Category Archives: Anxiety

Goose Island State Park

23 Thursday Feb 2017

Posted by in Anxiety, Campground, Personal, Travel

≈ 6 Comments

sunrise on Goose Island

Not a goose, but a pelican. And that tiny little sliver of white in the sky above its head is a crescent moon.

Very, very erratic internet here. I’m using my phone as a hotspot and even that is not so solid. So this may be a short post when my frustration level gets too high.

I’m at Goose Island State Park. It’s an interesting exercise in appreciation. I’m on the bayside loop and I have a beautiful view of water and boats outside my front window–but there’s a road and another line of campers between me and the water. If I had one of the sites on the other side of the road, there would be nothing in front of me but water.

Would anything in my life be different? Nope, I would still be camped in a beautiful place on a gorgeous day with dogs that I adore in a comfy little van… and yet I feel vaguely dissatisfied, wishing I was on the other side of the road.

I’ve been feeling very unsettled in general. Which is, of course, a perfect word, because although I mean it as a synonym for something like uncertain, I am literally not settled. Constant motion, constant change. It’s unsettling. My neighbor here has been on the road for four years and she used the word “rootless”–it’s a good word, too.

But I leave here tomorrow with no destination in mind, no campsite reserved. I may wind up spending the night in a Walmart parking lot, which will be good for me. It will remind me to appreciate campsites with water views, even when they have road views, too.

Here Be Alligators

14 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by in Anxiety, Personal, Pets, Randomness, Serenity

≈ 4 Comments

The signs actually say, “Warning: Alligators may be present.” The signs below those, smaller, say, “Watch out for snakes!”

It’s astonishing how threatening I find them. Really, they don’t say, “Alligators, sure thing, your dogs are going to get EATEN! And by the way, the snakes are poisonous and deadly.” But I seem to read them that way. As a result, despite being camped right next to a lovely river, I haven’t done any kayaking and my walks through the nature trails tend to be hasty and paranoid.

Florida does have a lot of snakes, but they really aren’t interested in eating people. The most deadly was going to feature in A Gift of Grace, a coral snake. Mostly because we stopped making coral snake antivenin a few years back, because it was too expensive, and that seemed like such a statement about modern society. Bit by a coral snake? Tough luck. We could have saved you ten years ago, when we cared more about people than money, but those years are gone. Not that doctors won’t try, but the antivenin they have available is both expired and so scarce that they try to save it until they’re sure you’re dying, not just paralyzed and struggling to breathe.

Also, coral snakes are a very pretty snake. I saw one in my backyard a couple of years ago — several inches away from my bare foot — and stood frozen, watching it slither away, while my brain said, “red on yellow, red on yellow, red on yellow, pretty sure that’s bad, bad, bad. But there can’t possibly be a deadly snake in my backyard. Can there?” Once it was gone, I went inside and looked it up and yep, red on yellow = deadly. That’s how I found out about the antivenin. The experience would have made for a fun touch of realism in the book — I’m pretty sure I was holding my breath the entire time I watched that pretty little snake and I know my heart was pounding so loudly I could hear it in my ears, that sort of throbbing you can get in your head when your heart is working too hard.

But I finally gave up on the coral snake. For whatever reason, it never worked quite right. Maybe some future book.

Meanwhile, in this book, everything I’ve written for the past several days has turned out nihilistic and bleak. Grace would turn into a tragedy if I let it. So I’m going to delete everything from last week and try, try again. Someday I really will finish this book. It won’t, however, be this week. Drat.

 

Re-designing everything

10 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by in Anxiety, House, Personal, Randomness

≈ 3 Comments

I realized this morning that I’ve been on a redesign binge. I think it started with the pantry, but I suspect I should be blaming it on the insurance company.

So ten days ago, I decided the pantry needed to be cleaned out and re-organized. I threw away a bunch of expired food, gave away a bunch more that I will never eat (products containing gluten), shifted the shelves around so that the stuff we need is in the middle, moved a bunch of appliance-type items into the garage, and wound up after a couple of hours work with a very user-friendly and half-empty pantry. It’s nice.

