The days are getting shorter and there’s less sun and I’m going through a depressive episode which just makes everything like cold, wet, molasses. Even my eyelids are heavy and it hurts to smile.

So I’m doing all the things one does when one is sad. And I think I should take my angst and channel it into a book. Lots of characters are angst ridden. Holden Caufield. Hal Incandenza. Esther Greenwood. I’m reading Binary Star. It is likely those people are depressed.

But I think I’ve slipped past the interesting part of being depressed, filled with witty and caustic and meaningful remarks on the futility of life, to the part of being depressed where even I don’t want to be around myself. I buy things online so I have packages coming to look forward to. That could go in a story, but it’s a pretty weak start.

So I need to write something and throw myself into that. I still have to proof-read Wolf Children. I’m getting near the end of a lotsa-feedback-first-read-through of my faerie story (thanks to my FtD online writing group). At the behest of a stranger/potential agent, I am streamlining my short story collection, but now I think I’ve streamlined too much, so I need to write at least one other five-thousand-ish word story to fill the gap.

But then naps call. And the new Wii U. And books. All I want to do is read books. Maybe I’ll take a sentence from each book I read and make a new story. Like found art. I’m not going to do that though. Copyright is too litigious. Maybe Project Gutenberg found art.

The sun is out today. I will hang laundry with it in my eyes and give myself a migraine in the hopes of a Vitamin D overdose.

I think my brain says to me today that we should write a story about a serial killer or war criminal or something of that ilk.

While my new favourite genre is Japanese horror manga (although I’ve only read Uzumaki from that list but totally want to read 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, and 13 from that list), I fear my brain’s suggestion will have me ending up overwhelmed, like Gogol, and burning all my work. I even have a pellet stove in which to burn. Then I think of Ray Bradbury.

It was a pleasure to burn.

I have a pile of stories that need to be proof-reader/rewritten. Not done.

I have about three stories started in my notebook. Not done.

I can’t even imagine still doing this in five years. I need a joyful idea to get me back in the game. But joyfulness was never my forte. I’m even reading a book about sheep solving mysteries and I can’t even get my joyfulness up with that one.

I hate reading dour. Serious with twinkles of humour I like, but complete overwhelming sadness with no hope, I can’t take it. I don’t want to write it, but dour keeps coming out.

This post is depressing me further. So I’m just going to stop typing it and go look at pictures of internet kittens until I cheer myself up.

I’m in the lull between short story ideas. I looked at my idea file because all the how-to-be-a-writer things I’ve read always said to keep a journal to scribble down ideas. Well, I don’t do that because I don’t have the wherewithal to carry a journal and a writing implement around with me (ditto a more info-age implement like a smart phone, because I don’t have one, and even if I did, it would likely be like my cellphone and I don’t take my cellphone everywhere with me, only on about 12.5439% of all trips outside the house).

So I look at my file. But if these were really contagious ideas, wouldn’t I have used them earlier? Who knows what I even mean half the time?

I’m off to think of new ideas.

No one has replied to my emails in days. I complain of feeling invisible.

Tesfa: But that makes no sense. If you were invisible you can still use the computer and send emails. The people you send the emails to don’t know you’re invisible.

We decide upon an internet monster is eating my emails.

I still think I can feel invisible though. If I want to.

I am doing Ukrainian on duolingo and reading The Night Stages and in bed last night trying to go to sleep I came up with this sentence, which I assume in the compounding of these two things:

Who can say how Ludmila Petrovna got her bicycle into the work camp.

Pleased with myself this morning waking up and remembering it, as well as getting the patronymic correct.

Now if only I knew something more about how this sentence fits into a story, I’d be set. I still haven’t got my last duolingo inspired sentence:

All the men have two red hats;

(which was one of the sentences duolingo kept making me translate to English from German: Alle Männer haben zwei rote Hüte) into a story either. Mélange peut-être (to add a third language in there)?

I don’t know anything anymore, if I ever did before.

Typing is boring.

I’m in my typical funk after stories (not that I’ve typed up the last chapter of Wolf Children or anything productive like that). I have no new story ideas. I don’t feel like writing. I feel like sleeping except there are children in my house and I should probably try to at least stay conscious until the one not sharing that much of my DNA goes home. Sunshine (my cat) is nuisancing me as I try to type this. I have nothing left to say.

Is this writer’s block? Maybe I should just buckle down and type.