It’s been awhile since I posted last!

I was in a horrible funk for a very long time. (Well, it felt long to me. Three weeks? Maybe four? Probably since my last heart thing, honestly.) I felt burnt out with the amount of stuff I had to do and afraid I wouldn’t be able to do any of it, and just generally suffused with overwhelmedness.

But the past few days have been better so I thought I’d better come out of hiding to commemorate it while acknowledging that it happened. I appreciate when other people admit they’re not superhuman, so I feel the need to do the same, in this age of ‘everything is awesome!’ all the time.

I emailed some people who’d asked me for reads/blurbs to admit that I couldn’t help out — I hated to do that, but I needed to clear some mental space and have fewer things to guilt myself about — I finished the short story that was due by the end of the month (hooray for flash!) — I got news that’ll postpone the release of The Hunted until 10/1, which is probably a blessing in disguise — annnnnndddd, spent the last four days beating my head against book edits from my agent.

(Warning, so many mixed metaphors follow!)

I started feeling okayish in general on Monday? And so I started back in. My agent wanted me to toss my old intro, which was good advice, but it’s like cutting off the head of a living animal and then suturing a new one back on that performs the same functions of the old one, by and large, only in a shorter space and also cooler. I also, well, you don’t even want to know all the stuff I need to do to this story. Basically the only thing I get to keep is the character voice. I have to make a marginal character important, I have to deal with the consequences of part of the plot better, I have to make everything better-better-better…I feel like I gave her a Pinto and she wants a Mustang. I can see why a Mustang is preferable to a Pinto, yes, but the upgrades are going to be painful. There was a phase shift in the plot, and if you’re a writer, you understand how bad those are, when you think you’re writing about one thing thematically but you need to include another that changes the first radically…oy.

But today I figured out the first new 600 words. Which may not seem like much, and doesn’t nearly spin enough plates for the thing to get off the ground, but it’s something. At long freaking last, it’s something ;).

I’m tempted to work on it more now (my husband and I are just goofing off) but I’m not going to. Just because I’m betterish doesn’t mean I should run myself aground. I may not make my self-imposed deadline of having it done to turn back in on 9/8, but that’s OK too. I just really have to work in increments I can handle and not push myself too hard for a bit — so I’m playing cat and mouse with my brain, and I’m just going to have to be patient.

I’m gonna give myself some bonus points for: visiting my therapist last week when I really started to spiral, being good about going to the gym/doing yoga while I was blue, and for setting up writing dates to stop me from rolling out of bed and staring into a screen and feeling lost and lonely. Tomorrow’ll be my first unaccompanied writing day of my break, but I think I can finally be trusted to be productive independently, which is a really good feeling.

In the future, hopefully I can feel things coming on sooner and avert them via nicer to myself earlier. (Doubtful, but one can hope!)

Hooray serotonin for now and all that :).