Non-Fiction For The Fading

 Well, here we are. Coming up on the end of the weirdest year ever . Or at least, I think we are. It is December, right? I have had no sense of time for the last eight or so months. Everything blurs together. I would like to say that I'm going into 2021 with a whole bunch of stuff written, but... I do not. It was a lot of starting and stopping all year long. Could not drum up the energy to focus on anything for very long. It's starting to improve, but still too early to tell if it can be sustained.  I'm also pretty sure that at the beginning of the year I said that I was going to post more about writing with ADHD and then... did not do that (which feels kind of on brand, doesn't it?). I mean, I've been spending the last eight-ish months living with even more time blindness than I have in my entire life. Of course, playing Stardew Valley did not help with this -- and I only got into it in the last couple of months. I could go with never seeing the words "in thes

 Around eight months ago, there were snow drifts almost as tall as I am (not that I'm very tall, of course). My province is currently under forest fire warning because of the surprise heat wave. So there's been a bit of a weather swing.  I have not been writing very much in general. Something about the whole general atmosphere makes it very difficult, but I'm trying. I think I'm on the third draft of the same story because I can't make it work right. I also managed to write a script during Camp NaNoWriMo July without any sort of a B-plot. It didn't come out great, but there might be the seeds for something better in there. I don't know yet. I've also been refreshing my HTML5 and CSS3 knowledge because it's been years since I did anything with either (from back before they had the numbers and were just HTML and CSS). But actually getting something finished ? Not so much. I've been mostly just reading a lot. Wow, this has been a scintillating post

Not much to update here. It keeps snowing despite it nearly being May (though it's usually followed by rain). I, like everyone else around, am just waiting for something to change, hopefully for the better. So I've started using this time to do some personal research -- I've been reading a lot of non-fiction lately and am trying to apply some of the methods and principles to my life, but I'm probably not doing that great with it. It's getting there, it takes some time to click for me. Insight Timer and Woebot are keeping me less anxious during this time too. Two months ago I would have never said that I liked meditation, but honestly, I kind of look forward to it now each day. And while Woebot is probably not a good replacement for a therapist, it's still good for walking you through some cognitive behavioral techniques (also, Woebot is very cute, which is always a bonus). And that's about it.

The numbers have gone from single digit to triple in about a week, and I imagine it's going to get worse considering how small of a population we have in my province. My anxiety is at a near-permanent nine (it's been higher before and seeing as it has yet to impact my sleep, I'm considering it bad and high but not that bad, in other words, under ten on a scale), I am forcing myself to try to get stuff done, but it's hard to these days. I think it's hard for everyone these days. We just don't know when the other shoe is about to drop and how it's going to get worse (because you know that it's going to get worse somehow).

It's been a long month, hasn't it? Things shifted really fast to the point that I can barely keep up with them. My province is locking everything down. I suppose it's because we're half an island and with an ageing population, so the virus will take down a huge percentage of the population if we don't do something about it. Our health care was already being pushed to its limits before the virus reached us, now it's worse.We're still in the single digits when it comes to confirmed cases, but we're all supposed to act like there are much more and behave accordingly. So yeah, basically we're all in quarantine (and oh look, I actually spelled quarantine right . That's been the word that I've been struggling with and I've been spelling it wrong for about two weeks now). Not that it's hugely different than how I was living before, but it feels weird to have it mandated by the government. I've been spending a lot of my time reading

I wrote an online serial for three years, and it ended in 2016 (for... various reasons) after three volumes. It was a run of the mill urban fantasy series called The Wake. Here's a few of the lessons that I learned from it: 1) Plan. Seriously, you need to plan these things out before they get away from you -- and they probably will, considering the deadlines that you're trying to keep to. You don't have to have the whole thing planned out, but you do need a general guideline of how the story goes. I did not, and it started to show by halfway through the second volume. 2) Have a buffer. Because life is going to get away from you and you should have at least a couple of weeks worth of updates ready to go. I also did not, and spent some -- okay, a lot of -- weeks scrambling to get something up. The writing suffered because of this. 3) If something big in your life happens and you think you should probably take a break, then take a break. My dad died only a few weeks a

It will just take some time to get into the swing of things, and for me to figure out topics. I've been slacking on this, have a bunch of half-finished drafts, but nothing finished. This post will probably be taken down once I have real posts ready to go. I am also going to stick with one of Blogger's standard themes purely because the mobile versions look decent and that is a thing I apparently need to think about now. It is not the most customized, but it works and that is more important. In any case, expect a short review on 4thewords sometime in the next week (might even be in the next few days). I don't know if I have enough in me to post more than once a week, but I'm going to try to keep that schedule going for as long as I can.  I do not have a niche for this, and I doubt I ever will, so I can't really tell you what to expect in general, other than: writing talk, the occasional stationery-related review, and maybe some posts about ADHD because I live with