So my plan to work on Red Hood Rider yesterday didn't pan out. See, as soon as I was finished with my blog post, I was called out to watch Jeopardy.

Actually, that's not quite true. I was called out to watch Jeopardy while I was still writing the second blog post, but I wanted to finish it, so I told them to wait ten minutes. (It took me 15-20.) Meaning if my second post near the end felt at all rushed...well, that's because it was.

And, of course, after that, the computer was free, and I got distracted by TVTropes. One thing led to another, and soon enough, it was nearly 2 and I was tired. I didn't have a set time I needed to get up (though I did set a timer for nine and a half hours), but it felt an appropriate time to go to bed, so I did.

It's a shame, since that means I'm not going to get much work done. Today is Tae Kwon Do (though...more on that below), tomorrow is work and dance, Thursday is dance, and Friday is family night. There's hours of opportunity to work, but I am very inefficient so those hours of work translate into only a fraction of the amount of time I'd prefer to have.

Anyway! If you did the math, you should realize I was supposed to wake up at 11:30 or so.

I did not.

Timer fail to go off?

Actually, I had to stop it, because I woke up early...in severe pain. Again. Same problem, in my leg. I tossed, I turned, but it was agonizing. I went out to the living room (to my parents' surprise, as I'm never up), tried sleeping there, still no luck. Pain was too great. This, at something like 7:30 or so.

The pain had faded by 9, slightly, and was basically gone by 9:30, but all the same, we went to the doctor about it.

The good news: not a broken bone (we had it X-rayed), and if it were any worrying thing like cancer or a blood clot, the doctor would PROBABLY know. (We did a test for a blood clot anyway, still waiting on the results. And, yes, I'm at the lowest possible risk factor for one, but we still need to rule it out to be safe.)

The bad news: It's an absolute mystery what caused it. There's no probable culprit; my signs and symptoms (where the pain comes, then suddenly is gone, no agitation when absent can trigger, but when present everything makes it worse, no visual marks, etc.) all effectively rule out any of the likely problems. Basically, they don't have a clue what's causing the pain. I know it's there, but every usual suspect is unlikely.

So, the backup plan, which is bad news #2? Treat it with an anti-inflammatory. AKA, a painkiller. AKA, a pill. Which I am obviously not fond of taking. In this case, it's not actually meant as a painkiller (though that's the effect it will have), meant to act as a treatment for one of the possible sources of the problems (even though said source was ruled unlikely), so it IS an attempt to treat the root cause of the problem, not merely mask it and treat the symptom (severe pain).

Given that, plus the temporary timeframe of 7-10 days, I'm willing to do it. Still not happy, though. This also isn't something that I can just ignore (although it is something that, who knows, maybe even without treatment would go away), since losing hours of sleep to pain is NOT something I can afford (the pain at its peak is VERY severely debilitating to the point where prior to the doctor visit I was considering a painkiller because of JUST HOW BAD it was messing with me), which means yeah, gonna take it, butstill.

I don't like taking pills. They're usually a last resort of last resorts.

Which I suppose is the point where I'm at.

Wish me luck. I'll need it to fully recover.

So, I just read an article in Reader's Digest about schizophrenia. I find things like that fascinating, and I always love to hear people describe what they go through in their daily lives like that. After all, even if two people have a condition that is diagnosed as exactly the same thing, they still live two entirely different lives and may experience things in a vastly different manner.

Of course, this is particularly obvious and relevant to me, given I suffer from an absolute minimum of two, those naturally being my bipolar disorder and that I am autistic. (Specifically, Asperger's syndrome.) I could go on talking about the things in that article which fascinated me (the perspective on reality, the voices talking, the different take on things allowing for very good processing of data and outside-the-box thinking, various other little things here and there), particularly since several of them are directly relative to me (there was a time I was afraid I could have schizophrenia, though I ultimately concluded I do not, and every professional I've seen seems to agree), but what I actually came here to do is attempt my own.

Obviously, I run a blog. That means, in theory, I already do this on a daily basis: I give you an insight into my mind with every post that I make. Sometimes it has personal details, sometimes it's just an apology for being too busy, sometimes it's just the latest story idea I have, but every post I make here is made with sincerity. Defining my true self is borderline-impossible, but let's say it was. This blog might not be absolutely my true self, since I do filter it slightly...but as far as filters go, my blog here is about as light as it gets.

