I’ve been quieter lately than usual on both social media and here on my website. That’s for a lot of reasons. The first is I was head-down for most of September-November developing and running games, including the blockbuster 1878: Welcome to Salvation (which will have its post mortem post on this blog). However after that, a curious thing happened: I got a job.
As many people might know by now, I was freelancing full time after being laid off from John Wick Presents and 7th Sea. That was a long stretch of me going from check to check and paying for private health insurance to stay alive. Trust me, it was a lean time and a very stressful one. So I started looking for full-time work again. I never expected to get the job that I eventually landed.
After returning from Texas from running 1878, I packed up all my things and moved across the country from New Jersey to Santa Fe, New Mexico to work at one of the coolest places in the world…
Photos by: Meow Wolf website
I am now a Santa Fe resident, working as a Narrative Lead with some of the most creative people I’ve ever met in my life at the immersive art installation Meow Wolf. I will admit, it was a difficult move, and I would not have survived it without the help of so many good friends. There are too many to note, but Craig, Nico, Josh, Abigail, Ariella, Ennis, Katie, Allie, Abby, MayaBe, Travis, Sean, Gia, Megan, Alex, my father, and our rockstar Sean Foster were primary to this adventure. I was also scammed by movers, drove five days across the country with Nico, slept for nearly ten days in a scary motel and then on a couch in an empty apartment, ended up getting super sick from the altitude here and battled chronic health issues upon arrival. But here I am, with a new home, far from my old original home, under glorious blue skies in Santa Fe.
Meow Wolf itself is amazing. I get to write and ideate and create all day. And that is the dream of so many artists and writers that I feel so blessed to be here. I want to thank Danielle Harper, Jeff Gomez and Ryan Hart for pushing me to apply for this job when my confidence wasn’t there. I wouldn’t be at this great job without their support. And the support of so many others who nudged me along until I did the thing, posted the thing. (Also Nico for pushing me to finish my writing sample even when I was in the hospital – written with an IV in my arm!).
I was never much for day-glo paint until I came here. Now it’s all up in my head.
Life-wise, things have stayed a little rocky. Those health issues I mentioned are still in play, which has kept me from doing a lot of things I wanted to do. I thought I’d land right on my feet here, but I’ve been in and out of the hospital constantly since arrival. I can’t tell you all how many times I’ve been writing or online lately with an IV in my arm in a hospital bed (or how much my hospital bills have become – $40,000!). But it also means I’ve had to be very serious about what I do with my spare time… Which is why, for now, I’ve taken a break from writing tabletop RPG content. I want to thank so many people who have contacted me recently with work, but with being so ill and still recovering from the move, I’ve had to take a hiatus. Because sometimes, you need to admit when you have to take care of yourself first.
My move has also made me have to recenter my larp design. I’m now far from the East Coast and far from the people I’ve worked with for so long. That doesn’t mean I’m done with larp design by far (or tabletop for that matter!). But it means I won’t be able to come back to the East Coast for every event… which makes me sad. But it also means maybe designing things on the West Coast…? I’m excited.
So what am I saying? I’m not done doing games just because I’m working here:
I’m not being egotistical or showing off, I promise. I’m showcasing this gorgeous place.
It just means I’ve got to take it easier and make sure I take care of my health, so I can continue to make creative things both for my day job and for myself. Projects like Arksong, Immortal Flight, Affinity, my writing, and my comic book are still going on, plus some things you’ve never seen or heard of yet. But they’re going to take some time to pull off now as things change. As life often does.
So I’m not done.
And I need to accept that slowing down is the right thing to do, while still telling myself:
Instead I’ll say this: life changes. And I’m going with those changes. And I hope you’ll come with me. Thanks everyone, and thank you to Meow Wolf for this opportunity.
[[Note: trigger warnings for mental illness, bipolar disorder, medication, and some spoilers for Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette.]]
These days, I call it burning, but for most of my life, I called it flying.
It’s that feeling when you’re wrapped up in a writing project so hard you look up, and half a day has gone by. You haven’t moved, you haven’t drunk or eaten or talked to anyone. You work and work until your knuckles hurt, and there are words flowing out of you, and you can’t stop until it’s all done. Then you look up, realize what time it is, and fall over because the words are done for the day and you’ve been doing it. You’ve been flying.
That’s what writing when you’re me feels like.
Well, a lot of the time. Some days it’s just normal. I get up, I do my morning routine (take my meds, get some grub, boop the cat, check my email, mess around on Facebook) and then it’s off to the word mines. And on those days, they are indeed the word mines. I check an outline, I write notes, I putter around, I get the words going however I can, tugging that little mining cart up the hill towards those far-off paragraphs and… y’know, this analogy has gotten away from me. I digress.
Those are the hard days at the job because that’s what it is – writing, like making any art, is a job. It’s craft and talent and passion rolled up into one ball. It’s doing a thing you worked hard to learn to do the best you can. You’re capturing those weird little ideas rolling around in your head and making them into words, then lines, then paragraphs, and somehow they’re all supposed to reach out to someone who reads them and make their brains go POOF, I LIKE THIS. No pressure or anything, writer, just take the ephemeral and translate it onto a page. You make it happen as best as you can.
Then, there are the other days. The days when BLEH becomes BANG. The days when something just clicks and comes roaring down the pipe inside my brain and it’s all I can do to get to my computer because it’s ready to go and that’s it. Get out of the way.
I call it burning these days because that’s what it feels like: like there’s an idea inside me burning its way out. But when I was younger, I called it flying. What I really meant was controlled falling. Like there was a tornado going on and I would leap off something and ride right through the middle of it, all the way up, chasing words. Because that’s what it felt like for me, rolling on through the manic energy that comes with being bi-polar.
There’s a lot of folks who equate the manic energy of being bi-polar with the creative spark that drives artists to brilliance. They point to so many great artists in history who lived with mental illness and say, “there it is, that energy, that’s what made them great!”
Except for so many artists, mental illness didn’t make them great. It made them ill. And if they weren’t careful, it made them gone.
Hannah Gadsby’s blockbuster comedy special “Nanette” was billed as exactly that: a comedy. She was meant to get up on stage, make some jokes, and entertain us all on Netflix. Instead, Gadsby delivered what I can only call a commencement speech for comedians, a bait and switch that took the audience from laughter to silence and ultimately to a standing ovation. Gadsby, a queer comedian with a career going back over ten years, started her performance with a fairly standard routine, drawing in the laughs. Then she started explaining how jokes worked, about how they increased tension and then broke it into laughter.
Then, she stopped breaking the tension. And just rose it higher and higher by telling the truth.
She spoke to her audience about a lot of things. Her family, and what it was like coming out to them. About violence, about triggering subjects. She broke from the funny parts of her routine a little over halfway through and talked about quitting comedy because she was tired of making people like herself, a lesbian still fighting with some deep shame issues, into a punchline. I watched in spell-bound silence as Hannah Gadsby deconstructed comedy to its most basic building blocks and rebuilt them into a soapbox, a grand forum where she read the audience a monologue of pain and vulnerability, her farewell to wisecracks and the opening of perhaps a new chapter of honest, open speaking in her life. She was out to speak her truth, and by the end, I was in awe.
It was somewhere in the middle where she told people to fuck off when telling artists to “feel” for their art that I felt the ground open up beneath me a little and I cried.
Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh
She talked about Vincent Van Gogh, the artist who suffered during his life from mental illness, self-medicated, was treated by doctors and struggled to succeed despite his obvious impossible talent due to his sickness. She talked about her knowledge of his life, thanks to her art history degree, and how he only sold one painting his entire life – not because he wasn’t recognized by his community as a genius, but because he struggled to even be part of a community due to his illness.
And I thought of the flying and the hard days at the word mines. I thought about the days when I heard the tornado in my head and couldn’t make the words get to my fingers. I thought about the frustration, the depression, the difficulties talking to people about what it sounded like inside my skull some days when I could barely pay attention because of the rush of words and ideas.
Hannah Gadsby told people artists don’t have to suffer for their art, and I’ll forever thank her for having the guts to stand up and say that to the world. Because I used to believe it was true.
When I was sixteen, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder type 2.
I came from a family that didn’t really get what being bipolar meant. My parents tried to get it, but when I’d do something irresponsible, it was always because I was ‘bad.’ I tried to explain how it was impossible to keep my whirlwind mind straight sometimes. How it was a battle against depression to get up in the morning and go to class. When I flunked in school, I tried to explain why, when I overcharged my credit card on a manic binge, when I cried for days and couldn’t stop. But those were the bad days. And the good days – those were the days I could take on the world, where no one could stop me, where I was manic off my head. I was out of control.
I went to a therapist when my school suggested it to my parents. The therapist took one look at my behavior and referred me to a psychiatrist, a loud and overbearing man who listened to me talk a mile a minute for fifteen minutes, heard my symptoms, and pulled out a giant prescription pad. I started taking the drugs he gave me but received no explanation about what being bipolar really meant. He never explained what behaviors were unusual, or what could be attributed to the illness, or any coping skills or resources to better understand my situation. He gave me pills and saw me every two weeks. I knew almost nothing about what was going on with me but was even enough to realize I needed more information.
