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| Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 | | 7:39 pm |
Good Days, Bad Days
One of the more frightening experiences associated with my schizophrenia consists of frequent periods where I become unable to think, speak or write clearly. In milder episodes, I might start to write something and shift topic completely without realizing, still believing that I’m making a coherent argument. I might start repeating myself, or use extremely clumsy phrasing.
In more severe cases, I become almost impossible to understand. In conversation, it can take me several minutes to convey the simplest concepts, when I’m able to do so at all. My already bad speech impediment is exacerbated, and I’ve been known to say or write completely nonsensical things. This journal contains a few examples. This would be bad enough, but there is one aspect that makes it worse. I can rarely tell when, exactly, I’m going through such a phase. There appears to be very little impact on my inner thought processes and subjective mental state. I might get a clue when I open my mouth and start spouting nonsense, or start to type and can’t make sense, but that is not guaranteed. I may be going through one now, for all I know. I don’t know if this is a good reason for sharing this, but it seems like the kind of thing people who interact with me might want to know. | | Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 | | 2:19 pm |
This Would Be Hard To Write
Don is considered slow by his peers. The processes which enhanced them did not fully take in his case, leaving him merely a genius by our standards. He lives a marginal life in the society of the far future, subsisting on benefits and reading the classics, until he is framed for his brother's murder. | | Monday, July 20th, 2009 | | 10:51 pm |
Yet More Easy Work
I’ve decided it is about time to share some more ideas I hope to develop, but probably never will. As with my two previous posts in this vein, there will be a short list of synopses after the cut. These are mostly from the last three months, as my laptop broke, and the backups are buried in my room. You will notice that all these ideas fall under the umbrella of the fantastic. My writerly inclinations seem firmly in that direction, as I’ve now discovered. I probably should have known that from the start, as given my unusual reading history, about two-thirds of all the fiction I’ve ever read falls under that label. ( Read more... ) | | Sunday, July 5th, 2009 | | 9:52 pm |
Well, Other People Liked it
In June, I was on a creative writing course. The tutor liked a fragment of mine enough to read it to the class, and so I thought I may as well share it here.
Fragment
Stephen lay in bed, watching the first light of the summer sun as it fell through the blind. He had been lying awake since the early hours, woken by the predawn chorus.
He disliked the birds, but lacked the energy to hate them. They sounded light, joyous and free. He comforted himself with the knowledge that they were not as happy as they seemed, that their symphony was but a continuation of nature's eternal war.
The sun rose to its zenith. He knew he had to get up. It was perhaps an hour after midday when he stirred.
| | Saturday, June 6th, 2009 | | 11:18 pm |
Mammothfail
That is the name of the latest argument to envelop online SF fandom. It started when some author I’ve barely heard of wrote a book about an America with magic, mammoths, and no Natives. The anti-racist portion of the fandom blew their tops. This reaction is, I think, misguided. I’m not attempting to defend the author in question, who clearly has some unpleasant racial attitudes. But a lot of the fuss seems to be based around odd or mistaken ideas. The central issue is erasure. "ack, it's a frontier story where American Indians have been literally and completely erased?!" This is what puzzles me the most about this whole imbroglio. There are three main ways in which erasure may happen, and the two of them which I think apply in this case are not particularly big deals. The one that does not apply is outright genocide, which does not accurately describe what happened to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Some people have the impression that this is wrong, but their opinion can be dismissed as worthless. The second is through the normal processes of history. This has happened hundreds if not thousands of times in the past, and will eventually happen to every group. While this entails a huge amount of suffering, and should be fought, you shouldn’t find it offensive. Unless, of course, you belong to the group in question, or are looking to be offended. The third way is through fiction. Someone speculates about what would have happened if there had been no Jews, or Indo-Europeans, or Bantu. They then erase that particular group from history, and investigate the implications. Harmless enough, but many of the participants in Mammothfail seem to disagree. Some of them are willing to forgive it, as long as the erasure takes centure stage. This position is obviously untenable. Others see anything of the kind as an exercise of privilege, and demand that all fiction cater to their concerns. This position is virtually Stalinist. Short version: A number of people I would usually sympathize with are acting in a way I don't understand. | | 8:07 pm |
Critical Mass
As I have previously mentioned, my reading has dropped off a lot since my illness began. What has not dropped off, however – or at least not as much – is my rate of acquisition of new books. Until a few months ago, I owned nearly a hundred books unread, out of the more than a thousand in my ten by ten bedroom. Then the Oxfam bookshop at which I volunteered closed, with an accompanying half-price sale, at which I bought another three dozen. Now I’m helping a relative clear out a house, and I’m allowed to keep anything interesting I find. That has netted me another fifty, so far. I think this might prove problematic. Its not the fact that I have more than enough reading matter for the next couple of years (note to self: read faster), but rather storage. I only have enough room in my room for another ten feet of shelving, and books are already piling up on the floor. A rethink of some kind is probably in order. | | 6:58 pm |
Missing Out, Two Years and Two Weeks Later
You'd think I'd forget the closest thing this journal has to a tradition? Well, almost. The late date is a good example of how important this journal is to me. Anyway. Two years ago I wrote quite a sad post, explaining where I was in life. One year later, I wrote an update, showing that I hadn't made as much progress as might be hoped. This year, the same. That is not to say no progress has been made. I am probably halfway into getting a qualification that should, if all goes well, get me into university in September after next (touch wood). My symptoms are at roughly half the level they were at this time last year, and I have a social circle, albeit one that is small and irregular. Even the bad things have some good mixed in with them. I'm still far away from losing my virginity, but fairly sure I wouldn't care about the gender of the person I do it with. I'm not doing voluntary work at the moment, but that is because I'm on a fairly demanding course. My level of life experience and emotional maturity is still lower than average, but not by as great a margin as it was. So. I think I met last years goal of doing better than the year before. But I see no reason why I cannot improve further. | | Saturday, February 28th, 2009 | | 8:01 pm |
