A Splintered Mind

Entry 18 – 11:46 PM: Just a quick update before I head off to bed. Finally, sickness left me so that I could attend Life, the Universe & Everything . It’s an academic symposium on science fiction & fantasy held every year in Provo, Utah. I used to help run it when I attended BYU. There isn’t anything else quite like it out there. I missed yesterday’s programming (economics of the undead and a discussion on folklore with Jessica Day George and Dene Lowe , to name a few), and I worried that I simply wouldn’t be able to shake off this virus. In a fit of unusual slumber, however, I retired to bed at 7:50pm and woke up refreshed early this morning. Well, refreshed sometime after 1:30am, then I was up all night, insomniac that I am, but refreshed I was, and off to the con I stumbled! I was delighted to bump into old friends from college. Life takes us in so many varied directions, it’s hard to keep track of everybody. Sometimes we let friendships go....

Sometime before midnight on January 31st, my blog crossed a threshold that I’ve been waiting for a long time to see. A Splintered Mind has hit 500,000 unique visitors. Considering the blog just had it’s twelfth birthday on January 2nd, this seems a fitting month to achieve such a milestone. Thank you, one and all, for your support over the past twelve years. I’ve grown so much as a person and as a writer. In fact, we’ve come so far together since the days years ago when I would blog about my wet socks, and you could leave comments—back before my blog template became damaged beyond repair. Maybe that’s a bad example. My socks are still a water magnet. It’s so irritating. I change them almost twice a day. I just stepped in a puddle a few minutes ago. Why was water waiting to lovingly soak my socks in that particular corner? How did the water get there? Why didn’t anybody else step in it? And why am I talking about wet socks, anyway? I didn...

Day 17 – 11:56 PM: I’ve put together a heavy schedule—a roadmap—that will lead me towards achieving my goals, but as usual with lists, life has a way of giving them a flat. Fortunately, the lists still work as roadmaps, even if distractions and responsibilities put detours in front of my deadlines. The point of writing openly like this is to share a bit of the process. I believe strongly that if we identify our stumbling blocks, we can learn to work around them. Some people who don’t have mental health issues look upon that belief as letting my diagnosis limit me—as if I could suddenly, for example, not have a tic disorder if I just stopped thinking about it so much. On the other extreme, I’ve met multitudes of people who allow depression, anxiety, ADHD, and other disabilities define and rule them. They give up and behave exactly as those who stigmatize mental health expect. I’m caught in the middle, just like a lot you. I can’t help ignorant or clue...

5:56 PM: I’ve had a flurry of productivity and focus lately. I know exactly why, but I haven’t decided to share the reason yet. Last night, I fell asleep while watching Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes “The Final Problem”. This was not due to the plot boring me. I’ve had a hard week of family drama, family emergencies, and ticking. In fact, minutes before I fell asleep, I had just been laughing out loud during the scandalous nude scene. There I was minding my own business watching Sherlock investigate Mona Lisa forgeries, when this guy 👇🏼 suddenly mugged the camera before heading off to chat with the nude model. It’s like the plot jumped the tracks for a few minutes and headed out behind the shed with the other giggling school boys. So strange. And I bet you thought Cumberbatch’s “Woman” was scandalous So I decided to go to bed early at 10pm. I’m all grown up now! Except at that point, I couldn’t fall aslee...

“Oh please, dear Lord, take me home.” ☜ Somebody posted this on Facebook last night. I had been reading this woman’s cries for help for weeks, but never spoke up because dozens upon dozens of people jumped into each post to give her love and encouragement. I didn’t believe that I could add anything that her peers hadn’t already expressed. Last night, however, this post bothered me. If you’ve read my blog, you know how I feel about drive-by suicide notes . These types of posts are cathartic for the people who leave them, but they burden the folks who read them. They aren’t constructive and smack of wallowing. I felt compelled to leave a comment, but what would be the best approach? How could I help her believe that she could take control of her suicidal tendencies? I didn't want to scold her. She was as down as a person could be, but she didn’t have to needlessly suffer, either. Most drive-by suicide notes posted in the comments on this blog were us...

3:43 AM: Since I haven’t gone to bed yet, yesterday is still today for me, and I have even less to report than I did with my last entry. I spent the day dealing with my child’s needs, seeing her therapist, doing tech support for my parents for a few hours, taking care of my child’s needs again, then spending hours trying to re-enable comments on my blog. I have no idea why I cannot fix the comments. I have gutted my blog code, replaced the code entirely with another blog of mine that has working comments, reset all the widgets, changed the template a dozen times, and STILL NO COMMENTS . I give up. It can’t be done. There is something corrupt on Google’s end that is preventing me from re-enabling Blogger, Google+, and, even, Disqus comment systems. There is nobody at Google who will help me. Nobody to call up for tech support. At this point, I have 4 choices: Create a brand new blog, migrate all my content to it, design it just right, then delete m...

4:26 AM: Alright, I don’t have great news to report. My writing goals are slightly behind. Between reinjuring my hernia surgery site, getting sick again, and ticking all the time, I haven’t been on top of my game. I’ve been so out of it, I haven’t referred to my ToDo list in days, something that is unheard of for me! It sounds like excuses, but these legitimate stumbling blocks will pop up again. If I want to get more books done this year, I’m going to have to learn how to manage these challenges. I believe the culprit was that I lost my focus. If I maintain focus—keep my eye on the goal—then I can work around these issues instead of acting like they just smacked me across the chest with a flagpole.