So? I went online.
Because my family didn’t know much about bipolar disorder and my doctor wasn’t telling, I learned a lot from the internet. Those were the wild and wooly early days of the internet, when it was the 90’s and everyone was in AOL chat rooms and the world was a wacky, wacky place. It was on the internet I found a community of roleplayers that eventually led me to the career I have today. It was also where I got a LOT of bad advice about mental illness.
I read a lot of stories about people being overmedicated or given the wrong medication. I heard stories about people being committed by their families if they didn’t hide what was wrong with them. But I especially came across the same story over and over from people who had been medicated. “If you go on the drugs,” they said, “the creative drive goes away. You’ll lose that spark inside you. If you want to be an artist, stay away from medication. It’ll kill your art.”
I didn’t believe it. I was taught doctors were to be trusted. And besides, I knew I needed help. So I took the drugs the doctor gave me and fell into the worst confluence of events you could imagine. Because the medication the doctor gave me DID kill my creativity. It also made me sleep too much, have no emotions whatsoever, destroyed my memory, and made me gain tons of weight. And every time I brought this up to my doctor, his answer was to add another pill to balance out the others or up my dose.
I didn’t realize it until later, but I had a bad doctor. What I did know was at the height of this medicine dance, I’d spend my days sleeping, or staring at a television, and feeling nothing at all. I couldn’t even cry. But maybe worst of all, I struggled to create. I couldn’t find that spark inside me like I used to, that flying feeling that gave me inspiration. In the moments when I could feel something, it was the overwhelming terror of going back into that stupor once again.
This went on from the time I was seventeen, when I was so messed up I dropped out of high school, until I was nearly 19. In between, I struggled to get my GED so I could at least get into college and proceeded to flunk there too due to the medication’s impossible weight on my mind. I went through so many ridiculous emotional issues I can’t describe, but all of it was through a curtain of medication so thick I can barely pull up memories from that time.
The times my emotions would push through was during what I discovered later were hypomanic phases, mood swings so strong they butted through the haze and made me wildly unstable. All the while I struggled to get my life in order, and every time I did, it was under a fog of badly managed medication, or through the adrenaline of mania so strong I could barely function. I didn’t understand I was badly medicated, of course. All I knew was everything was falling to pieces, all the time, and I couldn’t feel a solid, real emotion long enough to care.
So in 2002, in one of those moments of emotional lucidity, I made a decision to stop taking my meds. I suddenly thought: the internet is right, this is a horrible, horrible mistake. I trusted my experience and my terror and I stopped taking my meds.
And well, to quote one of my heroines from the time, Buffy:
What followed were ten years of the roughest, rockiest, unbelievably manic, altogether difficult experiences of my life. I had bouts of going back on medication, but would always stop for one reason or another. I’d make excuses but each time it was the same thing: I convinced myself I didn’t feel right on the medication. That I couldn’t feel that creative spark I so relied on as part of my life. I was afraid of going back to that medically-induced haze I’d been in before. I hid from it and kept riding the tornado, every day. And like any tornado, my instability left chaos and destruction in its wake.
I can’t say I regret those ten years. They taught me a lot. I regret a lot of the horrible decisions I made, the people I hurt, the situations I got into where I got ripped up myself. I have memories I’ll never forget, instances of realizing too late I’d gotten into something because of my mania that led ultimately to disaster.
But I remember the creative highs. The way I could just fly like the wind and produce 12,000 words in a night. How I could map out entire novels, series of books, all the things in the world I thought I could create. I wrote papers, read whole book series, stayed up for days on end, played role-playing games from morning until night, and never, ever saw anything wrong with where I was in life. Because I was living that artists life and I thought, hey, this is me. This is who I am.
I know now the truth: that was the illness talking. The living high on life, throwing caution to the wind, tornado voice? Is the manic voice. And unless tempered with medication and coping mechanisms can lead to disaster.
From 2002 until 2012 I remained largely unmedicated. And those ten years are, in hindsight, an unspoken cautionary tale of someone not flying, but falling without recognizing the drop in altitude. A tale of someone on a corkscrew through rough weather, catching fire all the way down.
I went to grad school in 2012 and thank god for so many reasons that I did. It’s not even my education I laud when I think of those years, but a single day in November 2012. I’d only been in classes for two months and already I was starting to lose it from the stress. The day I broke down with a massive anxiety attack after a critique from a teacher, hiccuping with tears and hyperventilating in a bathroom, I walked across the street to the health clinic and got an appointment with a mental health counselor. There, a very nice man named Bob talked to me about my experiences, about what I knew about bipolar disorder.
Bob told me some truth about where I was at and what I needed. He said he was surprised I’d gotten as far as I did going the way I was. He listened to my fears about going on meds and what had happened in the past. Then he calmly explained how he was going to give me medication and we’d work together to find what worked.
The first day I took medication, I woke up in the morning and the tornado was quieter. Not quiet, but less a twisting funnel of noise and more of a loud echo. I called up someone who was then a friend (who had experience with the medication I’d started taking) and broke down crying. I asked him: is this what normal felt like? I had no idea it would get even better.
Six years later, I’ve never been off my medication a single day. And I’ve graduated from grad school, survived a brain surgery and being diagnosed with two serious chronic illnesses, ending up using a wheelchair, running my own business, becoming a writer, and too many personal ups and downs to count. Each of them I tackled with a surety in myself I never could have before, because I was no longer screaming through a tornado all the time. More importantly, I’ve spent those years creating games and writing work I’ve made with deliberateness and careful consideration. When I create, it was no longer controlled falling, but dedicated flight on a controlled course. Well, most of the time.
I won’t say everything became perfect after I started medication because I won’t let blogging make a liar out of me. Being bipolar is a constant system of checks and balances. These days, I fight against needing my medication adjusted a lot, against depression and anxiety, mania and hypomania. I still end up flying some days, sometimes for days at a time, because as time goes on the body changes and you have to adjust to new needs, new doses, new medication.
Coping mechanisms change, life situations go ways you never expected, mania and depression rear their ugly head. But the day I went on medication was one of the greatest days of my life, because it was the day my creative spark stopped becoming an excuse to keep putting up with an illness that was killing me.
I did some research online (now responsibly!) about artists who were known to have fought with mental illness. Google it some time and it’ll be a stark look into some suffering for art you might not know about. People know about Van Gogh, but what about Beethoven and David Foster Wallace, Georgia O’Keefe and Sylvia Plath, Goya and Cobain, Robin Williams and Amy Winehouse. I did research and discovered artists like Mariah Carrey, Demi Lovato, Catherine Zeta Jones, Vivien Leigh, Russell Brand, Linda Hamilton, and of course Carrie Fischer all have/had bipolar disorder. Their stories, their struggles, are well known.
I read books about people theorizing about the connection between mental illness and creativity and shake my head. I don’t need to know the connection, because if there is one, it doesn’t matter to me. I take my medicine and work my craft at the same time because I don’t need to suffer as an artist. I don’t need the mania to take flight and reach inspiration. I can do that on my own.
So speaketh the General, the Princess, Carrie Fischer
Mental illness and the struggle against it is one I’ll tackle for the rest of my life. But to quote Hannah Gadsby: “There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.” The day I started on my journey to getting better by taking medication, by denying the world my suffering and instead gave myself permission to live healthier while making art, was the day I started rebuilding myself into the strongest version of me. Every day, one more brick, with every word I write, I build myself higher.
And so I offer a special thanks to Hannah Gadsby, and her brave “Nanette,” for reminding me of how important that choice was to my life. For reminding me I owe nobody my suffering to make what is precious to me, and that a creator doesn’t need to push aside their own mental health to be hailed as an artist. Thank you, Hannah, for your strength. May you find your inspiration wherever you walk.
This week hasn’t exactly been a fantastic time for me. Losing a parent can really make you get stuck in a maudlin, even slightly dark frame of mind. So it’s no secret that seeing photos coming out of Hurricane Harvey of elder folks near drowning in a nursing home due to lack of evacuation and inability to move well put me in a foul mood. It also got me thinking of conversations I’ve heard over the years about disability and the end of society.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. You and your friends are sitting around and having some beers, and the conversation turns to the apocalypse. Maybe you’re watching The Walking Dead, or reading Divergent, or even going to your favorite post-apocalypse live action roleplaying game. But in between talking about what happens if Daryl dies on the show and exchanging larp armor suggestions, someone inevitably brings up what they would do in the event of the apocalypse. Doesn’t matter what the apocalypse cause: zombies, an outbreak, Donald Trump. Everyone gets to play the “what would I do in the case of society’s end” game.
I used to indulge in this game myself with my friends. But these days, when the subject comes up, I get very quiet. Because there’s only one answer:
I die.
