Laughter Through Tears

bad ideas: reading 3 books and a fanfic in parallel, while also binging a tv drama and playing a narrative video game. my mind doesn't know what to think about first. I suspect that if I keep this up much longer, I will bounce off of all of them, and end up playing some lowgrade phone game for four hours straight.

Going through another one of my periodic Skyrim obsessions. I'm currently running three characters: an Argonian warrior who, on easy mode, is already able to defeat dragon priests; a wood elf archer who refuses to start the main quest because dragons; and most recently, an orc smith who... smiths. I'm fighting a constant urge to play and also contending myself with the fact that this phase will likely pass soon, and I'll forget all about these characters. Tuli (the archer) was a very new character the last time I loaded up the game after a long absence, to the point where I had forgotten I'd created her.

I try to maintain a streak of writing every day on 750words.com because it helps me keep track not just of work but also of my mood, and journaling in general helps. Sometimes I mark a few days as "days off" because I know I won't have time to journal or write, and it's technically possible to do this *during* the day itself. Which I have done before and it worked.

I did this yesterday late at night while playing a board game with family and it *failed* and I'm *mad as hell*. Which is DUMB and I'm also mad at MYSELF for even bothering to CARE this much about something which is objectively UNIMPORTANT.

Sometimes gamification creates problems, not just solves them.

Oh, it's also worth noting that I make a point of almost never doing work!writing on the weekends, at least on Saturdays. This is to help me unwind and try to do it guilt-free. It's also because I'm unlikely to get work done regardless on Saturday, so my options are do nothing and chill, or do nothing and feel irrationally guilty. Normally I feel my daily words for the weekend with fic snippets, or mood journaling, or planning for the week.

I have Pilates in fifteen minutes and I know that it's important and good for me and all that, but I am fighting a desire to play hookie anyway. Because today, this week, and all the way up starting from last Thursday was... a lot? Shit happened on Thursday and I'm not sure I'm ready to write about it because I still feel like the dumbest person who ever lived. And my brain's most rational response is to huddle under a fluffy blanket, eating mac and cheese and watching Netflix.

I could have spent tonight writing or reading, but instead I spent three hours making a tower and dungeon in The Sims 4.

Sleep is for the weak?

I use 750words.com to foster good daily writing habits, and have been having mixed success with it since 2015. Recently I've been on a 90+ day streak, fostered in part by my frantic work on Turncoat Chronicle. Today I quickly went back and checked when I broke my last streak. It was in late April. I checked the days before and after and found that I'd been having a productive time of it, plugging away at Blue Rose (my other main WIP, which has been in the works since December). So I tried checking here on DW, even though my update schedule here is sparse and totally unpredictable, to see what happened to break my streak. I discovered that the last week of April was when I picked up the new desktop... and suddenly recalled that the day I skipped (which also broke a super long streak) was a Saturday, and that was the day I spent all day playing The Sims 4, after having spent an entire Thursday setting up the computer to my liking.

So, in a way, my habits are incredibly consistent over the years.

Somewhat relatedly, the writing is mostly going well and I am trying to make the best possible use of the free time that I have left before I start the new job.

And later today is Jerusalem Pride, which I promised myself I'd attend despite sketchy weather conditions.

Holy shit.

I discovered two things today:

1. an old website that I used years ago to store unfinished kmeme fills that I didn't want lying around on my harddrive, has gone completely defunct and vanished from the face of the internet. yes, that website did still have some drafts of mine stored (attached to an email account similarly defunct, which I stopped properly using years ago). it's mostly okay, because the stuff that I really wanted to keep is still somewhere in my GMail drafts. I only really lost one document that I feel bad about not having, and it's no huge tragedy.

2. a quick search through my gmail account revealed two documents of unfinished stories relating to that very lost document. this is for an OC that I've been thinking about a lot lately, for some reason, and have developed a sudden weird nostalgia for. there's for sure no audience for it and I don't see that I would ever complete these stories, but it's extremely interesting to reread something that I wrote two or more year ago -- and totally forgot about.

life, man.

About six years ago, I spent six or seven months writing an "epic" multi-chapter fanfic anonymously on an LJ prompt meme. I was sunk so deep into it. I was obsessed with it. I was madly in love with it.

I never finished it.

I was writing other stories in the same fandom at the time, the fandom that ate my life (another recurring story for me). I got caught up in other things so that thinking about updating the story had me unbelievably anxious. I spent a long time after (what turned out to be) my final update scheming and guilting myself about how I would eventually finish it. Some time after I ghosted on the fandom altogether, I spent a fair amount of time telling myself that I would clean up what existed of it and post it to my AO3 with a final note saying I was out of the fandom and it would never be complete.

Today yesterday I was going through some outlining guides for writers and trying to take notes about how my different stories fit into the mold or don't. Part of my ongoing attempt to create some sort of writing style for myself that I can apply reliably to writing long-form. I was going to note this fic for its planned resolution (which I never reached, but still had an outline for), and I realized I had completely forgotten its name. For a while I had kept the document I was writing it in on-hand, and in my Dropbox, but my desktop of the time died and the doc is now buried somewhere in my backup drive.

I did finally locate it and add that note. And that fic is still to this day one of my most successful attempts at longfic. Which is rather tragic I suppose. Since then I've ghosted on at least two more major fandoms. And I have made peace with my tendency to leave stories unfinished, although I still try hard not to let it happen.

I made a very firm rule yesterday that I am not allowed to spend all of today -- all of the holiday weekend -- waffling on Tumblr and playing games and watching TV and generally wasting time. By the end of the month I'm (probably) going to be unemployed, and I have writing commitments that I'd just as soon rather not put off to the last possible moment (like I normally do). And I want to write, I swear I do!

...It's just so hard to get started doing anything. Especially when I don't even want to put on pants.

Of course, the most burning questions on my end are 1) Is someone going to vid Zero Motivation? and 2) If so, are they going to do it to every song that came out in the nineties omgf adjsfldg.

I mean. Is it just me or is this a hugely nineties kids movie. I know it's not just me. Right? Right?

I'm sorry I'm not sorry but this movie does things to my brain. I mean. It's a movie about the army that's not only relevant to my experiences but aggressively so. I MEAN.

I cannot with this movie. I. can. not.