Wary Writer, What Are You *Doing*?

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Absolutely NOTHING! Letting my first draft simmer, sporadic editing and blog posts, reading and taking pictures. Gah! I think I’m in some sort of funk- I cannot for the life of me get into produce mode. The problem is I am a “yes” woman- I say yes to EVERYBODY.

“Can you take a look at my MS and leave a review on Goodreads?”

“Yes!”

“Can you take a look at this story I wrote? I really would like your opinion!”

“Yes!”

“Could you run through this novel I wrote because I am having an issue with xyz.”

“Sure.”

“When can we collaborate?”

“Um…Maybe soon.”

“Read my novel and leave a review!”

“Yeah. Wait….Gah!”

And you get it. So far with networking and, well, my LIFE, I have 48 things to do on my task list and counting. 48! I don’t want to piss people off, or be mean. I do these things because I generally care about writers, writing, reading, and the writing community to the detriment of my reputation. I don’t get beta reads finished, I lax off on obligations because I have so much to do. I end up spending copious amounts of time doing anything but what I’ve obliged to do and it sucksssss.

I wonder if I am the only one who does this. Trying to help my cause by agreeing to the 50 or so things people ask of me and in the end, making enemies. Do any of you other writers do this too? Any remedies?

 

Something’s Gotta Give- Not Excited About the Blog Anymore, So!

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Ever since I tried blogging about the content of my book I have found it increasingly difficult to come here and blog about mental illness. I am not really thrilled about mental illness- who is? It sucks. Sucks terribly for anyone who suffers from it and the people who love the person who suffers from it. I don’t feel like coming here and blogging about it 24/7. I know it is necessary to do, but I don’t feel like it needs to be the sole purpose of this blog- I am not excited about coming here and as you’ve seen, posts have dropped off significantly.

I am sick of “experts” telling me how to blog, what to blog about. While some information is helpful, if your heart’s not in it, what good is it doing your blog? Your sales? Not much good, that’s for sure.

So this blog will split content- writing, writing process, the WIP and mental illness as a side piece. Not sure how to deliver this type of content and I am a relatively new blogger who is testing the waters, trying to see what works and what doesn’t. Being a solely mental health blog is not helping anything. Not my sanity, not my traffic, nada.

This post is just a short one but it means a lot to me because I dreaded coming here every weekend to write posts, so I never did. Now, I’m back. Did ya miss me? I missed me. We should all miss me. :-)

 

Histrionics and Borderlines, a Recipe for Total #FAIL

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So why do I say that? I have experience dealing with both Borderlines and Histrionics. I don’t want to divulge too many details as that would give away too much of the plot of the novel, but what I will say is that both Histrionic and Borderline Personality Disorders can overlap because of how similar they are.

How similar, you ask? Well, symptoms of Histrionic Personality Disorder are:

  • Be uncomfortable unless he or she is the center of attention
  • Dress provocatively and/or exhibit inappropriately seductive or flirtatious behavior
  • Shift emotions rapidly
  • Act very dramatically as though performing before an audience with exaggerated emotions and expressions, yet appears to lack sincerity
  • Be overly concerned with physical appearance
  • Constantly seek reassurance or approval
  • Be gullible and easily influenced by others
  • Be excessively sensitive to criticism or disapproval
  • Have a low tolerance for frustration and be easily bored by routine, often beginning projects without finishing them or skipping from one event to another
  • Not think before acting
  • Make rash decisions
  • Be self-centered and rarely show concern for others
  • Have difficulty maintaining relationships, often seeming fake or shallow in their dealings with others
  • Threaten or attempt suicide to get attention

Well, if that doesn’t look eerily similar to BPD then what does? The whole spectrum of personality disorders can overlap and seem muddied from time to time. The protagonist of my novel could suffer from Avoidant Personality Disorder (more on this another day) or Dependent Personality Disorder easily. But she doesn’t. She’s Borderline.

Her enemy, the other main character, is Histrionic and Borderline. When they first meet, it is a sport of exerting wills on one another. But as they soften, they become entangled in one another and one another’s experiences in the most unhealthy ways. This is a recipe for what seems to be a lifetime of #FAIL for both, though one of the characters tries to supersede the trauma that such entanglement makes.

There is a third character who suffers from Avoidant Personality Disorder, who is the pinnicle of grounding for the protagonist. It is a he, and he is also in this tangled web of misery and hijinks, to the detriment of all three.

So what compelled me to write these troubled characters? I knew them. I knew all three very well, lived with them, cried with them, picked up the pieces of each one, ultimately failing and moving on. It is me moving through a turbulent period of my life, laying it out on the page like a roadmap to the past so that I may find comfort, peace, and answers where there ultimately aren’t any. But hey, there’s no harm in trying?

