It’s been a while! I am still writing – just. This is despite the way life has done one of those turns on us and it has been a rough year, not just for me but for a lot of people.
After returning to the UK we were living in a small flat – too small for two adults (I marvel at the fact that some people are able to bring up a family in something of that size, and hats off to them – it can’t be easy!). We had a long six months where we thought we’d be moving within the next couple of weeks and it just didn’t happen. This, along with some other things happening, was bad for my mental health. I actually stopped writing completely for a few months at one point, stopped reading, stopped listening to music; all motivation to anything was gone.
The house move finally happened in January, on the same day I had a job interview (got it and started after lock down started… weird or what?). Talk about super stressful days, the two international moves were easy in comparison to that one, lets just say we don’t plan on moving again for a long time!
The lock down has been hard in some ways and not so in others. If we hadn’t moved it would have been really hard for us. In the new house we have the space to get alone time, both inside and we have a garden again, where I’ve taken to sitting out in that rare British sun.
As an introvert I’ve never struggled with not going out and about, but the enforced nature of this is so different, the social distancing is odd, where once there is bustle we now have people making a wide berth (well – most people, there are a few out there who seem to not know what two metres is!). I did enjoy heading out to a couple of places in town and going to a restaurant. Even doing the food shop when I needed and not having to plan and queue so much.
Its resulted in the fun things being cancelled this year too. I was looking forward to EasterCon and catching up with friends there. With other conventions, and gigs, we had planned on attending look less likely to be able to go ahead the longer the world remains in this paused state. I don’t envy the position the organisers of these are in, the amount of work involved with getting everything together to see it all vanish in this way.
What has come good from this is the virtual meet ups, I’ve reconnected with friends I made in Calgary and the writing group there with Discord meet ups, and with friends we have spread over the UK with virtual pub nights.
I’ve also started to write some more, I’m keeping away from the larger works until I’m fully back in the swing of it – I don’t want to dive back into that world before my brain is ready, and have a short fantasy story I’m working on. I’ll introduce you to Jeb and Viktoria at some point! I am learning to work with Scrivener while I’m doing this which is both different and not so much at the same time from how I’ve always kept a lot of my notes and research in OneNote. I will complete this story and see how I feel before deciding where to do the next one!
It is not just stories which have started to come out again, I’ve been learning to do more with PowerShell for work and enjoying that, I’m listening to music again, I’m reading a little, dreams are returning to their norm where stories start their journey though my brain before working to some kind of scrawl on paper. These are all sure signs that my mental health is well on the road to where it needs to be.