I share as much as I can. The only lying I can possibly do, then, is basically by omission: things that I think I should mention, but for whatever various reason, have not, at least, not yet. (At least three or four such things are rotating through my head right now. I should get to them eventually, but if I started down that tangent of listing them now, I'd never get to my original intended purpose of this blog. I realize that, being fully honest with myself, that's an excuse, but in this case it's also the truth. I'll get to them if I can.)

The point I'm trying to make here is, generally I do at least a decent job of sharing my experiences with you, my readers (few as they may be), so what exactly would be different? Well, because I'm going to attempt to describe things as I would to a person who asked me about my "disability". This is relevant to my recent thoughts in my job application, if you couldn't make the link. See, that's the beautiful thing. To me, as I was writing this, that was absolutely obvious. I just blogged about how I did a ton of job applications. Job applications contain a tick mark where you list whether you have a disability or not, and I answer yes, albeit a minor one.

So, because of this, I thought about it some, but didn't mention it last blog. Then, I came across the schizophrenia article, prompting this blog. In my head, the transition couldn't have been more clear. Schizophrenia, disability, recent blog about job search. The dots were there, connecting them together. But until last paragraph where I explicitly laid it out to you, be honest with yourself: did you have any idea they were at all tied?

If you are 100% truthful with yourself, the answer is 99% likely to be "no, not until you said it", though you'll probably also think, "in hindsight, I don't know why I didn't". Assuming my thoughts come off clearly enough for you to even have an idea what I'm talking about, this is no surprise. So let's get right down to it. My mind has many oddities, but focusing on the ones that are best branched under my autism, these are some highlights.

If you were not directly told about my disability, you would probably not assume I had one. If you interacted with me, you would probably think I was a bit odd, quirky, unusual. This is deliberate effort on my part. My entire life, I have put effort into trying to blend in and make you not notice all the things I "miss" that others take for granted. Every social cue has been taught to me, one at a time. I needed to be told to do them. I needed to be told why we do them. I needed to have them explained.

And even after I have learned them, I can't always properly apply them. If my concentration breaks for even one second, I'll lose eye contact, until I remember that I am supposed to be making contact. I have to run scripts through my head for every-day dialogs. If I approach, mentally, I have probably played my dialog through my head fifty times, refining it and preparing it for different responses. Do this. If this, do this. If that, do this instead.

Every day, I run those calculations each time I think of interacting with someone. However, thanks to my lack of omniscience, I cannot anticipate every possible situation. If you go off my predicted script, I lose my focus. I no longer have a prepared response. For a normal person, this might happen if you were expecting a question like "how long have you worked here?" and instead got a question completely different like "are you going to the event tonight?". Your brain was focused on the one, so when you got something else, you now have to spend time thinking about that new response and formulating a brand new answer on the spot.

The problem is, for me, this can happen if there's as much as one word's difference between what I expect to hear and what I actually hear. It sounds ridiculous, but I'm dead serious, here: I may have a perfect answer prepared if you ask me, "what are you going to do tonight?" If you ask it of me at an anticipated trigger, if you ask it of me at a time I am expecting you to ask me, then I'll instantly give my prepared response. Yet maybe, you instead ask me, "What are you going to do today?" Or maybe it's "what are you doing tonight?". Those two latter questions are identical in meaning, so surely, I can answer them just as easily as the first.

It is possible...provided I also prepared an exact answer. If I thought, in advance, of those variations in wording, then I'll have prepared my variation in response, which in most cases, would probably be...absolutely nothing, saying the same thing. But I absolutely must have also prepared for that wording. It all must go according to plan. You must say what I expect, at the expected time, in the expected way. If any of those conditions are absent, then I get into the above scenarios where the difference between "are you going to the event tonight?" and "how long have you worked here" means I must think up a new script on the spot.

And complicating matters is...I am human myself. That means, sometimes, even after having prepared my script a hundred times, running the dialog I'll say multiple times...I may mess up. If I time my words wrong, I can trip up, screwing the whole script up and forcing me to start from scratch. If I say so much as one word different from what I have planned, I'm forced to create a new script. Often, I'll have prepared more than one script, so when the time comes, I'll start one script and then accidentally start using another script I also prepared.