A few days after that, I decided to attack the spice cupboard. I took everything out, sorted through what we have and don’t have, put a couple of items on a grocery list, and arranged the rest according to categories. All the pepper-based products (red pepper flakes, chili powder, paprika, tabasco, sriracha, Marie Sharp’s, etc., etc.,) are in one group, all the green herbs in another, all the seasoned salts and spice mixes in a third. Frankly, it mostly made me want some really good spice racks or lazy Susans, but for a brief moment in time, it was organized.

Then I did my bathroom. The tea cupboard. The baking cupboard. Finally, I realized that I’m currently waiting on news from my insurance company about whether they agree with the damage control people that I should have all new cupboards and perhaps it’s not really the best time to be re-organizing all of them? Just guessing.

So my attention went bookward. This weekend, I went a little crazy. I went for a new cover on A Lonely Magic. I think I can’t talk about that too much right now, because my anxiety level will skyrocket, but it was an impulse purchase that goes with an expensive secondary impulse purchase and… yeah, anxiety rising. But re-design. And then on Monday, for whatever insane reason, I decided I needed to re-format all my books. I spent the whole day working on it, trying to make them as beautiful as some of the books Amazon is turning out. I didn’t entirely succeed, but I made some improvements and will be re-posting files eventually.

This morning I decided it was time for a website re-design. I opened the dashboard and started to consider my options–and finally, finally, I reigned myself in and said, “What’s going on here? Does everything need to be different?”

As soon as I started to think about it, I realized that all this change is really just a reaction to being in a holding pattern with house changes. I am going to need new floors. But I liked my old floors. I am going to need new cabinets. But I liked my old cabinets!

But my subconscious is busily working away, trying to get my conscious to reconcile itself to change sometimes being positive. Change can be good. My new floors might be as nice as the old ones. My new cabinets might be a lot nicer.

And my new web design–well, I’m going to try to come up with a fancy front page, maybe one of those slider carousels, showing off the books?–and move the blog to a less prominent area. Not hidden, but tucked away so that people who come here merely wanting to know if I have another book on the way don’t need to read about my dogs & other miscellany. Because change is okay. And unlike house disasters, I can always revert it if I don’t like it.

I should probably call the insurance company, too, and find out what’s going on with my claim. It’s time to bite the bullet and figure out how to get my new floors.

Being a publisher

30 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by in Anxiety, Self-publishing

≈ 14 Comments

I worked in publishing for a long time. Over ten years as an acquisitions editor. That was one of the reasons I was skeptical about trying to write “professionally”–in other words, trying to earn my living with my writing. I know how ridiculously hard it is, I know how few people manage to do so. But hey, I decided to try anyway, and even decided to make it formal, create a publishing company, etc. I decided to treat the job professionally, practically.

Yesterday, with my publisher hat on, I tried to talk myself out of writing A Precarious Balance. Not just now, but ever.

If I was a good publisher, I’d look at the numbers–29 copies of A Lonely Magic sold in the month of August, worse than any of the Tassamara books have ever done, including when I had no audience at all–and I’d make the kind of phone call that makes my stomach twist with anxiety for hours ahead of time.

“So sorry,” I’d tell the author. “We loved the book, really we did. But the numbers just aren’t there. We’ll keep trying. We’ll push it, see if we can squeeze it into a promotion or two, but we need to put #2 on hold. Indefinitely.” I’d mourn with the author, especially for a book I loved so much, and I’d feel guilty and torn by indecision–where had I made the wrong choices, how had I screwed up, why hadn’t my passion gotten through to the sales reps? But I’d bite the bullet and do it anyway, because publishing is a business and investing in books that don’t make money is a fast way to layoffs & cost-cutting & midnight stress.

I suspect that this is why at some point in my publishing journey, I’m going to wind up working at McDonald’s. Not because the book isn’t selling. That’s sad, but all I have to do is think about how much fun it was to write and I can shrug my shoulders and let go of that. But because I’m not capable of choosing my writing projects based on whether or not they’re good business decisions. When the practical publisher and the impractical author collide, the impractical author is winning every time. My anxious side really hates that, but my author side goes on strike every time I try to do it differently.

Today, the impractical author side is going to take a weekend day, and say good-bye to summer by hanging out with my niece, with swimming and maybe grilling and probably a lot of Doctor Who. And on Monday–or maybe Tuesday–the publisher side can start worrying again.

