July 3rd

Happy birthday, Tom Cruise!

Update: Ooh, look, a present!

Deadline FAIL

After that last post, I did some more writing last night. Then I did some more writing as soon as I woke up, and some more in this late evening. Now, I am a little burnt out at banging my head away at it. The opposite of feeling rusty (though no more productive). It's four pages long now, but I broke through my barrier. However, it is Saturday night, and I am not finished. Sigh. I guess I am going past deadline.

Luckily, the next story lined up in my mental queue consists of exactly one scene, and I know how how it begins and ends and who are the characters are. If I can just finish this first one after getting home from work tomorrow, then work on the next one a bit everyday, I should be easily back on schedule by next Saturday.

I also spent a lot of time today watching the latest episode of Dollhouse, and then reading various threads about it online. Holy Shit, that show is sweet. [Obligatory line about it being too bad that it will get canceled.]

Procrastination makes the heart wilt

Ah, another two days wasted, and my deadline fast approaching. I have been trying for the last couple minutes to work on the story, but it is just not working. I don't know where to take the story from where it is at right now, and it is bother the hell out of me, not knowing what should happen next. Also, I have become incredibly self-conscious about the act of writing, which is just making it impossible to get anywhere in it. Sentences are just not flowing out, and when I try to force them I don't feel right about them. Ugh. It's an ugly business.

I think the problem is that I had kind of reached, without noticing it, the limits of the previous combustion of words, and now I am on to trying to game out what comes after that. I am having to make actual plot decisions, and before I was just setting up the, uh, setting, so to speak.

Now I am feeling ornery and stifled. This will learn me to put off the necessary. I am creating bad vibes solely out of my own impetus. Still, that's a good thing. I need to start working on creating some system of self-discipline, or else I will never get anywhere, with this or in any other context.

What condition is my condition in?

No real writing was done today, or last night after getting off from work. At the moment I have a bit of a mental block about the idea of doing it, which typing this is meant somewhat to address. Also, I have just been reading about this Specter switch thing, which just comes completely out of left field to me and seems weirder and weirder the more I think about it. Also, listening to that Decembrist album, which I was able to exchange for a playable copy. The last song is quite good, though no "The Rake's Song."

Another source of blockage was an occurrence of what could be called "The Crossroads Dilemma," which is when presented with two things that both need to be done, I don't know which one to do, can't make up my mind and end up doing neither. Engorging on blog posts on Specter was probably a mechanism of that. Besides writing, the other path was doing my state taxes. Finally I broke down and did the taxes, just now. It took about 15 minutes. Everything had already been filled out; I just had to do the master copy. Now everything is signed, sealed and ready to be driven to the post office tomorrow. (I really need to stop procrastinating.)

...Today, when walking out of work, I had a strange feeling. I had felt rather all right at work that day, in control and, in a way, unconcerned with my mental state. And as I was walking, out the automatic doors and into the mundane air, I felt as if some switch was switching in my head, and something vaguely, for a split instant, a bit like euphoria, but more like normalcy, slipping through. And then the switch stuck, not fully completing its process. And I walked on, across the parking lot, feeling this odd phantom of gears in my head. It was, I suspected, the depression lifting, the way one of the patients described it in Against Depression (which I never finished). A singular moment when the depression lifted, before the gears stuck.

I think I was what jammed those gears in place. I think a part of me was frightened of the idea of being without it, like, well, it sounds crude to say it, but almost like a battered lover. I was going "No darling, come back, I didn't mean it, I would never leave you. I couldn't live without you. I don't know what I would do without you. Please, hit me again. I want you to."

That sounds gross, but really, this is quite a bit was it was like, I think. My apologies.

I don't feel like I have gone all the way back, though. I am still standing in the doorway. The gears haven't turned back around; they are still jammed in place. The Switch was thrown. It has not been thrown back; it is only that its process has been halted.

I don't know what will happen next. Maybe some vile shit will happen and I will go right back. Maybe I will hold in this pattern a while. Maybe I will pull out the brace, and things will just...change. I don't know.

There is a part in Against Depression where the patient whose depression lifted, like that, talks about how the depression is not her. That it is something else, but not who she is. I always thought that interesting, because of the stance such a statement implies on what is "You." What is the nature of consciousness. I mean, if you aren't the chemicals in your brain, what are you? Are you more you when unaided by chemicals, when on anti-depressants, when drunk, when sober, with raging with hormones or castrated? It seems that each of those is you, or a different shade of you, to me, but I am not that certain. But what defines you? If you strip away all those influences, the external, the innately biological, the pumping of blood and collections of neurons, would there still even be a you (are we more or equal to the sum of you physical parts? Is there a metaphysical level to reality?).

I think part of my reticence is, I have been depressed so long, I have been this unhappy, nervous, anxious, angry person for so long, I have been wearing this weight, this Albatross, for so long, that I don't know what I would be without it. I don't know how it would feel. I don't know if it would feel like me, if I would even be me. Is there anything to me, other then my depression? If I escaped i's temple, would I dash out into endless green fields, or find myself facing a trek through a barren Wasteland? "No Excuses." Would the sun outside of the cave be too bright?

I need to keep doing this...

Go with the flow

The story I am working on is kind of odd, because I don't know where it goes, quite. There is a faint flicker of an idea of an ending, but I don't know if I will use it. I am just writing the story, kind of one sentence in front of the next, trying to keep it along some pathway. A while back I wrote 800 words in a mad, late-night rush, but felt that I hadn't communicated all I wanted, hadn't set the mood as I wanted and pointed where the story was supposed to go. So I started over and have written about halfway through those words at much greater length and detail, and have written over 1100 words about those first four hundred or so words. Hmm, you know, it actually seems way more lopsided in terms of expansion than those numbers suggest. Single sentences have become paragraphs, or short scenes. Hopefully, writing it like this will give me a better idea of where it is going. I just write something, keeping the work in mind, (I have a deadline) and writing the next words whenever they come to me, whenever they do. I don't overthink it, or worry too much about whether I should be sitting there thinking, or taking a break. I just kind of feel my way through it. The real question, is just having the right sentence to put next, and writing that one down. Its a different approach for me, but I enjoy the exercise of it.