Depression Sucks

Yesterday, I did things. I made phone calls, washed dishes, cleaned the floors, and took care of things in general.

Apparently I was burning the candle at both ends to do so.

Last night I couldn't sleep, and woke feeling like I'd been run over by a truck. Nothing has improved through the day. I feel like hell, everything seems like its far too much work, and that means pretty much all the real work that needs to be done is being pushed onto my wife.

Its not fair to her, but at the same time, I don't have anything else I can do. My brain is broken, and I don't have anything I can do about that.

Depression sucks...

Ways and Means

This year, I participated in Reddit Secret Santa. In the Questionnaire, it asked what I would do to improve the world. My answer, was to write more fiction that is hopeful instead of dark and cynical.

My Santa sent me two books with the message "The world needs more hopeful fiction"
Writer's Workshop of Science Fiction and Fantasy (edited by Michael Knost)
Now Write! (Laurie Lamson)

This has given me both a bit of a painful poke, as I've not been putting much of any effort into writing, even when I do have an opportunity; but even more it has given me a bit of hope that maybe I can do something with this. I need to write more, I know this. And I know that its hard and I need to forgive myself for not being brilliant at writing immediately.

Right now, where I am, I need to try. That's all I can do is try, but its enough for now.

A total cop-out

I was planning on releasing part 2 of Under Ancient Stone today but, well, the prep I had to do for my game tonight took far longer than I had planned. So yeah, total lame cop-out for today, but it really isn't ready yet. I promise it will be up tomorrow though.

-Matt

Not a Clever Title

I usually try to come up with some manner of clever title, but I'm not bothering this time. This will be mostly just a rambling bit of nonsense, but perhaps it will help me to get somewhere; and if I'm lucky someone else else might find it at least mildly amusing.

Of late I have spent my time at work, writing in my journal, eating and sleeping, or playing video games. (Games of choice have been Borderlands 2, DotA 2, and Guild Wars 2... I just now realized they are all sequels...) You will not a distinct lack of working on my actual writing projects in there.
I don't have--and am not going to try to create--an excuse for that, I've just been lazy and unmotivated. I haven't wanted to do much of anything lately, which has been rather terrible. Of things that have attempted to hold my interest and get me to be productive, two I think are meaningful.
It keeps being suggested to me through various people and in various ways that I should try to start a sort of tech support business. Specifically one scaled to individual use and small business operations. Why this seems like a good idea is because of the mass numbers of technologically-challenged people, and the other large mass of people who are tech-savvy, but really don't want to try and explain things to the plebes, or just don't have time to constantly be fixing their friend's machine. So I've been kicking the idea around a bit, trying to get a feel for how it might work--and perhaps more importantly, if I could make money off it without hating every moment of it.
Second thing--which is considerably more interesting--has been a game idea that quite literally sprung into my head almost fully formed. My wife and I have been working on it off and on this week, and I hope to get it into at least a play-testable state by this weekend. I won't reveal too much at this point, but suffice to say it is a card-based game revolving around gaining political influence at court, and uses a tarot deck as the primarily played cards. Provided I can make the game work and balance, I'll start doing play-tests with my gaming friends, and if it actually turns out to be enjoyable at all then I think I might try to Kickstart it into something meaningful.

Aside from these, work has been mind-numbingly boring and exhausting as anything I've ever done. For the longest time I could not figure out how incredibly simple office work could manage to make me so tired, but yesterday I think I finally figured it out. My mind wants to run, but simple office work forces it to crawl.
I need to concentrate on a simple repetitive task until it is finished; unfortunately it is in no possible way capable of actually holding my interest, so I have to constantly exert willpower to force my thoughts back on task. When I have to do this near-constantly for 5 to 8 hours, it becomes a near-painful drain on my energy. If on top of the mindless repetitive tasks I have to try and coordinate and communicate with other people on them, then it just becomes something of my own personal hell. Not only do I need to stay on task; I now have to slow down thoughts to a level that I can interact with coworkers on, and try to explain what I'm doing and why--which is hard enough to do with intellectual people and without any insult intended I do not work with intellectual people.

So long story short, work is way more exhausting than it has any right to be, which leads to me not having energy at the end of the day to force myself to sit and write, or read, or hit the gym, or basically anything else. Something here needs to change... Please?

-Matthew

Hope Deferred

We had staked a lot of our hopes on a job offer that would have more than covered our expenses and given me the freedom to actually spend my time on writing instead of work.

It was turned down at the eleventh hour.

Now we are struggling to decide what to do and where to go. For now I'm trapped at work the same as I have been. Eventually I hope to escape.
Hope for now is deferred in favor of survival. For now I need what energy I have just to get through each day. For now all I can do is pray that the next step in the dark is illumined before my feet. For now... all I can do is keep placing the next foot forward, and trust that there will be solid ground beneath it.

-Matthew

Additional Posts Pending

I'm making another go at Nanowrimo, historically it has been a good time for me to get some actual progress made on something, so I'm dumping pretty much everything into it. Because of that I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep Hethir's story flowing steadily. I'm hoping to keep a post coming every week, but if I slide, that's why.

Lack of Update This Week: Explanation

This week I've taken the time I would have spent writing another update or two, and started writing basic outlines for the next half dozen posts for the Dust serial. In previous posts I only had a vague idea of where I was going with the story--even within the post itself, I sometimes surprised myself with how it ended. While it's sometimes enjoyable, I think overall the quality was suffering for it. So I sat down and started to figure out exactly where I was going to take things and write it all down.

Patience grasshopper... regular posting will resume, once I start to figure out what I'm doing.
-Matthew