I know I promised y’all a story. I swear I have not forgotten. And though I’ve been quiet here, I have been working.
While, I will admit this has not been my most productive month on record, any words is better than no words, right? Right?!
Like I said, I have not forgotten about the anecdote I promised to share. What I did forget about was how my schedule and productivity are affected by the school year. You see, school doesn’t care about streamer hours and the streaming world doesn’t care about school. Which makes my life a little chaotic.
What happens to me while school is in session – and most especially during marching band season – is that I go into survival mode. Not as in “fighting for my life” survival; no, this is more of a trudge. I get through the next thing. And the next. And the next. I don’t make big plans or really have much mental effort to expend on forward thinking. I take the kid to school. I pick the kid up from school. I do my scheduled streams (which are now up to 5x per week. Oof!). I take the kid to band rehearsal. I pick the kid up from band rehearsal. I read through emails from the school, putting important dates on the calendar. I take the kid to performances. I attend performances. I volunteer at events. And I squeeze an hour or so of writing in here and there along the way.
Individually, each of these things is not all that much. Even together, it’s not like I’m really suffering. Hell, my jobs are fiction writing and videogame streaming – could I be living more of the dream? No, the real issue is what this pattern does to my brain. Rather than thinking of things from multiple angles and exercising the creative muscles, I mentally plod from one thing to the next. Time disappears without me really taking notice of it. It’s the beginning of September and suddenly it’s almost October and I have yet to accomplish much of anything I set out to do this month. Even the promos I was doing for my streams have fallen off.
And then there are the pets. Oh my fucking Christ, these animals. Cali had an infection that turned out to be an abscessed tooth. Despite the risks to her kidneys, we had it removed because, well, infection. Also, she was miserable. The first round of antibiotics did nothing. The second round post-surgery seemed to help some, but then the infection came raging back a week later. She is currently on her third round of antibiotics and so far they appear to be working, but I refuse to get my hopes up. She has her fourth vet appointment in four weeks on Friday, so we’ll know more then.
On top of that, Cosmo decided to stop eating the day after Cali’s surgery. Now, she’s been on medication for gall bladder issues for a while and she had a rather severe attack of pancreatitis in the summer. This behavior was similar to how she acted then, but she wasn’t vomiting everywhere yet, so I did what I could to get her to keep eating and she is mostly back to normal. I’d still like to take her in and get her checked out, especially considering how much and how often she is befouling the air around here (seriously, so many of my streams now have multiple periods where we are complaining of dog farts…can’t imagine why I don’t have bigger audiences), but I’m hoping to get through this deal with Cali and get the cat feeling better before we start in on whatever for the dog.
Um, right. So. To sum up. School tedium + Competitive Marching Band season + pet chaos = my brain going into drudgery mode. On the positive side, I did complete one rough draft already this year, am getting close to done with another, and was talked into continuing last year’s NaNoWriMo project during this November (apparently people want to read about an asexual “social justice vampire”? who knew?). My goal (hahahahaha – yeah) is to commit some time to editing these WIPs when I get back to work on Vengeance and during November. While I said that didn’t work for me – and it still may not – I can’t just keep jumping from first draft to first draft and expect anything to actually get completed. I’ll give it another shot and hope (heh…there’s that word again) I can find it in me to better swap between editing brain and writing brain. Fingers crossed, yeah?
Categories: the process
Stormy Lane McKnight
Writer of trashy queer superhero romance, smutty sci-fi, and other things that are gay af. Disaster enby and all around bisexual wrecking ball.
https://bio.link/thatstormygeek
Outstanding Underground 