This may be a normal human response, but for the average person, they'll identify the mistake, and then swiftly correct it, usually with some manner of a word override, perhaps with an apologetic, and continue on in their speech as if no mistake was made at all. Unfortunately for me, when I cross from one script into another, both scripts suddenly get completely confused and disappear. I'm forced to start from scratch and think up entirely new ones. All the work I did is instantly lost, and I must put in new work to get there.

This is how I live literally every day of my life. I do this hundreds, even thousands, of times. My scripts are often messed up, which is why I may wander away from a topic, because my script was clear, then got confused. I need time to create a perfect script. If I lack time, my scripts may be unclear, may produce some weird-sounding stuff, may not answer what was expected, and are incredibly vulnerable to being burned again, which will cause stuttering, awkward pausing, sideways glances, all in an attempt to generate a new script.

That is my weakness. I cannot interact well in live-time, because these generated scripts are fragile. When I say "script", it's not just words. It's every facet of communication, verbal and nonverbal. Eye contact, posture, tone, bodily positioning, projection, these are all included in the scripts I have to make. They are things I actively think about every second of every interaction. I had to learn expected uses of them one by one, one automatic script at a time.

That is also my strength. Because I must generate these hundreds upon hundreds of scripts every day, I am very, very aware of many facets of these scripts in others that they themselves may not noticed: subtle pieces of humanity not-often observed. If I wasn't able to notice them, I couldn't stand a chance of producing them, since they aren't produced naturally, so that forces me to have awareness above average.

Because I must generate these hundreds upon hundreds of scripts every day, I am very, very creative. I must imagine every detail. I need to think of several variations on the mundane in order to function, so when applied in a more fictional environment, I have a clear ability to envision environments because I have practiced this skill my entire life.

Because I must generate these hundreds upon hundreds of scripts every day, I am very, very well-prepared. I know how to handle a lot of situations, probably more than your average person, because I have meticulously trained myself to have scripts available for them.

Because of these scripts I make, then burn, and remake, I am very quick to think on my feet. I absolutely must be, because if I wasn't, I wouldn't be able to function at all. These scripts contribute to so many of the things I am "gifted" with. They help with my problem-solving, because I think of things from every possible angle, thanks to how if any angle comes up that I haven't thought of, how my scripts will burn. They help with my comprehension of things like science, because if I wasn't able to ascertain the nature of things, I wouldn't be able to function. They help with my variety of knowledge in language, because if I didn't prepare a script for one particular word, I must restart from scratch.

I think more than your average person, because I have no choice but to think more than your average person. My scripts aren't perfect, thus the myriad of different ways I can screw up and give away I'm not entirely average, give away how there's something about me not the same as the rest of people. My scripts often need regular updating as well. When I was a kid, my scripts were easy because I was interacting with other kids, and the scripts were less complicated since they weren't as necessarily complex. I would enjoy conversing with older adults, because my scripts were flexible enough to be on point.

Yet as I aged, those scripts became obsolete. The dialog between ten-year-olds is completely different than the dialog between twenty-year-olds. And my scripts need to reflect that. Because I have so much to think about, my scripts are often very specific now, out of need to be specific things.

And this is one reason why I tend to jump between subjects a lot. My scripts start out on a specific thing. Then, they burn. When restructured, suddenly, it's slightly different things. Repeat hundreds of times in the course of a few minutes, and eventually, you get a mind which is trying to run three different ideas as one script, rather than separating them out.

So I'm forced to reset. To take my time. To breathe. To relax. To restart anew, focus my thoughts, and dive back in with a new script. Literally every word I ever say is done with this process, this scriptbuilding. It may be automatic for other people, but for me, I must think of every minute detail. It has its advantages, allowing me to describe things in greater detail than most people ever could. It also has its disadvantages, like sometimes missing an obvious word which could say the same thing more succinctly. Since my memory isn't perfect, I can't instantly bring to my mind literally every aspect of human interaction: every word, every thing needing to be done, every tone, every action. So my scripts have those gaps, those holes, in them.

