The blog of D Kai Wilson-Viola

Author, advocate, designer, mental health advocate and parent. 

When she sing, she sings “Come home” #mondayblogs #rungirlrun

When she sing, she sings “Come home” #mondayblogs #rungirlrun

(Don’t Google that, if you plan to watch Loki, the TV series, as the titular character sings it).

I’ve been equal parts restless, equal parts full of wanting to get on with changing things, but not having the energy to do any of it. So, as is my usual tactic, I’m actually travelling today. I’m going home.
Tomorrow morning, I’ll be heading to my temple, called Goddess Falls. It’s known as another name in Edinburgh, but I’ll be taking my lightsaber with me in the morning.

Travelling, thinking, going home

We’re hoping that we get to go (so, either this’ll be going out as I’m on the road – in fact, I should be just getting to our end destination), and my tradition is to think and write and make notes, and hope that nothing goes wrong while I’m out of touch. Maybe do a bit of crochet, which I’m teaching myself.

Mostly though, today is a holiday. So Joyous Yule, may the wheel bless you as it turns, if you celebrate. And Merry Christmas/Happy holidays too!

And books?

Every week, I talk about putting out books, about editing, but I’ve been slow. Really slow, so I’ll keep trying but honestly? Pressure has never been my friend, but I’ve got to start moving on with my books. So, I’ll be thinking about that too while travelling. We’ve got little TV trays for our knees, so I’ll be travelling with one of them, my diaries, and my surface. Just in case.

Going home though… it is in my bones. I’m a Gaelic gal to the core, to the point that I feel home in my very soul. I bring a little bit of it back every year for my shrine.
Today also marks the 25th year of being a standing High Priestess. Solitary, but still… it means this year I think I’ll be talking about my beliefs, my dreams, and what I’m doing it with my books to honour that stuff.
But…regardless. I hope your Christmas period is good. I hope you see those you love. I hope you get to spend time with your family. I’ll be taking time out with mine.

Changing around some categories – housekeeping 2021 – Part 1

Changing around some categories – housekeeping 2021 – Part 1

While my blogs merge down, I’ve got some housekeeping to do. Some categories will move, some will merge, some will redirect.

Hopefully I caught it all while I was housekeeping, but I’ve made a list. Some of these don’t always make perfect sense – they straddle two lines, I guess.
Eventually, some of these will be moved wholesale off my blog to new sites, or subdomains, or other places. There will be a housekeeping post about that too!
And I was kidding myself when I thought I’d get this done.
There will be an article that you can read these in a series to see what I’m up to, but for now, there’s just this.

Category redirects (including organisation/re-naming and nesting)

Category delete/merge

About Kai/D Kai Wilson-Viola merged into ‘About D Kai Wilson-Viola
The ALL category is gone and should simply flatten down to the blog itself.
Naming conventions – converted to a tag.
Amazon Kindle – I’m revamping how I talk about my writing, so platforms aren’t going to be categories, they might end up in tags.
books and writing is moving just to ‘writing’
Featured articles has been ‘combined’ with ‘featured’ though, it turns out this is mostly because I merged blogs. This will be more and more common as I merge down.

Category additions

Is it though? Thoughts on #failure

Is it though? Thoughts on #failure

If at first, you don’t succeed, try. Try again.

English Truism/cliché

(sidenote, I always thought the punctuation on that saying was pretty fluid. It actually reads more like a poem when I write it, cause I’ve always put the commas and full stops in there. Weird that my version actually talks about failing at least twice too. I’ll get to that later)

Failure – a loaded word

The last few weeks have been really…weird for me. I *started* making strides on becoming happier, healthier and more confident in my skin by trying to go for a walk outside and enjoying myself. I say started – last Friday, due to the completely thoughtless actions of a company that I’ll still say ‘remains nameless’ but is a social media scheduling program, who increased my bills by an eyewatering 1151% a month, this week has been a week of disruption, sadness, and annoyance.
And it didn’t help that I was fixing a stupid video problem that very few people actually see (that’ll go on my other blog, probably this weekend. What I’m hearing myself say right ow is I have a lot of blogs to work on. It’s not a happy thought, if I’m honest), but is key to a few clients who work on those platforms. And of course, I worked my ass off to fix it. But still…it’s been a rough week, and that’s meant…no walks.

I told myself that if I ‘failed’ at any point, I’d be gentle with myself – accept that it’s a ‘fact of life’ as it were when recovering that you’ll backslide, but I have to be honest. Although that language applies to me, if you stumbled on my blog out of context, you wouldn’t know what I was discussing was in fact not alcohol or drug-induced issues, but, instead, recovery from a mental health breakdown. And if I’m entirely open about that, it was a full-on ‘breakdown’. I spent a month refusing to leave our bedroom. Five years of being unable to leave the house alone. A LOT that I still don’t like to talk about.
I’ve still not gotten back to a place where the house is neat and tidy and everything has a place. I don’t think I ever will. I keep trying to put my work back together, and every little thing that knocks me off track is so significant. So hard.

