Personal

A New Process

October 16, 2020 by Joseph Little

Dilemma

Well, it has been more than a year since the last time I posted. Why? Because I haven’t done any writing in that time. OK. That’s a bit of a lie. I’ve done SOME writing, but I’ve largely been avoiding it like the plague. You know, by socially distancing myself from it months before the actual plague hit the US shores.

I’ve had trouble starting and staying started. I have a ton of ideas … until I sit down to write them. The shear joy of writing becomes a chore I begin subconsciously avoiding well before I ever sit down at my computer. I’ve even asked myself, “If I’m struggling this hard to write, do I even really want to?” The resulting stomach ache that immediately followed told me that giving up was not an option.

So, how do I continue? How do I restart with the immense weight of failure constantly pushing against me like Sisyphus’s boulder keeping me from a summit I’ll never see.

Happenstance

Then at work, I took a Fundamentals of Agile Programming training. There I and my other trainees learned about Agile Software Development (often just referred to as ‘Agile’). Without getting too bogged down in the formation and history of Agile, the principles of Agile were outlined in The Agile Manifesto.

While the Agile Manifesto concerns issues seen in the world of programming, one of my superpowers if to see parallels that exist in dissimilar items. I believe I can indeed compare apples to oranges in a way as to make the comparison valid to the discussion at hand … assuming that at least one of the two is relevant to the context at hand. Using my big brain, I saw how I could use certain practices and principles of Agile to improve my attitude and general writing process.

What follows are the most helpful Agile principles to my writing process.

Sprinting

One of the principles of Agile is to work in short “Sprints” with a limited, known amount of work. As I often get overwhelmed by the shear scope of the task in front of me when I consider working on any of my novels, I immediately saw this as a possible process that can help.

A sprint lasts two weeks, from Wednesday to Wednesday because Mondays and Fridays suck for starting and stopping things. The things I would like to get accomplished in those two weeks are outlined, given points that follow a weighting system, and posted to a Kanban board.

When I work on a goal (such as this blog post), the Post-It-Note that represents the item is moved on the Kanban board from ‘Backlog’ to ‘In Process’. Then once it is completed, the item again moves to ‘In Review’ then ‘Completed’. A completed item scores me the points it was weighted as on the board. At the end of each sprint, we evaluate the number of points of items I was able to complete.

So far … I’ve not done well. BUT I am doing better, and this metric is largely due to this process.

Stand Up, Sit Down

Another principle of Agile is to have a daily stand-up meeting with the team to discuss the success, failures, and complications of the sprint. This has been very powerful for me. Just talking about what I did or did not accomplish the day before has kept writing on my mind. If writing is on my mind then I am usually more likely to think of all the things I want to accomplish than to think of Sisyphus’s boulder.

My ADHD pushes me toward avoiding even thinking about things that are overwhelming or boring. Now if you’re a writer too, you probably already know this, but writing is both overwhelming and boring at the same time. It’s also lonely, difficult, and provides the least instantaneous of gratifications I’ve ever experienced. That said, when it’s good, time flies as the real world evaporates around you as your senses live in another reality that for now only you know.

It is an amazing experience.

Then the next day you read what you wrote the day before, and it is complete shit. But you know what? It’s done. Done means I get my points. Sometimes that’s enough.

Scary Mrs. Mary

The biggest change to my writing process is having an accountability partner. In this case my partner is my wife. She takes most of the Agile roles we are using, and she’s the person that leads the daily stand-up meetings. She keeps daily notes, and honestly that terrifies me. She’s even started keeping a record of the total number words that I’ve written for the week.

When I fail to get up and write one day, my wife is there the next day to talk about it. She doesn’t judge me, mostly. The daily stand-ups are not meant for judgement. They are meant for communication and a kind of communion of the spirit to finish the project.

I like to write in the evenings because I work during the day. Oh sure I could wake up at 5AM and write for two hours before starting my day, but the evenings are when I’m best. So when 8PM rolls around and I’m doing literally anything but writing, my lovely wife can, on occasion, cast judgement like the best of them.

She has helped keep me on track toward better practices more than anything else. So find yourself an accountability partner. Self-flagellation really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The Diary of Charlotte – How She Came to Be

August 27, 2019 by Joseph K Little

Origin Story

Upon my wall I have a one of my more prized possessions, the judgement of a short story I wrote that later became the basis of my first novel. At the time of writing, that novel is yet unpublished, but I have the manuscript back from the editor and a cover, so it is all but done.

