A little consideration

…goes a long way. I’m feeling particularly ill-considered this weekend. And particularly ill.

I’ve been so busy lately. Juggling all the pieces I’ve had has been a precarious balancing act, one that I hoped would get easier once my parents were back from their holiday. In some ways, that’s true. I have been able to relinquish a few responsibilities – small things, but they make a difference.

I’ve been running low on energy this week, since being up until 1:30am getting the parents back from the airport on Tuesday night. CFS means that I can’t screw with my sleep schedule like that without paying for it, and I’ve been struggling to get back onto an even keel since then.

Yesterday morning, the last of our furniture arrived at about 6am. I never even heard the delivery guys. Then an hour or so later, Mum decided to assemble the dining table, right outside my room. At about 8:30am, I finally gave up on being able to sleep and stumbled out in my pajamas. She was like a kid at Christmas, finally able to get her house looking like a house, so I didn’t say anything, even when they made fun of me for being all bed-hair. I even helped them put the damn thing together.

I was useless for most of the day. Played a bit on an MMO, watched TV – I was so tired that that was all I was capable of. I had planned to get some chores done, do a bit of shopping so I can sort out my room and writing space, but those kinds of plans fall by the wayside when I get tired like that. 

The weekends are the only chance I get to catch up on my sleep, get rest, and do the stuff that I’m too tired to do during the week. They’re my chance to have something like a normal life with this damned CFS. Last weekend was the first time in ages that I truly took some time off everything, and even then I was doing chores for half of it.

This morning, Mum and my aunt thought it was a good idea to move furniture while I was asleep. Heavy wooden furniture + fridge + tiled floor + really good acoustics = I CAN HEAR YOU PERFECTLY. Right outside my room. At 8am on a Sunday morning. WTF. Who thought that was a good idea?

What kills me is that I’m usually up by 9am anyway. Is it too much to ask for them to just wait until I’m up? Don’t they know how precious those scraps of sleep are for me? 

Now, I’m over-emotional and shaky all over, and a hair away from oh-so-fun chest pains. My room is a tip, I won’t get out to try to find a new desk this weekend, and there is a list of stuff I wanted to do but just can’t face right now. 

Today, I wanted to get some feedback done for a couple of friends. I’ve been pissed off since I got up, and that’s really not the kind of mood I want to be in when critiquing writing. So, I’m sorry to you (you know who you are), but I’m gonna shelve that for now. I might get to it later if I’m feeling more even-headed and less RARR I RIP IT TO PIECES NOW.

There’s so much I want to do at the moment – my novel, the short story I’m partway through, stuff for my writing groups, stuff for this blog, saving for a house. I feel like I’m wasting so much time.  I feel like things are passing me by.

But I’m running on the ragged edge of energy and collapse. I’m scraping past the bare minimum – work, keeping the writing groups running, and ticking AB over – and that has to be enough sometimes. But not all the time.

Ugh. I don’t know what to do with myself right now. Maybe I’ll go beat up the CSS code some more – I could do with something meaningless to do.

Buffer unbuffed

Been a bit of a week. I have been meaning to post here for days, but just don’t seem to manage to find the time! We have relatives staying with us at the moment, so my time is not all my own.

I haven’t been getting ahead on the Apocalypse Blog posting as much as I had hoped. I’ve been doing well with writing during my commute (and I love my little notebook), but I’m not always feeling good enough to do it. I’m still working my way up to full  health after the pneumonia (or as ‘full health’ as I ever get), and it’s a long road.

The CFS is not helping, these days. I think I’ve hit the point where my body wants to be more tired than it is, but I don’t want to do too much activity because it makes me wobbly and want to sit down. So I don’t sleep well at night because I’m not tired enough, and that makes me more exhausted during the day. I’ve been in this spiral before and it’s a really hard one to break out of. Today, I can feel my eyes burning heavily and my body just wants to slither into a pile under my desk. Yesterday, I was completely useless when trying to figure out the technicalities of encryption terminology, with my poor little brain lurching around in circles and spitting out lots of ‘…..’

The plan at the moment is to start up my morning exercise again and see if that helps. It’s possible it’ll make it all worse, but that’s a risk I have to take at some point. I’ll start on Monday and see how I go, I guess.

In the meantime, AB posting has become more hand-to-mouth than I like. I made it worse by delving into a whole section about a prison, and there was so much to say there that I wound up doing two posts a day a couple of times. Whoops! I didn’t want to waste an opportunity like that by missing anything out, and it was already eating up way too much time – I didn’t want to string it out, or one day’s events would have taken a week to tell!