I’ve read a lot of apocalyptic fiction in my life. From The Stand to Alas, Babylon, I’ve gone through the gamut. It’s a fascinating genre, really, considering what the fall of our civilization would do and what would happen to our plucky band of intrepid protagonists. How would they struggle? Who would survive? I used to identify with the hard-working protagonists, enjoying their constant battles and sacrifices. I, like so many others, put myself into the perspective of the struggling hero. I never thought I’d be one of the people left behind. The reality is, however, I’d be one of those who probably perished in the first few days/weeks/months, the footnotes in the Roland Emmerich movie who isn’t even in the credits with a name, who stares at the incoming giant wave or alien attack with the defeated, accepted resolution that this is the inevitable end.
As a disabled woman, disaster epics, apocalypse fiction, and post-apoc tales aren’t a vicarious thrill for me anymore. Theoretical zombie apocalypse escape plan BS sessions with friends aren’t amusing anymore. They’re an exercise in facing my mortality.
I grew up thinking I could handle anything. I was a young woman who largely lived out of my backpack, ready to grab it and go on a regular basis. When I read about characters in end of the world stories, like The Passage, The Road, Swan Song, or any of the countless others en vogue for the last thirty years, I always put myself into the head of the protagonist. I thought in their situation, I’d strap on my best sneakers, grab supplies, make sure I had my friends and cat food, and survive, me and my cat and my friends/family, together.
The reality of this vicarious thought exercise changed dramatically as I developed serious health problems. Chronic health issues like mine require continuous medical care, including a regiment of medication three times a day. Prescriptions, of course, run out, and when the corner pharmacy has been annihilated by a horde of zombies, there’s no more medication to keep me alive. Within days of running out of pills, I’d end up in some serious trouble. A lack of my painkillers would send me into serious, dangerous detox, while the lack of my endocrine medication would lead to a complete collapse of body systems. Within days, I’d be suffering. Within a week, I’d probably be dead.
And that, dear readers, is without considering the difficulties of locomotion for me in a wheelchair during a societal breakdown. I have difficulty navigating the crowds at New York Comic Con, or walking through New York City due to potholes and breaks in the sidewalk. Imagine off-roading in my wheelchair during a hectic evacuation, either pushed by one of my friends/family/a stranger or riding in the electric wheelchair until the battery runs out. I think about the protest I went to after the Eric Garner shooting, where we marched up the middle of 6th avenue. Two buses blocked our way, and three people had to stop to lift my wheelchair over the tiny gap between vehicles. Such a small thing, but in an emergency so deadly.
This personal look into how reliant I am on society to stay alive has been an eye-opener for me. In a world were destabilization is so much closer than we ever thought possible, I look for solace to literature to relax, and realize how many of the narratives I enjoyed before leave a bitter taste in my mouth. I reread The Stand and came to Stephen King’s chapter where he outlined all the people who died in the collapse of society post- Captain Tripps. And after so many of them, he wrote: “No great loss.” It always gave me the shivers. I’d be one of those people, probably, slowly dying in the face of the end. No adventure to go meet Mother Abigail. Just toodles, and hoping my life didn’t earn me the “no great loss” title in the end.
And so it brought me back to the inherent problem about post-apocalyptic narratives: they are, by nature and design, ableist in the extreme. Apocalyptic fiction doesn’t just embrace the erasure of the disabled and medically compromised, it normalizes their obliteration. It presents stories where we’ve re-embraced survival of the fittest as the only moniker and lionizes those who overcome hardship through leaving behind the injured and ill.
Worse, these stories accept the death of those who are disabled as not only the norm, but as a heroic sacrifice to the survival of the healthy, a gift the disabled and ill can bestow on their fellows. Most of these stories have at least one or two examples of people who commit suicide to keep the disabled or ill person from becoming a drain on resources, or to keep them from suffering too long. While people battle furiously over things like doctor assisted suicide in the real world, they’re willing to accept disabled folks taking themselves out of the equation as an inevitable, even noble, deed in society collapse fiction. And it says something very eerie about how people look at the disabled in these stories:
In a stable society, the disabled are tolerated, if not welcomed. In the face of disaster, they are a liability, and one to be excised for ease of the able-bodied.
There are exceptions to that narrative, stories that stand out for the characters willing to stand up for those less able. One of my favorite scenes from the first season of The Walking Dead comes when Rick and his band of friends encounter what they first believe to be a group of thugs in Atlanta. The scene is uncomfortable in that Rick and his (mostly) white friends immediately size up the other group, made up of mostly people of color, as a threat, with the narrative implying they believe they’re gang-bangers and criminals. (They’re known as the Vatos gang).
Addressing casual racism AND ableism. Why I fell in love with The Walking Dead.
However, the story flips the whole thing on its head when we discover the ‘thugs’ are actually protecting a building full of the elderly and infirm. The Vatos are cooks, janitors, and family members of the elderly who refused to abandon the patients when the able-bodied staff fled. They are willing to face the hordes of the undead to protect the elderly who cannot flee easily, even in the heart of besieged Atlanta.
Logan cares for Professor Xavier despite both physical and mental health issues.
This caregiver narrative is often absent from apocalyptic fiction, as the notion of care of those less able is relegated to characters deemed salvageable or valuable to society. Protagonists will focus on the rescue of children over those who are disabled, seeing them as the future of society, while those who are injured or disabled might be a drain. Only those disabled characters who are seen as highly valuable are fought for and preserved, such as in the case of Mother Abigail in The Stand, wheelchair-bound Vriess in Aliens 4, Professor Xavier in Logan, or even Bran in Game of Thrones (which can be considered an apocalyptic tale considering the White Walkers invasion). These characters require effort to be expended to keep them alive but are almost always preserved only because their abilities are deemed too highly valuable to lose. Otherwise, care is often withheld or deemed a drain.
Furiosa: the heroine we need and deserve
What’s often frustrating in these narratives is the way adaptive or assistive devices are treated, as if they are equally burdensome and do not allow characters to navigate the world with greater ease. Characters who could continue to be included in narratives are often set aside or sacrificed because other characters don’t even bother to seek out assistive devices like braces, crutches, or wheelchairs. This makes characters who utilize such devices so important in fiction. A prime example of a character whose assistive device is included but never overly emphasized is Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road, whose missing arm is replaced by a metal one. She is a prime example of a disabled heroine who is not only not marginalized, but who thrives as the movie’s protagonist.
Hershel took over Dale’s amputation storyline on the TV series after Dale was killed the previous season.
I particularly appreciated Dale in The Walking Dead comics for this reason. Originally able-bodied when he joined Rick’s group at the beginning, Dale (spoiler alert) loses a leg during the course of the flight from the zombies, and though it gives him trouble, he remains a part of the group. (In the television series, the storyline is transplanted onto Hershel). Seeing someone with mobility issues still included as part of the group as opposed to being discarded was a major sticking point for me in loving Kirkman’s comic and eventually the TV series.
Raven in the Arcadia camp post-injury.
Another fantastic example is Raven from The 100. The former space-dwelling engineer becomes badly injured during the course of the show, her leg and back permanently damaged. Though she can walk with the help of a leg brace, she is slowed down and in constant pain. Raven struggles with her new challenges, considers ending her own life, and ultimately faces her new disability status with a grim finality, realizing that at any moment she could lose her life due to her limitations. Still, she survives each season with determination, supported and bolstered by her friends, who do not let her give into depression. In fact, few characters in the show are as resourceful or vital as Raven, who is supported by others in her role in the community. Raven is a wonderful example of a narrative that embraces the disabled, rather than obliterates them.
Yet there are more stories which sweep away the disabled than embracing them. And what’s worse, the idea of the disabled being abandoned is lionized, given a sort of solemn acceptance. It’s known the disabled need to be forgotten, left behind. The able-bodied in the stories often embrace how painful and awful it is to lose someone because of their medical situation or disability, but largely move on with a sense of acceptance. It’s accepted, of course, that the fittest move on, and don’t try to waste resources on their differently abled friend. There are countless scenes where someone must be sacrificed to help the rest of the group survive, and more often than not it is the cruel “I tell it like it is” character who points out the disabled/ill person as a drain on resources who should be chosen. And though the others moralize, in the end, they often agree. The message becomes clear: the differently abled are expendable.
More often than not, these scenes include some kind of noble sacrifice moment, where the disabled/injured/ill person looks deep into the heroes eyes and asks to be left behind so they can help the group. They stop fighting, stop trying to survive, ending the drain they put on resources with solemn acceptance, the last heroic gesture they can make. This is often mirrored in zombie stories when a single person is bitten and they calmly pick up a weapon to end their lives, the generous actions of a person trying not to inflict their sickness on others. Yet while some stories have heroes fighting to save the zombie-infected person, few have heroes fighting to keep their diabetic friend alive.
“Leave me, Master Luke!” Even C-3P0 in Star Wars has that disabled martyr complex.
