Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Long overdue update which is actually kind of a good exciting sort of thing

Hi again...

I've basically been trying to rebuild both my writing career (if you want to call it that) and my mental health from the ground up over the last several months. I've managed to be at least a bit more active on social media and I am in fact writing a lot of things, but I have been shamefully neglectful of this blog, and I apologize for that.

I've mentioned this in places before, but in March of this year, I was diagnosed with PTSD, on top of my previous diagnoses of persistent depressive disorder and social anxiety. The details are a story that I'm nowhere near ready to tell yet, so all I'll say is that PTSD is just...the worst. The fucking worst. I would wish death on my enemies before I wished PTSD on them.

So anyway. In the course of all this rebuilding, I've thought a lot about what I want to write and how I want to handle writing going forward. I've thought about what exactly I want to write, and how I want to publish the things I do write. I have a pretty good handle on some of the stuff I want to do, but other things I'm still figuring out.

To put it shortly, I have come to the realization that I was trying really hard to force myself into a small, marketable box. I thought that "real" writers only wrote one kind of thing, like novelists only wrote novels and poets only wrote poetry, and if I didn't pick one thing and stick to it I would never get anywhere. Honestly, I can still kind of see the case for that on some level, although I no longer think it's that simple.

But here's the thing. I love to write. I have to write. I can't NOT write. And so, that's what I'm going to do. I don't want to be hung up on how many views I have, or how do I get big, or how do I be more visible. I just want to create things and put them out there. And that's what I'm going to do. I'm writing what I want to write. Poems, visual novels, essays, text-based games...There's a ton of different stuff that I want to do and I need to stop telling myself that I can't, because I don't think there's a good reason why I can't.

So what does this mean for Some Strange Circus? A couple of things. My website has been undergoing edits for a while, but is currently in a mostly stable state, although there are still some squirrelly bits. (Like the fact that there's a place where an Etsy shop that I haven't actually opened yet should be linked...Ahem.) I've also redone my Patreon page with new and less expensive reward tiers, so check that out if you're interested! (It too is still a tiny bit squirrelly in places.)

I'm currently trying to buckle down on finally finishing Yumi-chan's Wonderful Cake Shop, and also writing a bunch of other things. Mostly poetry, but there is this one other thing...

https://themighty.com/2017/05/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd-doubt/

I will now be writing articles for The Mighty! To be honest, I still feel really, REALLY awkward about having an article published on any website at all. But excited too. The articles that I write for them will mostly be about my personal struggles with mental illness, so they probably won't be happy reads, but I hope that they can help someone understand what going through this is like. This one in particular talks a bit about my PTSD diagnosis and what having it is actually like. I get that it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but if you would like to read it, then by all means go ahead.

https://themighty.com/2017/05/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd-doubt/

(I had to link it just one more time.)

I actually intended this to be a short update, but I seem to have rambled on for quite a while, so I'm going to go ahead and go. Thanks to everyone for your support thus far, and thanks especially to Naomi Norbez, who has been unbelievably supportive for far longer than I deserve. There are good days and bad days, but this actually ended up becoming a good day, and I'm going to go enjoy the rest of it.

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