A Bad Week – Lockdown Day 54

This week has been hard. Not sleeping well, for one thing, which always makes my anxiety worse. A dearth of good news in the news, for another. I see no light at the end of this tunnel—on the contrary, I see the tunnel being extended as states open too soon and people ignore social distancing because they are tired of it. Now instead of just fighting the virus, we are fighting each other, and it makes me sick inside.          

I get that people are impatient for this to end. I am, too. I’ve had enough of never being alone, never being off the clock. Enough of the anxiety that sits on my chest all day every day. Of the tears I can’t even shed because I am never alone to do so. Of not writing. Of eating too much. Of this dystopian Groundhog Day.

I’m ready to be done with this, but I can’t be done with this because it’s not over yet. And the uncertainty of when it will be over is part of the problem. I talked about anticipatory anxiety early on, and it’s still there. I know this will all end one day, but the when and how is unknown, and that weighs heavily on me. I’m good in an immediate emergency, but this extended emergency is grinding me down.

I don’t really know how to shake out of this, because there is no end in sight. So I will just have to endure. Stay as isolated as possible, make up with my daughter from the fight we had last night, and try to get more sleep. All I can do is keep putting one foot in front of the other, because there is no way out but through.

            Stay strong, stay home, stay healthy.

Empathy, Creativity, and Negativity

I am what people call an empath. Not in the spooky Star Trek type of way, but I am a person who is hyper-sensitive to other people’s emotions. I not only read people well, but I am personally affected by their emotions. At funerals I rarely cry until I see those close to the deceased crying. At weddings I cry happy tears when I see the joy of the couple.

Not only do I feel what others feel, but it sticks with me. There’s a reason I can’t watch certain films even though I hear they are fantastic—because I know the emotions will haunt me for weeks, perhaps even triggering an anxiety spiral because of their intensity.

I am not alone in this. Many creatives are also highly empathic. It’s what allows us to walk in other people’s shoes as we write characters different from us, inhabit and perform characters different from us, and envision a world different than ours.

And I know that many creatives, like myself, have been very off their game the past few years. In my case, my anxiety disorder has flared up, and everyone knows that when you are anxious you have difficulty focusing and therefore completing tasks. The past few years have been stressful for creatives, and for empaths in particular.

Darkness is everywhere we look, oozing over everything like a thick oil slick. The anger, the bitterness, the despair, the pain, the rise in hate crimes, the never-ending gun carnage…the list goes on and we empaths suck it all up like a sponge, whether we want to or not, and it infects us like a disease.

I think now that my creative slump is not just from my high anxiety. I realized the other day that I have been seeing so much darkness that I have had trouble seeing any light. My books contain some darkness, but in the end the light always wins. But I couldn’t see the light in real life, and I therefore struggled to find it in my work. I seemed caught in a black tunnel that had no end.

But a few days ago I watched Greta Thunberg’s impassioned speech and I saw hope. And I heard Alex Borstein urging women to “step out of line, ladies”. And I realized that I had been seeing something else these past few years, too. Something I hadn’t really noticed.

Women. Women coming together for a purpose. Women moving outside their comfort zones to make things happen. Women finding their voices and taking up positions of power. Women saying, “It’s our turn now.”

A change is coming. I do not know exactly what it will be, or how it will play out. But I feel it. A wave is cresting, sweeping in something new.

Maybe that is why I’ve seen only darkness for so long.

Because the darkest hour is always just before dawn.

The Best of The Goose’s Quill 2018

I always enjoy looking back over the past year and seeing what posts readers enjoyed most. I see an unexpected pattern with the top 4. Enjoy!

10. Genetic Genealogy: Proving the Paper Trail

9. Anxiety Spiral: Idling in “A” Gear

8. Control Your Inner Critic: The Power of a Name

7. Power Outage 2018

6. The Split Brain Phenomenon: On the Outside Looking In

5. On Being a Low-Energy Person in a High-Energy World

4. Spring Book Fair 2018: Snowmaggedon!

3. The Enchanted Book Fair: Fall 2018

2. 48 Years

1. Book Fair Magic: Casting a Reading Spell

Thank you to everyone who has read The Goose’s Quill this year! I hope you all have a safe healthy, happy 2019!

On Being a Low-Energy Person in a High-Energy World

I am tired All. The. Time.

I don’t sleep nearly enough.

I don’t eat as well as I should.

And although I average about 7,000 steps a day, I’m not sure “chicken-without-a-head” steps count as real exercise.

So it’s no surprise I am tired.

But I think it’s worth asking: Why? Why am I cutting my sleep short? Why am I opting for the faster meal rather than the better one? Why am I not making time for more focused exercise?

Because there is too much to do and not enough time. The modern world is high-energy, and I am not.

