nostalgebraist:

My seasonal depression has really kicked into gear in the last few weeks.

I find it nearly impossible to do creative work while depressed. That’s why I haven’t written any more of my novel since late November.

(Among other things, it disrupts my ability to look at my own ideas or drafts and ask myself “is this good? how good is it? how could it be improved?” If I’m depressed, this faculty is replaced with a broken machine that always says “no, this is worthless, don’t even try.”

Even if I know not to trust the broken machine, that still leaves me unable to perceive gradations of quality, and unable to tell which changes might improve the thing I’ve got in front of me.)

It’s very frustrating…

My mood is usually not too bad while the sun is up, but during the work week that time is all taken up by work, and then in the weekends there are often other constraints.

I am relatively free this weekend, so I’m going to give writing a try. Probably won’t finish a chapter, though. And there are a lot of chapters left … but “waiting around until one’s ‘productivity’ returns” is a great way to get absolutely nothing done, so I shouldn’t just do that.

An update:

I made this post in December. Since then I’ve only written two more chapters, both in January.

I’ve felt mildly depressed on and off for a large fraction of this calendar year. Spring has arrived, so it’s clearly not just the usual seasonal depression anymore.

It continues to make writing difficult.

(There are other factors too. I’ve also been unusually busy at work for some parts of this year, and I’ve had an unusual amount of physical illness, e.g. I had Covid for the first time.

I continue to work on Frank, but that’s different. Coding doesn’t make any emotional demands on me, the way writing does, and in fact it takes me away from my emotions in a way that’s very welcome, when my baseline emotional state isn’t good. It’s not a coincidence that I really started working hard on Frank in the middle of 2020, when Covid was new and no one knew where it was going to go.)

—-

I wrote around 1000 words of the next chapter, this past weekend.

I would have written more at the time, but I was suddenly struck by a feeling of,

“no, the light’s gone out, the magic is gone, I don’t care about this anymore; I don’t feel passionate about this story and these characters, or indeed about anything at all, right now; I could try to continue, but it’d be a mockery of what I was doing a moment ago, and – all else aside – the reader would be able to tell that something had changed, had gone wrong, in the words I might hypothetically write now.”

So I stopped. It was around 5 PM, when that happened. There was still plenty of time in the evening, but I couldn’t go on.

Those 1000 words are still there, of course, on my computer (and my cloud backup).

Maybe I’ll write another 1000 next weekend. Hopefully, a lot more than that. But maybe even less. The light goes on, unpredictably, and then it goes off again, unpredictably.

Based on past experience, it should come back on for good … eventually. I’ve been depressed on and off in the past, many times, but never for more than a few months at a time. I don’t know if I’ll still be able to say that in once this year is over, but we’ll see.

—-

It’s frustrating!

I’ve dragged on the writing of this book for an absurdly long time already, and it really is very close to done.

There are a lot more discrete things to get through, in the story – events, explanations, revelations. And there are a lot of distinct chapters that need to be written, just to space all those things out in a structural sense.

But in terms of the larger structure, all those things are a single big, dense cluster. This section of the story is meant to feel fast and explosive, not dragged-out and laborious – and hopefully it will feel that way on the page, for “archival readers.”

Ideally I’d be writing it in a fast-and-explosive way, too. (And not just for the benefit of “serial readers.” If you want to build story momentum, it helps to have writing momentum.) But I’m … working with the resources I have, here.

—-

And, as I always say: I really, really appreciate the readership that the story has gotten so far.

Sometimes I feel like this book is a merely a long, lonely, and endless conversation between me and myself. A single-player game whose only player is also its designer. Or a Henry Darger novel. Or … one of any number of other metaphors.

But every time I the story gets a new comment, or I get an ask related to it – it snaps me out of all that. And I really appreciate it. These days more than ever.