2022-20-30 Brown Starfish
(Everybody's Got One)
Allow me to first apologize. I've been out of touch, an international man of mystery, totally not talking… Nor have I really been writing.
Mental health (yes, again) is a funny thing. You could think of it like the management of chronic pain, which sometimes it is―the management of emotional pain. Sometimes you need to reassess the situation and that can mean adjusting medication. Unfortunately for some psychotropic meds those changes can take an unfortunate amount of time. I had to wait nearly a month to fully realize that half as much antidepressants were quite ineffectual and led to a state of nearly zero productivity. I was just barely functioning, going through life with the bare minimum of effort because that's all I had to give.
Okay, one might think, just switch back! Well, I did. I started the heavier dose again and it began working as fast as possible. It only took another month!
The good news is that I did a huge amount of writing between June and September in spite of all this, almost 20,000 words! I've only tacked on an additional 382 here at the end of October but I'm near the end. Funnily enough I thought I was near the end twenty thousand words ago. What do I know, right? It's only my story!
Even so, I'm up to 99,632 words at the moment, a proper sci-fi/fantasy novel not counting the prologue, Rain Shadow―an additional twenty thousand words! Yikes! This is going to be a tome!
Honestly? I'm impressed. I wasn't sure I could do it. Really, I still haven't, but it's just tying up some loose ends and hopefully bringing a sense of completion to things. "That won't be hard," the naive writer told himself while the muses laughed and laughed and laughed.
Barring anything really jumping out of the woodwork unexpectedly, I might actually have this done, at least the first draft, in this calendar year. Considering the file creation date is September 23, 2013, I guess nine fricking years for one book isn't bad? At this rate I have what, maybe five more in me? Four? I feel like I have a lot more than that in me. Fortunately my life has significantly changed in the last several years. It apparently took me eight years to reach 50,000 words but only two to add 49,000 more. That's a pretty good illustration, I think, of where I'm at as opposed to where I've been.
At any rate, allow me to apologize again for being so quiet for so long. I was pretty "busy" (read: major depression) but that's really no excuse for radio silence. In the future, on this book or any I might have left in me, I will do my best to maintain contact even in times of stress.
If you read this far, just know that I love you. Even if we've never met, following me on this journey automatically makes you one of my favorite people. Thank you so, so much.
–MRH