I've had many 'this is my hardest's to deal with - probably more than anyone my age has any right to deal with in some ways. But this one hit the hardest about three days ago, and I thought
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My AtoZ blogging challenge reveal 2021 #AtoZChallenge
I take part in the Blogging from AtoZ Challenge every year. I have several of them that I’m taking part in this year, but the main one, the A to Z of me will introduce a lot of the things that are important to me.
Unlike other times I’ve done this challenge, I’m thinking about whether to do short (letter is for) posts as seperate, small entries, or having an overall post and breaking out into it in more detail in the next few weeks and months.
Any days that I can’t find something to talk about, I’ll either do a poem, a flash fiction piece, or something else.
I’m not revealing all of my posts right now, but just to give you guys a taster, and whether you’d like to give me some thoughts.
A is for Alt-worlds.
B is for Books
C is for Cats /CPTSD
…
M is for Mindfulness/Meditation/Morrigan
N
O
P is for psychosis
…
ZZZ is for sleep disorders
If I were doing a post on any of the ones that have more than one category, would you prefer, do you think, a different post for each concept, or all in one?
The radical changes I need to make #Mondayblogs #Wedswriters
So, I was a bit quiet about it, but I went on holiday for two weeks in the middle of August. I spent the last two weeks battering around a pile of theme parks – Disney, Universal, Blizzard Beach (One of Disney’s waterparks), plus Nasa, Gatorland, the Florida Mall, Denny’s, IHOP… we did so much that I’m spending so much time just exploring my experiences and filing them away carefully. My memory being what it is, I’ve also got about a gazillion photos that we all took – me, David, his mom, his sister, the kids.
I’ll talk about that more in another post (because this blog is getting picked up again as my ‘personal’ place to talk stuff, aren’t y’all lucky), but I need to touch on something I realised while I was away. I am doing far too much. FAR too much. There’s no room for me to learn and explore my world, and there’s no room for writing, none at all.
So, you might say ‘but you knew this already Kai, this isn’t a surprise’. And you’re right. But between barely holding it together to grief, and to sleep deprivation (I sleep six hours a night, on my best night. Normal nights are closer to five hours clawed back, with melatonin and other meds), so my little brain needs to be taught the hard way.
And the hard way was basically taking me offline for most of two weeks. My phone doesn’t do roaming and I decided, early on, that I wouldn’t use the wi-fi, so I basically read, spent a lot of time hanging out with my kids (my son and I played pool a lot) and just enjoying *being*.
Now, my being is books and writing, so I spent a lot of time trying to work out what I should do with myself. I don’t read or write nearly enough, and just behind that, I’m not doing a day of learning that I promised myself. So there’s all that. Behind that, and not far behind that either, I have a business to run – hosting and apps as it happens, and a diary I designed to help with all of this stuff. I know it works because I hit the ground running when I came back.
I know it sounds like I’m happy with all of this, but I’m not. It’s one of the most important things in my world- the ability to get to the point where I am comfortable and happy and can work with what I’d like to do, and I’ve lost that.
I’ll get there, but I’m sure it’s going to be bumpy for the next few weeks. I’m happy to get with it, but there are things that are important to me, lost in the shuffle. And all it took was a two-week holiday to spot it.
My mental health is still deteriorating, but I think I know how to sort that out too – I just need a bit of space to do it. Space isn’t easy to come by though, so while I do, I need to make sure I’m holding up my end of other stuff too.
But there is a ray of hope. Writing and my books. While this is a personal blog, the pro stuff will appear here too. One thing I did learn while I was away was that while my heart is full helping others, my soul sings for words. And I have so many stories to tell. And I want to tell them.
And then she said….follow me :)
I know, I know, I said yesterday I’d post something, but we filmed this, we filmed some other stuff, and then…well, other things got in the way, so we changed the order we did the vids in, and stuff.
I’m writing this from my bed today – I’m not having a great week already, but I’m sure it’ll get better 🙂
So, today, I’m inviting you over to Authorinterrupted, which you, Constant Reader, may or may not know, is my ‘professional’ writer’s blog, but which, for a very long time last year was just ‘my blog’. I’m going to split off the personal posts and either mirror or redirect those to here.