An example of a scene that faces down this issue comes from The Stand. King introduces Stu Redman as our everyday hero, a caring soul who becomes the heart of the survivors on their way across the country to meet the magical Mother Abigail. In the first scene of Part 3 of the TV series, Stu is elbow deep in a man’s guts, trying to remove a burst appendix on a cold concrete floor. Stu is no doctor but does his best without anesthetic and with nothing but a medical textbook to guide him. And though his patient dies, Stu at least attempts the operation rather than let the ill man die without a fight.
Stu attempts an appendectomy in The Stand Part 3.
This instance, however, just like the zombie bite, is an example of an onset illness, meant in the narrative to convey the fragility of human health when there are no hospitals, no safety nets for the often changeable human condition. But more chronic, ongoing illnesses are treated much differently in these stories, often signaling an accepted death sentence with no attempt at treatment.
Physical disabilities might be badly treated in apocalyptic fiction, but equally marginalized in these stories are those with mental illness. Already often badly used in fiction, the mentally ill are often portrayed as not only a drain on society but a danger to those around them. Those with mental illness or neuro-atypical status become an outlying wildcard in the apocalyptic survivor stories, playing the role of simple sidekicks, quirky but unstable comedic relief, or else hampering burdens to the survival of the group. While these stories highlight the heroes often suffering from things like PTSD and depression, rarely are conditions like these treated as illnesses to be addressed. Instead, they are dangerous shifts in personality to be treated with “tough love” scenes as other survivors cajole the character to get over it, get stronger, move on. Those that don’t are often killed off, a victim of their own emotional instability.
Those portrayed with chronic, less environmentally-contributed mental illnesses are usually treated far worse in the stories. Apocalypse stories often include someone with mental illness to throw in the magical crazy prophet trope or the unstable person who will endanger the group. Rarely is their mental illness addressed as treatable, or even manageable, and the ‘crazy’ character often becomes a casualty of the story, perishing due to losing control of themselves to their ‘madness.’
Pilar McCawley as played by Linda Hamilton
A well-explored version of this story happened in the TV show Defiance. Set in a post-alien invasion Earth, new frontiersman Rafe McCawley tells his children their mother Pilar died rather than admit he left her behind due to her mental illness. After society fell apart, Pilar could no longer get treatment for her bipolar disorder and became erratic. Rather than face handling an unstable Pilar, Rafe takes his children and leaves. Pilar survives, however, and later comes back to reunite with her family. She becomes a villain of the show, however, as her bipolar disorder makes her do inappropriate things like, oh, kidnap her daughter’s half-alien baby. But while the show attempts to show characters empathizing with Pilar’s situation, it also showcased the show’s protagonists turning on Pilar, calling her crazy and eventually killing her while she was in the throes of her mania.
Her death in the show too closely mirrored the violence so often perpetrated on the mentally ill in our world when they act out inappropriately. And this is one of the good examples of well-explored mental illness characters. Many others are far, far worse.
It’s no secret that fiction of any kind reflects the anxieties of the times. In the 50’s it was the body snatchers, mirroring the fear of invasion and infiltration by the Russians. In the 70’s and 80’s, it was concerns over rampant consumerism and wanton behavior that bred our slasher film fascination, and the 2000’s are all about fears of society collapsing in the face of global terror and societal instability. Yet what does it say about our society as a whole when our fiction is not only about people trying to survive such collapses but embraces survival of the fittest as the rubric for that fiction’s heroic journey?
Too often the disabled are set aside in our society, considered burdens and drains on resources. Yet while most at least show basic discomfort with the marginalization of the disabled, our apocalypse fiction envisions futures where the disabled not only don’t exist but go heroically to their deaths so as not to be a bother in times of trouble. The concept smacks of an insidious undercurrent of near eugenics-level categorization of the disabled and chronically ill most would find distasteful when called out in the open. No one wants to admit they accept the disabled as a burden. Yet there it is, in the stories about our most difficult times. In those stories, the disabled are deprioritized and erased from existence, sacrificed at the feet of the able.
I’ve stopped indulging as much in apocalyptic fiction lately. My own medical status has made it difficult to enjoy stories in which I would be annihilated pretty quickly, or else considered selfish for trying to survive. Instead, I look for stories like The 100 when people with disabilities are equally valued and fought for, and not just treated with pity but embraced as integral to the continued survival for their skills, experience, and contributions to society.
I envision if there was a zombie apocalypse, I’d be there, whacking zombies in the head with something and then zooming along in my wheelchair until my medicine runs out. There’d be no noble “save yourself!” from me unless necessary due to circumstance, and not because I would be a ‘burden.’ Instead, I’d strive to be a comfort and an ally to my friends and those around me, contributing to the whole as I do in my everyday life, right up until the end. Would that the fiction I consume had the same confidence in me as I try to have in myself.
It’s a Friday night in Jersey City, and I should be at a larp.
Instead, I’m in a hospital bed in the local emergency room with an IV in my arm. My roommate Craig is sitting with his iPad nearby. We’re joking over the latest antics from the White House and the recent defeat of the SkinnyRepeal. “I get to live another year,” I joke. But it’s no joke for me. I massage my arm and try to ignore it’s stinging. The nurse came in and tried to get blood a little while ago, but my veins are so shallow from dehydration they couldn’t find a good one to tap. It took six tries before they could get the blood they needed. I’ll have bruises in the morning.
“I’m just glad I finished all my work before today,” I say. The nurse comes in to wheel me to get an ultrasound of my stomach, but I’m pretty sure I know what they’ll find. Nothing. Because what’s happening is all part of the glorious roulette wheel of fibromyalgia symptoms plus a great big dose of dehydration.
I hadn’t eaten in twenty four hours, was unable to even keep down water. By the time we made it to the hospital, I was seeing spots and couldn’t stand well to transfer from my wheelchair. And the muscles spasming up and down my back, neck, and shoulders had locked up into a single, solid knot.
And all I could think about was: I could be at a larp right now. Or I should be writing.
Welcome to the life of a chronic illness creative.
I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia when I was twenty six, but I’d been experiencing symptoms for years. I’d have muscle pain, lock ups, generalized fatigue we couldn’t figure out, and brain fog that would knock out my concentration. I’d sleep for way longer than I should and had pain up and down my back, shoulders, arms, and legs. Doctors checked me for just about everything. I’d been hit by a car in 2005 so most doctors figured it was just after-effects of the accident. It wasn’t until I saw a particularly canny pain management doctor that I got the right diagnosis.
People with fibromyalgia often have trigger points of pain where the fascia and the muscles meet (or at least that’s what I was told). My pain management doctor walked over, poked four of those spots, and watched me nearly leap out of my skin.
“Ding ding,” he said, “we have a winner.”
Kicking ass at Dystopia Rising: New Jersey
Within days, I was in treatment. I was getting medical massage, got acupuncture, was trying out the latest fibromyalgia medication, and getting pain medication to become functional again. And I did. For a little while. I went back to school, went back to work. I graduated, kept working eight hours on my feet at Apple, kept LARPing. I would run through the woods on my weekends, ignoring the muscles that hurt so bad I could barely see sometimes. Sure, I’d fall over sometimes and throw up from the pain. Sure, I’d get muscle-tension so bad it triggered headaches so violent I would be in bed for two days. I had doctor notes for work. I exercised. I took care of myself.
But fibromyalgia can only be treated, not cured. And as time went on, it got worse.
Let me tell you what it’s like to try and write while having fibromyalgia.
Imagine you got in a fight. A knock-down, drag out fight with someone. Doesn’t matter who won in the end, but you came out the other side. You’re not badly hurt, but every muscle is hurting from the strain. You feel bruised in places so bad it burns. And the rush of adrenaline is wearing off, so the awful exhaustion is kicking in, so thick you want to sleep for a month. And inside your head is that foggy feeling that says you need a very long, very restful nap, just to make all the pain go away.
That’s fibromyalgia on a medium day.
On a bad day, you lost the fight, and there are places on your body that are screaming.
(If you’ve never been in a fight, substitute running up and down a really steep hill with heavy bags of groceries and a giant backpack like ten times in the heat. I think it about equates.)
Imagine then asking your body to sit in one place, at a computer, and be creative.
Or worse (for me), run a larp. For those who aren’t familiar, running a larp is half being a ringmaster and performer, half logistics manager for an improv immersive theater performance, half writer-on-the-go, and half team manager. Now try doing it while your muscles are screaming at you to just sit down, shut up, go to sleep, just stop, just stop, just STOP.
Sometimes, you just have to stop. Sometimes, you can push on. But one thing is for sure. Over time, it gets harder and harder to push. And you’re always so damn tired.
My health got worse, over time. I developed Cushing’s Disease, a disease of the endocrine system that spawns hormone-producing tumors in your pituitary and adrenal glands. I had a pituitary adenoma (that’s a tumor) we had to remove as soon as it was found. We named it Larry, and Larry was a sonofabitch. Larry screwed up my endocrine system so badly that three and a half years later, I’m still recovering. My body in fact may never recover fully, and I’ll need to take hormone replacements for the rest of my life.
