(Words are over on my Patreon: fifth scene of the story I have been working on: https://www.patreon.com/posts/70552371.)
I had every intention of being really really productive, but basically ended up spending Friday, Saturday, and yesterday in a death-spiral of self-pitying inertia that eventually devolved into me reading comics with a pounding headache. Why? A certain amount of my time during those days was asking myself exactly that. Was it that school was starting? That my future is weirdly uncertain? That I have a lot of deadlines looming? Feeling under the weather? Bored yet swamped? Lonely? Crowded? What?
Who doesn’t feel like that sometimes? We live in a world designed — designed — to make us unhappy because that’s how capitalism works: keeps you scared and insecure so that you don’t rock the boat and you keep spending money. (Oh yeah, I spent a lot of money too; though I can justify most of it.) And I’m lucky that all these years and all this thinking and all that therapy has given me some good countermoves — but even when I see it, I still get mired down from time to time. It helps to force myself out of the loop, into a walk or a drive or creating art or some damn thing — but this time it took three days to do that. Still, better than a week or a month or a year!
I finished a draft of Ghastly Spectre this morning, which makes me very happy. It’s part of the forthcoming collection I am pulling together. It’s due with the publisher in two weeks, and this may actually be doable! After this, back to the final edits on American Tour, and then a short story I promised by the end of the year.
And what else? Today is a catch-up day, to make up for all the things I didn’t get around to during those three days of inertia. Wish me well!