For those of you asking how best to keep up with this instead of remembering where I left off the day before, if you go to ByKai, you should find that all the posts mirror there, though they may appear slightly out of synced order to when I post on Facebook to say there’s a new post live. But, also as requested, Kai’s Blog Page, or Kai’s Blogging Network as I prefer to call it, has started this week too! Exciting stuff.
So, without further ado, my promised freebie, and see you later, over on Authorinterrupted.com – let me know what you think!
If it’s not behaving here, I’m launching my own Youtube Channel too, so please join me over there, or on my page at Facebook, where I’ll load it direct!
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Uh….ooops?
Have you ever wondered why people blog?
I have. I think about it every day, to find the reason that I’m blogging. A problem though, and a bit of a hiccup to it all is that if I’m not careful, I start trying to justify why I spend time.
Spend is right actually.
Blogging, and time most specifically, is a sort of currency for me. As is social media, and everything else I do. But I think what I mean by that is TIME is a currency that I struggle to decide how to spend. Blogging seems to be something I didn’t want to ‘spend’ on at all, and I don’t really know why. Or I didn’t until last week.
The thing is, I’ve been given back a lot of time lately.
When last I posted, I was ok. I wasn’t brilliant, but I was ok. My life was on a downward trend though. February 2015 was right smack bang in the middle of the first six months of what I was told was a very short treatment course with the team – anxiety, while hard, was manageable. I wanted to sleep more, but it’s taken until NOW. This week, I can actually say that five days out of seven, I’ve slept more than the goal I have on my fitbit. It’s taken Haloperidol, melatonin and changing my eating patterns to do it.
And you know, I’m talking about this as if it’s a tiny thing. It’s huge. I spent the last year and a half struggling to sleep more than four hours at a stretch, and struggling to go to sleep AT ALL some nights. I’d be up all night, and my brain wouldn’t stop. It just wouldn’t stop. It still doesn’t. But it’s easing. The grip on my head is easing, and oh, it’s so nice. I’m still needing to randomly nap in the afternoon, but I’m finding it so much… not quieter but, I don’t know. I’m sleeping. Which seems to make it easier for me.
So, I thought Id talk about this in a way I could understand myself when I look back, but more importantly, in a way that makes sense to everyone else. I need to work out how to spend my time – though I’m not sure how I’m going to measure it right now – and make sure there’s a nice balance for family, exercise, writing, work, and all of the things I want to do. If I can’t do that, I don’t know what I’m going to do.
And last week, it hit me. I stopped blogging because I lost things to say. It wasn’t so much I didn’t even have stuff to *babble* about. I just looked at each single blog I had as one blog, instead of a continuum. It’s going to take a bit of organising, but I think I’ve got an idea that will work.
So, my mission this week is to keep a diary about what I do, and how I’m spending time, and then, from there, I should be able to understand what time I actually have and whether I enjoyed what I was doing, and if there’s anything I can tweak.
My other major projects are sorting out a crowdfunding campaign for a project I’m doing, that I’m hoping will be good for others (it’s not to pay to publish something – it’s a product I need dev money for), and some other things. But I’m starting small this week – tracking.
And, hopefully, I’ll be blogging here semi-regularly again. Let’s make it a date, ok?
New Year…sorta….
Yeah, I know, its six days into the New Year and I still haven’t done the promised blog here about how this coming year might look. And that’s because I’m still not sure. I was working out of the house between September and November (should have been December but I fell in work and gave myself the most impressive concussion I’ve ever had, therefore finished up a bit early). I’m now back out of work, and looking for a new job because it was only temp and I was good with that.
Plans for my writing
The New year didn’t make it any easier to make plans for what I wanted to do with my writing – to be fair, all I do right now is sleep (still very depressed and tired, even though I’m six weeks post-concussion), and do some work on 750words, but I do have a plan. It does mean I’m going to be secret-squireling for about six months, but that’s ok. It’s not as if it’ll take me away from writing already in the works/complete.