Happy Monday

21 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by in A Lonely Magic, Anxiety, Personal

≈ 2 Comments

I was walking the dogs this morning–on a rather beautiful, slightly cool, very green April day–when I realized that my mind was telling me stories again, specifically a conversation between Fen and Javier which is going to make Ch25 so much better. Yay!

For the past few weeks, my brain has been caught on a hamster wheel of college plotting and planning and financial calculations and frustration. In the daydream-y moments when I’m usually lost in my story-world, I’ve been stuck in a not very pleasant set of realities. Most days I still worked on the book, but it’s been slow and painful, the words dragging and dull. Yesterday, though, we paid the deposit for New College of Florida and filled out the financial aid paperwork and stuck the forms in the mail, and now my brain appears to have jumped off that unpleasant hamster wheel and moved back to Syl Var. Whee!

This week, I’m going to finish the revisions, one way or another. Next Monday, the book goes off to the editor. Next Tuesday, I start writing the next one. This month has been a rough spell, but that thought makes me happy!

Existential dread

24 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Anxiety, Personal, Trill, Zelda

≈ 3 Comments

I’m having a strange month.

The details don’t feel like my story to tell, but my stepmother is on the health roller-coaster, the one that goes slowly up and then much too quickly down, down, down. She’s been sick since we were in Belize and now she’s in intensive care again, or she was yesterday.

As a result, Gizmo is living with me. That’s been 90% pure pleasure. He’s a nitwit, but so sweet. The 10% is that as I have been falling more in love with him, Zelda has been getting a little more suspicious, a little more inclined to shove him out of the way and glare. He’s completely tolerant, he lets her be the boss, but I feel sad for her. Jealousy isn’t pleasant, even for dogs. I’ve been making sure she knows she’s first dog, but Gizmo does need to get brushed and loved, too, and she just has to put up with it.

Requisite cute dog photo:

two dogs

Zelda and Gizmo

One of the positives of having Gizmo is that he’s helped me stop missing Trill quite so much. Ironically, given how often she bit me, her loss has been the hardest pet loss I’ve ever experienced. My childhood dog would have been first, but when we lost him, I’d been gone from home for five years. I sobbed for hours, but he wasn’t a fixture in my day-to-day life, and two days later, it was a sadness, not an emptiness. Trill left an emptiness. A silence. It’s been almost a month and I still miss her every morning. (That’s an improvement, though, over the first week, where I cried every day and felt ridiculous almost every time. She was a bird. A grouchy bird! But she had such a big personality. Ugh, I probably have to go cry again.)

Moving on… worrying about C — and in relation, worrying about my dad, who seems older every time I see him, more tired every time I speak with him — plus all of last week’s horribleness, has got me hovering in a state of existential dread. I want to feel like the world has good things in it, positive outcomes, happiness. Instead, I’ve got that sense of generalized anxiety that grinds away in the back of my head, reminding me constantly that life is fragile, the world dangerous. I’m not enjoying it.

Anyway, I’m not going to go on and on about that, because I don’t particularly want to be reminded of it two or three years from now or whenever I re-read this post, but it’s all a long-winded explanation for this picture:

a big bird

A bird on our morning walk

Seeing birds like this, views like this, when I’m just out walking the dogs, reminds me to be mindful of the magic around me. It’s a reminder I really need at the moment, so I’m going to be trying to post pictures of my morning walk for a while. Probably not a long while, because I’m not that organized, but expect to see some flowers and birds for the next few days.

Motivations

18 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by in A Gift of Time, Anxiety

≈ 2 Comments

The dog is watching me pack. Every time I stop moving, she tries to climb into my lap. She has an opinion about what is happening, and it is very low. Her worried look would be charming if it wasn’t so very worried.

In un-related frustration, writing about a character who knows the future in the same book as a character who has various angelic abilities is somewhat maddening. I’m halfway through and continually stumped by the “well, wouldn’t she know that?” and the “couldn’t she handle that?” type questions. But I’m bringing my iPad keyboard with me because even at my current rate of eking out a few sentences at a time, I really love Nat and I don’t want to leave her behind for ten whole days.