I don't really have a good way to end this insight into my mind. I started with one in my script, one which has been revised hundreds of times, with every single word I've written in here. But by the time I reach the end, here, whatever ending I had planned has long-since had its script burned. That's why so many of my blogs usually have such abrupt endings: there was an idea for an ending, and yet...it never quite worked out that way.

Just like now.

So! Let's talk some about it. For a start, my family went for a hike today, it being Memorial Day and all. My brother went, my dad went, I think my mom went, my older sister went, and they took our dog, too. The only member of the family planned to be absent? My younger sister, who had prior obligations.

It would have been nice to go, but I ultimately decided against it, because an old injury flared up. Specifically, my right leg pain. It's an old, old injury. When I first got it, I think in Tae Kwon Do, when the pain didn't go away, I even briefly suspected I may have had a minor break. This was probably something like a month ago, maybe more, though maybe less. I kind-of think I may have blogged about it, but then again, maybe not.

Anyway, the point is, it was a severe pain in my leg, obtained a long while ago. But then, the pain went away. Until a little over a week ago, when it randomly reappeared for no apparent reason. It was on again, off again, so when I did TKD, I took it easy. All the same, it was present Thursday, and back to the off again relationship aside from an occasional flare...until yesterday, when it got so bad that I couldn't sleep. Me, the girl with a high pain tolerance, tossing and turning, specifically because of pain in my leg.

THAT bad. I figured the hike would do me no favors, and that I might end up causing them to either slow down or turn around prematurely, ultimately making the call it'd be safer for me to not go. But, owwwwwwwwwwwww, it hurt.

It's mostly off again today, though I can tell the injury is still there. Whenever I think about it (for instance, when writing this blog post), the nerves in my leg send a reminder to me that there's some sort of injury there, even if they aren't screaming at me like they were earlier.

So, no hike for me, sadly. Oh, well, some other time.

I spent the majority of the time they were gone with a cat being very cute by using me as a bed. Among other things. She walked around, rubbed me, sat on my face (well, close), various other things which generally made napping hard, but I appreciated it all the same.

The day also wasn't a waste; I've spent the majority of today sending in about a dozen job applications. I don't realistically expect so much as a single nibble, but it's the thought which counts. Now that I've done all I can on the desktop...time for more stuff. Like a blog post, a lengthy one at that, but more.

I'm in the mood to do some writing again (it helps that I looked at my LinkedIn profile, which again contains a taunt about published material which I currently don't have), but I also owe you an update on Red Hood Rider.

Yesterday, I did draw half a page. It was frustrating, because while on the one hand, the art felt appropriate somehow, and did look truer to my vision in some ways, on the other hand, it felt like a minor regression, and far more importantly, the scene's not quite playing out like I wanted.

So, I caved into the frustration and attempted to do a realistic drawing, mostly freestyle without much in a way of references, and at some point it vaguely morphed into a sort-of self-portrait. Spent half an hour on it and it was okay, but nothing particularly remarkable.

Anyway, as for what's on today's agenda...I'm actually thinking of doing some general note-taking on Red Hood Rider. There's lots of little details here and there that I don't want lost. Things like a plot arc where Sally applies to become a professional superhero, for instance. The need to put Brigand's profile up is another.

Yet what really brings this up is that...well.

On my bed, right next to my head, I sleep next to hand-written notes. These are the various things I have yet to document on my official note file. And the reason why I mention this? Aside from how I literally stare at all the things I've not yet done, there's another motivator behind this decision:

The ink on the oldest two is starting to fade.

Not slightly fade.

As in, the ink on the oldest two is so faint in some places that my already-sloppy writing is unreadable because of how much has vanished.

Environmental hazard, of sorts. Certain spots in my room seem to be very bad places for written things. (Other places can go undisturbed for literally years and not age a day. It's ridiculously random.) So, there's a bit of a timer going on, to get those things written before time runs out.

And that's what I'll mainly be focusing on today. We'll have to see if I succeed.

As promised, time to talk about yesterday. Memorial Day weekend meant that there wasn't normal anime on tonight (just a marathon), so we didn't have the midnight limitation.