I see people who can do everything I do and more. I don’t know how they manage. Somehow, they have the first 10 things on their to-do lists done while I’m still on number 1.

They are high-energy people. The type that makes me tired just watching them. I am low-energy. I always get things done, but it takes longer. Takes more time. And time is in short supply in today’s world. Hence the shortcuts.

Am I taking on too much? Probably. Most people are in today’s day and age. So perhaps I need to prioritize and prune a bit. And I know my anxiety has been high for a while now. This matters because the way my anxiety works is to make me feel massive fatigue to deter me from engaging in anything.

Sleep deprivation and general overwhelm exacerbate my anxiety, creating a feedback cycle. I need to break the cycle so I can pick up the pace of life a bit.

Even if I do that, I will still never match the high-energy people. But if I can be even a little more productive, I will be happy.

Do you ever feel like your natural energy level doesn’t match the demands of our modern life?

Anxiety or Burnout? The mystery of my missing motivation

I am normally a self-motivated person. I know what I want to accomplish and I get it done. All my life I have been a workhorse, churning out whatever work I needed to do—homework, work work, video production, writing. But for some reason, I have been highly unmotivated lately.

All I’ve really wanted to do is retreat into my genealogy hobby and shut out the rest of the world. Forgetting all my other responsibilities sounds good, as does sleeping for a week. I have projects I want to write, but apparently not enough to actually sit down and do them. I’ve been reading very little as well. I just feel exhausted inside and out.

Sounds a lot like burnout. Unfortunately, all of those symptoms are also signs of my anxiety. So which is it?

It could be anxiety. I have plenty of social and political stressors in my life right now—stressors I haven’t had before. My overall anxiety level has been higher than usual—I lay awake at night with crazy scenarios of catastrophe running through my head. Professionally, I am in that place where the last writing project is complete and I need to start a new one. That spot can be thrilling—but it can also be scary. Which project to pick? What if it doesn’t go well? A novel is a long-term commitment, I want to be sure I’m putting my time into the right project. I’m also querying, which in itself is not too stressful, but…what if someone actually wants to represent me? Wonderful, of course, but it would be a new chapter, a big change—and sometimes the fear of success is as paralyzing as the fear of failure.

It could be burnout. I haven’t had a real vacation in almost two years. What do you mean? I hear people saying. You’ve posted beach photos. You’ve been on vacation! I hear you. But that’s not the type of vacation I had in mind. A “real” vacation, for me, is when there’s nobody around. No husband, no child, no deadlines, no nothing. Just me. Now, I love my family, and I enjoy my work, but I am a classic textbook introvert. I need absolute solitude to truly recharge myself. My husband is wonderful and tries to get me some alone time on the weekends so I can relax, but it’s never quite enough (especially because I often spend it working, LOL). I am fast approaching the point where I have no social reserves left—and that saps energy from my creative well.

So which is it? I don’t know. The truest answer is, perhaps, both. I need to dig out of it, but am not quite sure how. I have joined a book club just to get myself reading (and reading outside my usual genres). The answer may be as simple as just making myself write. Just sit down and write something. Anything. Or maybe I need some outside accountability. After all, I submit my blogs on time.

I will slog through this morass as I have every other one, because I am nothing if not persistent. And I know all things come to an end, this slump included.

How do you re-motivate yourself when you hit a motivation desert?

A Safe Place to Recharge

Anyone creative knows that stress can bring your creativity grinding to a halt. My January was an avalanche of physical and emotional stress: family illnesses pretty much every week, an arm injury that is not healing, Donald Trump’s inauguration and the chaos that followed, and the anniversary of my best friend’s death, which always knocks me sideways. My creativity bombed big time. I needed a safe place to recharge.

My tailspin seemed unshakeable. I could still churn out the non-fiction blog posts and query letters, but my fiction vanished. Something outside myself had to bring my focus back. I found that something at Kathryn Craft’s Craftwriting sessions.

My anxiety disorder niggles at me in the best of times, and this January exacerbated it to the limit. I cannot write in that frame of mind, and it is exceedingly hard to “snap out of it” when you are in the depths of the spiral. When I told Kathryn how my anxiety was acting up, she said, “You know you have a safe place here.”

Yes, the term “safe place” has been politicized of late (what hasn’t been?), but we all need some places in life where we feel physically and emotionally safe. Ideally, home is one of those places. If we are lucky, we find other places outside the home where we feel safe. Without that safety net, being creative can be too frightening.

This is especially true at Craftwriting, where we end each session practicing a craft element by writing a scene, and then share it with the group. It can be terrifying to share your first-draft word vomit with a group of people, some of whom you may never have met before that day. Yet we do it, because Kathryn has created a safe place for us to share even the rockiest of writing.

