Vivienne's Adventures

A lot of us neurodivergent people struggle with the holidays. As a kid, it was my favorite time of year. I had time away from school, I got presents, and I got to see my family and eat lots of yummy food. As I've grown older, the holiday sparkles have faded and grown dimmer.  There are a thousand different reasons for not enjoying the holidays, but it's not all bad. I'm excited to introduce my nephew, who's not quite 2 years old, to our favorite Christmas movies and teach him to make cookies. I want to see him get excited about presents and seeing family and trying new things.  However, the massive amount of Christmas decorations, the expectations of getting and decorating a tree, putting all the lights up and whatnot, and making sure you have gifts for pretty much everyone you know...it's a lot. It's made me feel a bit like the Grinch. Not angry at the holiday itself, but annoyed by all the decor and overt CHRISTMAS everywhere. As someone with anxiety and depre...

I've done Nanowrimo since 2013, and every year it hits me differently. This year was a weird struggle. In the beginning, the story flowed quickly and I got a lot more written than I expected to. But my characters had ideas, so I really had no choice but to follow where they led. Then I hit 50k mid month. But I wasn't done, and neither was the story, so I kept going, curious to see if I could hit 100k in one month. (I didn't, but I did reach 72k!) The second half of the month was harder. On the one hand, I was able to set time aside to get writing done, but it got harder to connect with my characters. Not for any particular reason that I can name, but come January, I'm going to reread what I've written and continue from there. I'm still trying to figure out why it got so difficult, but I think it was mostly just the fact that I had written so much already by the end of the month, and I kept pushing myself to keep going, just get a few more words written. It gets ...

  Happy December!! Hope everyone was able to get lots written last month! I know I definitely did. My plan was to just hit 50k, but when I started writing, I was captured by the characters and they didn't let me go easily. So I ended up writing over 5k the first day. Over 4k the next two days. By day 5, I'd already hit 21k.  I've no idea why in particular my characters were so wordy, but I can't say I didn't enjoy it. I rode that high as long as I could, but by the end of the month, I was definitely flagging and slowing down. Here's the thing, though. This year has been a rollercoaster. I've also been writing all year, on and off on different stories.  January, I worked on book 1, getting it ready for my editor. February, worked on book 2. After that, I worked on book 3 for a couple months, then, middle of the year or so, I was informed by my characters that book 4 wasn't ideal for the title of book 4, so what if we had a book 4 that came in between?  .....