The first thing we did was complete the Ajin anime. Given that the manga continues, I heavily suspect the anime will, too. But until it does, we had to go back to the Blacks. We started with Black Cat, but it was episodes 13 and 14, which were fairly lighthearted and ridiculous episodes all things considered, which turned my siblings off.

Next came four episodes of Darker than Black, since they always come in blocs of two. (Which is where the two-episodes-then-change thing came from.) The second set being the PI episodes, that sort of killed the mood there.

I believe we did Black Butler next, through episode six, which is the last episode to follow the manga until MUCH later, so we moved on to my brother's choice: two episodes of Berserk, in spite of protests. Given that, we were able to finish the night off with two more episodes of Black Cat.

All in all, very good outing. Did get more sleep than normal, in spite of having to wake up early to comfort a very lonely dog. (Who normally sleeps with my parents. That were, obviously, gone. Anime is on every Saturday night, but when I say 'my brother came for anime night', I mean my parents were gone for the night and my brother came over and that's what we do. This has been the tradition for...quite a long time.)

Fun time's over though, so now, it's back to work. I have one week and one day to make a personal goal, of reaching the point in my novel I was at before my next counseling appointment. Unlikely to happen, but it's an ambitious goal I wish to reach for.

Yet far stronger still is my overwhelming urge to finally get my dang Red Hood Rider work done. I can do more on the script. I really, really want to finish the pages. I can't realistically meet a June release date, but a very, very, VERY obtainable goal is a July one. Six months later than anticipated. That's a little over a month to finish drawing the pages (not so hard), then color them all (may be hard, but we'll see).

My body is fighting the natural urge to procrastinate right now.

But...I'm getting this done.

Now.

Like, now now.

Swearing it to myself, no distractions.

It also helps motivate me that I'm kind-of cold right now (I'm wearing just a T-shirt and shorts, rather than my workout jacket and pants), meaning that hiding under the blankets is a good way to stay warm.

So, yeah.

Wish me luck!

My brother came for anime night, so will talk tomorrow. (Sorry.)

So I was reading the TVTropes article BlackVikings, and it got me thinking about something. More specifically, do you remember my seven samurai knockoff I've talked about before? You know, the one focusing on seven warlords? Yeah, well...I got to thinking. What if, instead of a single Roman army, a single Celtic army, and then at least two each of Angle armies and Saxon armies, I added some historically-improbable combinations?

The whole idea already takes extreme artistic liberties, loosely combining Arthurian myth with dark ages history with the seven samurai idea, so what's a little push further? Once the idea formed...well, you know what they say. Spreads like a disease, hard to kill, and all that. So, now, Roman/Celtic/Angle/Saxon warlords are still present, just...singular. I thought I might as well add a legion from Africa, and may as well draw some inspiration to have Persian mercenaries as a sixth. Not sure on who the seventh would be, would have to check my blog posts prior on the idea, not to mention, start actually doing research.

For an idea like this to be viable, I'd have to have a better understanding of what tribes existed where at the twilight of the western Roman empire. But I do think the idea would be interesting to pull off. (Fun fact: the game that I made a few weeks ago? Which I blogged about at some point? I actually invented it for this story idea, so I have been thinking about it some.)

You know, it really says something about the previous draft when I'm deliberately ADDING content, as in, deliberately putting in extra stuff I strictly speaking don't need...and yet, I'm using up LESS space than the previous draft did.

I'm not actually cutting out any info, either. I'm looking at what the words are saying, and simply not using all of those various redundancies. The ironic thing is...breaking my story up with bunches of third person is something I wanted to do ages ago and even tried three or four times.

In my writing youth, they were epic fails, breaking the pacing and ultimately being so unwieldy that I had to scrap the entire concept, scrap the entire draft, and frankly lost all the time effort and work I put into those versions because they were beyond salvation. But now, in my maturity, I'm doing the exact same thing...and it FITS!

It maaaaaaaaaaaay still break the flow a BIT, but I think it helps to emphasize further that we're following the thoughts of a person, as in, we're in first person for a reason, and that we could exit it at any time. (The given intention.) There is still a bit of a quality drop between the prologue and the first chapter, but that's inevitable. I have to sacrifice SOME poetry in order to actually advance the story forward.