The contest was the San Antonio Writer’s Guild short story competition back in 2014 (I think). Joe McKinney judged the horror entries. A handwritten note at the bottom of the page states, “Joe, Yours went to the finals but did not place.” I cannot say that I did not wish to win. I can say that I did not expect to win, or even place. I had only been doing this writing thing for less than a year by that point. Well … I had only been doing it for a year for the first time in near 30 years, but I wasn’t very good back then. I cannot pretend that I really, really hoped I would win though or at least place. How cool would that have been?

Super cool. Don’t lie to me.

Anyway, here’s what Joe wrote about my piece…

Notes on “Charlotte”
This piece manages to create an environment of creeping dread that has the reader cringing in anticipation of the conclusion. I especially enjoyed the description of the gluttonous aristocrats. Nicely done there. The choice of first person narration here is problematic, though. There is nothing wrong with the “main character has been dead all along” storyline. A number of successful books, stories and films have used it. But the trick is to figure out a way to do it that doesn’t fall into the trap of straining credulity while still making us really care for the fate of the person involved. I think what’s needed here, especially as the opening paragraph tells us that this is only the first half of the story to come, is for the author to establish up front some reason why a dead person is telling us her tale. That isn’t clear in this version. If you get the fact that she’s dead out of the way up front, you open yourself open to all sorts of storylines. As it is, with the death of the protagonist coming right at the midway point, you pretty much lock yourself into some version of the revenge tale, and that will be telegraphed to your readers. A story like this needs to upset the reader’s expectations, and the author of this piece clearly has the skill to do that.

Now, I don’t know about you, but to me that’s a pretty amazing critique for someone who’s struggled with reading problems, ADHD, and language in general for much if not most of his (then) forty-three years alive. When I received my judgement all I could think was, “Wow. Just wow.”

And then my ego struck.

OK, so maybe I did not go full on Stewie, but I disagreed with Mr. McKinney. Revenge was not the obvious route for the story to go, at least not for me. So I decided to write the rest of the story which I hadn’t to that point. I hadn’t finished the tale because I imagined it being a bit of ‘found footage’ style story. You see Charlotte dies in the story. Yes. But she does not stay dead. I wasn’t rewriting The Lovely Bones. I was doing my own thing, but therein lay the real flaw of my story. The ending was too obscure.

Everything starts somewhere. Writing, like plants often starts in a pile of shit.

The Origin of the Origin

To explain how my ending became to obscure, I have to go even further back, to Gen Con 2014. It was my first Gen Con, and I was super excited. I was even more excited to learn that they had a sort of writer’s workshop going on at the same time, and I had JUST started thinking about giving my writing an honest attempt. One of the events that I purchased a ticket for was a “Critique: Read & Critique”. Basically each person attending would read a piece they have written and have a panel of editors give their opinions. I’ve always been the kind of person to do first and learn second, so I figured, “why not?” Well for one, I needed something written.

At this point I began trying to come up with a story to write. Now at any given moment, I can drum up a story idea from the ether without a problem, but this time I had an inspiring vision. Yes, a literal vision. No, I’m not the kind of insane that sees things that aren’t there. I am the kind of person that sometimes gets an image in mind so strongly that I experience it just like I might if I were there. And yes I am or was awake when this happens. OK. Maybe I’m a *little* bit of that kind of crazy, but just a little mind you.

Anyway, I saw clearly a dungeon door in front of me. The stone was an old grey that was almost black except the highest edges where wind and God knows what brushed the stones clean. I could almost see the humid air clinging to the stones despite the almost nonexistent light. The door itself was wood almost as dark as the stones, and it stood ajar. I knew that above my head and to the right, just out of sight of my snapshot vision was a hook in the ceiling. I also knew, somehow, that just outside of the door there was a girl and a large man. The girl was in a poor maid’s dress and the man looked like a combination of Lurch from the Adam’s Family and Solomon Grundy. I also knew the girl’s fate. She was destined to be clubled over the head, hung upside down from the hook, and bled to death.

I have only had a handful of these “visions” in my adult life, but they are profound. I figured, “That’s a good starting point.” And began thinking about my story. Why was the girl coming down into the dungeon? Who was that man that escorts her and kills her? Why is she killed? Well for me the answer was obvious.

Ghouls.