The differences between my life and this story are many and one key to difference is the ending. Some writers punish what they don’t understand, people who have harmed them in some ways and when I wrote the original short story to this novel, I punished plenty. But working in a notebook, I laid threadbare everything I felt and as I decided to write the thing, I found I actually loved these people, despite the pain they caused and am trying to paint them with as deft a hand as any writer to confess a trauma in either fiction or non-fiction.

People who suffer from these disorders cannot help how they feel, that is, until they learn how to think their way out of initial discomfort and past the intense emotions their automatic thoughts bring. An automatic thought? I can see your wheels turning. “Aren’t all thoughts automatic?” Kind of. But these thoughts that are thought by the sufferer of these illnesses are not recognized. Sort of a like a thought switches a feeling and the person doesn’t even know what the thought that triggered the anger, depression, suicidality was. It takes a ton of practice through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Mindfulness therapies to recognize the thought behind the feeling.

Often times, though, BPDs and Histrionics leave therapy. BPDs don’t trust easily and Histrionics don’t believe they need therapy at all. With BPD there can be a history of lurid and intense attachments to therpaists which make a consumer/therapist relationship hard for both parties. The Borderline becomes frustrated and hurt that their needs aren’t being met by the therapist and leave. Histrionics, on the other hand, will enter therapy only to quit after a period, believing whole heartedly that nothing is wrong.

This isn’t true of all that suffer, I just want to point that out. But it is true of a lot that suffer.

Do you know someone who suffers? Do you suffer from either one of these disorders? Leave a comment in the comments section. I’d love to hear from you.

 

Review: The Bluest Eye

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The Bluest Eye
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don’t give a lot of five stars. But this one deserved it, if only for the poetic flow of her prose, the imagery. I fell madly in love with the metaphors- the blue eyes for a universal beauty that the ugly black girl Pecola Breedlove could never have, clean/white things for white people, beauty. In one passage she writes the character Claudia been cleaned, scrubbing “the ink” (blackness) off of her. There were other metaphors as well but these are the ones that stood out.

We don’t get to see much of the sisters, Claudia and Freida who befriend the subject of the story, Pecola Breedlove, the girl who felt so unnoticed and ugly that she wanted Blue eyes. Pecola comes from a poor, broken home, where her dad and mom physically fight each other in one turn and make love the next. Kids pick on Pecola. There was even a girl, a Mulatto girl, who pretends to befriend Pecola after Pecola was picked on in the school yard by several boys. The Mulatto girl is pretty with green eyes. She takes Pecola, Claudia and Freida for ice cream but doesn’t treat the two sisters. She treats Pecola, and then sneakily puts in a jab, the same jab the boys had before they left for the ice cream shop, “Pecola seen her daddy nekked” only she did it on the sly.

I felt that Pecola’s life was so miserable- there wasn’t anything happy about her existence. At all. The catalyst for her was just awful. Her father rapes her and impregnates her. But Morrison handles this with a deftness I don’t think any other writer could pull off. It is in the chapter where we get to know about the past of Cholly Breedlove, Pecola’s father. There is a section break and the rape happens. Because we know why Cholly is a drunk, violent, nobody, and because Morrison explains Cholly’s motives, which aren’t good but they make you empathize with him, at least for a moment, the whole rape scene is not as painful as it could have been. Pecola is 11 and has already had her period, which there is a scene of this earlier in the novel. We don’t know how old Cholly is.

I really wish there was more, something happier for Pecola other than the prostitutes whose home she hung out in. The whores gave her soda and candy, told her stories. But we were only introduced to them briefly. I would have liked to have seen more interaction between Pecola and the prostitutes.

Also, although I liked the imagery and metaphor, it got a bit heavy handed in the second chapter. I was starting to get weary of it. I don’t know. Maybe I was tired but I would read lines and think, “What the fuck is she trying to say?” But I didn’t feel that way at all during the rest of the book. 5 stars.



View all my reviews

 

You Just Keep on Pushing My Love, Over the…Borderline Personality Disorder???

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Not only have I aged myself (I was a little girl when that came out so there :-P ) I have let you in on a little secret. My two main girl characters are, what they say in the mental health field, “Borderlines”. That may sound callous, but it is the reality of a person who suffers from the disease.

So what is it? As I write this I am consulting my DSM IV (I bought one off of eBay for $5- a steal! They cost at least $160. If you haven’t signed up for eBay, um, what are you waiting for?). I’m going to list the criterion and break it down for you a little bit after I’ve listed them.

1. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment

2. a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation. (i.e., he is the best thing to ever happen to me/ I fricking hate him! I hate him- all within a small period of time.)

3. identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self (I’m a goth /I’m a gangsta! /I’m a goth again)

4. impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (eg. spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating)

5. recurrent suicidal behaviors, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behaviors (eg, cutting, burning self)

6. affective instability due to marked reactivity of mood (eg feeling depressed, irritable or anxious and only lasting a few hours, only rarely more than a few days)

7. chronic feelings of emptiness

8. inappropriate intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (eg frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurring physical fights)

9. transient, stress-related paranoid ideations (thoughts) or severe dissociative symptoms

So what does all this mean? Well, it means essentially you’re pretty messed up and how you got that way is usually through some intense trauma and heartache. Borderlines report having been sexually, physically and emotionally abused and/or negelected at some point in their lives. Not just talking my Uncle touched me stuff though that is still very significant. A lot of times Borderlines have been beaten by mom, neglected by dad, sexually abused by Uncle and raped by a friend. And because of this the cycle of victimhood never stops and we get BPD.

Just like with any personality disorder, there are no cold hard facts and proofs or causes just behaviors and patterns that are diagnosable.

So why is this significant? Because 1 and 5 people in the US suffer from BPD and most are women, though men are diagnosed just not as often and (this is done purposely.) That’s right. Maybe your friend from high school seemed a little upset when you didn’t want to talk to her five times a day. Or your girlfriend in college seemed a little needy and would throw temper tantrums when you called at 8 pm when you said you were going to call at 7, accusing you of not loving her and she hates you now. These are not even extreme examples. It happens.

My characters are teenage girls, which is usually when the diagnosis happens. I am still trying to figure out a way to work in when the main character gets diagnosed, as that is a pivotal moment for her, or anyone for that matter. In real life, back when the novel is set, they did not know much about BPD so they wouldn’t elaborate on what it was, how you got it, why you had it or how they were going treat it. Reality was, you were stuck and no one cared. The stigma, amongst your normal peers and in the mental health field, the people treating you even, was that you were a hopeless case that wanted as much attention as possible. We know that’s not the case now. Still the stigma is great and real.

The girls don’t like each other. The second MC and antagonist, if you could call her that, has Histrionic Personality Disorder as well as BPD. If you thought BPD was delightful, then hang onto your seats for the next blog post! Just kidding. The girls don’t like one another as most people who suffer from the illness are cautious when they meet new people. They don’t trust easily or they over trust immediately. The range of perception and emotion differ from one sufferer to the next.

The purpose of both of them having BPD is to show how co-dependency works in such fragile relationships and minds, both girls about to become adults at 17 years a piece, and that love can happen, even through the twisted emotion and nature of the illness.

This blog post is kind of long so I’m going to stop. For more information on BPD follow these links.

BPD Family

Mayo Clinic

 

New Content Focus, Better Marketing for…READERS.

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Whoa, guys! It’s been a while, I admit. The holidays are an atrocious time of year for me, full of depression and crippling sadness. I am happy to say I completed my NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words coming in at 50,012. I’m a winner. Yay!

I also was under immense school pressure, trying to settle my school loans so I can be up and out of my small tired city by summer. Unfortunately, it won’t happen until December. Such is life, I guess.

The purpose of this post after such a long and sometimes deliberate absence is to tell all you readers that the focus of the content will be changing. Kristen Lamb’s book, We Are Not Alone: The Writer’s Guide to Social Media helped me decide how I was going to market myself, and took me on a long journey of writer soul-searching, trying to find my true intent for my social media efforts and blogs. Instead of writing a writing blog- which is great, for the most part, if your audience will consist of mainly writers and you are willing to languish at the bottom of Google’s search engine- I am focusing on my book’s content and the readers. I will no longer be posting about writing techniques and encouraging writers to keep writing, which I may have writing posts scattered throughout the blog. But the focus is changing, and that’s a good thing.

The plot of my book is simple:

A lonely, loveless, mentally ill girl lands herself in a group home, where she meets her opposite equal, in a quest for position, love, compassion, and understanding. But things get intense when the two headstrong girls clash over everything from boys, girls, and themselves.

Writing the story with the complex subplots and subtext is anything but simple, the relationships in the book are complex and intertwined and connected by severe mental illness, such as Avoidant and Borderline Personality Disorders, as well as Schizophrenia and Schizoaffective Disorder. I have a DSM IV on my desk. :-)

The reason for me writing the book is also simple- these kids in this story were my life at one time. I am a sufferer of mental illness, a few of the ones listed as well as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Suffered most of my life (my real mother had a penchant for using cocaine while pregnant with me. She, too, may have suffered the 200 lbs gorilla on her chest as well, thus self-medicating and making me also cerifiable. I am trying to forgive her.) So this blog’s content will be for readers to find out more about my characters, why they suffer the way they do, mental illness links, information on group homes and care for the younger generation who may suffering, cutting and other not-so-kosher topics. It will be handled with the love and care and humor of one who had suffered severely and come out the other side.

