Hello everyone, long time no writes, I know, sorry about that!
I want to say that I have been having a lot more infections than usual and a lot more chest and breathing problems which are not Covid related; I have not been infected with Covid luckily. I have completely self-isolated since March 2020, I have only left the house twice in that time for dental appointments – I have been scared of Covid especially as I have a history for chest infections and pneumonia anyway!
Other than dental appointments I must admit I have steered clear of all doctor clinics and hospitals because I think that if I go, I am more likely to get infections – now this is frustrating because before Covid the doctor could care less for my health problems and whilst Covid has been a factor I have had to turn down huge amounts of appointments because the doctor is now ready to try and solve them… it is like the world is conspiring to trap me to get Covid lol!
I think there is one good thing about the fact I was isolated all of my life by my mother, that is, Covid19 isolation is literally a doddle for me as I have always learned to cope with what I have and make the best of being at home. But it is also deeply depressing that again, I feel like the world is conspiring to keep me cooped up for all of my life!
I have mental health issues because of my past and so many people have been concerned for how Covid isolation may be affecting me mentally. But they don’t understand that it is normal for me, I have been so used to it for so long that it is second nature. So unlike the rest of the world that has always had some kind of freedom, I don’t go stir crazy just because I can’t leave the house for a time.
Staying at home or even cooped up for prolonged periods inside a single room really doesn’t bother me as long as there are things I can do. If the room was empty, that could be a completely different matter, I may go crazy after a few days, but I would make do with meditations, visualisations and if I were not causing trouble to do so, singing and reciting poetry etc.
The thing with me is, imagination is easy. Imagination is my friend and I have learned to harness it on command for any situation. I do meditation and visualisation so well, that there has been times I have been hungry and I have visualised eating a meal and I have come out of meditation not feeling hungry anymore!
It’s amusing really that I am overweight; when I consider that I can do this. But I will be completely honest with you; I am overweight for only three reasons. As part of the abuse I have been victim of, a large part of that was being fed constantly, my abusers were feeders. I have lost a huge amount of weight since being away from them, but not enough to be of healthy weight. Secondly, I am addicted to caffeinated sodas such as cherry cola and Pepsi, but still, not as bad as I used to be. I have gone from a 5 litre a day habit to only 1 litre now -still trying to fight the addiction. Third reason – the biggest one of them all is. I lost a majority of the weight I had because when I moved in with Paul and got away from the abuse, I started to religiously walk 9 miles per day and I that was doing the trick with normal eating. Since becoming sick back in 2012 I then walked only twice a week for about 2 miles and since Covid I walk nowhere at all, except around the house.
In my humble opinion I need to lose a lot more. I have tried to go on a diet, but diet alone is not working at all. I have stuck religiously to a diet for 3 months and I haven’t lost a pound! It’s only going to go via exercise, which this body just can’t cope with right now. Every time I try to exercise I get weird symptoms of lower back shakes and unsteady shaking legs and hands. I am residing myself to the fact I can’t garden anymore, not for longer than 15 minutes a time.
I have to make do with trying to think about what I want to do versus what I can realistically do these days.
I love gardening, but short of sitting at table with pots, that is something I can no longer do the exact way I love the most – which is to kneel down with my hands in the dirt, pulling and pruning and chipping and replanting from ground to ground in true food forest garden fashion.
I have to reside myself to the idea that someday, if I get a little money, I can get someone in to pull my whole garden out for me and make me hip high raised beds with seating around them, so I can sit and garden the lame man’s way. Sorry, but to say I don’t feel bitter about not being able to do it the usual way, would be a lie!
My disabilities are affecting my creative crafts too sometimes. Hand shakiness (presumably not Parkinson’s) are sometimes affecting me using utensils when eating as often as once a week, as well as hand cramps and so therefore drawing and painting on those days is a no go.