Cushing’s Disease also makes you gain weight. Point of fact, it’s one of the ways they find out you HAVE the damn thing. Now I’d never been a small girl, but gaining 180 lbs in nine months is unreal. Falling asleep nearly face down at my desk, struggling with blinding migraines, all of it led them to Larry. I had a brain surgery that laid me out for over six months. I was tired all the time. I could barely get out of bed.
I continued as a freelance writer. I graduated NYU. I wrote a book. I looked for work. I ran LARPs. Because life wasn’t waiting for me to get better, and I needed to work. Because I’m a writer and a larp designer and my mind won’t slow down because my body does.
I got a wheelchair to get around. I said goodbye to larping in the woods for a while.
It takes time to adapt to failing health. Your mind wants to tell you that you’ll recover soon, that you’ll go back to the way things were before. You’ll remember the glory days, the days when you could run, when you could fight, when you could walk across Manhattan with friends all night, talking about absolutely nothing, for hours on end. You remember hiking up a mountain, or backpacking through a country. You remember waking up in the morning without pain.
Your mind is a great denial machine, to help you stay mentally healthy. It shields you from the enormity of what you’ve lost. But one day, while you’re planning this grand trip you just know you can do because hell yes you can, you twist some way when you’re sitting down, and your back explodes in pain. And then you remember your limits. And you remember those days of doing things easily, of racing through the woods in a larp or even getting up a damn flight of stairs with ease, and know they might be over forever.
Well, the ease part is over. Whether or not you go and do it anyway, though, that’s up to you.
I got rolled into the MRI room. The technician had to do a lot of imaging, so we got to chatting. She asked me a lot of questions about my medical situation. I had to give her the full run-down, which is a long list of medications, medical issues, and treatments. When I was done, she stared at me.
“You’ve got all that memorized, huh?”
I shrugged. “I’ve got practice.” When you’ve got chronic health issues, you’ve got to learn what’s up with you, so you can talk to doctors as an educated patient. I came prepared for speaking to my doctor with all my medications memorized or in my bag, the full run-down of what’s been going on, and the doctors to contact if more information was needed. Par for the course.
We chatted for a while longer. She asked what I did. When I told her I was a game designer, she gave me the same response plenty of people do. “Man, my __________ (insert relative here) would love you! It must be a great job!”
And I always say the same thing, “It’s a hard one, but I love it.” Because I do. Every day, I get up and I know I’m working in the creative field I love. I get to write words and people read them and enjoy them. I help bring books to development that will give people joy. I run larps and see people get excited, and get immersed, and come out loving what they’ve experienced, the stories they lived through if only for a little while.
I think about my deadlines as I’m lying in the MRI room. I’m thinking about the larp I’m writing, the books I’m developing, the projects I have planned. I think about my novel and the few chapters left to the end, dragging on and on because I’ve just been so stressed and exhausted.
I am exhausted. I’m always exhausted. And I’m always, always mad. I’m furious at my body for giving out on me in the prime of my life, of how it fights me for the littlest things these days like going up a flight of stairs or reaching for something in a store aisle. How I wake up in pain that robs me of a good night’s sleep. How I have to take medication just to get through the day, especially painkillers so often demonized by others for their addictive properties.
I’ve been on those painkillers for six years under a doctor’s care, and never deviated from treatment, never taken more than I was supposed to. But I’ve still had people in my creative field try to slander my name by calling me a junkie. I think about life without pain management, about the screaming muscle pain and the blinding migraines and the fatigue from just fighting the pain. A junkie, huh?
And people wonder why I’m always so pissed off. I do a lot of meditation, a lot of spiritual exploration. People tell me I should do yoga, as if yoga will cure things. People suggest a lot of things. “Have you just tried not thinking about it?” is my favorite. Or, “I heard if you just go vegetarian/paleo/Atkins/low carb/stand on your head, you’ll feel better.” Or the old favorite, “You’re always sick all the time.”
Yes. Yes, I am.
I practice a lot of that anger management meditation to deal with dumb-ass questions, concern trolling, unsolicited medical advice, inaccessible venues for my wheelchair, and unapologetic discrimination against disabilities. I need a lot of patience. There’s a lot of bullshit people deal with when they’ve got chronic disabilities, especially some that are invisible. You need a lot of patience explaining your needs to people around you in everyday life. At airports, conventions, at the corner store. Some people make it easier. Others make your head just plain hurt.
I practice a lot of deep breathing and remember that old saying: oh lord forgive them, they know not what they do. And even if they do, anger is only some bricks in my already overflowing backpack. I do my best most days. Most days.
But I can’t do that best alone. The days of being able to just bear up and do things by myself have sadly vanished. And because of that, I have to rely a lot on the kindness and support of others around me. It’s not a natural state for me, to ask for help. Anyone who knew me in my twenties would know I was always taking on too much without delegating, without even letting others know when I was in trouble. It’s an ongoing challenge. Once I got sick, however, that went out the door. Some days, getting food can be a challenge, or wheeling down to the corner coffee shop, or out for pizza.
I have good people in my life. Amazing people. Brilliant people. We travel together to conventions, to concerts, to days out. And some days, that includes pushing my wheelchair, snagging me food, making sure I sleep, I eat, I drink. I push too hard and fall over, and they’re there to make sure I don’t fall. Without them, I wouldn’t be able to survive, let alone be creative.
I remember every day they give me strength. I remember to thank them as often as I can. I am afraid I’ll wear out my welcome with them. I’m afraid they’ll get tired of the sick friend, who makes it hard to get places, who has a wheelchair. I get concerned I’m asking too much when I ask for help. I am afraid I’ll lose them.
I have lost friends. Friends who didn’t get it. Friends who called asking for help ‘being selfish.’ Friends who just drifted away because I couldn’t come out as often, couldn’t be there. It was painful. It hurt. But people drift out of our lives. And I learned to be more thankful, to let people know how much I appreciate things more, both in my everyday life and at work. People throw around the word blessed on Instagram and Twitter in hashtags, but that’s what I know I am. I’m blessed. And it fuels me to keep moving every damn day.
The MRI tech finished up what she was doing and got me ready for transport.
“You know,” she said, “you’re doing better than a lot of people with half of your issues. A lot of folks would have just given up by now.”
I blinked at her. “And done what?” I asked. “What’s my alternative?”
She started laughing. “See, that’s why you’re making it.”
As the attendant pushed my gurney out, I shrugged and said, “Nah, I’m just stubborn. They’re going to have to wheel me out of this life feet first.”
My first Star Wars larp in college.
When I was sixteen, I was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. A very brusque, uncommunicative doctor in Brooklyn sat me down and explained why I was so depressed and then utterly manic, why I was having trouble with suicidal ideations. He said the only way to get things under control was medication. He didn’t explain much about my illness, only that I was going to have it my whole life. That was eighteen years ago, and I spent most of my twenties struggling to come to grips with my mental health. I can only be glad I got it (fairly) under control before my health kicked out.
I get up every morning, and I take my medication. I feel no shame in talking about taking medication for anything that’s going on with me, be it chronic health or mental illness. These are everyday parts of my life, my reality. And I find no shame in seeking treatment for what is wrong, for what needs correcting so I can live a healthy, safe life. I take my mental health as seriously as my fibromyalgia or my Cushing’s Disease, maybe more. Depression, to be blunt, can kill you as fast as a mismanaged endocrine system. Maybe even faster.
The MRI tech reminded me of something I’d promised myself when I started the latest course of anti-depressants and mood stabilizers. I was just starting grad school and I’d been on and off medication for too long. I took my first dose of a new medication and within hours I was feeling better. I called a friend and asked him if this is what normal felt like, when the windstorm of mania in my head had calmed down and I could think straight for perhaps the first time in a long while. And I promised myself that day I’d take all that energy I used to use to hold onto being stable, a fight I sometimes only won by my fingernails, and I’d turn that to working and gaining my goals. To succeeding at my dreams, and never, ever give up.
They’ll have to wheel me out of this life feet first.
I keep that motto in mind every day.
Me at the Women’s March on Washington D.C. in 2017
And some days, it just doesn’t work.
I woke up today and I’m fairly sure I’ll be asleep for a good chunk of the morning. I’m back from the hospital, and I was right. The doctors found a nasty case of severe dehydration (my medication makes me dehydrate pretty fast), some gastric issues, and a whole lot of fibro symptoms that masquerade as something more serious. (Ever get rolling chest, arm, and neck pains that squeeze the breath out of you? If those symptoms sound like a heart attack, ding ding ding. Now play the home game, “Am I dying or is it fibro?”) I lie down, thanking everything that looks out for itinerant writers that the ACA provides me with the insurance I need. I drink a ton of water. My body is still sore from the muscle spasms. I’m loopy from medication.
I have to work today.