Basically, the story's going perfectly. I've got a little bit of work to do because I'm about to embark on an ambitious reordering of events (meaning, skipping ahead to a part which was later, and restructuring things so that the earlier content fits in later, since that makes more logical sense), so that's a bit stressful, but nothing I can't handle.

What's mostly concerning me right now isn't my writing. It's me. My left shoulder is absolutely KILLING me right now. It's hurt like this before, but the last time it was this bad was way back when I was running track/cross-country, because my shoulder naturally lifts up and over prolonged distances that causes fatigue. Yet...I haven't traveled long distances, and that shoulder problem is something that I've learned to fix and have actively done so.

I've monitored my shoulder every day. It still shifts up every once and a while when my posture (terrible as it may naturally be) gets at its absolute worst, but for the most part, I absolutely KNOW it's where it's supposed to be, and yet, it is hurting BAD. For no discernible reason.

Even worse though is the pain on my right hand--specifically, a zone of great worry, JUST above where my hand meets my wrist on the outside, the pinkie side. You may know that zone well. It's the default carpal tunnel zone, and my family DOES have a history of it, and as a writer AND artist I know my tendons are incredibly vulnerable and this is not the first time this has happened.

Worse is that if so, there's not much I can really do about it. Writing and drawing are, quite literally, my life. I can eat for a few hours, I can sleep for a few hours, I can do some activities for a few hours on select days (TKD, dancing), I can play games a little bit (but I get bored easily; why do you think I'm writing in the first place? I got tired of doing nothing!), I can watch TV when there's something worth watching (there isn't right now), I can watch a movie when others do...

...But really! Everything I do revolves around either writing or drawing. And of the two, writing's generally the LESS stressful one on my hand.

So I'm incredibly frustrated right now. This is literally the worst time for that to start popping up. And there's absolutely nothing that can be done about it. Rest? Drives me insane, as discussed above. Splint? Very hard to maintain and doesn't even work very well. Painkillers? God I hope I never have to use them. If I did, it'd be purely to prevent damage, because I can live with the pain; it's irreversibly screwing my hand up I'm worried about. Injections? Temporary solution which can only be done three times total. Surgery? Can't afford it and that's a bit extreme anyway.

For being a physical problem, which, you know, you'd think we'd have down (mental problems are more understandable to not know about), it sure isn't something which looks like we have a good grasp on. Then again, given the back problem my younger sister has which absolutely NOBODY can identify the problem for, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

But gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! I can live with the pain. I'm a tough girl. I have a high tolerance for pain naturally. Even when tested, this is a pain I know well thanks to how often I've experienced it. Even if the pain does make me absolutely miserable, pain by itself doesn't stop me.

...Yet consequences OF the pain? THAT can stop me. Pain is usually the body telling you about a problem. (Which is why I don't believe in taking painkillers for just killing pain: that's treating the symptom, not the root cause.) I don't know what the results of a damaged tendon are, but if it's something like, say, losing the ability to use my fingers or something like that...obviously, not something I want!

Probably demonstrating my lack of medical knowledge here, but I think you get where I'm coming from. I don't care about pain. I don't care about lifelong pain. I don't care if the pain gets worse. I don't care if the pain would continue to get worse.

What I care about is if the pain is warning me of something that could have actual dangerous results from ignoring.

The good news: I finished the prologue!

The bad news: that's four pages of what will be 400 or so. No amount of cutting or editing will remove all the content I have planned, and the content I have planned is only covering half, since I have plenty of material for the sequel too.

So I need to do more, there.

Not much else of note today, though I did think of a really killer (albeit creepy) string instrument remix of the Mocking Bird song. (You know, hush little baby, don't cry a word? That song? Well, in my head, I mentally composed a short tune using those notes, just broken up into different instruments, and the effect is pretty dang cool.) Now if I could only just MAKE the darn thing.

The good news is, I'm absolutely in love with what I've written. My computer's being stubborn and having trouble recognizing my USB ports (at least I hope that's the problem), so I can't exactly bring the document up to show this. Yet, anyway. Literally every word is speaking out to me as being right.

