NaNoWriMo: Into the last week

I had planned to update this every week during NaNo at least, but once again, time has run away from me. Good intentions and all of that. Bah!

NaNoWriMo is going better and worse than expected. The ML side of things is going fantastically – we have three to four events per week, and people turning up to all of them (!!!). It’s much better than last year, and I can’t say enough how grateful I am to have help this year. I couldn’t have done a lot of this stuff without my fellow MLs.

The best part is the the wrimos have noticed and are also grateful. I’ve had lots of comments about the write-ins and other stuff we’ve got going on, all of them positive. It gives me such a boost to hear stuff like that; it’s always nice to know that your work is appreciated and that you’re getting stuff right. We do all these events so that people come together, write, socialise and, most importantly, have fun. If that’s happening, I’m a happy ML.

I am, however, rushed off my feet. There were two write-ins this weekend, and I was due to be at both of them. I wound up pulling out of today’s, knowing that there would be other MLs present to pick up the stuff I usually do there. The Chronic Fatigue is biting pretty hard at the moment, which isn’t a surprise considering how much I’m running around at the moment. Also, I wanted to get my head down and do my own writing; it’s very easy to let all the ML duties distract me from NaNo itself and writing my own novel.

My writing isn’t going to plan. I’m getting plenty done on the weekends – especially since I started taking headphones to write-ins so I could zone out and write, rather than monitoring the meeting and joining in with every conversation (I’m a social butterfly, what can I say?). However, during the week, I’m not getting as much done.

The thing I was afraid of is happening. I’ve been in such a routine with my writing this year – writing a post a day, editing, and posting it up – that it’s hard to step up the pace and write more. I should be doing two posts per day if I’m going to hit my target of getting everything up until the end of December written. Couple that with a crazy work situation – the Team Leader stuff continues, quieter than before but still busy enough that it’s sucking up a lot of my mental energy – and it doesn’t leave me with much impetus to write more per day.

My attempts to make writing time have frequently been thwarted. I managed to get out of work a little early and hoped to get in a couple of hours’ writing when I got home, and I got to the train station to find that all of the signals in the city centre had broken. I waited nearly an hour for a train, and it crawled all the way home, stuffed to the gills with frustrated commuters. By the time I got home, I was so tired and hungry that I wound up just editing and posting, then cooked and zoned out in front of the TV.

I’d hoped to have a full day to write today too, but I was so tired after being out all day yesterday at a write-in that the morning was mostly pottering around in a daze. Plus I had to sort out all my weekly chores so that I have clean dishes and clothes and food and all those small, essential things that get missed when you’re out all the time.

I swear, I need a maid. A very cheap, invisible maid. …hmm, maybe that’s an idea to shelve for a future short story.

So, it’s been a struggle. I’ve been playing catchup half the time, which is a stressful situation I have managed to avoid in my previous NaNo ventures. However, it’s not all bad news.

I’m on track with my wordcount. Almost 39,000 words now, which puts me a day or so ahead of target. If I keep going as I am, I’ll make the required 50k, probably by the skin of my teeth.

I’m not doing so well with the post count. I should be halfway through December by now, but I’m only up to the 5th. I might wind up having to write post-NaNo to finish things up. That’s not a disaster, but it leaves me with less of a break before I start the next blogfic. Or possibly no break at all – it’s hard to say yet.

What this means is that the posts have swelled – as NaNo kicked in, I became more verbose, and it has been a struggle to keep the post lengths down to a reasonable level. I’ve had to split a few of them up into more manageable chunks, which isn’t ideal but it has helped fill in the posts. My rough average for a month’s posts is about 25,000 words, but November finished up at over 33,000. Whoops. Not exactly what I had intended to do!

Yesterday, I finally got to the end of November’s posts. That was such a good feeling – I could breathe again. I knew that once I started on December’s posts, I was on the downhill run – that was my own personal halfway mark. Today, I spent the afternoon writing out the first few posts for December, making a dent in the backlog. It still feels strange to finish a post and then move straight on to the next one; I keep wanting to pause and edit. While it is a good habit to write every day, it has its down-sides too!

This evening, I went over the posts for November that haven’t gone up yet. This is one bit of really good news: they are all edited and scheduled. I don’t need to do any of that over the next eight days. No more stopping to sort out the day’s post; I can concentrate on writing now. I can’t say how freeing that is (partly because I’ve only just finished and haven’t enjoyed an edit-free day yet) but I am looking forward to it! With luck, I can get my head down and make some decent progress through December’s posts between now and the end of NaNo.