Now I know many people have a rather distinct idea of what ghouls are and how they look, but I kind of have an odd opinion about ghouls. I once read Lovecraft’s “The Outsider.” I took the story to be a man who’s lived and died and risen as undead. I assumed that since he resided with ghouls at the end of the tale that he himself was a ghoul, but I don’t believe that was never stated. Still the thought struck me as interesting, “What if ghouls did not know they were ghouls? Or what if they didn’t see anything unusual despite the drastic change in their ‘lives?’

For years I ran my ghouls in DnD as thinking creatures … that just happened to love eating human (or demi-human) flesh. Fresh was preferable to decayed, but decayed was still really, really good. So these were my bad guys, and this was the core of my short story’s plot. One ghoul, the butler was set to find more food while the two other ghouls, a count and countess maybe, feasted on their previous capture.

My first incarnation had the two ghouls talking to each other over a meal. The reader would not initially know that there was anything unusual about these two. Then as the story was to unfold, the two would say more and more disturbing things letting the reader in on the secret. Then eventually their butler would bring in a new victim, she’d be killed, and they’d tear into the new meat like the monsters they are.

I liked the idea of the story, but I hated my version of it. I honestly did not have the skills (or maybe the patience) to work that version of the story into one that wasn’t silly. So for version two, I changed the point of view to that of the girl. She’s homeless and being led to a “new job” underground … in the catacombs so I guess it’s in Paris, yeah, because she’s hungry. There were hungry people in Paris at some point wasn’t there? I seem to remember a movie or two with that kind of theme. Hunger … ghouls … WIN! So yeah, the girl is led to the room with the aristocrat ghouls and then she’s killed.

Then one of my readers said, “So she’s led to where some ghouls are and she dies. That’s pretty much to be expected. Otherwise not bad.”

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!!!!!!

OK. So I changed it up. She’s led down into the catacombs, is killed, and then turns into a ghoul! And the same reader came back and said, “Yeah, OK. She’s killed and becomes a ghoul. Right. That’s about the second most likely thing I’d expect.”

*Sigh*

So I changed the ending again. This time I lean hard into the imagery. I ramp up the dread. The girl is writing this herself, and in my mind the pages are written in blood. She has two supernatural beings in her head Hunger and Reason. Reason is trying to get her to run for her life, but Hunger tells her lies of all the things she’ll be able to get if she keeps with the ‘grey man’ leading her to work. She asks herself, why do they live underground? Well maybe they went into hiding during the Revolution and don’t know it is over. At this point, she’s cast aside Reason and under full sway of Hunger who she now calls her Mistress. She meets the count and countess, but blows the interview when she starts screaming at their horrid visages. So she’s killed, hung from a hook, and bled to death. I end the story with…

I assumed my hunger would disappear once I died, but as I drifted toward oblivion my Mistress was there with me whispering in my ear, “I will never let you go.”
And she did not.

Now to me this suggests many things. Many, many things. To the “glorious and judgemental” Mr. McKinney, it screamed “revenge plot!” Well sir, I would have you know that I wrote the ending that way just to make you wonder what might happen in the second half of that diary. Ha! Check and mate.

Except that’s not how writing works.

If the reader is confused by what they think is happening and what the author intended them to think when they wrote it, the writer failed to do his or her job. I wanted to leave the reader with wonder. Instead I left the reader thinking, “I know where this is going.”

Yeah, That’s great. So what?

Well I told you all of that just so I could tell you this. I started writing my first novel with a teenaged female protagonist set in Paris around 1820 just because I wanted to prove Joe McKinney wrong. My story is about a girl who … umm … gets killed and turned into a ghoul … and then tries to live a normal life? It’s a slice of (un) life story.

OK to be fair I originally had no idea where I was going to go with the first novel, and my first draft showed it, but once I figured out the end I set upon the last revision which – I think – is much better. The reader who I talked about earlier said he liked it, and as you’ve seen, he’s the kind of ass that would tell me if he didn’t.

Also let me say, I realize the written word conveys sarcasm and kidding poorly at best. I admire and respect Joe McKinney for his body of work and how he judged my first ever contest entry. Again, I have the write up hanging on the wall where I write. It inspires me, and I’ll always be grateful for it.

Thanks Joe!