Don’t get me wrong, we do not indulge in the pats-on-the-back, participation trophy type of false praise. We are professional writers, we are there to learn, and we cannot learn without honest feedback. However, we don’t couch the feedback negatively. We talk about what is good about the writing. We offer suggestions of what might be done in future revisions to improve the technique we were studying. But because we are all equally vulnerable (we all had the same 25 minutes to write something—anything—after all), we choose to uplift rather than tear down. I have been taking Kathryn’s Craftwriting workshops for years, and I have never had a negative experience. This is a testament to the atmosphere and expectations Kathryn sets, and the character of the people who come to the workshops.

This round of Craftwriting has done more than (hopefully) improve my craft. It has shaken me out of my daze, and forced the creative flow back to the surface. I’m writing again, and the writing itself is helping me find the stability I had lost in my tumultuous January. I feel more like me again.

And it’s all because I had a safe place to recharge my battery and refocus my mind. Many thanks to Kathryn and the wonderful participants of the workshops for providing me with exactly what I needed reconnect to my writing.

Do you have a special place to recharge or to reground yourself when you lose your writing mojo?

The Best of The Goose’s Quill 2016

As 2016 winds to a close, I take a look back and see what Goose’s Quill posts resonated with my readers the most. I often get surprised! Here are the top 20 of the year:

  1. Productivity and Expectations
  1. A Clean-Out Vacation
  1. Summer Slump: Is it September Yet?
  1. Gans Family Reunion 2016: Blood is Thicker than Water
  1. Beta Readers: A Vital Part of the Process
  1. Trans-Siberian Orchestra
  1. The Best of the Goose’s Quill 2015
  1. Research and Citations: Save Time, Get it Right from the Start
  1. The Dread Synopsis
  1. Book Launch! But What to Read?
  1. Critique Groups: A Resource Worth Having
  1. Book Fair Magic: Casting a Reading Spell
  1. Evolution of a Speaker: From Wrecked to Relaxed
  1. A Successful, Grateful Book Launch for The Witch of Zal
  1. My First Author Panel: The Student Becomes the Teacher
  1. Learning to Excel: Spreadsheets and Writing
  1. How To Cope With Book Launch Anxiety
  1. My Biggest Takeaway: 2016 Philadelphia Writer’s Conference
  1. Musings on Grief and Comfort

And my #1 read post of 2016:

  1. The Witch of Zal Book Trailer

Thank you everyone for reading The Goose’s Quill! Have a safe and Happy New Year, and I will see you in 2017!

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How to Cope with Book Launch Anxiety

As an extreme introvert with an anxiety disorder, I can simultaneously be looking forward to something and wanting to crawl in a hole and hide until it’s over. Such is my state of mind over my upcoming book launch event on Saturday. I am so excited to celebrate with everyone, but terrified of being the center of attention.

Author Kerry Gans has Book Launch AnxietyMy anxiety level has already swung upward, with several almost-panic attacks barely avoided this week. My protective avoidance behaviors have been strong as well, with fatigue wanting me to sleep all day to still the anxious thoughts swirling in my brain. After 2 hours of errands (many related to the launch) today, I gave in and slept for an hour and a half. Not the most productive use of my time, perhaps, but sometimes it is necessary to indulge the anxiety in order to knock it back down to a manageable level.

And what of the big day? How am I going to handle Saturday? There are two approaches I could take: keeping busy or keeping quiet. Both options work, but there are tradeoffs with each.

If I keep busy, I have less time to think myself into an anxiety attack. I have less time to dwell on the anxiety, and so it tends not to grow as large. The tradeoff is that by keeping busy I use up a great deal of my social energy, leaving very little by the time I actually get to the book launch event, and that might make the launch less enjoyable as fatigue catches up with me.

If I keep quiet, I use little of my social energy, but I have a much greater chance of curling up into a sobbing ball before launch time and being a wreck the entire time I am there. Too much time to think, to feel, can be very dangerous for me. What if I get sick? What if my car breaks down? What if no one comes? What if I have a heart attack in front of everyone? What if the store catches fire? (You see what I have to deal with in my head?)

So which have I chosen for Saturday? As it turns out, I am busy by default. My daughter has to be at my parents’ house by 9:15, so I’ll be up and out early. I have scheduled a tax accountant meeting for 11 am (my accountant lives near my folks), and at 1 pm I need to head up to Doylestown for a Craftwriting workshop with Kathryn Craft. Then I will buzz out of there at 4 and hop over to the Doylestown Bookshop for the launch event at 5.

Busy it is, then. I think that’s the better option for me, because when my anxiety level is very high, busy is more effective than quiet. Quiet will be reserved for Sunday, when I will get to sleep late and relax—and enjoy remembering what I know will be a fun and successful book launch the night before.

