What do I do when I am not writing?
Quite a lot actually, because I don’t write much at all these days; I have lots of ideas for things to write but I think illness has made me lose focus and passion for it. I was a lot more passionate about writing than I am nowadays. It is simply because pain distracts me and makes me lose where I am heading – coughing fits and a severely runny nose are the biggest contributors for throwing me off course, yanking me out of the zone, as it were. As I have said before in many posts, I live with a perpetual chronic cold, with ear, nose and throat infections thrown in. It isn’t just a sniffle, I wish it were, but I can get through five hundred individual tissues on a bad day, two hundred being the norm for me.
Since the 21st December 2019 the only things I have written are what are on the blog and approximately 5000 words of non-posted works of other things, but nothing contributing to my novels. Hand written notes of other ideas are not included in this, I am spending more and more time in bed these days as I can barely move. All these problems are giving me severe insomnia and hypersomnia. What do I mean by that? Well I don’t sleep at night, I seem to sleep better during the day, for some reason my chest and sinus is worse at night. When I do eventually sleep during the day I sleep between 7 and 16 hours in a stretch, to wake up for 2 hours in a choking fit with a dry crusted mouth. Not a pretty visual I know. I can go 30 to 40 hours without sleeping, purely because I am too busy clearing mucus from my system.
So it isn’t any wonder why I lack focus and concentration really.
Basically, everything I do when I am not writing, are things I can do at home, in the bedroom. Primarily with my desktop computer, as I have recently had it moved to the bedroom due to the fact I am often too sick to get downstairs these days and I have moved my laptop downstairs for the rare occasion I am down there for more than an hour. Because my legs swell a lot sitting at the computer desk, I can only sit here for an hour before I have to rest with legs up for thirty minutes, to get the swelling down, so even if I am on a roll, my ankles start burning and that throws me off course and I have to go and put my feet up.
I read approximately 30 to 80 pages of a book per day and about half a magazine too. The types of things I read the most are fantasy, sci-fi and comedy fiction with a lot of non-fiction thrown in; the non-fiction I enjoy are self-help books, nutrition books, history books, theological research, mythology, folklore and cultural studies. My current reading list is Time Song by Julia Blackburn, The Toll by Neal Shusterman and Roy Vickery’s folk flora.
I do puzzles such as codebreakers, arrow words and gardening magazine crosswords – before my chest got too bad I used to love doing 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles, but it is frustrating having a coughing fit and losing pieces across the room all the time!
If I am not too busy fighting mucus, I get to knit, crochet, sew or practise my recorder and keyboard.
I watch TV only if there are documentaries I am interested in, I mostly watch Smithsonian and BBC four with some Drama channel thrown in. I will watch anything with Lucy Worsley, anything about the history of jazz, soul and classical music, nature and wildlife documentaries, documentaries about farming and country life. I like science too, so I will watch sky at night and space science programs as well as things in the past such as time commanders, gladiators and the occasional wrestling show. I love comedies, I only watch the comedies on the Drama Channel, but I am picky about which ones to watch. I like only connect and some quiz and puzzle shows like Countdown, but I don’t watch them all the time. I have to be in the mood to watch TV and before I was sick I watched around three hours of TV a week, these days it’s about two hours a day. We never miss Michael McIntyre’s Big Show if we can help it, nor do we tend to like missing gardeners world or shows such as the RHS show, cruft’s and BBC Proms. I’m pretty old fashioned I suppose for someone who is thirty seven. I dislike soap operas and drama llama stuff – yes I mentioned the drama channel, but there are three hours a day where it is strictly comedy and I tend to only watch that channel (at the comedy times) or food network when there is nothing else on. Sometimes I put on a DVD and I will often choose vampires or family animations and comedies.
The main things I do these days are play games online. I don’t even socialise that much online anymore, because I lose concentration and people who know me are starting to think I have memory problems. Because a coughing fit will make me forget what I have said or what I was on about.
The online games that grip me are… Roblox, yes Henry got me onto it and to be honest, Roblox has saved my relationship with my son! Because I find his kind of games hard to do since becoming sick – Roblox has opened a whole new world for us and we play hide and seek and various other games together. When Henry is at school, I still sneak onto the site and play bee swarm simulator, Ripull mini games and fairy simulator. Bee Swarm simulator especially!
Other online games I play are ovipets it is a cute breeding game on facebook and I have been addicted to that for nearly 5yrs.
Flightrising is another breeding game, but I go in and out of phases with that. Primarily I have played this for a whole eight months without a break, purely because Henry wants to see what dragons I breed and he loves to name them and do what we call “Dragon Lottery”. Dragon Lottery is where I look through the offspring possibilities scrying menu to see what will happen if I pair certain dragons up, sometimes I can’t decide, so I make a list of all the best ones that go with my chosen female that day and I number them, then Henry, Paul and I will choose a number from the list and put it through random.org and sometimes someone gets the number right, in which case that person must get a treat of some kind or get to choose to do something; I breed five pairs of dragons every five days, because that is how long it takes for the eggs to hatch and we have a limit of five breeding nests on this game.
I used to play online scrabble but I have got accused of cheating because I know too many unusual words. I don’t cheat on that game, I don’t see what purpose that serves other than the joy of creating misery on another person who loses and I am not a vindictive person like that. I really do have a broad vocabulary, though I rarely use it outside of scrabble and I love doing anagrams for fun, so I see a lot of seven letter words and I am a dictionary and language addict, so I know words that are weird to normal people. Here is a list of words I know for high scoring on scrabble, which have got me accused of cheating when used previously – plus, I have read books written by scrabble champions.
ZEBU – QAT – QUARE – SEQUIN – AWK – EUOI – AIA – QI – KIMCHI – VEX – VAV – TAV – EAU – UVEA – AEON – OXIDE – POXY – QIN – QINTAR – FATWA – QABALA – QADI – SJOE – KHAKI – EUOUAE to name but a few. I have to admit I was shocked when SEQUIN was considered a questionable word, the others I can understand, but I was sure almost everyone knew what sequins were?
I love words and word play so much I have considered about having a word of the week thing, but I am unreliable with keeping to things like that, as you can clearly see from past efforts or lack of.
Other than sketching with pencils or sharpies in bed and/or colouring in and story planning, I don’t do much else on a bad day. On a good day I can add about an hour of light gardening to the list but not much else anymore.
I’m pretty boring I suppose, by my peers. I can’t even cuddle the rabbit lately because I cough too much it terrifies the poor thing! I suppose I sound like some big barking bear or something to the poor creature.
I have gone out to the doctors and walked past dogs when I am like this and the dogs think I am barking at them, they react accordingly, it is embarrassing!
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