Also, I think the plot is on-track to get where it needs to go. I have a good idea of where I need the group – and the story – to get to, and I know roughly what the last post will look like. So far, it’s lining up (allowing for the ridiculously long travel times that happen in the Apocalypse Blog). It’s hard to judge exactly how it’ll pan out, but I think I have given myself enough leeway to make it fit. Fingers crossed!

Right. I’m tired and have to be up early for work tomorrow. My brain is shutting down (it’s possible it did that before I started this post, but shhh, don’t tell anyone). Time to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything and hit the sack. Oh, and I have another milestone turning up soon – I must look up when that is. Whee!

Another crazy, event-heavy week coming up. Catch you all on the flipside. Wish me luck!

Picking up

I’m doing better. My last post was somewhat dire, but it needed to be said. I had been silent too long. I am immensely grateful to all of those who responded, publicly or otherwise.

At the moment, I’m in the process of disconnecting emotionally from all of that stuff. It’s not an instant thing – it’s a gradual separation, and I have to remind myself sometimes that this thing doesn’t matter, and that thing isn’t quite so important. I’m dealing with the fallout and attempting to reduce any further damage to myself or anything else I still care about, but I’m getting there. I’m like a buoy that has remembered how to float again.

I’m also sleeping better. The chest pains still come and go, particularly if I get wound up (they’re one of the more extreme and unpleasant symptoms of CFS, and only turn up when it’s particularly bad for me), but I’m starting to come back to a more even keel. It’s never great, but at least I’m not as shaky and emotionally strung-out as I was.

As I’ve said a couple of times over the past few days – I prefer my drama on the page rather than in my life. Let’s put it back where it belongs.

So, I’m picking up the Apocalypse Blog and slinging it in a new direction. Both the blog and I needed a change and a bit of rejuvenation.

I allowed a post to get a little bit romantic, after fighting to stop it from becoming sappy. I think I rearranged it about three times before I was happy. It was fun! It has been ages since I’ve had the chance to do something like that, mostly because I’ve been beating Faith down with very unromantic stuff. But it’s still there, bubbling under, and Faith deserves to have a bit of a break from being pounded on emotionally.

The other plot-stuff relating to Haven is also coming up towards a turning point. It has been a long climb, and it’s almost time to run down the other side. I just have another thread or two to get in place, and then we’ll see what the shape of it all looks like. Now that I have more mental energy to devote to it again, I’m looking forward to seeing how it all comes out.

I had two bits of bad news today. The first was from an old friend of mine, someone I haven’t spoken to in a while due to various life stuff on his end. I didn’t know how bad it was until he spoke to me this morning. I’m helping him out where I can, though it’s difficult when he’s on another continent. We worked something out, and hopefully he’ll be able to get himself and his fiancee in a more comfortable position now. I’m relieved that I was in a position to help him out.

I came across an inspirational quote earlier, which made me think of him: “Emotional security is just as important as financial security.” (P.K. Shaw) I think he’d agree with that.

It relates to the second bit of bad news I got today, too. It’s family-related and I don’t want to get into it right now, but it’s more saddening than stressful. I’m doing what I can to ease things, even if it’s just being an ear when it’s needed, and offering a spare bed. It’s not a problem I can solve but that doesn’t mean I can’t help the people I love.

If it’s not one thing, it’s another at the moment. But I’m okay. I’m healing. Things aren’t great, but they’re getting better.

If you want an image to take home with you: My heart is as big as a star and covered in bandaids. They’ll fall off when they’re ready.

Bruised

The last two weeks have been hell for me. I can’t remember the last time I was this stressed, strung out, hurt, and inclined to cry.

As I’ve mentioned before, the team leader I’m replacing at work has been having complications with her pregnancy. The week before last was a huge deadline for us – the delivery of a three-year-long project. In the middle of it, the TL announced that she had preeclampsia and had to go into hospital straight away.

The good news is that she’s doing okay – she was due to be sent home this weekend, still pregnant (she’s at about 31 weeks now). I went to see her the other day and things are going okay there. Everyone is relieved about that.

