So It's Been a While

Photo by Jonas Gerlach✌🏼 on Unsplash

I’ll be honest with y’all. I’ve never been much of a Content™ Producer™.

I don’t know what it is that keeps me from being organized and having a system of doing things—of regularly writing blog posts, of writing and recording poems, of doing anything. And even the times I try it, it only lasts for a little while before something else carries me away, and I forget to do it.

And a week becomes two weeks, and two weeks becomes a month, which becomes two months . . . and so on.

It’s the reason I could never keep a semester-long binder together for any of my high school classes. It’s the reason that months pass between when I call my mom. It’s the reason why I didn’t make thousands of dollars a month on Medium, and it’s probably why I don’t have a huge social media following.

I don’t know what it is. Call it the Major Depressive Disorder. Call it the chronic illness and fatigue. Call it being an artiste who couldn’t be bothered doing anything in a somewhat professional way.

My brain, my focus, my thoughts, my directions, come and go in waves. And I’m only ever likely to focus on a handful of things at a time. I can’t juggle a million different things. That’s why I work on one novel at a time, or on my poetry, or on my blogging, et cetera, et cetera, &c.

The last few months have been kind of a drifting time for me. Accepting that I’d failed with querying my novel, The Unbreaking of Hannah Cole, and trying to decide what project I need to focus on next. Trying to do the new substack and the serial fiction and the poetry chapbook, and the essay chapbook, all at the same time. I flicker from thing to thing, and nothing ever gets finished.

And then I caught COVID.

I’m used to working while not feeling great. I usually feel kinda not great as a daily baseline. But COVID cleaned my fucking clock, not to put too fine a point on it.

Basically, I’ve spent the last few days in bed, feeling pretty terrible, sweating my body away, drinking as much water as I could, and binge watching One Tree Hill.

Sidebar: One Tree Hill is amazing. Like, I’m going to rave about this TV show forever, because it’s seriously freaking amazing. Lucas and Peyton may have the best love story of all time, but it’s so much more than that.

It’s the humor. It’s the subtle digs and the great characterization and the extended cast and community, and being this perfect little world I want to crawl into. It’s the great music that’s going to be filling my Spotify for ages to come. I’ve watched all nine seasons since I’ve been sick, and now I’m dragging my heels on the last episode or so.

But once I’m done, I’m probably going to watch it again. And listen to the podcast hosted by three of the stars. Seriously, I’m ashamed I never watched One Tree Hill when I was a teen, when it was coming out.

Anyway, back to my personal and creative failings.

I know things have been quiet here. I’ve been kicking around new ideas for a story, and that kinda takes focus. (Though I’ve had lots of good inspiration from OTH and Friday Night Lights, the last two shows I’ve binged.) I have some poetry I need to record and share. I should probably be able to drag my ass to post a Musical Theatre Monday post.

(I just realized that today is, in fact, Monday. COVID brain. I lost track of the days.)

Anyway, I need to do better. I want to do better. But this blog is like being in my brain, and my brain is sometimes a pretty choppy place to be. I try to swim, and sometimes I do. Sometimes the current wins, but I’ve always managed to drag my ass back to the surface again.

And so the cycle continues.