Putting Things in Boxes

For those who haven't been following my every movement (shame on you) I ran a website dedicated to miniature wargaming. It got very very popular and ran for many years, but the fickleness of the Google algorithm updates did a lot of damage to me and it eventually became more expensive to maintain--it stopped paying off.

Anyway, I've been playing miniature wargames since I was nine years old. My dad had stumbled on a copy of Wargames Illustrated and brought it home, and I was instantly hooked. The miniatures, the maps, the rules--I was in love. I have played and collected miniature wargames for decades, spending many thousands of dollars on this hobby.

But something happened when the website died (which happened about a year ago). I lost the love. I still get excited looking at minis, but I just don't care about it in the way that I used to.

I was afraid to abandon it because it's been not just a hobby but a part of my identity for most of my life. My bedroom has four floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that are filled with miniatures. And now they just seem oppressive. They're not interesting and they actively make me feel bad about myself because, well, it's like I've failed. And I don't mean failed with my website, but failed to be the megafan that I've always been.

I brought this up in therapy this week (I go to therapy and think everyone should go to therapy) and she asked why I didn't just box some of it up and put it in storage. And I had reason after reason, but eventually it came down to: do I want to give up on who I have been AND more importantly, does my wife want me to give up on something I have always been.

(This is not to say that I thought she loved miniature wargaming--she doesn't care about it at all. It's that I worried that I'd be disappointing her if I let my hobby go. Like, if she told me one day that she didn't want to be an artist anymore, I'd worry if something was wrong with her.)

So we talked about it. And, she was incredibly supportive of the idea, because she could tell that my heart's not in it right now. It may come back, but it's not there right now.

(She also expressed that she would love to have some of that bookshelf space in the bedroom.) :)

So the plan is that I'm going to (slowly) sort through all of my stuff and select the ones that are most important to me, and put all the rest in boxes.

For those in the know, I'm keeping all my Stormcast Eternals (from Warhammer) and plan to paint them. Everything else is going in a glass display shelf or a box.

I feel good about this. It feels like a good change. Writing has come back as a pastime, so it's okay to let something else go.

Creature Comforts, by Arcade Fire

There’s a song that’s been going through my head for a while now—I think it’s because I’m writing a book about teenage girls, but also because I’ve been thinking a lot about mental health generally.

The video for Arcade Fire's "Creature Comforts" shows the band--dressed in shimmering gold and silver, illuminated by spotlights and strobes--from the neck down. The style is synth-pop, synthesizers, electronica, and even a keytar. It sounds like dance music with a catchy melody and a strong bass line. It could be a song about anything—a peppy love song, a feel-good pop sensation.

It's about suicide, body shaming, cutting, depression, and self-hate. The video illustrates it, showing an overly-fantastical world where everything is light and flashing and glittering, as if to say "this is everything that you're supposed to be."

The repeated hook and chorus is:

Some girls hate their bodies,

Stand in the mirror and wait for the feedback.

Saying "God, make me famous.

If you can't, just make it painless"

It's a song about the harsh pressure put on girls (and boys) to be perfect, famous, and beautiful, and the lyrics are devastating:

Assisted suicide

She dreams about dying all the time

She told me she came so close

Filled up the bathtub and put on our first record

Saying "God, make me famous.

If you can't, just make it painless

Just make it painless."

The twist comes in the two-thirds through, where the singer replies to the girl in the mirror:

It's not painless

She was a friend of mine, a friend of mine

This isn't a trifling thing. Suicide isn't painless. The song continues with the refrain, finally ending with a short piece of simple advice:

It goes on and on, I don't know what I want

On and on, I don't know if I want it

On and on, I don't know what I want

On and on, I don't know if I want it...

Well if you're not sure, better safe than sorry

I find so much to love in this song, and so much to think about. I have depression and I've had suicidal ideation. I've self-harmed. But more than that, I think about my kids, and my teenagers, and the pressure that is put on them to look attractive and be popular.

(From a lyrical perspective, I think it's interesting that the word "painless", and the phrase "make it painless" are so immediately linked to suicide. The theme to M*A*S*H, after all, was "Suicide is Painless", but that show outdates the all the musicians in Arcade Fire, and most assuredly the majority of their listeners. But when we hear "make it painless", we know exactly what they're talking about. I find that interesting.)

Here’s the thing about the song that gets to me: I think it has to do with so much more than just teenagers. The older I get and the more I live on social media, the more I see people my age—and I’m in my mid forties—trying to look perfect for Instagram. I especially see this in the community of artists and authors I’m in: we all have to look like we have idyllic lives, because our lives are not just our lives—they’re our book advertisements. So we get dressed up for church every Sunday and we take a picture in front of the chapel in our fancy clothes, and we go on vacations to Mexico and show pictures of us eating delicious tacos (always with the caveat “I’m going to have to exercise so much to work this off but OMG tacos are my favorite!”). It just seems to be rampant and it bugs me so much.

And I’m not immune. I feel the pressure to conform to worldly body standards that everyone else does. I’m overweight, which I like to blame on the fact that so many of my meds have “side effect: may gain weight” on the label, but also… I don’t exercise like I should. And the fact is: I am 100% comfortable in my body. I don’t have body image issues for myself. But I do feel this unspoken “obesity is a moral failing” attitude surrounding me.

Of course, Creature Comforts also hits different because I have, in the past, dealt with both suicidal ideation (thankful not a lot, but enough to scare me) and self-harm (an awful lot for an awful lot of years).

