You know that moment, where you’re playing a Nintendo Switch, and you kinda register the low battery warning at the top and do the Mr. Incredible ‘I still got time!’ mental gymnastics, only to realise a moment later it was the critical warning to say your console was about to shut down, you’ve left it too long and the screen just, goes? That, right now, is my brain. The batteries aren’t low, they’re drained to the point of nonfunctional. I’m on my third coffee and, fun fact, coffee does not in fact give you energy; it suppresses the creation of tiredness hormones in the brain if memory serves me right, but suffice to say, it masks fatigue, it does not overcome it. I am dangling by a thread, and it’s fraying in front of me as I type.
I think the root of this is a wholesale collapse of my resolve to ‘just book a damn day off’ into ‘eh maybe tomorrow/next week/eventually.’ It’s the same basic problem as above: the warning signs I needed to recharge were there the whole time, and I just kept ignoring the charger, kept soldiering on. You know, it is awkward in this house right now to both charge and use the Switch. It’s the same with recharging in general, I have to be in a specific position, and with things set up the way they are right now that’s not always possible. Actually, it’s more often than not, not possible. I need to have a quiet weekend or I am going to fall apart. Moreso.
HOR and WHT are suffering for it. The latter is benefiting from an abundance of overly long chapters, so cutting 200~ words each day is a substantial move and is helping, but that will only get me by for so long. HOR, well let’s just say it’s morphing into TWR all over again, where half of what I write will need a redo once I manage to figure out what I want the bones of the story to be. The good news is I have more of an idea of that than TWR: it’s a story about challenging your beliefs over what is acceptable in society. The problem is I feel I’m drowning that theme in a ton of fluff that, while it’s desperately needed across my writing, is too much here and now. My lovely partner is being my rock in fixing this but, I need to get my act together if I don’t want the rewrite to be an entire redo.
I just want to be ok. I just want to feel like I have my routine and boundaries back, and that I’m, ok. It’s doable. Done it before after all haven’t I? Except, I made time to recharge those previous times. You can’t beat the level if the console won’t even turn on…
samshuttleworth.com 