If a crone could speak pretty thoughts

Morning darklings,

I wake every morning a crone, spindly fingers locked in claw position, as if I was just scaring a child in my dream. It’s from the fists I make in the night, from the nightmares, the night terrors, really. It’s from the hEDS. It’s from losing weight and watching even my hands wither to bone and skin.

All of me is disarticulated, but my other joints slide back into place. They are softened by warmth and movement.

Not my hands, though. They are never soft. They slip and slide and ache. They throb and bend and shift. They burn and tingle and heat the air around them until it glimmers like a black top. But they do not adjust to my wakefulness.

It’s why I worry. It’s why every time I start a new project now, I have to wonder if it’ll be my last. Will my hands allow me to continue doing this for more than a month? A year? Two?

I have always said write whatever length the story comes to you in. Same goes for point-of-view and genre and so on.

Lately, my brain has been very idea-heavy. Short stories, novellas, novels, scripts, games, apps, tea blends, spice blends, recipes, art collections, photographs, projects. As you know, that can cause overwhelm for me. Sometimes analysis paralysis.

Over the last two month, I’ve had so many documents open, so many things started, you’d have thought I was making a six-course meal for thirty people. At one point, I had five manuscripts, a script, three art projects, a game, four other projects, and new recipes going all at one.

It was unsustainable. I knew that, but I didn’t want to let any of them go. Still, I set some aside, put others on hold.

All the while, the cyclical thought nagged me: How will I finish it all?

The 38 book ideas. Over 100 story ideas. Game and app ideas (and hi, hello, I can’t make either of those things). The food. The art collections. There is so much I want to do. And I have no idea how much time is with my hands. Some days, it’s zero minutes my hands work without tears. So I can’t even begin to predict the end of my literary career. Not to mention the art career I had planned—the one that starts with a collection I’m working on now in a small gallery that will have me, and ends with maybe my second or third collection that also brings me joy in another small gallery. I guess career is more like I’d love to see my art in a public space again. It has been almost twenty years.

And what about the new ideas I come up with? I’ve been working on the second volume of The Miniature Project for those, but even that takes time and energy.

Now you see why dictation is so important to me.

*I guess I should clarify and swap words. I’m using a transcription program. I record myself stumbling through things, without saying comma or quote. I give myself five minute pauses to think. Then, I upload the long recording to get a few hundred to a thousand words in a mostly coherent (for me) order to parse through and get me going. My hope is I will have less parsing and more continuing as I get better at it.

After looking at my many open documents, all with thousands of words, chapters in, developed characters, and mini-flashlight outlines, I found my current heartsong story. I thought if I started there, speaking for these transcriptions might come easier.

With that, I’m thrilled to announce that my January book, Joyce, is going to be a part of a standalone series. And currently, each feels like a novella. They are snapshots of time, wholly focused on experiencing what it’s like to live in haunted bodies. The condensed word count feels good for them because it keeps the story moving. It’s not weighed down by the superfluous.

They are the kind of character-driven books that are now being reviewed as vibes more than plot. There is a point, there is a plot, but you are there for the experience and emotion more than to find out whodunit.

After spending a few mornings a week talking to myself on a morning walk, I’m sure to be a whiz at the whole transcription thing, right? That’ll preserve my hands some, like tossing them in silica to dry them out slower, keep them true to color, rather than air dry them and watch them gray.

And oh, how I want to have them stay bright and vibrant for as long as possible. Or at least until the end of this series and those books I’ve already started on. I’ve published over three quarters of a million words in books, essays, and short stories. And I’ve got over half million unpublished words, spread out between three written and unedited novels, oodles of shorts stories, and books that have been started but weren’t ready to be finished. And that’s not to mention everything I’ve deleted—all the stories and chapters and essays and full length novels—over the last seven years.

My hands have been workhorses for me thus far.

I’m grateful. But I see a shift, and I have to figure something out. Because no matter how much I want to get the stories out, I need them for other things, my hands. Like throwing a peace sign. I’ve already given up on putting my hair in a ponytail, because it was beginning to sublux my thumbs. I don’t want to give up anything else.

I wrote a chapter while on a morning walk yesterday, though. So maybe there’s hope.

Don’t tell anyone I said that. I’m a firm believer in not having hope. Usually.

Until next time, harness the Little darknesses and embrace the Little things.