July 16th, 2020 – 659 – Day one-hundred-and-twenty-two

~ Sam Shuttleworth

Yesterday before I finished up at my PC for the evening, I flipped through my blog posts from the start of my isolation. Looking at a holistic big picture, I think I now see why I struggled so much in late April, going into May, and only gradually recovered. Turns out, when you don’t grieve properly, it can send you into a spiral. I wasn’t doing great before Tim’s death, that’s for sure, but looking back at all my writings since, it’s pretty clear a macabre streak took me over for a long while. Being several people’s rock whilst a part of my world crumbled took its toll. I shouldn’t have bottled it up.

I guess that stands testament to how powerful a diary of any sort can be for unpicking the patterns of our life, and finding where we perhaps slipped off the rails. As I technically keep three daily diaries, as well as being able to point to what scenes I wrote on what days, I have a pretty complete image of my mental state for the duration, and can now see what I must do a bit different going forwards. My mental health dipped to almost the levels of Sussex University. So in a way, I’m proud I managed to stay above that line.

WAN is now about 300-400 words short of the 40K mark. I have a different midpoint in mind for the book, which should fingers crossed mean less cutting is required to get the beats in place, even if just as much still needs axing for quality. Of course the latter can wait; even when I do make the story available in a limited form, it’ll be late 2021. Still though, this does bring me around to talking about editing, and I need a decent solution here. I’m not actually sure if it’s a motivation issue, a logistics issue – it’s a pain to make edits on WattPad’s awful interface – or some unknown mental blockage. But if I want my stories to be great, then I need to get my act together here.

Target is getting earlier in the day again, and I couldn’t be more happy. It’s taken a long time, but I think I’m at last getting back in control of my head. I just pray that this sticks. I want the old me back.

Published by Sam Shuttleworth

I’m Sam, and I live to write. I spent most of the first 8 years of my adulthood trying to balance writing with a large amount of crap in my personal life, until towards the end of 2018 I threw everything out and started afresh with just my writing. I built the new me around one goal: I have to write at least 1,000 words a day. I called this goal 1K, and it changed my life. So long as I write a thousand words a day, the day is a success, and atop that I've managed over time to build the life I wanted all those years. My greatest flaws as a writer is I still use too many adjectives, adverbs, connectives as openers, accidental passive voice and I don't force my work down people's throats enough on pain of extreme and unusual torture. My greatest strength is I know my greatest flaws and I'm working on them.