Some girls hate themselves
Hide under the covers with sleeping pills and
Some girls cut themselves
Stand in the mirror and wait for the feedback

I don’t have an amazing conclusion to this except to repeat the words of the bridge: It’s not painless. There is so much pain surrounding self harm and suicide. And it’s not just the “It’s not painless—she was a friend of mine” type pain, because that’s telling people that they shouldn’t hurt themselves, because it causes pain to other people. It’s an important thing to note, but it’s not the primary reason that people should hurt themselves. Don’t not hurt yourself for me—don’t hurt yourself for you. It’s not painless, and it’s going to cause pain that you can’t imagine.

Not Just Good - It’s Great Depression

I talk about my depression a lot, but that’s because depression is really the main thing that I do these days. It eats up so much of my life that it is an ever-present entity that requires my time and obedience:

• When I wake up in the morning I know that I’ll feel good for a certain amount of time where my brain will function normally and so I MUST make good use of that time. Therefore, I cram as much into that time as I can, waking up as early as 4:00am to have more of it.

• When I go to the gas station every morning (this is a thing that was recommended by my therapist and no I will not be answering questions) I get my morning Diet Coke knowing that I need to time the consumption of that Coke efficiently and strictly so that it lasts until

• 3:00pm, when I go to the gas station a second time, marking the second half of the day, knowing that I need this round of Diet Coke to last me till bedtime. Because

• Then I get in bed. At like 3:10pm. And my new med routine is miraculously giving me back some productivity in these afternoon and evening hours, but that productivity is found in bed on a notebook or a laptop.

I don’t like that I am so beholden to the plague of depression, but it has me in its clutches and it is fierce. I tell ya, I have schizophrenia and I have hallucinated some scary stuff, but I will take hallucinations over depression any day. Depression is debilitating and awful.

And this is me talking at the PEAK of when depression is good! I’m currently doing better with depression than I have in the last three years.

Here’s the problem that we’ve been facing: my schizophrenia has been miraculously cured (effectively medicated) for the last five and a half years. And getting that medication balanced so perfectly as to remove all hallucinations and delusions COMPLETELY is so astoundingly unlikely that my psychiatrist has been loathe to change any of my medicines, even when my depression started getting bad.

So we turned to things like the Coke thing (which is all about establishing routines and timetables to motivate me through the day) and I’ve been in therapy for a long time getting all the brain help I can get.

But man, depression.

The current regimen changed the timing of one of my meds, splitting a large morning dose into a smaller morning and afternoon dose, with the theory that I was metabolizing it too quickly leading to my downturn in the evenings. The second change was to add a stimulant that I take both in the morning and at night, because if I can’t get non-depressed, at least I can have more energy.

And it’s bought me 2.5 - 3 hours more productivity in the day, which is AMAZING. I can’t complain, but sometimes I still do.

This is still early. I’ve only been doing this less than two months. But it’s a breath of fresh air.

Seriously, I can’t even remember what it would be like to have a normal brain.

Coming Out of Retirement

Astute readers will note that my last book came out in 2019 which was, like, a long time ago. Before that I was publishing (almost) yearly. So what have I been up to?

Well, I’ve been calling it semi-retirement. I got a fulltime job after six years of writing fulltime because as much as I loved the freedom of calling myself a real honest-to-goodness successful author, I also never had the financial stability I wanted. And I honestly will trade annual publishing in exchange for a steady paycheck and health insurance any day of the week.

The problem is that the fulltime job is also as a writer—just as a different kind of writer. I work for an internet marketing company and I write content for other companies’ websites and emails. It’s not exciting (my personal specialty is in roofing and plastic surgery), but it pays the bills in a way that writing books never did. (ie: reliably.) Anyway, the problem is that when I’m writing all day for the day job, I don’t have a ton of creative stamina to write after hours for books. So I haven’t been writing.

Add to this the fact that I am mentally ill and that I have been suffering for the past three years from terrific depression. (To be clear, I’ve been suffering for the last fifteen years from depression, but the last three years have been debilitating.)

BUT: about five weeks ago (end of July 2024) my psychiatrist made a change to my meds that has done the following:

• Bought me three more hours of productivity in the day. Previously the depression essentially put me in bed at 3pm every day. It still does put me in bed, but I’ve found I have the willpower to gut through the depression and work three more hours on my laptop or in a notebook.

• Made me not sad all the time. Which, you know, is great.

ALL OF THIS TO SAY:

I’m kinda working on a book???

It’s still in the early stages, but I’m really loving the process of creative writing again. I am completely out of the loop on the market, so trying to step back in and pick up where I left off is daunting. The YA market is not what it was when I left it.

For starters, I write science fiction, not fantasy, and YA sci-fi just doesn’t sell like it used to. My whole career was built on the shoulders of The Hunger Games—my books were often called dystopian even though they weren’t really dystopian. I always referred to them as modern day young adult with a science fiction twist: you know, androids and bioweapons.

The book that I work on doesn’t fit this mold exactly, but it certainly isn’t middle grade fantasy, which seems to be all the rage.

My current project, temporarily titled “Failure to Thrive”, takes place 100 (or so) years in the future. There is an international science fair kind of thing called the Junior Genius Grant, and the book starts with Maeve, our main character, and her team landing a top spot and winning a trip for an internship on a Mars colony. But when they get there, things start to go very wrong.

Will it be published? I have no idea. But I’m writing again and it feels good. I’m 28k words into it and haven’t gotten nearly far enough in the story. This thing is going to be long (for a YA), or, in other words, it’s going to need a ton of revisions. But that’s okay. I like revisions.

Anyway, it’s good to be writing again. And, if all goes well, this book will eventually make it into your hands.