Still, I was left holding the can to deliver this project’s work, with barely a clue about what was required as the TL was training me as we went. So the week involved a lot of scrabbling around for me, desperately trying to make sure that a) I knew what needed to be done and b) someone was actually doing it.

We made it. I can hardly believe it, but we did. I have an awesome team there. Big huge relief, big fat tick for all of us.

But I couldn’t relax. The TL had been training me on the delivery process, but we only do that once every few years – all the stuff that comes in between was going to be handed over after the deadline. Which meant that last week I had to figure out what the hell to do next, because nothing had been handed over to me. There are lots of tiny pieces scattered around that I have to make sense of.

The TL was good enough to email me from hospital, sending me stuff that I needed to know. But still, it was stress city. I’m still not sure exactly how many balls I’m supposed to have in the air there, apart from ‘a lot’. I feel like I’ve had no breathing space.

On top of all the work stuff, the communal writing project I’ve been putting together went sideways. Badly.

The day before the TL went into hospital, one of the project’s writers attacked me in a meeting. I won’t go into detail, but suffice to say that a couple of members of the group believe that they should be able to do whatever they want and to hell with the rest of the group, and they didn’t like it when I said that wouldn’t fly. Rather than trying to tackle the problem and work out a solution, spending two hours trying to shout me down was the option they chose.

I was shaking by the time they left. I don’t give under that kind of pressure and I don’t put up with bullying, but I wasn’t in any shape to handle an attack like that emotionally.

If it had just been one of them, I think I could have dealt with it. But it wasn’t. I spent the rest of the week in isolation – two of the group decided to stop talking to me in favour of the ringleader. It wasn’t a good week for me for so many reasons.

Then it got worse. I tried to speak to the ringleader to straighten things out and he refused to talk to me. I had the other two ambush me after work, so that they could tell me about how selfish and unfair I’m being, and how unhappy they are. They weren’t interested in my side of things. It had turned into a whole drama of the sort I thought I’d left behind at secondary school.

It was all way more than I was prepared to put up with. I spent half of last week worrying about what would fall on me next, where the next attack would come from. My CFS was so bad that I was having chest pains most days – stress makes it worse and this was a pressure on me all of the time. I felt like I hadn’t smiled in forever. Worse, it was showing – I don’t tend to show that kind of stuff in public, but people noticed. I was just too tired to pretend any more.

I put a lot of work into that project. I set up the world, the concept, the wiki, the forum, and the website, organised meetings, and helped others plan characters and plot stuff. I did it because I love writing and I had a group of friends I wanted to share it with.

It had got to the stage when I dreaded someone bringing it up in conversation. I didn’t know what was coming at me next, what other thing would go wrong. This thing that I love wasn’t fun any more – it was so terribly far from fun. I couldn’t see a way to salvage it, and I really didn’t want to try. I don’t give up on things easily – I work hard to make things go, but this wasn’t worth it. It just really wasn’t worth it.

I waited until after my Creative Writing Group meeting on Friday night to end it. Most of the group was there and I was determined to do it right. I wanted to do it in person, not by email, which can be read in so many ways. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I was trembling before I even started. I got through it, even though the ringleader walked out halfway through with great protestations. I said my piece, I explained my reasons, I named no names (in an attempt not to make it worse), and I almost broke down.

I had intended to come straight home afterwards – I knew I’d be a mess – but the half of the group not directly involved in the drama insisted that I stay. They made sure I was okay, and it took a while for that to happen. It felt like an hour before I stopped shaking and teetering on the edge of crying at any moment. But they were so good.

They didn’t know a lot of what had happened – the last thing I was going to do was drag more of them into it and make it a huge fight between all of us. I don’t play those kinds of games. That’s why I stopped it when I did – to preserve what little was left between us all. They had seen enough in the meetings to know what had caused it for themselves. By the time I came home, I felt a lot less alone in all of this. I am so grateful for them.

Now all that’s left to deal with is the fallout. Those involved in all the bitching that went on behind my back say that they don’t want this to ruin any friendships. Again, that’s why I ended the whole thing, but it’s going to take some work from everyone to mend what’s been damaged.

I’m bruised, all the way through. Every time I think it’s finished and I can start to move on, something happens to poke the bruise again. The stress has made me so sick that I’ve spent most of the weekend on the couch, attempting to recover – and even in that there has been poking. I’ve lost a project I cared about, and friends have turned against me. I just want a break from the pressure now. I want it over.