I don’t have to. But my brain is itching to write. I wake up at 8AM and put hands to keyboard and write this post, not because I want to bitch about my health (although a little exposition to get out the feelings never hurt) but because I need to write. I need to. It’s a part of me as much as anything else, and so much more true to me than the pain from the chronic ailments. Because writing was here before I was sick and will go on through it all.
I don’t have to write today, then. But I will. Hell or high water, I will.
I’ve met a lot of people in the gaming and writing world dealing with any number of medical issues, any combination of chronic illnesses. I’ve seen people I know get knocked down by serious illnesses and terrifying diagnoses, or else stand with family and friends when they’ve had the same. Being sick or being a caregiver saps the hell out of your energy. It rips away from you the daily stockpile of spoons you have to spend (and if you’re not familiar with Spoon Theory, check it out here to understand more) and instead leaves you at a deficit that can wreck agendas, plans, even careers.
For everyone out there facing this, I see you. I see you struggling to get up in the morning to finish that game book on time, or to attend a convention no matter how much energy it will take. I see you fellow wheelchair buddies fight to get into accessible venues, or those with chronic issues seeking accommodations at events so you can participate. From creating quiet rooms for those with overstimulation to people advocating for longer breaks between events at conventions for proper self-care, and to every game dev and editor who recognize chronic health issues and are understanding, I thank you.
I see you and what you do. I thank you for making sure the games world makes room for creatives who are chugging along, trying to make it work. Who aren’t willing to give up the muse, even when sometimes the body is trying to give up the ghost.
Today, I’ll take it gentle on myself. I’ll try to give myself a wee break. I’ll curse a little at my muscles, still ripping me up with tension. I’ll pull out my edits and get back to work.
And I’ll take this day head on, until they take me out feet first. Because I know no other way.
I’ve been reading a lot of words of encouragement lately about how to be a better writer. How to motivate yourself, engage with your readers, what to do and what not to do. A lot of it has centered around the idea that creative folks have a tendency to be extremely self critical about their work. In fact, one of the issues that writers seem to deal with is self-doubt to an amazing degree. I speak from personal experience when I say that my own issue is usually a crippling fear of my work being judged as inferior or lacking, which often can stall me when I’m just about to do a major writing push.
“What if it’s not good enough?”
“What if it’s not received well?”
“What if it’s not engaging enough?”
“What if the material is found offensive and I get yelled at on Twitter?”
(That last one is particularly troubling, but that’s an issue for another blog post).
The thing is, lots of people are insecure about their work. I mean, there are doctors and lawyers out there who worry about the services they provide. Having a crisis of confidence isn’t just an issue for the creative sphere. However, I believe that the inherent issue about creators taking it much worse than in other fields is the fact that the rest of the world invalidates creators on a regular basis.
Being an artist isn’t valued the way it should be in our society. People ask writers to do hours of work for pennies, for nothing, for exposure. They ask artists to ‘just draw me this, it’ll look good in your portfolio.’ And everyone can write, can’t they? So why hire someone who is a professional in the field, when you can cobble something together for cheaper? Thank goodness it’s not this way everywhere but ask anyone who has a child if they’re pleased their kid is a writer, and the response you’ll often hear is that they wish that child had been a ________ (insert higher paying profession here). Being an artist remains, to a large extent, looked at as a dalliance, a pie in the sky, unless you make it big. Otherwise, you’re just messing around. You’re not actually doing anything.
And you wonder why we develop insecurities? Even the best potential writers grow up with this knowledge in their heads – that there are a million of you. That there are others out there probably better. That you won’t make any money. That you won’t get published. That you will never make it. That you will fail.
What a litany to feed your insecurity. What a mess to try and work through.
So when a writer has a complicated relationship with their work, with how they feel about themselves as a writer, it’s one thing to try and bolster them and get them into a better mindset. It’s one thing to try and help them see that there is validity to their work, and help them fight to be in a better headspace to create brilliant art. It’s another to invalidate their insecurity.
All feelings are valid. Whether or not they’re productive, that’s another thing. But I find that often when I’m reading encouraging messages about the writing process, there’s an insidious message behind the bolstering that sounds very much like tone policing to me. Don’t be negative about your work. Being negative is bad. It’s the mindkiller. You can do better than that. Just be positive. Face your fears. That’s what makes you a writer!
No. What makes you a writer is producing the work. What makes you a writer is getting up, putting words on paper, no matter how it happens. If you struggle with it but it happens, then you’ve written today. If you don’t struggle, good! You’ve written today. If you sit and slam your head into the wall and wonder if you’re wasting your life and then can’t write that day because of it, you’re a writer tackling a crucial issue in your writing process. I posit that grappling with your fears is part of the writing process. It’s a nasty, difficult, exhausting process, but it’s part of it. And telling folks that those fears should be tackled and moved past before a writer is ready is in my mind negating the struggle that that creator has been undertaking.
There’s this idea in our society that if you just pull yourself up by your bootstraps, if you tackle things head on, if you make the battle happen, then you’ll win. Isn’t that what G.I. Joe taught us? Our cartoons growing up? We learn a valuable lesson about self-esteem and courage in a thirty-minute episode and suddenly Knowing Is Half The Battle. The fact is the other half the battle is tackling the issue. But that tackling, that fight, is not a one day thing. For some, it can be a constant, ongoing struggle until they find the answer they’re looking for. And often the most well-meaning support can sound as though any writer who isn’t making headway into being positive about their work is a fragile writer that needs to toughen up to fly right. So I ask a question:
When did it become a sin to be sensitive about your work?
When did it become a problem to feel badly or have negative feelings?
Don’t get me wrong. I think life would be so much easier if we didn’t have these insecurities as creators. I think it would be amazing if every time I tackled a project, I didn’t have to face down some scary demons inside that tell me I’m a failure nobody will want to read. I wish that I could sit down every day without having to battle fear paralysis. But that’s my cross to bear. And others have their own. But I think that far too often these negative feelings are brushed aside with a forced ‘You Can Do It!’ smile that almost reminds me of those vintage WWII posters. But if you think of it for a second, those posters were propaganda, out to encourage people to forget about the fears they might have about, y’know, war.
I would never compare creation to war (because we don’t dodge bombs, folks, as much as it feels that way sometimes) but the cheerful enthusiasm without consideration for negativity being a part of people’s lives smacks to me of it’s own brand of writer propaganda. In our rush to try to improve ourselves as creators and help our fellows through the darkest places, we may be forgetting that people have a right to their feelings. And telling them How To Be Better might just be a way of telling them that they’re not good enough all over again.
I believe that instead of white-washing away the negative, of telling ourselves and each other that we need to have a stiff upper lip about our bad feelings, we need to acknowledge that they’re there. We need to acknowledge where they come from with sensitivity, honesty and empathy for each other. We need to support in ways that are a little less brute force. And we need to admit that for some, it won’t be a one-day, one-week or even one-year turn around. This might be a black dog battle that a creator fights every day of their lives.
And that’s okay. Because they’re still fighting.
Sure, it would be easier if the fight was over and the issue tackled and everyone had a self-esteem party. But that’s an internal struggle for the writer in question. But as long as they’re still fighting, and tackling, and writing, then that writer is doing the job. A writer, to be a writer, must do what they do: write. If they take deadlines for jobs, if they have responsibilities, they must meet them, even if the black dog of insecurity comes to visit. They have to pick up the fight because that’s what they agreed to do when they signed up to be a writer. But they’re still fighting. And they’re still writing. And they don’t always have to do it with a smile on their face, or in a way that other people feel is ‘best’. It’s their process, their feelings, and they get to have them. Even if it makes other people uncomfortable to see negativity. Even if other people wish they could ‘help make it better.’ Even if the prevailing idea is that feeling bad about yourself is bad.
Insecurity sucks. Feeling bad about your work sucks. But your feelings are your own.
May we all come to a place where we don’t have to feel this way. May we all fight that black dog and win someday. Until that time, I’m here with you, with my own dog to battle, getting the words done. But some days, I’m not doing it with a smile. And that’s okay too.
There are currently four, count them FOUR, articles half finished in my drafts box.
Why, you ask? Why are they unfinished as opposed to gracing this blog with their presence?
I’ll tell you why: side effects.
In a previous article on this blog I talked about being bi-polar. I mentioned how difficult it is to take steps to get healthy. But in the end, I did take the jump to medicating. I’ve been very open both here and on Twitter, because I believe transparency as a creator is important. It helps people understand, both personally and professionally, what is going on with me as I work in my current field. I do it not to fish for sympathy but to illuminate my creative process and how I go about doing what I do. I also do it so that anyone out there struggling with the same thing can hear another voice going: you’re not alone. I often feel like I am, so I want to offer that. So if this sounds familiar to anyone out there, raise a glass. Because we’re going to talk about side effects.
Drugs have side effects. And when you sign on to be medicated as someone who needs mood stabilizers, you realize that you might get these side effects. Sometimes they’re harder to track than others. The doctor will ask you ‘are you finding yourself fatigued?’ and my answer is usually, “I’m an insomniac grad student, when am I not fatigued?” But after a while, you look back at what’s been going on in your life and say, “Hey now. That’s not how things were before.” Then you look up the side effects and you say, “Oh.”