Things to Remember

July 1, 2019 by Joseph K Little

The hard things …

Nothing easy ever made us more than we were before we conquered them. The cliche goes something like, “Nothing worth doing was ever easy.” We’ve all heard it countless times, and it is easy to lose the meaning in the repetition. That’s the problem with cliches, but they are cliches for a reason. Typically, that reason is because the saying is simple yet holds depth. Therefore, people repeat the saying until the meaning is lost in the repetition. So I’ve reframed the cliche into the following:

The hard things make us who we want to be.

Remember this the next time you resist doing something because it is difficult. Remember this the next time you want to avoid something unpleasant. Remember this when you forget why you would even consider starting to begin with.

If you have something of value to say…

This one has come from my writing, but I like it a lot and think the idea behind it is true. I can be loud and boisterous at times, grabbing everyone’s attention and holding the spotlight. This saying reminds me to slow down and be quiet more often. It reminds me to listen to still my tongue until I have something to say. I don’t need to be loud to be heard, and if I do, I’m probably saying the wrong things to the wrong people.

If you have something of actual value to say, you can whisper and be heard around the world.

OK, mostly I just like that one because it sounds like something someone wise might say to a screaming lunatic.

That’s all today. I thought I had more of these but I should probably learn to …

Write down things you wish to remember. Memory is only reliable until you need it.

What IS My ‘Why’?

May 28, 2019 by Joseph Little

Why is this sign in the middle of nowhere? Oooooh, now I get it. Clever.

Why do I write?

I’ve tried answering that question a number of times, but each time I do, I feel like my answer misses the mark. Here are some examples:

I just have to.
To be a good example for my daughter.
I always wanted to.
To fulfill the desires I had as a kid.
Because I create.

All of those feel right, but they all fail as well. I don’t know why.

There are days when I sit down to write, but for the life of me, I just can’t find the willpower to do it. I have ADHD, sure, but the meds don’t help me with this particular issue either. So what is it? I feel like if I knew my ‘why,’ it would help me get over this horrible push back, this resistance that forms somewhere in my gut and pushes me out of my chair to do literally anything else.

So what is my ‘why’?

I didn’t create this. I’ve never owned enough Legos to put something so large together.

I am a creator.

I am and have always been a creative type. When I was a kid I would draw. It was natural. Dinosaurs were an early love, then Godzilla, and eventually dragons. Reptilian-like creatures have a soft spot in my heart for some reason, but hey, dinosaurs, Godzilla, and dragons are really cool.

As I got older I would make things. I would take art that I loved from magazines, cut them out, and put them on my walls. I had things from a vodka ad where polar bears pulled a sled to Chester Cheetah stuck on my wall. I took my father’s tools and a slat from under my bed and made a sword. I used string and metal to make bolas. I enjoyed the wonder and possibility contained in these things and what they represented.

When playing with my action figures became less interesting as I grew older (maybe too old for some), I made dioramas with them. I put them in dramatic poses fighting one and another. The wizards I hung from a string from my ceiling since they could fly. Man, I wish I still had those figures.

When I moved into playing more and more Dungeons and Dragons as a kid, no one really wanted to run the games other than me. It felt like a natural calling to me though. Premade modules were where I started, but I was soon creating my own adventures. I wasn’t drawn to the stories behind the adventures at first, not for many years in fact due to my poor reading level and hatred of English class. I wanted to create interesting combinations of monsters, dungeons, and treasure. This really stirred my imagination.

It was only after I found that there were actually books that I enjoyed reading, that my skill with reading, English as a language, and storytelling began to develop. Unfortunately, this wasn’t until my sophomore year of high school. The sheer number of things I read in the next three years catapulted my language skills, but I only near the end of my high school career did I even begin to imagine storytelling as a possible future career. When I did, I was basically told I wouldn’t be able to hang with it, and in all honesty at that time with my undiagnosed ADHD (because it was not even a thing back then) and my short but frequent bouts of depression, I would have been as unable to hang with it as I was unable to hang with the architecture degree that I attempted.

I once drew a comic strip called “The Hillbilly Surf Gods.” It was fun. I could draw things that weren’t super complicated and write little short jokes and people enjoyed them. It was the ADHD that killed that, however. As soon as I started thinking that I might actually do something with my cartooning, it became more of a job and less of any enjoyment. So that fell away too.

I continued to play DnD, mostly as the person running the game (the DM, or Dungeon Master). This provided me lots of story creation experimentation. More it allowed me to do one thing that I really love. It allowed me to create characters. Lots and lots of characters. It also allowed me to create situations that would humor or intrigue my friends.