The Fury and the Mire
This is a rough, incomplete draft of a story I was working on a month or so ago. I'm posting it to my LJ because, given that three of my last five posts relate to my writing, anyone who stumbles across this journal may be interested to see what it actually looks like. I'm not completely sure that this is the best piece to use as a demonstration, given its obvious flaws, but it is one I've already shown to a handful of people in real life, all of whom professed to like it, which is somewhat reassuring. ( The Fury and the Mire ) | | Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 | | 10:46 pm |
Slightly Harder Work
On the eve of my twenty-first birthday, I was talking to my Prince’s Trust progression advisor about my future. In passing, I mentioned that I was planning to restart writing when my powers of concentration improved. Once I articulated this plan, it immediately struck me as suboptimal. Why not instead start writing as soon as possible, and improve my concentration that way? So I did. Or at least, tried to. It has proven much harder than I had hoped for. I don’t really like the fact that most of what I write turns out to be crap – that seems to be the rule for the first million words or so – but rather the fact that I write so slowly. With a few brief exceptions, it takes me hours to write a few hundred words. At this rate, it will take me the rest of my life to write my million words of crap. I can think of at least four reasons why this might be so. None of them will be easy to address, but I hope that writing about them here will clear my mind and strengthen my resolve, as well as letting me vent. The reasons are lack of practice, lack of recent reading, lack of life experience, and slowed processing speed. The first three are easy enough to explain. One of the first symptoms of my Schizophrenia was a general withdrawal from life, and the abandonment of activities I had previously pursued avidly. Within a few months of first starting to hear voices, I had completely stopped reading and writing poetry. A year later, around the time I stopped doing schoolwork, my prose writing degenerated to lists of weapon specifications before drying up completely. One more year on, and my reading slowed to the trickle at which it remained for the next seven and a half years – a book every eight to ten weeks, maybe, compared to two or three per day before my illness. Needless to say, I wasn’t getting out much. I’ve never been good at making friends, and my condition certainly didn’t help. Nor did stopping going to school. While most of my peers were out discovering themselves and each other, I was lying in my room, alone and hallucinating. Occasionally, I opened my curtains and stared outside. Quite apart from being a miserable existence, this lifestyle was not conductive to gathering material. The fourth reason is also related to my illness, which can cause severe damage to cognitive functions. According to some tests I took, my mental abilities are all in the “above average” to “very superior” range, aside from one. That is processing speed, and there I am borderline retarded. My mind feels slowed down by about two-thirds, to the point where I find holding a conversation difficult at times. Obvious problems aren’t much harder to solve, but the deficit becomes more and more obvious the more complex the task, and writing is pretty damn complex. Surprisingly, perhaps, given the obstacles listed above, I’m actually cautiously optimistic about being able to improve my writing. After all, things have gotten easier in the last nine months of practice. I’m writing much more per week than nine months ago, at a noticeably higher quality. I’m also reading about five times as much as I was a year ago. I have something that looks kind of like a social circle, which is new. I definitely feel a bit more mature than I did a year or two ago, an opinion that seems substantiated by comparing this post with others past, and I might even be thinking a bit quicker than before. I just need to keep it up without dying of frustration. | | Monday, December 8th, 2008 | | 10:14 pm |
| | Friday, November 14th, 2008 | | 7:56 pm |
Provisional Hooray
My symptoms appear to have decreased by between a half and a third in the last couple of months. Hopefully this trend will continue, and is not just a temporary blip. | | Sunday, August 17th, 2008 | | 9:43 pm |
More Easy Work
Immediately after posting my last entry, I realized that most of the ideas in it were Sci-Fi or Fantasy. I have nothing against either of those genres, but they don't form a major focus of my interests, and haven't for years. To remedy this, I attempted to come up with ideas for more mainstream work. Of course, I then came up with about three times as many ideas for the genres I was trying to avoid compared with the ones I was trying to focus on. I'm not complaining, but. Anyway, the same as last time. Synopses of my last eleven days inspiration after the jump. ( Read more ) | | Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 | | 11:13 pm |
The Easy Part
Recently, I've decided that my ideas are accomplishing very little just whooshing around my head, and really should be pinned to paper. To that end, I have written brief synopses of a narrow selection of them - those which I could remember in one sitting, where I have a title and a rough mental outline of how I want them to develop, and that will probably be long-form prose fiction in the unlikely event of me finishing them - which I am now posting to LJ. Why? Well, I have a vague hope that anyone who stumbes across this journal will find it interesting. More interesting, at any rate, than the usual whining that usually fills this space. Also, I have paranoid delusions about people stealing my ideas from out of my head - this is a way of proving that I came up with these ideas first, if I make the big assumption that any of them are, in fact, original. Synopses after the jump. ( Read more ) | | Friday, May 23rd, 2008 | | 6:58 pm |
Missing out, one year on
Exactly one year ago, I wrote a rather mopey post talking about the course of my life, which, in short, had not gone well. I am writing this post as an update, of sorts. How has my life changed in the last year? Nowhere near as much as I would like. I might have made a friend or three. I now do two half-days voluntary work per week, rather than one. My symptoms have decreased a little. But all this pales next to what I haven't accomplished. I am no closer than ever to losing my virginity. I am still confused as to whether I want to lose it to a boy, a girl, either, or even both, largely due to the voices that, amongst other things, scream homophobic abuse. I am only marginally closer to getting into university. And I have discovered more things that I want to do, which I will not detail here. Next year, I aim to do better. | | Sunday, April 27th, 2008 | | 9:12 pm |
Hmmm.