I know that this crap has been affecting my writing, and that makes me feel even worse. The Apocalypse Blog has been strained of late – I almost missed a few days, but it has been my one escape through all of this shit. And I was determined that they weren’t going to fuck up my perfect record for me.

It’s been really hard to get into the mood to write – even today, I’m writing this because my brain doesn’t want to click into Faith mode. Sometimes it has been the one time when I didn’t think about the project and all the crap that was being slung my way. Other times, it was hard to see past the pile of crap to the blank page. Most of the time, I struggled to get something down.

I’m hoping that this week will be better. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to sleep properly tonight, and that AB will come back on track and pick up pace again. I have so much planned for it. I’m hoping that this whole unpleasant business can be finally put into the ground and we can all move on.

Hope with me – I could use the help right now.

Flagging

So much for updating this more often! Bah.

Things are crazy right now, and I’m struggling to handle it all.

Work is running up against a deadline and the pressure is on there to get everything done in time. That’s not going to let up until the end of the month at least. Coupled with the work I have to get through, I have to pick up the team leader stuff as I go too.

My desktop fell down and refused to get up again, so I had to go get a new one. That’s left me having to deal with Vista (argh) and incredibly poor this month. I can’t do half the stuff I was hoping to.

NaNoWriMo stuff is picking up again. I’ve been tossing ideas around for it for a while with some friends, and it looks like its going to be a busy November for us MLs. Currently trying to line up what we need to do before it all kicks off.

I’m trying to put together a new project, and that is proving to be more difficult than I had anticipated. Communal writing projects are never easy, and between that and my natural habit of wanting things like this to work, I’ve wound up in charge. On the one hand, it’s good fun – I’m getting some fantastic ideas for it, and the enthusiasm of the group is great. On the other hand, nine people is a lot to coordinate and there are headaches involved with that that are currently dragging me down.

Then I have my writing groups to organise (2), the writing festival next weekend to sort out meetups for, an author’s talk next month to get everything in order for, and an upcoming family reunion.

Then there’s the Apocalypse Blog. I’m struggling with that. With everything else on my plate, the Chronic Fatigue is biting hard. So many things to think about and not lose track of, so much running around in my head. It’s hard to sleep or rest.

It all leaves me with little energy to devote to my beloved blogfic. I’m keeping up and posting every day, but I feel like it’s getting strained. I can’t tell how the posts are coming out half the time. I’m fairly sure that it’s suffering, though, and that frustrates me to no end.

On top of that, the story has just hit one of the big markers and I have to get my head around how to handle it. It’s not always easy after a day full of everything I’ve just listed. My usual commute writing time is short and sometimes non-existent if I can’t get a seat.

So, yeah. I’m flagging. Running on empty right now. I’m gonna have to start making some hard choices if it carries on like this for too long – best to put one ball down before I start dropping several. Problem is, I don’t want to put down any of them.

Before anyone panics, AB is not one I will put down by choice. I’m committed to it, and it’s the only part of everything I’m doing right now that’s just for me. (And my readers, of course.)

Bah. Anyway. I should go get myself together for Father’s Day. Time to go hang out with the folks. Post atcha later.

A little consideration

…goes a long way. I’m feeling particularly ill-considered this weekend. And particularly ill.

I’ve been so busy lately. Juggling all the pieces I’ve had has been a precarious balancing act, one that I hoped would get easier once my parents were back from their holiday. In some ways, that’s true. I have been able to relinquish a few responsibilities – small things, but they make a difference.

I’ve been running low on energy this week, since being up until 1:30am getting the parents back from the airport on Tuesday night. CFS means that I can’t screw with my sleep schedule like that without paying for it, and I’ve been struggling to get back onto an even keel since then.

Yesterday morning, the last of our furniture arrived at about 6am. I never even heard the delivery guys. Then an hour or so later, Mum decided to assemble the dining table, right outside my room. At about 8:30am, I finally gave up on being able to sleep and stumbled out in my pajamas. She was like a kid at Christmas, finally able to get her house looking like a house, so I didn’t say anything, even when they made fun of me for being all bed-hair. I even helped them put the damn thing together.

I was useless for most of the day. Played a bit on an MMO, watched TV – I was so tired that that was all I was capable of. I had planned to get some chores done, do a bit of shopping so I can sort out my room and writing space, but those kinds of plans fall by the wayside when I get tired like that. 

