I think that one of the things I do with the extra hours I gain by not sleeping is to get the things done that I didn’t get done while I was overcome by depression and anxiety. I’m not sure I come out much ahead in the long run compared to where I might be if I was never struck down by this crippling sadness, but I think I come out close to even.
I probably won’t finish Book Three by the end of the day tomorrow (my 27th birthday, two years after I finished my first book), but five finished books (four of them novels) in two years is a pretty nice accomplishment anyway. Six books in two years sounds a little better, but if I keep things up I might just reach a dozen books in three years, and that’s better still.
Depression and lethargy (not specifically related to being tired, just to losing the will to move) sapped me at about 24k words in and again at about 42k words in, but I’ll be done soon enough. The cliffhanger ending I’m working into drives the action of the next trilogy rather than just the next book, so I’ve got to be sure I handle everything just right. Which for me seems to mean doing stream-of-consciousness writing most of the time and complex math and research here and there.
I was looking through my paperwork from grade school and middle school earlier, and while the actual grade reports from everything but 7th grade are missing from my copies, the documents I do have indicate that I was always a pretty bad student. I didn’t do my homework, I didn’t get good grades in class, and I didn’t meet expectations. But on standardized tests I scored 93rd percentile and above overall, with my lowest areas being Math Computation, Spelling, Capitalization, and Punctuation. Yep. Understanding math concepts, no problem. Overall math scores, great, but on the test in my equivalent of 8th grade, with most of my grades well above average, my math computation scores actually managed to go below average. Not just low relative to my other scores, like my spelling, punctuation, and capitalization were, but actually below the national average. I was getting B’s, C’s and D’s in my classes in 7th grade, and at the same time I tested out to 93rd percentile.
I suck.
Anyway. I’m going to go watch TV and maybe cross-stitch a custom design.
