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Oh hell, hon. You’re in our thoughts; if there is ANYTHING we can do, please let us know. *hugs offered*
Oh yes, this totally happens to me. If I get really “into” a character, it will affect my mood or the way I act. Some people from LongTimeBack (TM) at FM might remember when I was first working on Stronger with an incredibly foul mouthed main character…
Which, I suppose is somewhat better than dealing with depressive episodes because of characters. That was not so much fun at all.
Sometimes, it happens when reading a very immersive book, too.
Hugs, David! For some reason, summer is just as bad as winter for me with the fibro and autoimmune stuff. Pneumonia sucks, too.
*healing vibes your way*
Oh my gods hon! Good thoughts your way, and fingers crossed. Hope everything is dealt with as quickly, easily, and painlessly as possible. *hugs offered*
Hm. I don’t think there are good books that I wish I’d never read. There are incredibly painful books that I wish I’d read at different times (when the subject matter might have dredged up less immediately painful things), or books I will probably only ever read once… but generally if something is such that I wish I’d never read it, I won’t finish it in the first place. (And there are some books in that category, ones that are generally well-respected, but I won’t read them because I know that I’m not yet in a head-space to handle reading them without being triggered.)
Lately just black on white on the computer, since I don’t currently have a word processor that handles background changes well. (I used to do gold on black.) If handwriting, I am stupidly attached to those rainbow gel pens you used to see all over the place.
That thing is always convinced that I’m male and my male-bodied partner is female. (Well, it’s half-right with him.)
One of the bases is that “definitive” writing is considered masculine (ie, not using words like “just” to affect a word)… but that’s also something that’s taught as good writing!
Gerri wrote:Basically, don’t connect the death to only the emotions of the MC. Connect it also to the events going on. And it sounds like you have.To carry off what Gerri is saying, I would also possibly read up on the Women in Refrigerators trope and make sure that what you’re doing isn’t fridging a character. (The link there is to an essay by Marie Brennan.) It’s okay for a character to die, but if you make her death all about the hero’s pain, then… that is an example of fridging.
That is not to say, don’t do it. It is to say, think about what you’re doing and the messages you may be sending. (I would actually find it more interesting if the male friends you talked about were the ones killed, and then he and his girlfriend went off to have adventures together.)
I also don’t do resolutions; I do goals.
2012 royally sucked. It was mostly spent in a back-and-forth with an abusive housemate (and boyfriend, in my case), in which my primary partner and I told him he needed to change his behavior or leave. He did change, for awhile, but it went right back to the same old patterns as soon as he felt secure. We just got him out in November.
Needless to say, 2012 did not see much writing at all. I intend to rectify this in 2013. I want to finish a novel; not one that I have already started, that is a large part of the way finished, but one start to finish. I think I am leaning towards my medieval-esque/steampunk/magic-heavy setting, which has some cool characters that have been really calling to me.
It would make more sense to finish revisions on the novel I have finished and toss it out into the world, but I think it is more important to me to rediscover the love of writing — because truly, it has been so long since I have written that I have forgotten what that love feels like. And that is a sad, sad thing for a writer.
Wandering Author wrote:In fact, after I finally figured out what was “wrong” with me – I grew up undiagnosed but on the autism spectrum, which was not unusual in the 1960s – I realised just how much books had helped me. They didn’t just give me a refuge from all the garbage in my life, they gave me a window on the world that helped me figure that world out. I love books.Sympathies there! I have bipolar, generalized anxiety disorder, and they are not sure if it is ADD or Asperger’s in my case. (Suspect Asperger’s, but finding specialists that diagnose adults is difficult.) It doesn’t help that Asperger’s in women presents very differently than in men, for the most part.
Quote:But, yes, even if I can never reach anyone who would be inclined to become a mass murderer, I can still do a lot of good with my writing.And I think what I was trying to say was that, no, you’re not likely to help someone who is on the edge of doing that — but who that, without anything positive in their lives, anything to make them think and feel less alone, like maybe the world isn’t totally against them (because of the people I know who have commented that they were very violent as children or young adults, all had abuse histories and NO support from ANYONE — more than one commented it was books that helped them hold onto “Yes there are decent people in the world and there is more to life than this”). If that makes sense? It won’t help the ones on the edge, likely, but the ones whose paths are starting to head in that direction, maybe.[/quote]
Wandering Author wrote:The people who watch news like this and feel ‘inspired’ :sick: by it would not want to read anything I wrote, and even if they did, if they aren’t already sickened by what happened, I doubt I could drive it home any better.Not entirely true.
There’s a blog post that has been floating around in response to the tragedy, “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother”. There has been a lot of response to it from people who are mentally ill and have gone through periods in their lives where other people felt they were a risk. Mind that people with mental illnesses are statistically speaking at high risk of abuse — most of the people I have seen talk about this were dealing with not only a mental illness, which is (from experience) awful when combined with all the normal teenage crap, but also frequently with abusive family or school.
Something that has come up a lot, not necessarily in these response posts, but in comments, is that for many, books were a way of escape that helped them get through that period of their lives. I’m honestly not sure if I would have made it to adulthood without my books. (And if I had, I would certainly be all the more screwed up for it, considering the uber-conservative religious phase my dad went through.)
I’m on some fan related “secrets” community based on the Post Secret project. Something that comes up commonly, at least once a week, are people talking about how books, or other forms of storytelling, have kept them alive — because even when everything else in their life had gone to shit, they could hold onto “But I haven’t read the next book.”
You do more good than you think.
