Since my last post I have been struggling a lot with health issues. I have been writing, editing and continuing on creative posts but I’ve been a bit absent here.I’m still waiting to hear back about tests but the issues I have been experiencing are highly likely to be related to my thyroid because I’ve had problems with it before and problems run in the family. This has meant that I’ve been exhausted, off coffee ;( and I’m not pushing myself to be productive but I miss being more active.
But I’m not here to bitch about my health. Although the health issues have necessitated a dialing back on a variety of things it has also forced me to rethink my approaches and methodologies when it comes to work. I’m still writing, still creating and still very committed to all of it but I’m learning how to be infinitely more forgiving of myself when I need to stop and take care of myself. For years I’ve been cutting corners trying to push myself to be more productive and although that isn’t the only factor in what’s going on with my health now I am beginning to grasp that everything happens at its own pace.
For 4+ years I have been working on a series of stories set in a fantasy/sci-fi world. The over arching story is plotted, some of the side stories are as well and much of the color of life of the world is present. But it has been incredibly hard to come to terms with the scope of the editing I need to do. Difficult because everything in the larger world outside my book says–you have to hurry, you need to market this, you need to do x if you want y and z. Its hard to say if I’m going about this the right way or not but during June and July as I slowed down and accepted that I needed to focus on my health first I started to get headspace again.
In that new headspace I recognized that I was trying to put too much into the first book in the series. The story focuses on a space traversing alien species and a planet bound magical species–narrowing in to a focal point on a prophesized Sage, a mysterious death and a girl struggling to accept her place at a tumultuous moment in history. Originally I had made my focus too large beyond those details and had been overwhelmed by how to introduce a fantastic world with a baroquely detailed history, mythology and magic system. Now that I’ve accepted that what I had wanted to sum up in three books will inevitably take on a larger scale I’m able to return to the project in a way that is slow but finally has some forward momentum.
Sidgwick Black 