June 2020 updates

It’s been a while since I’ve written about what’s going on in my life. The pandemic is still all around us and nothing is easing up, and my mental health has been awful for a few months at least. I’ve rarely left my apartment in ninety days and have mostly focused on self-care, coping with mental illness, and surviving to see a day when everything will get better. And everything has to get better eventually. I know that statement annoys a lot of people when I say it, but we have to hold onto some kind of hope.

In May, I finally got a laptop I’ve been after. Ironically, it was so I could take my writing with me to the coffee shop and get out of the apartment. I was doing so well and I felt the best I ever had before all of this, and my mental health was improving. I couldn’t stay home. Life was starting to go so well and so right.

Now, the laptop has found use in relocating to my bedroom to work on projects. Being stuck at home in an apartment building full of people who make a ton of noise, party, get drunk, or in the case of the person next to me, are even a bit dangerous, has been damaging to my creative drive. Usually, I would leave to my favorite coffee shop to escape all of this, but my bedroom and an open window on the cooler days will have to do.

Changing my writing environment at home did bring back my creativity. I managed to write a novella, a 26k-word memoir about my childhood with a small fantasy element added in. I finished it in about three days and edited it in one more day. I truly feel it’s one of the better stories I’ve written in a while, and every time I go back to it to do another self-conscious sweep, I fall in love with it a bit more. It’s with my editor now, so we’ll see what comes of it!

I’m also in the process of (finally) querying my first complete novel, STIGMA, after sitting on it since January. I was so intimidated by how difficult everyone said writing a query was that I put it off. I kept telling myself it wasn’t a good time because I needed to take care of my mental health. I found that once I actually started the damn letter, it wasn’t so bad after all. A wonderful agent on Twitter offered to help critique my letter once my first draft was done, and by the second draft, she said it was so much better! I also got recommended an agent to submit to from a pretty nice agency, so… yeah. This is happening.

The one thing hindering me now from actually submitting is the dreaded synopsis. I knew I’d hit another roadblock because synopses are hard as hell to write. I decided to just dive in like I did with the query. At least I have something now, and even if it’s bad or totally wrong, I’ve got more than a blank page staring at me with the threat of stopping my future writing career in its tracks.

Making myself get back to work was the best thing I could do. It gave my life meaning again and a hope for some kind of future, whatever that may be now. I’m dreaming again of things I most certainly will never see, but at least my head’s in a more dreamy, happy state, and it’s going to help me survive all this madness.