Till my brain hurts….

The long, hard thinky stuff.

It’s the thing that gets you ever time in character development. The defining moment when you see the character ‘grow up’. I’ve had two this week, neither comfortable, and neither probably, any good for my chances of getting over the second one in any meaningful way.

First up though – I know this blog is *supposed* to be about writing. I KNOW this blog is *supposed* to be about the fabulous fun stuff I get up to as an author (we’ll not add successful in there, it’s something I don’t think I’ll ever consider myself) but lately, I have to be honest, my life has *sucked*. My cat is sick, my partner and I are both *incredibly stressed* dealing with a special needs child who, let’s face it, probably could keep six adults busy with her myriad needs, and I’ve been ill myself. I’m not ‘enjoying’ editing – I know I need to do it, and there are some really nice books passing through my hands, but I just can’t get behind it.
Worse, every day I go to bed and realise I haven’t done a minute of work on my own stuff. And this isn’t going to turn into a rant about how disorganised I’m feeling, or how I’m going to make changes, and though I appreciate the advice, and nod in agreement when I’m reading it, right now I’m not at the point of enacting it. So, yes, disorganised Kai. But I hit a couple of epiphanies Friday night/Saturday morning that I wanted to share.1) People only hurt you as much as you give them the power to.I’ve recently seen a side of a pair of my friends, who met through me and are now dating, that I dislike intensely. We introduced them to a specific hobby, but when a question is asked, we’re not only missed out of the conversations, but our advice is ignored. Even if someone comes in behind us and says something identical, our advice is ignored. I only hear from one of them when she wants me to come in and see her in her work, and he only contacts me when he wants books promoted.I was really hurt over this – till, really, I realised , there’s very little I can do to change the personality of certain people. People will do what people do. And if they hurt me, perhaps I should give them a little less ‘power’ over me to do so. I can still be friends with them, but perhaps the fault here was my expectations of them. Expectations lowered, access to me curtailed, problem solved.

Except….I now have to do the same with other people, who are, for various reasons, the same sorts of people.

Which led me to my second realisation.

I spend waaaay too much time on Facebook. I’ve given myself the excuse of ‘I moderate’ but the truth is, I could be in and out and not mindlessly staring at feeds, and I’d probably feel much better.
But, I spend waaaaay too much time on Facebook because I’m lonely. And though I chat with people, and that helps, it’s not helping enough. Which, in turn, I think is having a negative impact on my mental health. And if I’m still lonely after being in chat with people for hours on end, I don’t think it’s them, it’s me. And I definitely know what part of it is.
Over the last few weeks, since coming off part of the meds that I’d been on, I’ve had really vivid, really strange dreams. Most of them about a woman, and characters from various tv shows – though they’re not BEING the characters – they’ve got the same names, and the same people, but it’s not like my brain is making up fanfiction while I sleep.
It’s not EDIT and it’s not SHADOWBROKER and it’s not GLASS BLOCK – it’s something new. Something that’s sci fi, but has a lot more emphasis on the relationships. All of my projects get a code name (which is usually their novel title, but MAGI changed to BLOOD MERRIDIAN and GILGAMESH isn’t going to be called that when it’s done) so this one is called OTHERSIDE. It was going to be called PORTAL, but as a gamer, I know that I’d always be thinking of the very fun game, and the story has nothing to do with controlling when the portal itself appears. So….I dunno. Maybe I’ll work on that after this next stint.

I can kinda understand the studies they’re doing about how we interact right now. I can understand and am really beginning to relate to the people that need to be online but really shouldn’t. And part of this came about because I caught my nearly teen sneaking his laptop to his room and watching movies at night (no harm in that? How about finding out he was talking to my ex at 3am in the morning, and my ex said nothing?), and I realised, actually, it’s probably not entirely healthy for him (the pre-teen) to see me working all hours of the day, and chatting on Facebook to clients and still being *this* miserable.

So. I’m not sure how to fix either of them. I do know though that the time I spend ‘mindless’ on Facebook might be better spent elsewhere. That said, I don’t want to lose some of the friends I’ve made through Facebook – I just think it’ll be less on Facebook and more in chat….