Is there an age or year of your life you would re-live?
No.
Because I already have.
That’s the thing with brain injury. It throws you back to the beginning of your life. And you have to grow up all over again. Childhood with adult memories and experiences is strange. But adolescence’s pseudo-hormonal fluctuations is just as awful the second time around. Cringe-worthy, as they say. Luckily, being unable to feel embarrassment helps!
I also don’t want to relive any year because, in a way, I do in my fiction writing. I don’t usually put myself in my novels. The characters come to me. And we work together to flesh out their lives and my ideas and anti-ideas.
But a strange thing happened this week as I prepped for the traditional November novelling. An aspect of myself entered the plot as a new character. And a stranger thing happened as I banged out at high speed the last chapter today on my laptop: the character has my name! Yikes!!
I hadn’t expected to be so blatantly in the second novel of The Q’Zam’Ta Trilogy!
I won’t tell you which aspect of myself appears in The Soul’s Reckoning. Let’s just say, Charlotte Elisabeth finds her annoying. Heh. That’s me! The one who challenges and irritates.
I spent this week finalizing the feedback and approval for the print cover SelfPubCovers was designing for me for The Soul’s Awakening. Money well spent to not have that usual headache. And it’s stunning! Better than I could’ve done with the front cover I also bought from them. I chose the fonts, though. I didn’t like their choices.
Then I spent too long setting up the title in IngramSpark for The Soul’s Awakening. I’m waiting for the proof. I also need to update the copyright page in Brain Injury, Trauma, and Grief with a sentence on AI. Who knew we’d have to protect ourselves against greedy scraper billionaires‽ Not like words in a copyright paragraph will protect. And only their fellow billionaires could take them to court.
Maybe a class action suit planet-wide will level justice back to us.
I haven’t done NaNoWriMo in a couple of years. Between their straying from their core mission and me trying to adjust to the upheavals in my life and healing my brain injury grief, I didn’t join in.
This year, I’m back to novelling in November. I first joined thousands of others writing frantically during the grey month in 2009. It feels like I’m restarting that habit but without my fellow NaNo participants. I don’t know how long I’ll last without the external drivers NaNoWriMo provides. I’m using trackbear.app to track my stats and am posting my progress on Bluesky. If I falter, I may join like the old days so that I can receive the pep talks etc that kept me going in past Novembers. We’ll see.
