Well, I got back the developmental edit of Concussion Is Brain Injury. As expected, my editor did a bang-up job. Hard questions, detailed comments, nit picky on the grammar and punctuation in the way all good editors should be. Awesome! But also really, really tough for me because of the thinking and decisions involved. This isn’t just a story about fictional characters; this is my life that intersected with other lives. This is about real relationships and real events and real harm. From my perspective and relying on written sources and materials, ’tis true, yet the emotional challenge it creates is almost paralyzing. Plus all the reading!
It took me two days to read my editor’s cover letter once. Now I have to go through it properly. I’m thankful CCAC is supposed to give me another four weeks of help to plan the work and organize it so that I can discern and address each question, each point systematically. I have a few days to prepare before our first appointment. I’m using these days to try and skim bit by bit the editor’s comments in the manuscript and, as well, to set up my Patreon Creator Page because I apparently don’t have enough to do. Ahem.
I badly need a monthly income so that I can get my writing done and out. Although I’m focusing on Concussion right now, I have manuscripts piling up on my hard drive that are crying out for editing and publishing — and most of all, marketing. I’ve been studying what successful Patreon Creators do and trying to follow all the instructions. I started this without absorbing the dates! That my manuscript would be coming back soon, I take longer than normal to get things done, and, hello Shireen, once again taking on too much!
But my emotional work has gone to hell. My neurodoc seems to have lost the thread of who I am and what I need, and I’m being forced into the untenable position of having to work on my book sans the experienced, compassionate guidance I was promised and dealing with the emotional fallout mostly on my own. Unless someone, like God, smacks him awake to what he’s done, the only recourse I have is to rely on the limited but excellent CCAC health care people and my brain trainer and then the rest of the time overload myself with work to distract myself. Distraction therapy alleviates emotional hell in the moment; but it’s not possible when fatigue hits. Since that happens a lot when I’m writing, I also turn to Netflix. Distraction therapy doesn’t fix anyway. Witness all the kids who grew up during WWII (outside of protected North America), are retiring now, and falling into rage and emotional turmoil from WWII PTSD because there is no more work to distract. Except for a couple of events, I am not looking forward to the next 6 weeks.
