tweaking kerning as necessary, on a collection for several weeks now. And my efforts tend to go to creating. It’s more important to me to create than to package something to sell. My budget disagrees, the hours I’m capable of working to increase said budget disagrees, but my health comes first and if I stop creating, publishing hardly matters.

So I wasn’t expecting to start talking about all this stuff, but yeah, thoughts there. And bandwidth. Bandwidth is the thing I really want more of—that confluence of time, opportunity, energy, and memory. I’m grateful for what I have. I’m trying to be a good steward of it. Maybe I’m not there yet.

I’m not too fond of that answer, but at least that, I might be able to change.

On a Health Front

There’s such a thing as way too many pills. And I’m actually out of CBD and NS Calm and am not drinking enough of the right teas to make up for it.

I’ve got these exercises I’m supposed to do to help my sciatica, to build up my core and train my diaphragm, since apparently I use my core to breathe and am constantly making an unconscious decision whether effort or oxygen is more important, oooh yay, but I failed dramatically at doing any of them when I came down with a touch of strep. While I managed to stave off the worst of that, the low-level feeling ugh that goes with that has lingered since. And I haven’t gotten back to chiro in those three weeks, so I’m also frequently getting twinges of sciatica that get way too painful.

Aka, I have a few health-related ponies to climb back aboard. And some days I stare at the almost 20-pill monstrosity that is my lunch to-take and just think, please, pretty please, no more pills.

too many pills

not enough joy

thank you, I pray

that I’m still alive

I’m sure that my day

will improve if I praise

it’s better than pills

but for those too, give thanks