There's some repetition built in, but it feels meaningful rather than superfluous. There's some longwinded parts, but these sections--while easily shorter--feel incredibly poetic, with the words flowing one after another with hypnotic effect. One of the things I did was building in a fair amount of alliteration along with the occasional rhyme, so it really does feel like instead of the prose it is, an actual poem, simply freestyle versing instead of structured.

My transitions feel natural. I'll need to reread them today to make sure everything is in place (there are parts closer to the end of what I've written I'm not so sure fit, where the protagonist is describing himself rather than thinking to himself), but what I have is magnificent. It's EXACTLY what I was going for. It's exactly what I felt my constant rewrites had caused me to lose. The editing, the restructuring, the deletion, the adding, the constant tweaking, breaking my original intent. And I feel this third draft has brought it back to my vision.

...The bad news?

Mother of god, this is taking FOREVER. I must've spent two or so hours on it yesterday at minimum, probably closer to three or even four. I'm less than half-way through the prologue, at least the original one.

It's SO good. It's what I was missing. But I was thinking I'd get to where I left off in about a week. As in, 115+ pages, writing quickly, using a few hours each day to progress.

Whoops!

Ah, well. It'll take as long as it takes. With luck, I make headway. I do want to emphasize quality over quantity this time through, though, so...I WILL take time to get it right, even if it means I only get a few pages per day, because I WILL make it so that I don't get stuck again this time around.

So let's talk about superstitions, then. Everyone has them. Literally everyone. There's not a single person on earth without some sort of superstition.

Now, plenty of people who think they don't have any will deny it, because they think superstitions need to have some sort of nonsensical element to them. Not so. You can have a belief entirely grounded by real science. It doesn't mean the paranoia behind it is any less a superstition. It just means it's a well-reasoned, maybe-justified superstition, rather than an undefined one.

Of course, my superstitions tend to be even more wacky than my religious beliefs are. You know, stuff like believing in spirits and the like? My superstitions make those seem rational in comparison. (What can I say? I'm a crazy lady, and proud of it.) So, yeah. No rational superstitions from me, at least not that many. Just a bunch of irrational, nonsensical, weird ones.

Among them? Well, you know how one of my two names is Ranger, right? Yeah, well...ever since I started driving, I've developed an absolute paranoia whenever I spot a Range Rover. Why? Because if you shift the second r over, you get Ranger Over. It's completely silly, of course. Absolutely ridiculous to think that a car could mean anything.

But through some cosmic coincidence, a good half of my car incidents (be it tickets, scares, or accidents) have happened shortly after having spotted one, and me not paying heed to the warning provided.

So, whenever I spot one, I instantly go, "Oh, crud, it's THE Omen". As in, I call Range Rovers 'The Omen', and instantly become a super-cautious driver: driving the speed limit or under, with proper posture, both hands on the steering wheel, and not multitasking.

Silly as it sounds, it's my belief and I'm sticking with it.

But anyway...fun as superstition talk may be...I actually came here to say that I'm making a huge decision.

I specifically told my counselor that I was going to power through my current draft before starting a rewrite...but...

...I'm not making much, if any, progress on my rewrite. My head's just not in it. It's not that I'm disconnected. I've been working on and off on it. It's just that editing is...so...slow.

And I know starting over is a dangerous loop.

But...I've actually grown a very strong passion the last few days or so, really, a week actually, and in that time...the thought, like a disease, has grown: "You can do better. You have a better direction. You have these ideas. Put them to use."

And...I think I'm right. So, on my novel, I'm going to start over again, hopefully the last time. I'm going to officially start it as a third draft. Not second draft, take four (well, a restart would be five). Proper, actual, third draft. Starting with getting some formatting changes, some timing changes, some pacing changes. And letting go of the urge to make things "longer! Longer! Longer, pad it out!"

I'm going to let those details go. I'm going to cut, not add.

This is a huge risk. How many pages was I into the second draft? 200? It had to have been at least 100, maybe 150. I put the exact amount in the blog at one point. It was a huge number.

But...I need to do this.

Sometimes, things just...just feel RIGHT.

And this is among them.

Meaning, my blogs may either skyrocket in length or virtually disappear in the future, because I'm actually going to commit some true effort to this.

Hopefully I'm not making a colossal error.