I hope you stick around. You may find something useful or of interest. You may know someone suffering and maybe something I say can lead you in the right direction to find them help. I’m just a vessel, a writer, trying to tell the world that suffering is real. I’m not sure how I’m going to do it, but I will. You can count on that. :-)

 

Since Last Post I Bombarded You With Apps…Day One

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Okay! I’m going to let you Droid users know the skinny on apps. This will be a two day post linking to my most used and favorite apps on the Android platform (I am an addict, no denial here. :-) that all writers on the Droid platform should not be without, especially during NaNo. The list will have bullets and be linked with a little description. And for the artsy folks I will have links to my fave photography and camera apps (no, Android does not have Instagram ( :-( )

  1. Gmail- who doesn’t have a gmail address? Don’t take this off of your phone. It comes standard. It works a lot better than previous versions and has colored. Labels. So why not?
  2. Dropbox- Cloud storage is very, very important. You can backup all your photos, docs, videos, etc on the cloud, which is just another way of saying your info is on a server on a website. But because some of these servers don’t use redundancy, which in essence is keeping your info available by looping it through several different servers just in case one server goes down, it is good to have your data on several cloud servers. Dropbox offers 2gb for free and then there is a nominal fee for 50gb, I think $10 but if you are only storing docs, 2gb should be enough. These other apps are also cloud apps that I use for my own redundancy: Box.net  or Boxroid for Box.net (5gb free but if you login using an iOS device like an iTouch you get 50gb free!!) SugarSync (5gb free) HiDrive (really secure but I can’t get it to work on my phone right now, 5gb free), Google Docs or GDocs (It is free for 1gb but it costs $5 a YEAR, a YEAR! for 20gb of space or $20 a year for 100gb of space across all of your Google services)
  3. FolderSync- Don’t want to manually sync your files from your Android device? Use FolderSync to set up folder pairs for automatic background sync. For use with Dropbox, SugarSync, HiDrive and Box.net!
  4. Maildroid Pro- Now this is the best, most functional email client on the Android platform but, it is pricey ($17.99). I would not use anything else, but if you can find an alternative app for cheaper then go for it. But I’ve tried them all and this one is a keeper. Not only does it work like and better than Outlook with Rules, Identities, signatures, IMAP and POP3, it is beautiful and handles the push and pull of your mail accounts with ease. (Wait for the update on 10/26/11. The current update is not good. Having trouble with a scrolling issue. The dev is super responsive and has tested and put through a test run with the non pro users so that he is certain this version works. Gotta love devs like Joe. :-) UPDATE: Since the first draft of this post, Joe has updated Maildroid and it is blazing fast. Get it now!
  5. Evernote- Remember everything. That’s their motto. And it fits. Snap photos of passages in a book or of things you see on the street, store them in Evernote. Record audio, make check lists and store them as notes in Evernote. Create notebook heirarchies, tags, and attibutes. Download the web clipper for your browser on your computer and clip whole web pages and store them in Evernote. Evernote stores your notes on their site (cloud). It is free for 500mb a month note capacity and something like 120 web clips. If you want offline notebooks it is $5 a mo or $45 a year.
  6. Business Calendar- Um, no offense Google but this is what Android’s calendar should have been. This is, by far, the best calendar I’ve used on either iOS, PC, or Android. It is $4.99 and worth every penny. You can sync your Facebook events, all your Google calendar accounts, Toodledo tasks, you name it. Gearing up for NaNo and sticking to your schedule is a cinch with this app. Go on now and get it!

Writing Specific apps

  1. My Writing Spot- This is a neat little app that can sync with the website My Writing Spot for online access to your files. It is essentially a novel or short story writing app that you can arrange the way you’d like, chapters, scenes, etc. Then you can go online and sync and download your file as a Word document etc. If you use novel writing software, you can import the file into your novel writing software with a little bit of file savvy. It is a simply neat little app to have, as you can use it as your primary novel writing software and you’ll always have a backup in the cloud. It is $2.99. Pretty good price for such a nice app.
  2. Documents to Go ver 3.0- This is my Word Processing app of choice to look at my Word docs, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations but there are other apps that do the same thing that might work best for you. Quick Office Pro has integration with Google Docs, Box.net, SugarSync, and Dropbox, therefore negating the need for the official apps but Quick Office does not render files properly, not quite like Docs2Go. Just Office for Android. Plain and simple. To edit documents you must buy a key and at $14.99 it is the cheapest in the Market. You can find it here.

This is Android apps for writers day one. Stay tuned for other great, essential apps, most of which are free. :-)

To see what I’m using, here are some screenshots of my HTC. Enjoy!