Writing plans are, as always, contingent on what happens with my work, because making an income for my family has to come top of the pile. Even for another year until we get out from under the pile of bills left with me after I finished freelancing and clients refused to pay. I estimate that’ll take until the summer, then we can start saving for our wedding etc. but y’know, hope springs eternal that I’ll find a (well-paid) job that lets me write too.
Plans for other stuff
I know I’ve talked on here about grief and miscarrying, and all of the other stuff that went with that. We’re still no further forward and after another ‘event’ over my birthday, David and I have decided, for now, to call time on the whole trying to get pregnant cycle. It probably doesn’t help that we’re both stressed to the eyeballs over what to do about the youngest, various sick members of both families, living so far away from everyone and basically having no real time to work out or grieve properly, but I really feel like there are parts of my life that need sorted out before I look to the future. It’s not even fixing the past – can’t be done, so I’m just going to get myself to a point where I’m at peace with it, it’s more…having a routine and working and doing stuff that’s good for me instead of what’s good for everyone else. I did it when I sat my degree, and I’m very proud of that, but there are other things I can do too. I just have to find my way out from under the grey clouds first for some of it. My brain isn’t dealing with happiness the way it should, and more than anything, that’s something I need to fix, and it’s all internal.
New books
When all’s said and done, there will be new books this year. I promise. I’m just not sure when. Given the secret squirrel project is taking away half of my time, it’s a bit difficult to say ‘this is what I’m going for’. It’d be nice to have five novels out by the end of the year, time permitting, but I’ll be satisfied if I just get three or four. Again, it’s all down to whether I get a nice job or if I can stay home and PR to cover the bills, and write for the rest of my time. Even shaving down our outgoings and what I pay for, I still need to work about 20 solid hours a week to make anywhere near what I’d need to cover bills, which is why anything extra goes straight to said bills
That said…there’s going to be a weekly ‘state of the writing’ on Author, Interrupted, with pretty pie charts and metrics and other fun stuff ;).
Blog schedule
And finally, the blog schedule. It’ll appear here before the 15th, so you know where I’m writing, when and what for.
Birthdays and stuff
Normally, I do my ‘birthday’ update on or around my birthday – but I’m a couple of days late this year. And with good (ish) reason.
On the 8th of this year I graduated officially. And so began a week of visits and catching up with friends and family. Unfortunately, so also began a week of random exhaustion and a horrible rash that’s over most of the front of my neck and up one shoulder.
The rash
The rash itself isn’t actually too bad now, other than it itches like mad. I’m itchy in various places to be fair, but it’s all mostly associated with one side of my body. I spent Monday rearranging my conservatory, and sorting out the house – Tuesday – I graduated – Wednesday and a docs visit saw me picking up meds, but little else. I started needing about 200% more sleep. Thursday, mom came back from Egypt, and visited. Friday, Keith arrived, and Saturday….
Well, Saturday was supposed to be my book launch, my big birthday *bash* and my graduation celebration. It ended up being coffee in the morning with my nanoees, napping most of the rest of the day, before landing in the out of hours service at 5:30. Which lead to ‘you have meningeal symptoms (stiff neck, headache, bright lights bothering me, nausea, no temperature though), go to the ER’, which led to ‘the heck no’ conversation that comes up whenever I land in the Gloucester hospital. I eventually talked my other half into letting me go home for my birthday party – which, in the end was food, chatter and watching some cartoons. And then I slept. I did much of the same on Sunday.
And yesterday.
As of 11am this morning I’m still randomly needing to nap for an hour or two after only being up for a few hours, I’m stiff, I’m tired, but I’m still working.
Not quite the way I wanted to celebrate my 33rd birthday, but it let me have a think about several things, and, as Glass Block was signed up with a press, I’ve got space now till February to pursue something fun. So I am.
A picture being worth a thousand words and all….
