A Splintered Mind

Although it is 6:30am now as I write this, yestermorn's insomnia was worse. I retired to bed at 9am and lay there awake and unsleepy. The CPAP mask hugged my face with its life-giving embrace. A dark blindfold was tied around my head to thwart the sun's purpose. The sounds of brown noise ebbed in the background, while my headphones were sounding the lilting oddness of binaural beats . Yet, sleep still eluded me. After twenty minutes of lying there trying to think of sleepy thoughts, I suddenly realized how to fix my easy reader manuscript. ADHD had struck. Off came the blindfold, and up came the iPhone. Held over my head in the air as I lay on my back, my thumbs pounded away at my new idea. Just as my triceps and shoulders began to burn with the strain, I typed my last word. The manuscript was finished. I had taken the agent's critique to heart and worked on improving my story. With luck the revisions would hold up to scrutiny when I awoke. I was so satisfied, I fina...

Here's something I forgot to blog about. My friend, Bree Despain, had a book launch party in the beginning of January for her paranormal romance, The Dark Divine . You may recall that I put together a silly video for her a few months ago to help promote her book. I can't say the video had much impact, but the launch party was packed with eager readers, surprising the staff and Bree with the turnout. You can see photos of the event below. In fact, King's English Bookshop sold out of Bree's book quickly. Almost makes me feel guilty that I bought three copies. Maybe I'll have to give one of them away? Bree's launch was important to me for a few reasons. First of all, I was very excited for her. In the past I would not have enjoyed myself because I would have felt diminished by the success of others. Although I don't do that as much anymore, this time I was far too thrilled for Bree to worry about my insecurities. Secondly, Bree was a fellow classmate last June...

Over at HealthyPlace.com I wrote this morning about how ADHD tastes to me . If you've followed my blog here you'll know that social gaffes and I tend to go hand in hand. The gaffe I reference in that article was perhaps mild compared to past mistakes, but certainly not anything to dismiss lightly—though I do my best. While it is true that my blogging over at HealthyPlace.com has been going well, something I feared might happen is very much indeed happening: I'm not writing my books; I'm just blogging. There are two solutions. One is to quit blogging over at HealthyPlace.com , but I can't emphasize enough how distasteful that solution is. This is an opportunity for growth for me. I can step up to the next level if I master this transition in my life. The other solution is simply to write faster. I may have to completely rethink my workflow in order to accomplish it. This is exactly the sort of ADHD wall I expected to encounter, albeit a bit earlier than planned. ...

This 3D picture represents the incredible rocket ride I live through every day. Why, I can hardly stop to catch my breath. Look at that cane—a 3D metaphor for my life. Doesn't your heart just pound in your chest with excitement⸮ It's better than Avatar . Sickness, insomnia, ticking, and teenage insurrection. These four horsemen of my own personal apocalypse have kept me quite busy lately. Truthfully, I could use a little less of that kind of excitement. Winter cannot end fast enough for me. I attended a dinner party on Saturday that I would love to tell you about, but I am pressed for time. I can say that I had a great evening. At times the half dozen simultaneous conversations melted my brain—there was way too much background noise; My tragically ADHD-esque brain was overwhelmed. However, aside from being made to feel at one point that I was sexist simply because I have the wrong kind of plumbing, I had a wonderful time. With that teaser I must go off and write. You a...

It's 7am and I should be in bed, but I'm up writing instead. This is a good thing, though perhaps the AM could be PM. My life has been busy writing, which makes me immensely happy. However, I have not finished "Take a Hike!". Two stanzas await my attention. They don't exist yet, but when I'm done with them I will wonder how my story managed without them. How could I be happily writing if I'm not writing my picture book (now an early reader), my chapter book (most likely now a younger middle grade novel), and my novel (still an older middle grade novel, but perhaps soon a 19 volume treatise on singing magic before I'm done with it)? That is easy to answer. I have been busy writing for other people. For the past two weeks I've been trying to revise a new article for ADDitude Magazine . I've rewritten it so many times it no longer seems clever or witty or entertaining in any way. I don't resent my editor's suggestions. Far from it....

So how's your book coming along, Douglas? Um, errr, hey! Did I tell you what I did on the 9th? I was supposed to be in line early to hear Shannon and Dean Hale talk about their new book, Calamity Jack . I had planned to attend for days. Me. A library. Authors. Adult conversation. What could go wrong⸮ [Cue family drama to rear its cutely coifed head.] I can't recall (thankfully) the exact events, but when the drama dust settled, I was an hour late and I hadn't even left yet. I was thinking of not going at all, but my fifteen year old practically pushed me and the eleven year old out the door. I ended up having a great day, made especially great because I wasn't ticking. We missed the keynote and some interpretive dance , but I made up for it by meeting, Stacy Whitman , an editor from Tu Publishing . I've been chatting with Stacy over Twitter since the summer, so I introduced myself. These IRL moments can be so awkward, but we seemed to hit it off well. We...