That was good fun to write about, though. The unseen and potential dangers are so much more creepy than the ones that smack you in the face. I had one reader tell me that she was all creeped out by one entry, and that made me happy (target achieved!). I don’t usually write much horror/suspense, so it was good to experiment with that stuff, and it fitted in with the ‘Rumours’ section nicely (all about what’s heard, but not (yet) seen!). That was a bit of a happy accident, as the only reason I put the prison in was that there was one next to the little black line on the map I’m using to keep track of things!

I think I need to sit down and write a load of posts one day on the weekend. All I need is the chance (and the energy)! That’ll get me ahead enough that I can start double-posting again if I need to, without running out of post buffer (I only finished up today’s post on the train into work this morning, and will have to put it up when I get home). If nothing else, it messes with my ability to schedule the posts to appear at an appropriate time during the day.

Also need to get working on my novel again. Been ages since I picked it up. Hopefully the novelling group meeting next week will kick me back into action with that!

Right. ’nuff talking, time to get back to work. Write atcha later!

Handwriting

This week has been better. It has been up and down but, on the whole, better. It feels so good to be able to say that.

It got off to a bad start – the CFS has really been pulling me down lately (as I’ve complained about a lot), and last week was a mess. But the energy levels shifted about mid-week, and the braindead turned into brain-active, which is always nice. The body is still sluggish, but at least the mind appears to be mostly working. I got a lot more achieved at work and have been able to attack some other stuff that I’ve been meaning to do. Go me!

I managed to get the next instalment of Writing Tips done this week, too, but managed to forget to email them to myself. I’m going to need to VPN in to work to get them (not that I was writing them at work or anything – lunch hour writing! It was!). I will hopefully get that posted tonight or tomorrow.

The AB Cast page has been updated and expanded, including past cast members and proper links to character-centric posts. I haven’t finished tagging up all the existing posts yet (there are a lot of them!), so that job isn’t complete, but the framework is all there. Big fat tick.

I’m getting a lot of ideas for the Apocalypse Blog, which is always good. Thanks to my current technical issues (stupid laptop battery making it impossible to write on the train), I haven’t been able to get them all written the way I wanted. By the time I get home, I’m way too tired to be able to concentrate on writing properly, so my commute is really the best time for me to get stuff done during the week.

I gave up trying to use the laptop halfway through this week and switched over to paper-and-pen writing. It has been a rude reminder of why I don’t like to write that way. My brain is always six steps ahead of my hand, I keep thinking of stuff I want to add in or have missed, my handwriting is a mess, and the writing itself comes out sounding so different to the way I usually write. 

I’m going to have to heavily rework the posts I’ve done on paper to keep it sounding like Faith. I’ve managed to get today and tomorrow’s posts all edited and up, and I should get a couple more sorted out today. I wound up writing stuff a bit out of order this week, because one post went sideways and needs to be split up into two very separate ones, and there were events in the middle that I had missed out, and… yeah. This week hasn’t been my most organised and together. 

I’m going to persevere with the handwriting, though. I have to do a lot of work on what I end up with, but the basic material is still there. It’s giving me a base to work off, which is much better than a blank page. It’s better than last weekend, when I wound up having to write a lot of the stuff from scratch and post it all in one go. The time spent concentrating on AB gives me more time to think things over and work ideas through. I even spent one train journey just writing down notes of the plotpoints and conversations I wanted to cover because so many things kept coming to mind. Those notes should help me get the next week’s posts in the right order and progression.

For the time being, I think I’m going to have to restrict myself to one post a day. I know I keep saying that I’m aiming for that, but I’m going to be strict about it now. It’s turning into so much work to get everything done that I’m struggling to keep up. Yes, I am going to bite the bullet and order a new battery for the laptop – normal service will return once I can write ‘properly’ again. Which means me and the laptop on the train with ears plugged into an iShuffle.

It has been an interesting experiment, this handwriting endeavour. It’s making me much more aware of how I write and when. Anyway! Back to editing AB posts. Mustn’t get too distracted by my own musings. More later!

Energy

Energy is an issue for me.  Thanks to the CFS, I have to watch my energy levels very closely.  Some times are better than others, and a change can actually be a lot better than a rest.

Lately, it has not been great for me.  It has been getting more and more difficult to scrape myself out of bed in the morning, and some days it has been near impossible to think straight, let alone do anything useful.  I won’t go into the other symptoms (it’s a lovely, long list), but let’s just say it sucks in many ways.

I’ve tried a lot of things to try to combat the effects of CFS in the past – magnesium, omega 3 oils, yet more iron, getting more sleep.  There is no treatment, and none of those things have worked for me (though they have for others).  

The only thing that seems to work for me at all is exercise.  Which creates a rather interesting conundrum – I have to expend energy to get more energy, but where do I get the initial investment?  Unlike business, it’s not the sort of thing you can borrow.  So yes, it bites hard when I kick the process off.  If I do too much, I just end up worse than I started out.