Hack cleaning, and Psycho Killers
Something that I don’t think is very evident from my writing is that I’m very music oriented. If I can get away with it, no matter where I am, in the house, or out and about there’s either music, an audiobook, or crime programs on in the background somewhere. Music starts my morning, and audiobooks, or more rarely now, TV shows finish out my day. I’m constantly somewhere where there is noise. To the point that if I ever end up catastrophically brain damaged or otherwise unable to instruct it myself, or am in a coma, I’ve got it written into my living will (kinda sad that I’ve got one at 32, but the books go one way before a certain point in my life, and the rest belong to my other half, to do with as he pleases, and the kids need to be taken care of too) that there is always to be music wherever I am, even if it’s only just loud enough to be heard by me. Even if it means bringing my phone and speakers into the hospital.
But, unless you knew an old incarnation of this blog, you wouldn’t know that – I used to open out posts with the music that was influencing me – either a lyric, or a song title. I’m going to start that again, because this blog, and to a lesser degree Kai-q is going to be about me. All of me.
Which means this blog is going to get a bit frenetic for a while 😉 I’m difficult to define at the best of times, without actually looking at what I get up to, or even, what’s on my desk, my Kindle, my Goodreads list, my camera, my phone… I am a complicated, complex, multiple type geek, and probably very rarely, I’m a multiple type geek that has several strong focusses.
Basically – what you think you know about me – it’s probably mostly true, but there’s probably more to me than most people realise. And more than I’ll ever probably be able to express.
One of the things I do know right now is I’ve got a plan – finally. I’ve also got a very clean workspace, and the freedom to actually work for myself now. Totally and utterly, I’m free now, and that’s a good thing.
As for the title – the blog was hacked this weekend – and had we not already been keeping a vague eye on the site anyway, I think that this could have been a lot worse than it was. I’m still working on cleaning the residual issues that I’ve been left with, but most of them were temporary. The reason – the main reason, I took the blog offline is because I couldn’t apply the fix while people were trying to access parts of the site. So, we put the temporary redirect up, fixed the blog, voila ;). Well, kinda, cause I’ve not finished the blog design yet, so for now it’s a bit bland…
The psycho killers thing – well, that means one of my characters has decided to stop being such a huffy little pain in the ass and is talking to me again – his two favorite bands happen to be Talking Heads and Nickelback, though he’s taken a shine to Mazzy Star lately too. Mostly I’m just glad Elliot is back from wherever he vanished off to. I’ve still got yet more planning to do, to the point of paralysis, but I’m finally in a place where I can actually see the light at the end of the tunnel – and apparently on my keyboard. It does mean less time downstairs vegging with my other half at night for a while, but I think, if I can make it work, it’ll be more than worth it.
Of bright lights and disappointments…
We are, to all intents and purposes, one month after ‘the Watershed‘
And there’s a couple of things that have changed since then – some for the better, some in a different way and with no impact. One for the worse.
As the last post explained, I finally graduated. What the last post barely touches on is why it’s taken so long to get to that point. And, y’know, I wish I could point at everything I’ve been up to recently and say ‘see, good reason’, but the truth is, the reason, though, probably, a valid one, isn’t a ‘good’ one by any stretch of the imagination. Focusing on the positive though – I graduated. I’m delighted that I graduated. I’m trying to decide if I want to go to the ceremony where our degrees are officially conferred – right now it’s looking at least an option.
Other improvements include taking on better paying work, in some cases. I *love* copywriting – but what I don’t love is the fact that I’m basically at the mercy of clients. Most are darlings – but some leave a lot to be desired. And when I’m having to be draconian about billing practices, I know something has gone wrong. And that’s the problem – there’s no give in my billing. And for those that know why, don’t even say it in public – it’s not necessary. I’ve taken steps to remedy that, in the form of http://indieunbound.com 🙂 I’m now officially and formally an editor as well as a copywriter, using my experience as a writer and graduate to support indie writers in creating a product that works for them – and the market. It’s good, and in the last few days, I’ve already managed to book clients till our holiday in October, which is just stellar.