Akira is cautious. Sylvie is a planner. But Natalya is orderly. And having her order messed up is stressing her out. In the sense that all the characters I write are really just parts of me, I’m pretty clearly working out my anxiety issues on paper. (Um, pixels.) But that said, there’s something about what’s happening with Natalya right now — in my head, anyway, if not quite in the pixels yet — that is just plain fun. A long time ago, I had a bumper sticker on my car, selected by R, that read “Not another learning experience!” Nat is having learning experiences and she doesn’t like it. But they’re good for her and she’ll wind up better off in the long run, so it’s okay, and meanwhile, I get to feel both sympathetic and amused.

I’ve already planned out Grace’s story (more or less) so I know it’s not going to have anything to do with anxiety. Grace is not the anxious-type. But eventually I’m going to give an HEA to a character who has full-fledged panic attacks. Maybe I’ll write…oh, no, I won’t. I was going to say that I’d write the first agoraphobic romance, but I’ve actually seen one before. It’s erotica, and I haven’t read it, but for fellow agoraphobes, Escorted, by Claire Kent features an agoraphobic hero. (I think, anyway.)

Moving on, back to the packing. Or maybe back to eking out another sentence or two. It would be convenient for me to be able to post my latest chapter to fictionpress tonight, so that it’s easily accessible from my iPad tomorrow. Hmm, good motivation.

Waiting for Disaster

12 Friday Sep 2008

Posted by in Anxiety, Personal

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This week contained the most invisible 9/11 of the past seven years. It seemed to slip by without mention. Where were the moments of silence? The memorial services? Despite never having worn a ribbon for a cause in my life, I think I want a 9/11 ribbon, something to demonstrate visually that on that one day a year, we still remember and we still mourn. Even if the things we mourn are a lot more complicated than they were seven years ago.

Maybe because it’s that week and memories of disaster linger, I’m feeling really anxious about Ike. I keep flipping on the television for brief moments and then walking away from the nothing that is the news. Just a few minutes ago, I watched a clip on CNN and in the background, a woman in yellow was posing flirtatiously on the beach. I wanted the CNN reporter to run across and get her name, so that we’d know if she was on the list of the dead later. But even the thought seemed overly paranoid. Still, hanging out in Galveston right now seems like a really stupid choice.

My anxiety, of course, is translating into food. There’s a bowl of bread dough rising on the counter, and the house already smells of the beef stew I started an hour ago.

Dyslexia

22 Wednesday Mar 2006

Posted by in Anxiety, Personal

≈ Comments Off on Dyslexia

The blandest looking blog on the Web

Without formatting, this blog is going to be the blandest thing ever. I want bold. I want italic. I want color, dang it. But I’m attached to Safari. I’ve got so many bookmarks and they are organized just the way I want them.

So Friday is a school conference day: come 1:30 I will get to hear my kiddo and his teacher talk about the year so far and I am surprisingly anxious about it. My sense is that he’s doing really well. I would say that he is making enormous strides, compared to what my expectations were. I feel like that sets the bar too high, though, and I should be prepared for worse news!!

In the beginning of the year, his resource teacher said that sometimes kids were just not developmentally ready to read at the same time as everyone else. Two years ago, I would have totally agreed. Since then I have been so convinced about the verdict of processing disorder/dyslexia that it was almost hard for me to hear that, but now…well, he’s really making progress.

There’s a part of me that wants to believe that he’s not dyslexic at all.

On the other hand, there is a speech dysfluency that goes along with the diagnosis–these delays that I hear in his speech when he’s trying to retrieve information, even simple information. It’s not a stutter; it’s a slowness. He speaks much less fluidly (albeit with an enormous vocabulary) then do other kids his age. And that’s the processing disorder. That’s the information being filed in the right side of his brain, and so taking longer to retrieve. That thing is the same thing that has made reading so challenging.

I think maybe it’s natural to waver, to wonder whether it’s real, to think maybe, maybe…The idea that he just needed to do it in his own time is so appealing. But I don’t really think that’s true. Reading came so easily to me, so hard to him. Even if there was something developmental there, I do believe he’s dyslexic, and that he always will be. I’m also beginning to believe, though, that he’s going to be able to read someday. Really read, not just painfully piece together the words.