My previous entry was definitely premature. | | Friday, April 4th, 2008 | | 9:57 pm |
Progress?
After nine weeks on the Prince's trust team program, most of my teammates can understand most of what I say the first time around. Whether or not this represents improvement on my part is difficult to measure. | | Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 | | 5:56 pm |
Hello, Tomorrow!
It really is funny that the rise of the internet means that the future will draw a disproportionate fraction of their view of today from maladjusted nerds. | | Thursday, December 27th, 2007 | | 7:50 pm |
Vernon Godlittle
I read this novel a few days ago, and I think I've figured out why I hated it so much. An otherwise mediocre novel that takes a jaundiced view of ordinary people, lapped up and lavishly praised by the literati? Could the cliche be any more pronounced? And I'd love to be proven wrong on this, but would a novel of equal quality that took an equally negative view of the literary world be so warmly embraced? | | Saturday, October 20th, 2007 | | 11:21 pm |
Human Contact
It is roughly the fourth anniversary of the last time I had a conversation with an attractive women- or girl, rather, considering our ages at the time- in my peer group. This level of human contact is fairly typical of me, for reasons detailed a couple of posts down. I've no idea why I'm mentioning this, other than being in the mood to post something to Livejournal, but it might be worthwile to enumerate my total experience of human contact outside of family, mainly to make myself feel better about my complete incompetence in social situations and general creepy aura and, possibly, motivate me to change my situation for the better. My first memories of human interaction- and, indeed the majority of my memories on this subject- consist of being bullied. I was a wierd, socially inept child with silly affectations and no friends, and an easy target. Things improved slightly in secondary school, for the first year or so. I made the closest thing I've ever had to a friend, and a girl smiled at me once. Then the schizophrenia began to take hold. I stopped going to school, except on the rare occassions I had my symptoms under control. I have had virtually no non-school related interactions with my peers, aside from the quasi-friend mentioned above, a handful of acquaintances, and one major event in April 2001, when the aforesaid acquaintances tried to set me up with the girl who smiled at me. It was a miserable failure. Aside from that, there is very little to tell. I made no friends my year at college, in spite of the conversations allued to at the start of this post, and, aside from mental health professionals, the people at the museum, and occassional contact with the children of my parents friends when we were younger, I can't think of much more non-family human contact I have experienced, other than being laughed at in public. That happens about once per month. My situation now is quite depressing. It barely needs to be said that I have no experience of sexuality beyond masturbation. I constantly feel an emotion that might be loneliness, but its hard to be sure. I've never felt anything else. I'm very poorly socialised, with various bad habits that go along with that. I'm very inarticulate, due to going entire years speaking less than the average person speaks in a day, and can barely make myself understood when I need to. And I don't know how to change these things. But I intend to try. | | Friday, September 28th, 2007 | | 5:40 pm |
A Modest Accomplishment
I've done voluntary work in a museum for the last couple of years. To occupy myself between visitors, I try and read. I average ten or twenty pages per four-hour shift. My record was forty, with Sen's Identity and Violence. Today I managed to read eighty pages of The Life of Pi . This might not seem like much, but have to consider my illness. Long term psychosis can have a bad effect on your cognitive functioning. This has certainly being the case with me. In processing speed, my mind feels like it has been slown down by around two-thirds, and my concentration has been, if anything, several times worse effected. As you might imagine, this has had a devastating impact on my reading. Before my illness really started to bite, I read a couple of books a day. Now- If you discount rereads of books I've read beforehand- I read a couple of pages per day. If you count rereads, that increases to twenty or thirty pages per day. Hopefully today will mark a permanent increase in that figure. |
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