Oh boy, this is going to be a massively longer update than usual, and I’ll try to divide it up pretty clearly so you can skip to the parts you want to read.
There will be discussions of Mental Health, Author’s Technology, Writing Goals, and basically whatever else I ramble to. The banners will be the color of the text here, just so that you can simply skim for the color if you want to.
AUTHOR’S TECHNOLOGY:
Well, I could say I’m about to scream about the fact I really hate updating the OS on most of my devices. Why can’t companies leave their bloody UIs alone?
Unfortunately, I don’t have much of a choice in this matter. I have to update the OS on my phone because a good third of my apps, which are supposed to still work with my OS don’t and it absolutely has become annoying and rather inconvenient. And it’s worse because I’ve heard stories of this OS update bricking the phones, though it didn’t brick my tablet when I updated that. Hopefully it won’t brick my phone. I’m still copying my entire pictures archive over to my computer just in case. And I’m going to make an Excel file of all of my contacts and the addresses attached to those. (27 folders worth of pictures, broken down by month, because apparently my OS does that on it’s own now, and nearly 5.3k pictures. Dear gods, I’ve taken a lot of pictures since May 15th 2015.)
I am looking forward to playing with the updates to the apps that I can’t get right now due to the fact I haven’t updated my OS pretty much since sometime not long after I got the phone.
On the other hand though, my ipod is dying, and they don’t make decent MP3 players anymore with the kind of storage I need. I have a massive music collection and while I like iPod Nanos, I would need up to 10 of the little buggers to handle all of my current music collection. I suspect that with a little babying I can get my even older classic iPod to hold out for a while longer, but even doing that I’ve got to save nearly $450 to replace it with a device with a smaller storage capacity. My classic is 180GB, and the largest iTouch they offer is 128GB. I could save up even longer and get two 64GBs and divide my music in half, but even still that’s not going to work as well as having it all in one place. I may get the Nano with the intent of using it as a stopover for a while and then upgrade my music to the largest iTouch to replace my current music system around the house. Then, I could use the itouch for just podcasts, and that would be quite fantastic.
Writing Goals:
Obviously, it’s looking like I am almost entirely up to par for my Year of Writing personal challenge. (As of the end of May, I should have crossed 150,000 words and I had just managed that with 150,329) This June I’m aiming for the standard of 25,000 again, though at the rate I’m going I’ll have a 30,000+ month again. I look forward to that, because I am going to end up taking nearly a week off in August and I’d like to have a nice cushion built up on both the yearly goal and the monthly goal by that time.
I’m hoping that I’ll be able to possibly get myself together and get enough more progress done on several of my stories that I should be able to possibly get something into heavy edits stage and even more possibly get more than one thing published this year. I’m not going to promise anything at this time though, only because I know myself all too well.
However, these goals pretty much hinge on something that’s happening later this week, and that I’m going to discuss below.
Mental Health:
Alrighty, if you’ve skipped to here or have actually made it to here then you’re in for a bit of a ride. Last year in August I was diagnosed with ADHD-I and anxiety, but because I didn’t have a low enough level of change in my levels of identifiable stress inducing situations and triggers – I didn’t qualify for any of the medical studies that that office specialized in. Unfortunately, this also means that my diagnosis isn’t really worth much anywhere else.
So, in light of that, and in light of having gotten new insurance and a decent mostly stress free job, I’ve got an appointment on Friday June 9th 2017 with a mental health doctor to see about getting a refreshed diagnosis and possibly get further diagnoses.
I am absolutely freaking out about it, but I am hoping it won’t be as strenuous as a first few appointments as the appointments with the Medical Studies office across town happened to be.
And of course, the doctor emailed me several forms (11 pages, 6 forms) to fill out of history and just general medical awareness forms, and well, in the process, I’ve discovered that there’s a pretty decent chance that I’ve also got a rather large degree of OCD to go with the ADHD-I and Anxiety.
I’m hoping that getting treatment will also help me with the things I want to do in life, which basically translates that I’m hoping that treatment will allow me to work on a story without burning out on it after 25,000 words every single time I pick it up. This is partially why the only thing I’ve released is O’Mally’s Station. Not because I don’t want to release more, and not because I don’t have about a dozen projects in the works, but because I can’t work on one for more than about 16 or so hours or roughly 25,000 words. And sometimes the burnout is only for a couple of days, but sometimes it can last for several months. I want to get past that, so that I can complete things easily.