Other than that, I’m working on finishing up my websites and setting up regular spots for blogging, fixing my timetable to balance stuff (though, I’m slowly coming to the realisation I can either have a quiet life OR work really hard – there’s no doubling up and earning both) and slowly resolving everything that needs to be resolved.
The negative? other than a couple of outlines, I’m still not writing. And that sucks. But I think I have a solution to that too – one, that if I can keep up with the editing client bookings, will give me the best of all worlds and allow me to be the last piece of the puzzle that is me. I have to find my way back to fiction writing, or there’s no point in freelancing the way I do. I could, instead use my degree on something else, and let go of the idea of being an author – and to be honest, that all or nothing decision makes me more worried than any other choice I could ever make.
I guess the last thing I need to talk about is ‘what’s next’? I already miss university desperately – I’ve never felt more at ease in an establishment in my life, and I want to go back to that at some point. So, realistically, some of the money I make editing and writing is going back into ‘me’, and in turn, making me a better writer and editor, via my MA plans. Ideally, I’d like to do linguistics of some kind, rather than a wholly creative project, but ultimately, I guess I’ll need to see what is available to me, and how long it’ll take me to save for it. For now, all of my energy is going into clearing up the last of the server costs I was left with, sorting out new hosting for that secondary account, and building a buffer of savings for my family. Editing and copywriting together are a good combination, especially if I can keep streamlining my time and using it to the best effect.
Now though? Work beacons. Laters 😉
Degree confirmation
As many of you know, I’ve spent the last four years doing a degree in Creative writing, with a side of psychology. It’s been a long road, especially after I fell and banged my head.
But, to the credit of the University of Gloucestershire, and my tutors, we got through it – they were amazingly supportive and helpful and made sure I was in the best position possible to make my degree work for me. I can’t praise them enough.
But – I’m delighted to confirm that I got a 2:1.
So, now I’m a graduate. Wooohooo!
The new schedule
So, yeah, I’m still on writing burnout, at least for fiction. I’m a bit concerned about that actually – there’s no ideas, no flashes of ‘oooh, I wanna write *that*’… nothing.
But, there is the niggling nagging feeling that I should at least get my life back into a ‘productive’ space instead of sitting on the couch for days and thinking ‘why me’. I guess the ‘why me’ isn’t the right question. ‘What can I do to fix it’ is the real question.
In all of this drive, I’ve lost most of my passions. The blogs that I’m most passionate about? Fallen to the wayside as I keep my head above water. Finished my dissertation, and all that seemed to fill it? Moping.
The new schedule
When I say ‘schedule’, I’m, for now, not looking at the list on my plate, and then slotting stuff in. I’m also not going to say ‘I’m using these blogs to ‘warm up’ in the morning. In fact, I’m going to do my level best to get a bit ahead with the evergreen stuff and pick up the information that’s not evergreen and post it as and when required. I’ve got special plugins that do stuff with queued content and works with what I’m doing.
But there’s a certain… need to actually say ‘well, this is what I’m doing’.
The blogs
http://kaiberie.com (this one)
http://literary-forensics.com/ – which, bar the information posts, is going to restart. Literary Forensics is a bit of editing, a bit of language, a bit about etymology, and a lot about the ‘language’ of crime. It’ll feature crime and thriller writer interviews too, alongside a non fiction book sometime early in the new year.
http://bi-polarbears.com -it’s probably not particularly well in the communities I’m involved with right now, but I write a mental health blog. I’m not very good at writing on a schedule though, and that’s something I’d like to change. Again, there’s a book associated with this blog.
http://indieunbound.com – it’s a bit about editing, a bit about writing.
and finally – http://indieauthorcommunity.com – which actually encompasses something like six mini blogs, but still… 
Other projects
I’ve got a couple of other projects to deal with, including setting up some sites for some projects, and writing content to achieve that. One of them is ‘indieauthoraide’, a site designed to support indie authors in accessing everything they need. But it’s quite a big…if not one of the biggest projects I’ve undertaken, and actually needs planned. Needs to ask people to come help too. But that’s the underlying structure.
30 hours of copywriting, with the company I work for, and those blogs. I think it’s a good underlying structure to go for.