Construction is going on all around my home. Even on this blog. I am finally satisfied with the look of the site. This time comments still work, as well as ordered lists, which inexplicably stopped functioning after I updated the design earlier this month . I haven't received any complaints from Internet Explorer users that the new site design causes their computers to spin in place then melt into slag. It's all good. Besides, those users shouldn't be using Internet Explorer anyway. Don't they know that the French and Germans now forbid it? After IE was proven to be the weak link in the recent Google hack attack in China, a lot of people are clamoring for internet denizens to finally give up on Microsoft. Especially IE6. It is verboten. And evil . I won't code for it, no siree. Please don't make me code for it… IE6 broke me in 2004. It made me cry. I gave up web design because I would have nightmares about IE6. I'd spend hours scouring over source code fo...

Setting out to write a book without interruption is tantamount to slapping Life in the face with a steel gauntlet. There are bound to be challenges thrown at me in response—the greatest of which come from family. I have four wonderful daughters from the ages of seventeen down to eight. My second oldest is fifteen and tasting the world to see what it offers. Whereas she never argued with me before, now we often find ourselves at opposite sides. She wants to experience life strapped to the hood of a Dodge Viper and I keep throwing up road blocks. Too fast. Too fast. She has already skidded and wiped out a number of times in her race down the road. As usual, I, the harried parent, am the bad guy for insisting she have a license before she drives. Last Friday was her first opportunity to socialize with friends at a school event since a recent grounding ended. She wanted autonomy and I wanted her chaperoned. Fight. Fight! The compromise I came upon was to ask her to help me with a p...

If I could characterize my week so far with three words, they would have to be "ticking" and "sleep deprivation". When I set out to reinvent my life by blogging with a goal in mind instead of just mirthfully writing about anecdotal episodes of disability, I had visions of hitting the ground running, filling digital folders with reams of virtual story pages, and impressing millions by my dedication. Well, maybe not the last one, but I certainly didn't expect to spend my time ticking, twitching, and moving in slow motion. Still, I laid out quite the list of obstacles the other day and my tic disorder & insomnia were two of them. Either I learn to work around them, or I won't reach my birthday goal. One cannot ever underestimate the impact that sleep deprivation has on the mind. I simply don't work at full bandwidth without a proper night's sleep, even if my "night" is in the morning. The obvious solution would be to go to bed regularly, b...

Long before there was Homer, there were the kids of Cape Cod, circa 1984. Every goof you made in school was greeted with a chorus of "Doi!" from helpful peers. ADHD + Klutzy Teenager = Chorus of Doi I heard that word an awful lot. It seemed then to be the corollary of my life. Last night I was so focused on getting the new blog design up that I forgot one teeny, little detail: to check the site on PCs. Remember that bicycle incident I wrote about earlier today? Doi. Well, this is not really a big deal. I'll just revert to the old design until I bang the bugs out of the new one. It does show me, though, the importance of getting my sleep under control if I want to make progress on this goal. I spent yesterday in a bit of a mental fog. The holidays take their toll on all, and I was no exception. My sleep schedule is a travesty. Although I worked on revisions for my chapter book, the pace was such that I'm certain that Time itself could have given me a severe...

The Goal: To finish a picture book, a chapter book, and a novel by December 23, 2010 and submit them to a publisher. Each project has its own unique challenges, not the least of which is actually reaching the end after the beginning has been written. The Writer: A sad, sap of a guy. Douglas Cootey is a married, full-time dad raising four girls in the Salt Lake Valley of Utah who has long ago overcome his aversion to the color Pink. Until this point, Douglas has blogged about overcoming AD/HD & Depression with humor & pluck, but now he wonders if there is something else out there for him—something more noble than telling the world how he forgot to put his pants on one day when stepping outside. Can he set a goal, give himself an entire year to meet it, and remember to stay on track? The Obstacles: Samson had his hair; Achilles, his heel. Douglas has ten weaknesses. They form an evil pantheon of nemeses and thwart his every attempt to do simple things. Douglas has writte...

It's time for a new look and a new direction. More on the latter later. For the time being, I'll be tweaking and rearranging things live because frankly, I'm too impatient to quietly fix the site behind the scenes before making the changes public. This means the sidebar is going to look fairly clunky while I modify each element to fit the new look. You can keep track of my progress here: http://darkstream.tadalist.com/lists/1478170/public Speaking of the new look, it's not complete since I really want a header up there. I was thinking of an animated Flash file that slowly destroyed the hard drives of every visitor but some people have suggested that bell & whistle has diminishing returns. The remodeling should be finished by the end of the week, provided I figure out how to reenable Disqus comments which I seem to have broken. Wish me luck.