The weekends are the only chance I get to catch up on my sleep, get rest, and do the stuff that I’m too tired to do during the week. They’re my chance to have something like a normal life with this damned CFS. Last weekend was the first time in ages that I truly took some time off everything, and even then I was doing chores for half of it.

This morning, Mum and my aunt thought it was a good idea to move furniture while I was asleep. Heavy wooden furniture + fridge + tiled floor + really good acoustics = I CAN HEAR YOU PERFECTLY. Right outside my room. At 8am on a Sunday morning. WTF. Who thought that was a good idea?

What kills me is that I’m usually up by 9am anyway. Is it too much to ask for them to just wait until I’m up? Don’t they know how precious those scraps of sleep are for me? 

Now, I’m over-emotional and shaky all over, and a hair away from oh-so-fun chest pains. My room is a tip, I won’t get out to try to find a new desk this weekend, and there is a list of stuff I wanted to do but just can’t face right now. 

Today, I wanted to get some feedback done for a couple of friends. I’ve been pissed off since I got up, and that’s really not the kind of mood I want to be in when critiquing writing. So, I’m sorry to you (you know who you are), but I’m gonna shelve that for now. I might get to it later if I’m feeling more even-headed and less RARR I RIP IT TO PIECES NOW.

There’s so much I want to do at the moment – my novel, the short story I’m partway through, stuff for my writing groups, stuff for this blog, saving for a house. I feel like I’m wasting so much time.  I feel like things are passing me by.

But I’m running on the ragged edge of energy and collapse. I’m scraping past the bare minimum – work, keeping the writing groups running, and ticking AB over – and that has to be enough sometimes. But not all the time.

Ugh. I don’t know what to do with myself right now. Maybe I’ll go beat up the CSS code some more – I could do with something meaningless to do.

Buffer unbuffed

Been a bit of a week. I have been meaning to post here for days, but just don’t seem to manage to find the time! We have relatives staying with us at the moment, so my time is not all my own.

I haven’t been getting ahead on the Apocalypse Blog posting as much as I had hoped. I’ve been doing well with writing during my commute (and I love my little notebook), but I’m not always feeling good enough to do it. I’m still working my way up to full  health after the pneumonia (or as ‘full health’ as I ever get), and it’s a long road.

The CFS is not helping, these days. I think I’ve hit the point where my body wants to be more tired than it is, but I don’t want to do too much activity because it makes me wobbly and want to sit down. So I don’t sleep well at night because I’m not tired enough, and that makes me more exhausted during the day. I’ve been in this spiral before and it’s a really hard one to break out of. Today, I can feel my eyes burning heavily and my body just wants to slither into a pile under my desk. Yesterday, I was completely useless when trying to figure out the technicalities of encryption terminology, with my poor little brain lurching around in circles and spitting out lots of ‘…..’

The plan at the moment is to start up my morning exercise again and see if that helps. It’s possible it’ll make it all worse, but that’s a risk I have to take at some point. I’ll start on Monday and see how I go, I guess.

 

In the meantime, AB posting has become more hand-to-mouth than I like. I made it worse by delving into a whole section about a prison, and there was so much to say there that I wound up doing two posts a day a couple of times. Whoops! I didn’t want to waste an opportunity like that by missing anything out, and it was already eating up way too much time – I didn’t want to string it out, or one day’s events would have taken a week to tell!

That was good fun to write about, though. The unseen and potential dangers are so much more creepy than the ones that smack you in the face. I had one reader tell me that she was all creeped out by one entry, and that made me happy (target achieved!). I don’t usually write much horror/suspense, so it was good to experiment with that stuff, and it fitted in with the ‘Rumours’ section nicely (all about what’s heard, but not (yet) seen!). That was a bit of a happy accident, as the only reason I put the prison in was that there was one next to the little black line on the map I’m using to keep track of things!

I think I need to sit down and write a load of posts one day on the weekend. All I need is the chance (and the energy)! That’ll get me ahead enough that I can start double-posting again if I need to, without running out of post buffer (I only finished up today’s post on the train into work this morning, and will have to put it up when I get home). If nothing else, it messes with my ability to schedule the posts to appear at an appropriate time during the day.

Also need to get working on my novel again. Been ages since I picked it up. Hopefully the novelling group meeting next week will kick me back into action with that!

