I’m feeling rather defeated about my writing lately. Not the story I’m writing with Zach; that’s going really well. But the stories I write on my own.

I guess the downside of managing my depression and mood swings and ADHD is that I’ve lost the almost hypo-manic, hyper-focus that comes with those things. That’s how I used to write. I’d think of an idea, I’d get obsessed with it, I’d basically write scene after scene in my head, and then I’d get to a computer and blargh. Out it all came over the course of a couple of weeks, typically.

Regulating my emotions so I don’t have massive depressive episodes more often than not and making my ADHD functional have also taken away that insane obsessive thought pattern and hyper-focus.

The answer isn’t to go off my meds. Hell, maybe this would have happened even if I’d never been medicated. Maybe my ability to think it up and sit down and write it out would have gone away as I grew up and my time became devoted to work and other things, anyway.

I’m grieving big time, guys. I’m grieving a lost ability and the center of who I thought I was. Because writing a tiny bit a day like a normal person? It isn’t fun. Or at least, it isn’t fun lately.

I’m starting to think I’m never going to be the writer I wanted to be. It’s been a year since I wrote Dangerously Omega, and I thought I’d be through a book and a half by now, easy. I’m like… 100 pages in Hazi? If that? And it’s been so long since I worked on it that I kind of dread going back to it. I’m going to have to start reading from scratch to remember where I was. I mean, I have major notes and everything, but I’ve never been someone who could pick something up from notes and just go on with it.

We’ve been watching Castle. If you haven’t seen it, Nathan Fillian plays a famous, rich mystery author who tags along with the police to get ideas for his books. The character he plays, Rick Castle, is practically the male version of me. It’s a special kind of awful watching the show, like poking a wound.

Then again, maybe I’m just having a midlife crisis. I’m 45. It’s about time, right? I just need to get my feet back under me, but I feel so defeated. And nothing I write seems good enough. That’s the other thing. The kicker. I feel like what I’m writing is sub-par for what I should be writing. I don’t have a barometer anymore for where my writing is stacking in the scheme of other writers, and that’s not helping. I feel like I’m talking into a void, and that’s not helping, either. I suspect the people reading this blog and on my FB are friends and family, people who have to cheer me on, but who only read what I write — if they read it at all — because, again, they’re supposed to.

Jesus. If I were a fan of an author, I wouldn’t read this. Okay, I probably would. Whatever. I don’t know. I just feel lost and defeated, I guess.

JB