Journal

Eleven days ago I noticed something weird – I hit the end of the two hours I’d set aside for writing and I was a good 400 words short of the word-count I expected. Not a huge deal, all things considered, but I’d been writing at a pretty regular speed ever since I went back to typing manuscripts.

I shrugged. It was just a weird thing, and a little surprising after being so regular in my productivity, but I hadn’t been sleeping well and I was feeling a little uneven that week.

Ten days ago, I kicked off a mild depressive episode. My first since going on antidepressants back in August. First my sleep patterns went to shit, and then I found myself wanting to shout at strangers for the cardinal sin of sitting at the table next to mine at a cafe, and the next thing I knew I’d spent thirteen hours glued to the couch spamming my self-loathing’s greatest hits over and over and over.

The echoes of that are still bouncing around my skull. I could hum you a few bars of I’m worthless; I should not want; I should just lie here until I decay without missing a beat. I keep having days where the task of maintaining a reasonable facade to present to the world is moderately tiring, and it’s harder to hold my shit together and write, or go hang out with friends, or go to work and produce blog posts.

A few times over the last ten days, my life narrowed down to do I absolutely need to do this? No? Then fuck it, I’m staying right here.

And it occurs to me how familiar this is. For years, this was the pattern – establish good work habits, get shit done, then suddenly…self-implosion. A complete inability to concentrate, whole days or weeks lost to procrastination, not really sure why I was staying in bed, doing nothing, or disappearing into a computer game I actually hated playing.

Weeks of anger and confusion and fits of self-loathing, berating myself for the weakness of not maintaining a system that worked. How dare you want to write, I’d think, if this is the best you can do. 

And for the first time, I get it: depression fucks with you. It fucks with your ability to get shit done.

Which, you know, is a thing that I knew and told friends who had depression over and over in the past, but not a thing I’d ever had any luck applying to my own situation until now.

I’ve grown complacent about travelling in recent years. I went from doing very little of it, to doing a whole lot, and somewhere along the line I stopped fretting about the logistics of getting places and packing things.

I paid for that, over the weekend. Three nights in Melbourne with antidepressants and a power chord for the CPAP machine meant I was feeling particularly blunted by the end of the trip. I yawned a lot. I got light-headed in the afternoons, just like I did before the apnea was treated. I had headaches and wasn’t quite so in-charge of my emotional state as I’ve grown used to in recent weeks.

Now I am home and medicated and catching up on sleep. Still blunt, but getting sharper, and vowing not to leave things behind again.

I went to see Nerve last night, and it was terrible, but exactly the right kind of terrible for my mood and mental state. If you’re okay with cheese, teen melodrama, and a plot that takes common sense out back and shoots it, Nerve is not a bad C-grade movie to pass an idle hour or so. The script is bad, the depiction of the internet makes 1995’s Hackers look state of the art, and the leads are charismatic enough that you almost don’t mind too much.

A photo posted by Peter M Ball (@petermball) on Sep 12, 2016 at 12:21am PDT

Towards the end of 2015 I sat down and wrote up a list of my current obsessions, which tend to inform my creative work and the types of things I end up blogging about here. By their very nature, obsessions are a short-term thing: they may stem from long-term interests, but I tend to follow them down the rabbit hole while answering a particular kind of issue or momentary curiosity, and then they get replaced by what comes next.

It’s been a while since that post was done, and a hell of a lot has changed in my life, so I figured it was worth revisiting. Here is a list of the current obsessions that are dominating my reading and thinking, and will inevitably lead into the blogging.

ONE: THE WORK HABITS OF ARTISTS AND CREATIVES

This is one of those recurring obsessions that comes up every week or so, and it’s been stoked by a weekend in Melbourne where I got to sit down and talk to a bunch of different people about what they’ve been up to. But I’m in one of those phases where my life is in transition, and I’m able to throw a lot more focus on creative work than I have in recent years, and so I find myself diving into artist biographies and posts about daily habits and productivity/time management books that have a particularly creative bent.

TWO: THE PERSONAL ESSAY

I have a weakness for a good essay. Not the dry, academic type they get you to write in university, but the living, breathing form where people really sit down and attempt to assay, in the original meaning of the work, testing and appraising a thought or idea. I’ve read a bunch of great essay collections in the last few months, and it’s stoked my desire to sit down and figure out how to write them for myself.

THREE: CINEMA

I don’t know how it happened, exactly, but I’ve gone back to being someone who goes out and watches movies in the cinema. I’ve really been enjoying the ritual of it, along with the chance to catch up with friends, but there is something terrific about the focus of sitting down in front of a screen without the distraction of home or mobile phone.

Naturally, an increase in the time spent going to the movies is resulting in a whole bunch of time spent thinking about film and how it’s constructed.

FOUR: LONG TERM COLONISATION OF SPACE

I’m not a hard SF guy. In fact, I am the furthest thing from a hard SF guy as you’re going to get, perfectly willing to handwave things like “how are we colonizing space?” whenever space-based narratives appear. But I got it into my head to start looking at the impact long-term space habitation has on the human body a few months back, and it was interesting enough that I kept digging around at things to look at the practicalities of living in space so I can at least hand-wave the interesting bits when I write about it.

FIVE: THE IMPACT WRITING IN A SERIES HAS ON NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

This came up a few months ago, when I was providing feedback about a friend’s second novel, and gradually turned into a thing I was obsessed about to the point where I pitched it as a PhD topic. There is something inherently curious about series narrative these days, given that it’s much harder to sell the audience on an iconic protagonist who doesn’t have a narrative arc, and it’s getting increasingly bizarre to think about now that Netflix is doing some really interesting stuff in the television narrative space.

Expect blogs about this, going into 2016. Lots and lots of blogs.

SIX: DEPRESSION AND ART

I thought I’d learned a bunch of stuff about depression and mental illness, over the last decade. Turns out, not so much, and certainly not the stuff that’s interesting after someone sits you down and points out that you’re exhibiting a bunch of depression warning signs and it’s probably time to do something about that.

I was never particularly paranoid about antidepressants affecting my writing practice, but I was sufficiently interested in the kinds of changes they wrought to start looking into other people’s experiences.

SEVEN: WRITING, ART, AND BUSINESS

This one’s a constant, if you look back at November’s post.

Hell, it’s a constant if you go back to the earliest days of this blog.

That said, it’s a little more focused now that I no longer work at QWC. I spend a lot less time trying to understand this in a general sense, and a lot more time specifically looking at the things I want to apply in my own practice.

EIGHT: BLOGGING

I haven’t really thought about the blog as its own product in the last couple of years, largely because it wasn’t particularly central to what I was doing in the old day job. But the moment the new one started to demand a more focused approach to producing content, complete with schedules and deadlines and long-term plans, I started refreshing my memory on a bunch of old-and-rusty skills and gradually found myself applying them here on Man vs. Bear as well. I spend a lot more time thinking about how I blog, and why, than I did twelve months back, and while I always put some thought into it, it’s basically been upgraded to a low-key obsessions right now.

NINE: NARRATIVE MICROSTRUCTURE

I’ve spent the last few years indulging some hardcore obsessions with the big, over-arching structures of narrative. Recently, I’ve started spending a lot more time studying the micro-structure – refining my idea of how scenes work, or how to develop narrative beats within a scene, and started pulling apart works that do this particularly well. There’s a level of control that some writers have over their work that I really envy, and it’s often when they’re doing this sort of thing exceptionally well, so it’s something I really want to get better at.

Well, that’s me. How about you? What are the current obsessions guiding your practice? What curiosities are you indulging in your spare time? Come and geek out with me in the comments.