Not so good

So I've not been feeling brilliant lately and have done practically nothing on my writing. I've had great plans and have done very little, including not submitting a short story to a competition. Stupid, but actually not that surprising.

This is because I am apparently suffering from moderate severe anxiety and moderate severe depression. Now there's something to get anxious and depressed about. To be truthful, it's not as bad as it seems. I'm not taking any medication and I won't be taking any.

I will be doing some 'courses' to help me change my way of thinking and reacting to situations. This is CBT - cognitive behavioural therapy and I should see results pretty quickly. It's not a quick fix, but most people see results fairly quickly if they do the work.

So I'm deliberately taking a break from writing and a few other things, while I get this sorted out or at least under control. I'm already feeling better, which may sound odd, but last weekend for the first time in a long time I took a brisk, 9-km walk, which I enjoyed immensely. Exercise does help as long as it's a type of exercise you enjoy.

I used to walk a lot. I lived on the edge of a village and used to walk in the hills frequently. I used to bike in the hills too. Now I live in a village in the middle of farmland. Very flat farm land too. It's now where near as pretty and I feel a bit uncomfortable walking around here. Most of the people who live here don't do that sort of thing. I need to get over this and get out more.

I'll try and keep writing here at least once a week. No promises though.

Christmas break

And it really was a break from everything except my family. I didn't write or read anything. Hopefully this weekend I will print out the entire NaNoWriMo manuscript, then I'll chop it into scenes and rearrange it all over the next few weeks.

As I move stuff around, I'll also rewrite the scenes - add or take away as necessary. I know that not all of them will be used. I put in extra background more for myself than anything else. The ending definitely needs work. I rushed it in November in order to finish on time.

The current version is almost two stories which don't quite come together. I need to make these two sides mesh a little better.

As usual I know what I need to do, I just haven't done it. Anyone noticing a theme here...

I also have a short story I wrote some time ago and as long as I can find it again, I'm going to edit it once more or at least read through it and then I'm going to submit it to magazines for publications. I still need to research this part, so at the moment I have no idea to which ones I will send it, but I will send it. That's my one resolution: to submit this one story for publication.

It would be nice if it is published, but I also want to get some experience in this area.