I am an attention whore

I am the fifth of six children, and I fucking love attention. I guess I was the baby for seven years until my little sister, the brat, came along, so I was probably the center of attention for a long time. Until I wasn’t. That probably had an impact. I also grew up a northern Catholic in a southern Baptist town. So while I craved attention, I had few opportunities to make friends to either give it to me or break me out of needing it. That’s probably why I became the jokester in our family – as a means of garnering attention.

I think ADHD also played a significant role in my road to becoming an attention whore. Getting attention from people is a little thrilling which is the kind of stimulation that people with ADHD lack. The stimulation makes us feel normal (or in my case ‘more normal,’ amiright fam?) This is also probably why I have made so many really bad and/or inappropriate jokes over my life. I often wonder how many people have I alienated because of my need to make any kind of impression possible. Man, ADHD sucks. What could I have done if I’d had a normal life up until now?

When I write, I get a little thrill when people tell me I did something they liked. I think I get a little thrill when they tell me they didn’t like it too. Only if I bore them do I feel like I’ve failed. Similarly, when I create something and people tell me they like it or that they can see I’m improving, I get a little thrill.

I start more conversations and insert myself into more conversations than I should. I really like the idea of sitting alone and not talking to anyone, but I think my craving the attention of others makes me want to insert myself. That really sucks to realize. I don’t think I would like me if I weren’t me, but I have a lot of friends that seem to like me so maybe I’m doing something right.

Getting the cold shoulder from someone is killer to me. I’d rather be yelled at or hit than for someone to just stop talking to me. All because of something I likely could not control. Mix in the depression I’d been going through a few years back and I can easily see me not being the kind of person someone would want to hang around with.

What is best in life, Conan?

For me, leaving something better than one finds it, is best in life. I try to smile a lot, because as my father used to say, “Smiles are contagious.” It costs nothing, but the impact a smile can have one someone else’s life can be significant. I can’t smile in the things I create. I can’t smile in my writing. But if I can leave a person happier for the time they have spent with my creations, then I have left them better than when I found them. I don’t think this is why I write, but I do think it is why I write the things I do write and how I write them. I want to entertain. I write to create. I write to get the beautiful attention. I write to entertain.

I cannot say that I write to make my characters’ lives better if not anyone else’s life better, because I do some bad stuff to some characters. I make them experience the feels hardcore. (I think that’s how the kids talk these days.) I don’t necessarily leave my main characters better off at the end of their journeys than I have them starting out, but I’m not writing for the characters.

Who am I writing for then?

I wonder if this is a valuable question. I mean I’m writing for me. If so, why do I desire to publish? Is it only for the attention whore in me, or do I have another reason? Will sales translate into validation? If so, then would I not be better off writing for the audience than writing for myself? Or is there some middle ground where I get to write what interests me and find an audience that is also interested in it as well? That seems like a really good way to remain undiscovered and lacking a real audience if you ask me. Luckily no one has yet asked me, but is the question of who relevant to the why? I don’t know. Not yet.

Is there more?

I often tell people that I don’t want to say anything special with my writing. I don’t want to teach anyone anything. And that is mostly true. If I could teach anyone anything, it would to be happier and to be more grateful. I would teach people to love and forgive. I would teach people that mistakes are natural, and not only are you going to make them, and make a lot of them, but other people are going to make them too. We can’t hold ourselves to an impossible standard, but neither should we hold others to standards that may be impossible for them at this time. Maybe my characters and the plots they encounter will eventually show a pattern of such things, but more than anything else, I hope that I entertain people.

Is it bad that I would like everyone in America to be just a little happier? Is it bad that I would gladly accept a single dollar bill for that little bit of happiness from each person? 😉

So, why do I write?

I write because I must. I must create. I must share. I write because I want the validation of people I don’t know. I write because I’m an attention whore. I write to hopefully make the world a little bit better than it was before people became aware of my work, and I write because it interests me.

I don’t know if I have a clear and single ‘why’?

I write because I’m a writer. Does there need to be more to it than that?

Joe’s 2018 Audiobook Year in Review

January 17, 2019 by Joseph K Little

These days I don’t read much, but I do have 60 to 120+ otherwise boring minutes during my commute. So I listen to audiobooks.