Right. ’nuff talking, time to get back to work. Write atcha later!

Handwriting

This week has been better. It has been up and down but, on the whole, better. It feels so good to be able to say that.

It got off to a bad start – the CFS has really been pulling me down lately (as I’ve complained about a lot), and last week was a mess. But the energy levels shifted about mid-week, and the braindead turned into brain-active, which is always nice. The body is still sluggish, but at least the mind appears to be mostly working. I got a lot more achieved at work and have been able to attack some other stuff that I’ve been meaning to do. Go me!

I managed to get the next instalment of Writing Tips done this week, too, but managed to forget to email them to myself. I’m going to need to VPN in to work to get them (not that I was writing them at work or anything – lunch hour writing! It was!). I will hopefully get that posted tonight or tomorrow.

The AB Cast page has been updated and expanded, including past cast members and proper links to character-centric posts. I haven’t finished tagging up all the existing posts yet (there are a lot of them!), so that job isn’t complete, but the framework is all there. Big fat tick.

I’m getting a lot of ideas for the Apocalypse Blog, which is always good. Thanks to my current technical issues (stupid laptop battery making it impossible to write on the train), I haven’t been able to get them all written the way I wanted. By the time I get home, I’m way too tired to be able to concentrate on writing properly, so my commute is really the best time for me to get stuff done during the week.

I gave up trying to use the laptop halfway through this week and switched over to paper-and-pen writing. It has been a rude reminder of why I don’t like to write that way. My brain is always six steps ahead of my hand, I keep thinking of stuff I want to add in or have missed, my handwriting is a mess, and the writing itself comes out sounding so different to the way I usually write. 

I’m going to have to heavily rework the posts I’ve done on paper to keep it sounding like Faith. I’ve managed to get today and tomorrow’s posts all edited and up, and I should get a couple more sorted out today. I wound up writing stuff a bit out of order this week, because one post went sideways and needs to be split up into two very separate ones, and there were events in the middle that I had missed out, and… yeah. This week hasn’t been my most organised and together. 

I’m going to persevere with the handwriting, though. I have to do a lot of work on what I end up with, but the basic material is still there. It’s giving me a base to work off, which is much better than a blank page. It’s better than last weekend, when I wound up having to write a lot of the stuff from scratch and post it all in one go. The time spent concentrating on AB gives me more time to think things over and work ideas through. I even spent one train journey just writing down notes of the plotpoints and conversations I wanted to cover because so many things kept coming to mind. Those notes should help me get the next week’s posts in the right order and progression.

For the time being, I think I’m going to have to restrict myself to one post a day. I know I keep saying that I’m aiming for that, but I’m going to be strict about it now. It’s turning into so much work to get everything done that I’m struggling to keep up. Yes, I am going to bite the bullet and order a new battery for the laptop – normal service will return once I can write ‘properly’ again. Which means me and the laptop on the train with ears plugged into an iShuffle.

It has been an interesting experiment, this handwriting endeavour. It’s making me much more aware of how I write and when. Anyway! Back to editing AB posts. Mustn’t get too distracted by my own musings. More later!

Energy

Energy is an issue for me.  Thanks to the CFS, I have to watch my energy levels very closely.  Some times are better than others, and a change can actually be a lot better than a rest.

Lately, it has not been great for me.  It has been getting more and more difficult to scrape myself out of bed in the morning, and some days it has been near impossible to think straight, let alone do anything useful.  I won’t go into the other symptoms (it’s a lovely, long list), but let’s just say it sucks in many ways.

I’ve tried a lot of things to try to combat the effects of CFS in the past – magnesium, omega 3 oils, yet more iron, getting more sleep.  There is no treatment, and none of those things have worked for me (though they have for others).  

The only thing that seems to work for me at all is exercise.  Which creates a rather interesting conundrum – I have to expend energy to get more energy, but where do I get the initial investment?  Unlike business, it’s not the sort of thing you can borrow.  So yes, it bites hard when I kick the process off.  If I do too much, I just end up worse than I started out.

That’s what happened last week.  A few months ago, I got a couple of workout machines so that I can do exercise at home (with my schedule, a gym really doesn’t work).  When NaNo started, I didn’t have the energy to do both, so I let the exercise slide for a month.  With the craziness of MLing, I wound up drained and wobbly by the end of November.  It has taken me until this month to feel in a position to start it up again.