When the language is all about judgement, how do you not judge?

I’m discharged from the team in question on Tuesday (hooray, I’m better…hang on), but the very last psych I worked with before I wrote this post, who I refer to as Dr C, finally said, a few Januarys ago, that he believed that everyone was a little bit on ‘the spectrum’, and in my case, I was VERY language focussed. To the point that I’ll get upset with language usage because people don’t use words precisely. It’s a form of control of course, but my psych says that he’d finally come to a conclusion that it wasn’t a power play. He thought I wasn’t/don’t do it to push people, to control them, but instead, to understand my environment. My ‘my brain won’t let this go’ is constantly stimulated. It’s language. In all it’s forms, really.

What I do know though, about all of this, is that I’ve got a bias in how I perceive language. My language ‘understanding’ has an undertone of judgementalness. It’s how my brain works, and isn’t – really – about anything other than… I guess, when you grow up as badly bullied as I was, you need to find a reason for that. When you’re young, it’s most common to blame yourself. We think, unpicking everything, that my outlook is very much coloured by wanting to belong and not managing it because…children are children. I can’t blame the kids I grew up with (I can’t – many of them are in worse places than I ever ended up), and my family did their best. I just wasn’t… I’ll be blunt I guess. I grew up in an era where bullying was still viewed as character forming. Half of my teachers didn’t know what to do with me, and I must have been difficult for my family. I was sensitive, sad, often emotionally difficult, I guess. I began to prefer my own worlds to the ones outside. I didn’t interact well. If it happened now, as in, if I was a child/teen now, I suspect I’d have been put into a specialist education program, and I may – or may not – have turned out the way I am. And there I go again, judging myself.

So. This week has been not optimal. Not even minimal. It’s been rough and hard and tiring.
But… I’m learning a lot of things. Always growing. So.

I own this one. I didn’t do any exercise this week. I have good reason for it, I was disrupted, and upset and had a really ‘poor’ week. But, I’ve been able to think, plan, consider, when I’ve not been too preoccupied with reclaiming money that shouldn’t have been removed from my account. It’s been a frustrating week, but I DID get those video fixes sorted, I *am* working through stuff with clients to get on with. The week, on the surface, looks like a failure. But really?

It’s just been a week that hasn’t worked out.

If, at first, you don’t succeed. Try. Try again.

B is for Books – Walking off the earth #Finalchapterinthisbook #newbook #atozchallenge

B is for Books – Walking off the earth #Finalchapterinthisbook #newbook #atozchallenge

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 there was going to be a bit of give, a bit of wriggle room, but no.  I finally encountered the words that just broke me in two.  And I won’t repeat them.  I’ve deleted them.  But I came to a screeching halt, and I’m not sure how things will change, but change they absolutely will.  

But first – I have a heck of a lot of grieving and coming to terms with things to do – and I need to build an actual, sensible plan to sustain my businesses.  And I have to accept that part of that is digging out my work ethic and dealing with everything that’s gone on lately and putting things right. And I’ve come to the conclusion that to do that, this book needs to end.  This story, no matter that it’s not a happily ever after needs to become something that we relegate to the ‘not touching’ drawer.  Not everything that’s happened – no, they’re elements that can be reused.  But the tale of the sad girl that lives inside her house and does nothing…that’s a bust.  That’s so much of a bust we’re not making it past the first draft.

I’m not ashamed but…

When you’re where I am, you’re not *supposed* to admit bullying gets to you.  I’m the moderator of one of the biggest indie communities on Facebook, I run a lot of things for a lot of different people and I find myself, daily, waking up and dreading the comments that appear here, and on the other blogs, I run.  In my inbox, on Twitter, by PM on Facebook. And, in with that realisation is that I’m as unkind to myself as all of these people.  My self-talk is terrible.  I’d rather sleep (or try to) than work.  And I hate admitting that, but my sleep is disturbed again, and it’s getting difficult to do *much* of anything.

I do have one ray of light though, beyond my family, who are just the best, and my friends, who equally rock, and that’s my books. I’ll be talking about them more naturally in the coming days, but for now, I just wanted to thank anyone that’s supported me as a writer. I don’t always get to write, but it is one of my few places of solace. And if I’m walking off this earth to another, I couldn’t do it without knowing that I was writing the story as I went.

Today’s other AtoZ’s on the blogs I take part on.

Books by Kai – Black Monday
Fiction by Kai – the Knight of Coins
Bi-polar bears – Being, not doing
These our Fandoms – a quick skimmer onto the things in Battle Ground by Jim Butcher.

Oh, if you want to keep track of all my posts in one place, I set up a syndicated blog again. It’ll have everything in it, eventually, though it does take a few hours to catch up with stuff!
See you tomorrow!
The radical changes I need to make #Mondayblogs #Wedswriters

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 :)

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!
([youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDMd_U4lGIw])