I have die-hard reader friends that simply (OMG) cannot! listen to audiobooks. And if that’s you, that’s fine. I understand. But for the past decade or so, I’ve had trouble reading. Not trouble knowing how to read or the trouble with the mechanical process of reading. (Although come to think of it, the drop off in my reading habit started about the same time that my eyesight decided to go all 40 on me). No, after about twenty-five or so years of loving to read after discovering that was even a possibility in high school, the act finally became common enough that my ADHD decided to say, “Nah. Let’s do something else instead.”

It hurt to admit that. It really did. I love to read. Or more accurately maybe, I LOVE having read. I love the characters. I love being fooled by an otherwise obvious plot. I love figuring out the plot and watching it come to fruition. I love when a book puts me into a space, and I live there for a time, the memories every bit as real as my own – or near abouts.

So yeah, having lost the will to read has been a sad, almost painful experience. But I do not have my friends’ aversion to listening to stories. First of all, I’m partially an audio learner. Second, I’m a naturally slow reader. When I do read, I slowly stroll through a book and savor each experience as it comes, not mechanically like some uppity grammarian who gets his rocks off from excellent spelling and a clever turn of phrase. No instead I enjoy the experience of being in the place created by the author imagining all of the sensory input given and implied. Therefore when an audiobook narrator is clear and the book is good, audio is an excellent option for me when I have the time. And an hour commute one way is quite the time.

2018 had me completing thirty-six audiobooks. Granted, not all of them were full-length novels (50,000 words or more), particularly the writing craft and self help books, but others were quite long indeed, particularly the Bill the Vampire collections which were a steal at one Audible credit for each collection of four novels.

Craft writing books were big last year (most of Chris Fox’s works) as were LitRPG books (marked with an * in the list below). LitRPG is the sub-genre of sci-fi that involves people being pulled into game worlds. Usually the game worlds are video games, but sometimes they are also pen and paper games like DnD. The mechanics of the games are very important to the genre, and often the books deal with the main character’s progress as much or more than the central plot – usually how to survive long enough to get home. It’s a fun genre. I’ve completed all the LitRPG books in any series I started this year. I just have to know how the characters progress!

I have a least favorite book in this list, but I won’t point it out. I’ll just say that of the books I completed in 2018, the one at the bottom of my favorites list (not the literal list below) is there because I did not find the ending satisfying. So if you’re a writer, let that be a warning. Good endings are what bring readers back for more.

So here’s my list of audiobooks I completed in 2018. No. That’s a lie. I listened to Bird by Bird and Monster Hunter: Vendetta too, but I purchased those in 2017 instead of this year. I listened to both this year as well. Both were excellent. There are also some books that I started but for one reason or another, I never finished. I did not include those. So, here’s the list of audiobooks I purchased and completely listened to in 2018.

Warbound By: Larry Correia
Spellbound By: Larry Correia
Port of Shadows By: Glen Cook
War Aeternus 3: The Culling * By: Charles Dean
War Aeternus 2: Sacrifices * By: Charles Dean
War Aeternus: The Beginning * By: Joshua Swayne, Charles Dean
Ritualist * By: Dakota Krout
The Land: Predators: A LitRPG Saga By: Aleron Kong
The Land: Raiders: A LitRPG Saga By: Aleron Kong
The Land: Swarm * By: Aleron Kong
The Land: Catacombs * By: Aleron Kong
The Land: Alliances: A LitRPG Saga * By: Aleron Kong
The Tome of Bill Series: Books 5-8 * By: Rick Gualtieri
The Land: Forging * By: Aleron Kong
The Land: Founding: A LitRPG Saga * By: Aleron Kong
Write to Market: Deliver a Book That Sells By: Chris Fox
Launch to Market: Easy Marketing for Authors By: Chris Fox
Six Figure Author By: Chris Fox
NPCs * By: Drew Hayes
Plot Gardening: A Simple Guide to Outlining Your Novel By: Chris Fox
The Tome of Bill Series: Books 1-4 By: Rick Gualtieri
The Weirdest Noob * By: Arthur Stone, Mikhail Yagupov – translator
Lifelong Writing Habit: The Secret to Writing Every Day By: Chris Fox
The Haunting of Blackwood House By: Darcy Coates
The Darkening By: Paul Antony Jones
Super Sales on Super Heroes 2 * By: William D. Arand
Critical Failures V * By: Robert Bevan
Dungeon Calamity * By: Dakota Krout
Prosperity for Writers By: Honoree Corder
Super Sales on Super Heroes * By: William D. Arand
Tamer: King of Dinosaurs 2 * By: Michael-Scott Earle
Tamer: King of Dinosaurs * By: Michael-Scott Earle
Dungeon Madness * By: Dakota Krout
Write Like a Boss By: Honoree Corder, Ben Hale
5,000 Words Per Hour By: Chris Fox
Dungeon Born * By: Dakota Krout