So, I tried last week.  Getting up stupid-early every day, going downstairs, working out for half an hour, and then falling into the shower and going to work.  It was a mess.  I was a mess.  

I’m trying to write (AB) on the train to and from work, and it was a struggle to think straight on the morning trip, let alone put words together.  By the middle of the week, I wasn’t doing much writing at all.  I suspect the posts have suffered somewhat because of that (it doesn’t help that I’m in the middle of a particularly harrowing/difficult part of Faith’s personal journey right now, either).

I spent the weekend pretty much trying to get over that.  Yesterday at work, I was almost useless – when I’m tired, my attention span shrinks and I get very restless.  This is not conducive to being productive.  Today was better, because I’ve been forcing myself not to do much of anything except sitting, sleeping and eating.  Ugh.

 

I promised myself a long time ago that I wasn’t going to let this kind of thing get in my way.  I was diagnosed with arthritis when I was 2, and I did sports all through school.  I even went skiing once (the cold is not kind to me).  I have IBS, but I still eat the things I like, even when I know my guts might hate them.  

I could curl up in bed and let CFS be my reason – my excuse – for not doing anything at all, but I won’t.  I refuse.  If I let that happen, I wouldn’t be here right now – I would have stayed in the UK and never dared to pack two houses up and fly halfway around the world.  And I’m still convinced that this is a good move for me, that this is one of the best moves I’ve ever made in my life, for me.

So I choose to push on.  But last week proved that I’m not as resilient as I would like.  It’s been a long time since the CFS has been this bad – not for three or four years, I think.  I know it’s bad when I’m seriously considering calling in to work so that I can sleep (I never call in to work except when I’m really sick, unless it’s a job I hate, and I love this job).

I have taken a lot on this year – maybe too much, but I don’t want to shy away in case it’s not.  I’m not done trying this stuff yet.  I’m not done trying to figure out how to make it all work around the obstacles my body decides to place in my way.

Baby steps, I think.  Start slower.  Try to do the exercise every other day, instead of every day.  Bring my sleeping pattern forward before I get into it, rather than trying to do it all at once.  It’s so frustrating; I’d like to chew on the pace until it moves quicker, but all the will in the world won’t change my limits, I suppose.  Push them, maybe, but not change them.

Next week I’ll start again.  This week is for preparing and resting up.  It better damn well work this time, or I’m gonna have to go kick some ass.  I just wish I knew whose.

Holy Bats, Batman

There’s this huge awesome tree about 40m from our house, just outside our fence.  The local bats love it – they come swooping in through dusk and proceed to fight with each other in it.  They’re fantastic – the big ones are a good metre in wingspan, and against the dusk sky, they have those perfect scolloped wings.  A couple of nights ago, the moon was hiding behind the clouds – it was very atmospheric. 😀 

Now I can see why a boy might look at them and think, “Fuck they’re scary, I’m gonna dress up like one of them and scare the crap out of criminals with guns.”  The family and I sit out on the deck and watch them fly around while we eat dinner.  So cool.

 

In other news, I am frazzled this week.  Started getting up early to do exercise before work again, and it’s beginning to get hard to write on the train after that.  Dammit!  Need to climb out of this energy hole I’m in.  Time to kick the CFS in the backside and do my own thing anyway.  Just have to keep pushing, I guess – I promised myself a while ago that I wasn’t going to let it run my life for me.

On the plus side, I almost have the next week’s AB posts written up.  I have to get them uploaded tonight, as today’s post is the last one I have scheduled so far.  I’m starting to feel like I’m rushing them – I’ll edit them over before I post them, but they seem rougher.  Not sure I’m happy with that.  I’m entering the less-plotted part of the story now; maybe that’s why.  (I have lots of stuff plotted, but it’s all more spread out now.  Gotta give Faith a chance to breathe before I drop too much more on her. 😉 )

I need to decide what I’m doing with poor unconscious Nugget, too.  Killing her off just seems like cheating, and after everything that is happening at the moment, not going to have much of a kick.  I think there should be a kick if I’m gonna do that to the kid.  I’m sure something better (and possibly more evil) will come to mind before long.

I need to draw together a plan for the writing group meeting on Friday, too.  So many things buzzing around in my head right now!  I’ll feel so much better when I get that sorted out.

Yeah.  It is entirely possible that I have taken on too much at the moment.  When is it the weekend again?