I hope to see many of you at the launch on Saturday. And if you see my face turn bright red, that’s just my anxiety trying to crash the party. Ignore it—I plan to!

How do you cope with out-sized anxiety?

Philadelphia Writers’ Conference: My Annual Oil Change

DSCN9802I’m sitting in the waiting room of my mechanic’s today while waiting for my oil change, and it occurs to me that the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference (PWC) is my annual oil change (and yes, I change my car oil more than once a year).

The PWC experience, for me, is like a whirlwind, fast and furious. During this whirlwind, all the stuff gunking up my creative system gets shaken up and flushed out. New advice helps me see past old assumptions. New craft lessons steer me farther up the artistic mountain. A casual conversation sparks an idea that carries me past someplace where I am stuck, either in business or craft—or sometimes even in a personal revelation about myself.

I eagerly look forward to the PWC every year. This will be my 5th year at this conference and it feels like home. I have a history of good things happening to me here, and always leave with some big takeaway.

As much as I love the PWC, I always get wound up in the days leading up to it. Objectively, I have no reason for anxiety, but we all know objectivity is overrated. My anxiety disorder always rears its ugly head and stress is the name of the game for days before the conference. (Apparently, I need to take my own advice—see tip #3.)

This year I tried to figure out why I get so triggered by the conference. I’m not staying in the hotel, so it’s not an away-from-home thing. I’m not planning on pitching (although I probably will because if I do it at the last minute I won’t get wound up about it—ahh, the lies we tell ourselves). I’m eager to take the courses. So what is it?

It’s just me. All my weaknesses hit at the same time. Being essentially away from home for 3 days makes me feel like I’m losing work time. I usually do a lot of work on the weekends, and the conference means I will start Monday behind the 8 ball. Being in the city freaks me out because I am totally not meant for urban dwelling—too loud, too many people. The conference itself is exhausting, with all the mixing and mingling. I get exhilarated from the people and the creativity at the conference, but as a classic introvert the effort drains me. And it’s just being out of my routine. A person with anxiety likes control—or the illusion of control. So I tend to be highly routinized. The conference is anything but routine. New place, new people, new ideas. So much of it out of my control.

ANYTHING can happen.

That’s the scary part.

That’s the wonderful part.

And that’s why I keep going back.

 

AC at the PWC***See you at the PWC! I’ll be blogging nightly recaps over on The Author Chronicles.

My Biggest Takeaway: 2011 Philadelphia Writers’ Conference

“Takeaway” is a word often used in the business world, meaning the lesson, advice, or information you got from a seminar, meeting, or conference. “What’s the takeaway?” is a common question. Oddly, I could not find that definition online on any of the big dictionary sites. They all told me it meant the same as “takeout” – as in, “Do you want fries with that?”

You have probably seen the posts I did on the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference, both here and on The Author Chronicles blog. So you know there was a TON of awesome information in those workshops.

But none of that was my biggest takeaway.

My biggest takeaway came from my pitch with Sarah Yake of Frances Collin Agency.

You may know, from previous posts, that I struggle with anxiety. That I would have rather suffered another C-section than pitch face-to-face. You may also know that the Act Like A Writer Workshop in March 2011 caused an epiphany which let me approach my nemesis with an entirely different mindset.

That didn’t stop the terror when faced with a real agent, however.

I sat at Sarah Yake’s table and waited. She wasn’t there. In fact, none of the agents were in place yet. Every one of the agent tables held only a nervous writer staring into empty air, a rather bizarre tableaux repeated five times.

I wondered if I would remember to breathe while speaking. If I would remember to make eye contact. If I would remember my pitch. If I would remember my name. After a few minutes which felt like an epoch, all the agents hurried toward their tables.

Sarah was personable, enthusiastic, and interested. She was also slightly flustered because a faulty clock had made all the agents a touch late, and this show of humanity went a long way to calming my nerves. Sarah also appeared to be younger than I am, which I think kicked in some of my mommy instincts – I wanted to make her feel at ease, since she was obviously embarrassed about being a little late!

Once we began talking, the most unbelievable thing happened. All my anxiety drained away. My hands stopped shaking. My stomach stopped twitching. Not only did I remember to breathe, but I breathed easily. I sailed through my pitch confidently. Even when I missed some information, I deftly inserted it later in our conversation.

If I had not had such a nice person as the first agent I ever pitched to, I suppose my experience might have become a nightmare. As it was, it became the most profound takeaway I could have imagined.

I can pitch.

I can pitch well.

The confidence I draw from this lesson will carry far beyond my writing career.

Thanks Jonathan Maberry & Keith Strunk (Act Like A Writer teachers), Don Lafferty (I didn’t forget your pep talk just before Sarah came down), PWC, and Sarah Yake (such a sweet person!) for giving me a takeaway that will change my life in ways I can’t even imagine yet.

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