Depression: It Sucks

July 21, 2017 by Joseph Little

Hey folks, I know I haven’t posted in half a year, but I’m trying to change that. I often feel like I have to have something to say before I can post anything, but that’s because I’m lazy. Mostly. It also seems I have depression. I’m getting treated for it now so my willpower only has one major hurdle to overcome to get me to do things instead of two (depression and laziness).

I decided to make this blog post because I think people have a lot of misconceptions about what depression is. I also think most people who’ve never experienced a mental illness can’t quite wrap their brains around what it is like to experience it. So I decided to post about my experiences so that those that may be wondering just what in the blue blazes is wrong with you might be able to find something they can relate to and so that others might understand what sufferers might be going through when it is all but impossible to conceptualize something that is literally alien to how our brains are supposed to work. (Wow that was a long sentence).

So here’s the best description of my depression that I can conjure to date.

I continued to have ALL of my emotions, all of them. I could be happy. I could be sad. I could be angry. And I could be content. But slowly, so slowly that it was imperceptible, I started to feel a nothing in between. As that nothing feeling grew (and it totally did), I started to do less and to care less in general. I just wanted to relax because having to do things meant having to summon my willpower to gather the feelings necessary. This was a task that was getting harder and harder to do. It was much easier to sit and play video games.

Eventually the only real emotion I could have easily was anger … well anger or nothing. I could still feel everything else except maybe true contentment, but it was getting to be more and more of the extremes of those emotions. I wasn’t often sad, but if I ever did get sad, I’d burst into tears. When I was happy, I was ecstatic. But I was always just a little bit angry. I still had good days and bad days, but what I didn’t realize until after my meds kicked in was that my depression saddled good days were actually worse than my normal bad days. And since I was so easy to anger, anything that made me really angry just pulled me deeper and deeper.

I logically knew many times that *something* was wrong, but I figured it was my anxiety eating away at me. What drove me to the doctor was that I couldn’t concentrate without there being a ton of pressure to get something done. I assumed it was the anxiety or maybe ADD. I mean I definitely have some anxiety issues, but what I didn’t know was that anxiety and depression are VERY similar mechanically, and one can spawn or worsen the other. So my general practitioner sent me to a psychiatrist (a specialist because apparently a psychiatrist is also an MD – who knew?). She told me that the inability to concentrate mentally is analogous to a cough physically and therefore could be caused by a NUMBER of conditions.

So she asked me some questions, and I answered. I explained how I felt. I used a lot of metaphor, the two biggest of which were that I felt like I was wearing a lead cloak most of the time that held me down and prevented me from wanting to do anything because it was so much harder to do it. The second was how when things got bad on my bad days, I felt like I was spiraling deeper and deeper into a dark well or through dark clouds and I didn’t know if I could pull up and out or crash. I didn’t realize it until I was talking to her either.

So she was all “yep, you have depression,” and instead of giving me attention pills she gave me a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI). After about 7 weeks, I started to realize that things were going to be better. First because I ended up having a classic bad day, but instead of it spiraling out of control, when it ended it was done. A couple months later I realized I was actually feeling a wider range of emotions. I got angry without it being OMG ANGRY! I got sad without it being a sob session.

THAT’s depression.

Not feeling sad. Everyone feels sad sometimes. Not feeling numb, everyone feels numb sometimes. But the slow sapping of your emotions, your energy, and your sense of self.

At least that’s what it was like for me.

IF you or someone you know is experiencing symptoms like these, and if those symptoms have lasted for more than two weeks go to your family doctor. S/He will point you in the right direction.

Also know that if you EVER feel like committing suicide, unless you’re going to literally take out a half dozen Alien Xenomorphs as you go out (and I mean LITERALLY – so yeah, it’s not going to be in the cards), GO GET HELP! It gets better with help. It may take a while, but you’re just sick. You just can’t see it because the sickness literally hides itself from your brain’s ability to see it. You can get better.

No go forth and create something new.