I’ve been having side effects from my medication. Boy howdy have I.
Let’s start with fatigue. I cannot help but sleep ten hours a day. If I want to stay awake and not be half asleep, I have to front load on coffee when I wake up in the morning. I cannot even think about spending time in a comfy chair or near my bed or else WHAM, its nap time. Not in the ‘let’s take a nap, it might be pleasant’ but in a ‘oh hey, I just lost four hours, how did that happen?’ way.
Weight gain. Now I don’t eat well. I don’t exercise well. But that’s been a constant. These days however? Cannot lose a pound to save my life. And worse yet, I feel sluggish. That’s the fatigue working WITH the weight gain. It’s been pretty awful. I’ve always been big but I can feel the difference since I started the medication.
Here’s the one that gets me: my brain feels some days like I’m trying to hold thoughts together as they try to fly apart. They’re polarized to fly apart. They just run from each other like toddlers in a tantrum and my job is to hold them together to put together work. My focus is nigh gone. Reading has become a chore of the highest order. Where I used to polish off a book a day sometimes, I can barely read thirty pages without having to stop. I reread whole pages when I lose focus. I can barely watch an episode of TV without needing to let my thoughts wander like lost sheep. And when that’s not happening, there’s a fog in my head so thick I can barely think through it. I’ve had that before but not this bad.
Why am I sharing all this, you ask? Because of one thing: all this is making it a bitch to write.
I’m getting work done but its at a snail’s pace by comparison to what I’m used to. Where I could churn out ten thousand words in a sitting, I’m now fighting for two. And if that isn’t the most frustrating thing to a writer like me, I don’t know what is.
The hardest part is that my instinct for creating new ideas hasn’t slowed down. There’s still a million ideas building up in my brain, rushing around and pushing into me. I have notes for a dozen things I want to do, but when I sit down for execution? The fog rolls in and I have to slog through where once I could fly.
But hey, I’m not manic anymore. So that’s a plus, right?
That last line was bitter. Its hard not to be frustrated. When I signed on to take medication over just dealing with my Type II bi-polar, I confided in my doctor that I was always concerned about losing touch with that ‘creative spark’ that made manic so appealing. Now, my life has to change to fit this whole new paradigm. And that paradigm includes the thing that I love doing more than anything else – writing – being not the joy that it was but a fight for every page. Its not just work now. Its brutal sometimes.
But I’m healthier than I was, at least in my head. And that’s what’s important, right?
My friend John Adamus says I have to adjust the way I work to adapt to this. And I am… slowly. But I guess this post is to say that though it is necessary, it is a slow process that is demanding a lot of my attention. And it is making me feel off my game. I have not been the ‘get up and go’ Shoshana lately that juggles multiple projects with my usual stubborn tenacity. I’m exhausted, hiding away from distractions to try and get work done. But I am taking the time to do this. Why? Because adjustment means I can be the professional I want to be. It means that in the grand scheme of things, I will find a way to make this work so I can be the best writer and the best person together that I can be. Accepting that things need to change is an adventure. But they did need to change when I went on the medication, they are better off now then they were before, and the work goes on. On all fronts.
I’m talking to my doctor about the side effects. I’m going to ask him if there’s anything I can do to mitigate them. Until then, however, I’m going to keep working. Even if it takes me twice as long as normal to write a thing, the writing will get done. And I’m going to try not to be cranky at myself about it.
There is nothing more satisfying than completing a project.
Used to be in the old days I’d be afraid of finishing something. If you finish a project, you have to let it out loose into the world and talk about it and let other people see it. That used to be frightening. These days, there is nothing more that I enjoy than crossing off a project on my list of things to do and going to have a celebratory cup of coffee. (Because really, when is there not an excuse to have a cup of coffee?)
The other day I completed No Exit for Evil Hat Productions. It’s one of the stretch goals for the meteoric Kickstarter that’s under a month to competition. It’s been a joy to work on and now I’m looking forward to poking at more things with Fate Core. Because I’ll say this, it wasn’t just fun to write – writing No Exit gave me tons of ideas. I have been kicking them around in a notebook for a bit. The sky’s the limit with a system like Fate Core and my friends are going to get bombarded with ideas for a tabletop game or six in the next few weeks.
That is, when I get back from drinking butter beer at Harry Potter World.
Vacation is a heck of a thing. I took the opportunity to go in between semesters of graduate school and I’m going to nerd it up at the giant Hogwarts in Orlando for a week. And, y’know, sit next to a pool in the sun and write. Because a change of scenery does ya good.
In other news, I’ve also picked up my novel again last night to finish it. Because, as I said before, I’m not scared of finishing things any longer. Consider that a lesson learned from 2012 — writing is the act of bringing something into the world. And if you don’t let it free, it hasn’t really been completed. I’m not going to be scared of that any longer. Hey 2013, let’s see how much I can get done.
It’s been quiet so far on the home front here at my blog. And that’s probably because it got mighty busy around the holiday season. Graduate school final projects are no joke and then the holidays hit, which included my birthday and New Years as it does every year. In between all of that, of course, I’ve been tackling the amazing project I’ve been doing for Fate Core – my setting in psychological horror, No Exit.
The process of creating No Exit has been a learning curve and an eye-opening process for me. Not only am I organizing a lot of thoughts about the basics of psychological horror, I’ve been learning quite a lot about how much to show an audience in a gaming book. Coming from a fiction and screen writing background, writing for games is a whole new ballgame that requires a different way of thinking. Thankfully I’ve got a great editor, John Adamus, mentoring me through the process. His comments on my first draft made me cringe, then laugh, then cringe again. Then crack up a heck of a lot in retrospect. A handy tip: whenever your editor hands you a note, always consider it carefully and decide whether you agree or not before you start making changes. Unless it’s about grammar or layout, in which case you’re probably terribly wrong and should fix it immediately.
My favorite part of creating No Exit so far has been messing with the mechanics. I’ve enjoyed finding out the best way to fight an environment in a game and what would be the best way to do things like, oh, attack an apartment building. What fascinated me was the idea that you could do these things with Fate Core easily – need a new mechanic? Hack in there and create what was needed. Don’t have a skill that exactly fits what you need? Make it work yourself. The sky really is the limit. I’ve had a lovely time finding a way to turn people’s memories into weapons and creating a mechanic for it.
Speaking of new things I’m excited to see – the other stretch goal settings and scenarios for Fate Core have me excited to give them a chance. I really want to play White Picket Witches by Filamena Young and Camelot Trigger by Rob Wieland because small town witches and futuristic Camelot just sounds like fun. And it only goes to show what you can do with Fate Core – which, as far as I can tell, is pretty much anything.
I’ve also been delving into some other inspirations for No Exit recently. Here’s some things I’ve been listening to and watching to keep me in the mindset of this setting:
Songs:
“Amen” by Leonard Cohen, “Seven Exodus” by Tub Ring, “No Light” by Florence + The Machine
Television:
“Lost”, “Twin Peaks”
Movies:
“Identity”, “Jacob’s Ladder”
Today I hope to complete draft two and send it on it’s way. A change of scene is hard when you’re trying to write scary and you’re sitting in the bright sunny SoCal sun!
It’s been a long time. I shouldn’t have left without word. Can you ever forgive me?
If you’re still reading, perhaps you have. Maybe you’ve put aside the long wait for this post and wait instead to hear what has been going on in my life. For that, dear reader, I appreciate your patience and would reward you with cookies if the internet had the ability to send real baked-goods thru wifi. But sadly, since I can’t email a brownie, I’ll just give you the low-down on the world as according to me.
Life has exploded exponentially lately. I was accepted earlier this year into the NYU Game Center MFA program for Game Design for it’s inaugural class. For those of you not familiar, Tisch School of the Arts within NYU has a program that studies games of all kinds. It’s built around the Game Center, which is its library of games that students can come in and play as part of an ongoing project to study games as a growing media and job market. This year was the first time they expanded the program to include a graduate program and yours truly was accepted. I’m humbled and ultimately boggled by the fact that I’m studying under amazing teachers like Jesper Juul, Eric Zimmerman, Katherine Isbister and the head of department, Frank Lantz. I applied on a wing and a prayer and now I’m studying game design and theory at one of the best schools in the world! For a while it was hard for me to fathom – the whole thing felt very surreal.
Then school started and surreal disappeared when the work-load began. Graduate school is, no joke, probably one of the biggest challenges I’ve ever had educationally. The work load is pretty intense and, along with the other projects I’m working on, keep me very busy. But I’m designing some great games with some amazing people, all to make me a better designer for my future career, so how can I complain? I’ve met some amazing fellow students so far and we’ve jumped head-first into the work. Already we wrote a kind of cracked-out version of the card game war called WarSlayerz (the Z is very important) and I’m learning how to work on digital games via platforms like GameMaker and Unity. The digital aspect of the program is the most daunting for me, as I’ve never done computer programming at all in my life, and I’m struggling to grok a completely different language to translate game design ideas into little digital dudes. I’m also making sure to rep pretty hard the wonderful world of analog gaming, especially the live action role-play community and their importance as an evolving international media. I’ve been up, burning the midnight oil to do all my work and my other projects outside of school.