My writing can sometimes be affected on bad pain days; sometimes pain is so bad I misread things, miss-type things, mispronounce things and even have spoonerisms coming out of my ears! Hand shakiness and pain can affect how much I read in a day too as well as depression. On a good week without much pain or shakes I can read about three books, if the depression isn’t there. I think I mentioned this before. You can more or less tell how I am doing by how much I am reading on Goodreads.com
But don’t be overwhelmed with sympathy for me not getting down to my art and writing however! There are other factors besides health which leads to my tardiness – the phases I go through. I tend to find it hard to narrow down precisely who I want to be. So I go through weeks at a time being so involved in one thing or two and then move on again.
For example; Between October and April, I have got into the phase of watching around 3 hours a day of YouTube videos from people who are homesteaders and food forest permaculture gardeners, as well as food preservers and artists. February and April 2021 I have gone through another spiritual soul searching phase. I have read books based on spirituality and cosmic ordering and I have been thinking about my self-definition a lot. Since the start of April I have re-established my love for The Sims 4 and have been playing that daily for literally 6 hours a time. Disgusting I know. But I have still been practising my art approximately 3 days a week for an hour a time, which is becoming a record now, because that too, used to come in phases! If this is an unusually long phase, then I have been in this once since last summer!
Writing is on a severe back burner, I am writing about 90 minutes three times a week since March, whereas I wrote a lot more, before then.
On a very positive note however; my art practises are for the very reason that I have decided to make a children’s picture book series and I am practising my art to get the same characters right in several different poses. Now I know, you are all thinking that I am not a children’s author and that would be very true! But something happened in my mind, where I just have to have this children’s series about a dragon in true infant picture book form. I don’t know why this is happening, but I am going with the flow!
But I will tell you now; my main genres are dark fantasy and dystopia that will never change!
Until next time, thank you for reading.
Writing style and narratives
Many new writers write in a first person narrative; this is very limiting and produces problems if they want to include other characters opinions and viewpoints. The main character of a story isn’t psychic, so wouldn’t know the real reasons behind their nemesis or co-inhabitants reactions to various events.
When I first started writing my vampire dark fantasy series, I was also to blame for writing in a first person narrative; this made it very complicated for me to introduce new characters with their personalities effectively. My aim was to write the series as a series of biographies of individual characters from the same story, but this wouldn’t work well as it had already more or less been done by Anne Rice and I wanted to be different. I found it much easier moving onto the third person narrative, which is what’s happening in my rewrites.
Writing in a third person narrative gives me more flexibility for my story’s direction. I can skip viewpoints and characters at will, I can write about how everyone feels simultaneously and without too much effort. Since writing in this style I have been able to write more words to my story daily, much more than before, alongside another technique I will tell you about shortly.
As a writer you must see yourself as a god, you are creating a world and these are your people; you’ve made them, you control them, you control events; you should be as dedicated to your creations as you are to your own god, you should be motivated by the sheer fact that your characters are waiting in limbo for how you are going to progress their lives. But gods have two sides to them, good and bad, cruel and kind and so you should not feel too emotional about wrecking their lives, otherwise you’ll have a happy, clappy, crappy story.
Thinking about how I structure my novels, I am not the usual can of beans; I’ll share with you why; It seems to me that most writers write a book from beginning to end, I’ve noticed I can’t dedicated myself to surprises.
I write down my ideas in my ideas book, then I put up bullet point of events on my computer that I’d like to see happen in my story; then as scenes come to mind I write them, whilst trying to write from beginning to end, then I sew it altogether and sometimes I revise but mostly I don’t – in fact, everything that’s posted on this blog is never revised, I don’t know why, maybe it’s because I don’t have faith that what I write up here is my best work?
I do have massive flaws grammatically, punctuation wise and possibly prattle on too much needlessly, this is mainly down to the fact that I’ve had limited formal education. My mother home educated me mostly and had a problem with me studying in college and university so I was put under pressure to become a drop out on seven occasions.
I must remind you too, that my main tutor at home was my mother who is dyslexic; yet I still managed to do a distance learning course when I was nineteen and got my only qualification in the world of a B grade GCSE for English Literature.
So, if I am not fine-tuned or polished, those are my excuses and I learn through tenderness. This is why I beg for criticism and comments; I need help fine tuning my art of writing.
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