State of the Writer

As my military friends might say, a SITREP: situation report for those who don't do milspeak. I've weaned myself off my antidepressant pills a couple of weeks ago.

However, it can take up to six weeks to see if there are any signs of a relapse of my mental health. I'm hoping that my body has acclimated to the immunosuppressant medication that prevents my rheumatoid arthritis from running rampant.

We shall see.

Having slowly reduced the antidepressants over a long period of time, I've noticed I have more emotions. I can now cry, or get angry, and this feels odd having been emotionally flat for three years.

So I'm trying to get back in the saddle.

I'm working through my next novel, Two Moons, which has grown to a total of 50,394 words. This seems like progress, but the draft is a total mess. A crazy quilt made up from three drafts with three different openings.

So, I'm have got a lot of work ahead of me to tidy it all up.

The reason for the mess was the lack of emotions while on the anti-depressants, which is definitely a thing. During those years I flailed about with no real plot or story; a plot being a sequence of events, a story being how the characters deal with those events.

I lacked a certain something, indulge me riffing on an old Beatles song:

Help! I need story...

Help! Not just any story...

Help! You know I need a plot..

Help!

I now have one, the idea that will drive the plot and will make for an exciting the story.

It's amazing to feel like my old self  again. Of course there's a caveat, I've gotta get back into my writing routine, and being older now, I'm finding this harder to do.

Partly because I'm so easily distracted, and partly because I do so enjoy learning new things. But, that's the update. I'm working on the next Gate Walker novel.

You heard it hear first. I mean where else would you hear it from?