That’s what happened last week.  A few months ago, I got a couple of workout machines so that I can do exercise at home (with my schedule, a gym really doesn’t work).  When NaNo started, I didn’t have the energy to do both, so I let the exercise slide for a month.  With the craziness of MLing, I wound up drained and wobbly by the end of November.  It has taken me until this month to feel in a position to start it up again.

So, I tried last week.  Getting up stupid-early every day, going downstairs, working out for half an hour, and then falling into the shower and going to work.  It was a mess.  I was a mess.  

I’m trying to write (AB) on the train to and from work, and it was a struggle to think straight on the morning trip, let alone put words together.  By the middle of the week, I wasn’t doing much writing at all.  I suspect the posts have suffered somewhat because of that (it doesn’t help that I’m in the middle of a particularly harrowing/difficult part of Faith’s personal journey right now, either).

I spent the weekend pretty much trying to get over that.  Yesterday at work, I was almost useless – when I’m tired, my attention span shrinks and I get very restless.  This is not conducive to being productive.  Today was better, because I’ve been forcing myself not to do much of anything except sitting, sleeping and eating.  Ugh.

I promised myself a long time ago that I wasn’t going to let this kind of thing get in my way.  I was diagnosed with arthritis when I was 2, and I did sports all through school.  I even went skiing once (the cold is not kind to me).  I have IBS, but I still eat the things I like, even when I know my guts might hate them.  

I could curl up in bed and let CFS be my reason – my excuse – for not doing anything at all, but I won’t.  I refuse.  If I let that happen, I wouldn’t be here right now – I would have stayed in the UK and never dared to pack two houses up and fly halfway around the world.  And I’m still convinced that this is a good move for me, that this is one of the best moves I’ve ever made in my life, for me.

So I choose to push on.  But last week proved that I’m not as resilient as I would like.  It’s been a long time since the CFS has been this bad – not for three or four years, I think.  I know it’s bad when I’m seriously considering calling in to work so that I can sleep (I never call in to work except when I’m really sick, unless it’s a job I hate, and I love this job).

I have taken a lot on this year – maybe too much, but I don’t want to shy away in case it’s not.  I’m not done trying this stuff yet.  I’m not done trying to figure out how to make it all work around the obstacles my body decides to place in my way.

Baby steps, I think.  Start slower.  Try to do the exercise every other day, instead of every day.  Bring my sleeping pattern forward before I get into it, rather than trying to do it all at once.  It’s so frustrating; I’d like to chew on the pace until it moves quicker, but all the will in the world won’t change my limits, I suppose.  Push them, maybe, but not change them.

Next week I’ll start again.  This week is for preparing and resting up.  It better damn well work this time, or I’m gonna have to go kick some ass.  I just wish I knew whose.

Holy Bats, Batman

There’s this huge awesome tree about 40m from our house, just outside our fence.  The local bats love it – they come swooping in through dusk and proceed to fight with each other in it.  They’re fantastic – the big ones are a good metre in wingspan, and against the dusk sky, they have those perfect scolloped wings.  A couple of nights ago, the moon was hiding behind the clouds – it was very atmospheric. :D 

Now I can see why a boy might look at them and think, “Fuck they’re scary, I’m gonna dress up like one of them and scare the crap out of criminals with guns.”  The family and I sit out on the deck and watch them fly around while we eat dinner.  So cool.

In other news, I am frazzled this week.  Started getting up early to do exercise before work again, and it’s beginning to get hard to write on the train after that.  Dammit!  Need to climb out of this energy hole I’m in.  Time to kick the CFS in the backside and do my own thing anyway.  Just have to keep pushing, I guess – I promised myself a while ago that I wasn’t going to let it run my life for me.

On the plus side, I almost have the next week’s AB posts written up.  I have to get them uploaded tonight, as today’s post is the last one I have scheduled so far.  I’m starting to feel like I’m rushing them – I’ll edit them over before I post them, but they seem rougher.  Not sure I’m happy with that.  I’m entering the less-plotted part of the story now; maybe that’s why.  (I have lots of stuff plotted, but it’s all more spread out now.  Gotta give Faith a chance to breathe before I drop too much more on her. ;) )

I need to decide what I’m doing with poor unconscious Nugget, too.  Killing her off just seems like cheating, and after everything that is happening at the moment, not going to have much of a kick.  I think there should be a kick if I’m gonna do that to the kid.  I’m sure something better (and possibly more evil) will come to mind before long.

I need to draw together a plan for the writing group meeting on Friday, too.  So many things buzzing around in my head right now!  I’ll feel so much better when I get that sorted out.

Yeah.  It is entirely possible that I have taken on too much at the moment.  When is it the weekend again?