Speaking of those other projects, I’m still blogging over at Tor.com even though my posts have slowed down distinctly. GenCon rolled right into a LARP weekend and then into orientation and graduate school, which effectively tore through my writing schedule. I’ve recently taken on reviewing NBC’s newest post-apoc show Revolution for Tor.com and I’ve got a few more posts coming out. I enjoy working for Tor.com so much and the chance to do review and criticism is something I don’t want to give up while going through school. There might, however, be a wee slow down from the posting schedule I had before.
That’s also because, outside of the Game Center, I’m working hard at developing my tabletop RPG game Wanderlust. In the coming weeks there will be more information about it, including the launch of my company Phoenix Outlaw Production’s website, the exciting announcement of new talent being added to our company’s team, and even a schedule of publication and (hopefully) our Kickstarter. We’ll have a Facebook page all set up for updates too that’ll get put up here with commentary from my partner in crime Josh Harrison and more articles here about how things are going development-wise for the game. I believe it’s important to keep folks in the loop about how a game dev is going so they can see the process from the bottom up, and I’m excited as hell to share the development of this game with you. I’m working with a fantastic editor as well in John Adamus and he’s been fabulous at helping me turn this book into a space-epic reality.
I also recently broke through one of my most challenging fears by completing and submitting a short story to an anthology (which I’ll be writing about in a future post). That plus some other freelance work, my storytelling for Dystopia Rising New Jersey and preparation for Double Exposure’s Metatopia convention has kept me busy. When do I sleep? Let’s just say the last few weeks has been full of Red Eyes (lots of espresso!) and power naps.
So that’s the lay of the land, sports fans. I’m working hard to produce what writing I can in both the game design field and in plain creative writing. But I don’t want to forget that I have this blog too and it’s chock full of space for commentary and articles I want to put together too. In the upcoming weeks you’ll hear more about lots of nerdy things, including stuff I’ve read that is keeping me sane throughout the hectic work weeks and some views on writing too. Meanwhile, I’m staring down a pile of work with my name on it so I’m signing off.
Until next time, writers and gamers and geeks out there – don’t let the man get you down. Or the beagle. Those beagles are deceptively shifty.
In one of my previous blog posts, I talked about how I love reading for inspiration. In my mad crash through my bookshelves recently, I finished (among other books), Chuck Wendig’s Blackbirds and Lev Grossman’s The Magician King. What fascinated me about both of these books was their use of strong, complex female characters who were nuanced and engaging – specifically, Miriam Black in Blackbirds and Julia in The Magician King. Why bring up these two authors and their great female characters? Well, folks, they’re two examples of great male authors writing great female characters.
But Shoshana, someone will ask, why bring up the gender of the authors in question at all? Why’ve you gotta go all gender about good writing? Gender is a hot-button questions. And may I say, wherever that term comes from, there are degrees of ‘hot’. Where ‘who left the toilet seat up‘ might be a somewhat warm question and ‘did you sleep with my boyfriend‘ is a hand-in-the-toaster kind of hot, gender representation is one of those scorchers. Nuclear strike from orbit scorchers. Please deposit twenty-five-cents for SPF 9-Million scorchers. Everyone’s got a soap box about it, yours truly included. Hell, a lot of my blog posts for Tor.com or other places have been on the subject of gender representation in media of various forms or in the gaming world. But if I’m going to be able to stand up and question the way that other people represent women in their work, I believe it’s only honest to come clean about a problem I have as a writer.
So here goes. Hi, I’m a female writer, and I find writing dudes difficult. There, I said it.
This issue has come up for me because the novel I’m writing right now has a male and female protagonist. It’s the first time I’ve tried for a solid male protagonist to carry along a full-length novel and while I’ve found that while I can connect to my female protagonist Kate without too much trouble, I struggle to find traction when writing Scott. He slipped through my fingers whenever I tried and I began to wonder if it was because of difficulty capturing the male mindset, or if I’m just having trouble with Scott as a character? That got me back to thinking about male perspective versus female perspective, and if in the end there is a difference.
When creating Scott, I tried to think about the environmental factors that created this guy, the life he lived, and the thoughts he might have. I considered what he might have gone through, what ideas might have shaped him, and what his attitudes might be on things. In other words, I went about creating him the same way that I would any character: considering their history, their environment, their upbringing and factors like political ideas, orientation, ect. That’s how I approach the creation of any character, be they main protagonist or side character, and of either gender. As I began that shaping, I wondered if there was something inherent to consider about being a guy that needs to be included in writing a guy, a perspective that I was missing. Was that the place I started to have problems with his personality? Or was it just that I couldn’t reach the character of Scott as a person?
In the end, I went to the internet for advice and found, rather than a greek chorus, a cacophony of dissenting opinions. The one, however, that seemed to resonate the most with me was in blog posts by SciFi writer Hilari Bell. She stated that actions a character takes are not necessarily gendered. When writing a character the actions are only as ‘genderized’ as you want them to be. Character X might go across the street to shoot someone, for example, but how you describe their actions is more important than their gender. The character must be informed by their life experience, which are affected by their experience with being their gender, but it’s just another factor in their life along with any other. She also states that often, bad writing comes when writers get hung up on gender and don’t focus on characterization instead.
But are there portions to a character that are inherently important due to their gender, such as gender-specific experiences? I’m thinking of things like issues of birth and motherhood with women. And are certain experiences very gender-based, such as differences in sexual experiences? When bringing that to the page, it can feel like a stretch to try and portray a man’s headspace in sex when you’re, well, not a guy. That’s where research comes in. If there is an experience I haven’t had and need to write about, I try to read about or talk to someone who has been in that situation, be it childbirth, flying a helicopter or anything else. The experience of gender is just another piece of the human experience to explore and even though we’re often told to ‘write what you know’, research is the key when you’re stepping out of that comfort zone. So if I need to know about a guy’s experience having sex, or how a guy might relate to his father versus how a daughter does, that’s going to mean research for me rather than a fret session over how I just ‘couldn’t understand’. Anecdote and people-watching research mode are a-go, and I’ll just have to find a guy friend willing to describe what sex is like to a guy. I’ve got lots of chatty friends, I’m sure it’ll make for a hell of a conversation.
When it comes to the novel, in the end I sat down and thought more about what made my character Scott tick. It took some time but I realized that it wasn’t the gender issue that was getting to me. I did a lot more thinking about Scott as a person and that let me grab his more vulnerable, human side by the horns. Where before I was hung up on him as a guy, I had to get into the meat of what made him a thinking, feeling person to get inside his head. I found the commonality between us that I could riff on and suddenly I was off to the races, no longer afraid. The book now has several distinctive male characters, all done in the close third and each with their own life experience as different as they are. I decided that I won’t let the great gender debate worry me. My writing isn’t some grand exploration about what it is to be a guy, or a girl, or a treatise on gender experience – it’s a fantasy novel, and I had to just relax.
So I’ve decided to worry less about gender. My concern instead will be with writing in depth, well-developed characters where gender is only one of the factors that make up their anatomy. Or, to cut it short, I’ve just decided to worry less about gender. And maybe worry less in general and just do the work. Let’s see where that gets me.
I call it burning these days because that’s what it feels like: like there’s an idea inside me burning its way out. But when I was younger, I called it flying. What I really meant was controlled falling. Like there was a tornado going on and I would leap off something and ride right through the middle of it, all the way up, chasing words. Because that’s what it felt like for me, rolling on through the manic energy that comes with being bi-polar.
Hannah Gadsby’s blockbuster comedy special “Nanette”
When I was sixteen, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder type 2.
I didn’t realize it until later, but I had a bad doctor. What I did know was at the height of this medicine dance, I’d spend my days sleeping, or staring at a television, and feeling nothing at all. I couldn’t even cry. But maybe worst of all, I struggled to create. I couldn’t find that spark inside me like I used to, that flying feeling that gave me inspiration. In the moments when I could feel something, it was the overwhelming terror of going back into that stupor once again.
This personal look into how reliant I am on society to stay alive has been an eye-opener for me. In a world were destabilization is so much closer than we ever thought possible, I look for solace to literature to relax, and realize how many of the narratives I enjoyed before leave a bitter taste in my mouth. I reread The Stand and came to Stephen King’s chapter where he outlined all the people who died in the collapse of society post- Captain Tripps. And after so many of them, he wrote: “No great loss.” It always gave me the shivers. I’d be one of those people, probably, slowly dying in the face of the end. No adventure to go meet Mother Abigail. Just toodles, and hoping my life didn’t earn me the “no great loss” title in the end.
