A lot has occurred since Yule. My afternoon tea was a success and a lot of fun with my friends and family (๑>ᴗ<๑) and I only had one week left until my leave started. I am currently on that leave for a mental health break to get myself sorted but those four days before it were probably some of the worst in my working life. I didn’t even make it through all of the hours  (っ,-). It was pretty tough but now I have time to really work on my health. Trying to keep up with the world and its expectations—which could really be divided into two categories of “actual expectations” and “anxiety expectations”—just hit a dead end and I was sacrificing my health to continue to work full-time. Which is a no-go, but it’s so much easier to say that to other people than yourself, especially when life is so expensive these days.

To take the edge off the post, I will put in some pictures of my afternoon tea! I just wanted to give a little disclosure to where I’m currently at in life in case posts become even less consistent (sometimes it feels like I posted a few days ago only to find out it was a few weeks ago) or the content becomes a bit dreary compared to previous.

I love planning and organising events but I definitely toed the line with how much I had planned to bake and make. Luckily, my sister and partner helped me out. We also decorated cookies and made bookmarks.

Other than that, I have been writing and editing. Now that I’m at home for a while, I will need to get my edits out and do them at the desk. I had slowed down doing them on my lunch breaks at work (heart wasn’t really in it) but I’ve still made quite the headway considering how chaotic previous editing of works have gone. I think separating it from writing and making it a somewhat forced gradual process has been super for my editing process. It gives me breaks so I don’t burn myself out (I’m good at that) and those breaks mean I have more time to actually consider the parts that I have just looked over.

Recently, I’ve been working on a story that I’m currently changing the point-of-view for, switching the entire thing from first-person to third-person. There are a lot of pages to convert but I think it’s working out better. I was having a few issues with it and switching it has seemed to help with them but I also noticed something interesting ( •̀ – • )

I used to only write in third-person. Everything was in third-person and past tense. Around 2020 I started writing pieces in first person. I switched to first-person because it suited the tone of the story much better and found that I naturally wrote in present tense when writing in first-person. I thought it was because writing the novel in active thought just meant it was easier than writing it as a reflection or memory (past tense). So, the current conversion I’m doing is from present-first-person to past-third-person. And that happened naturally. As soon as I switched to third-person, I started writing in past tense, and when I tried to write third-person in present-tense, it just felt so weird. I wondered if it was the same for most writers/readers? ( ╹ -╹)? Do some perspectives work better with certain tenses? Or is it just my familiarity and habit with writing in particular ways. I predominantly read third-person-past-tense and the last first-person novel I read was in present tense. 

Surprisingly, this never came up as a topic when I studied writing at university. There’s somewhat of a common-sense idea to the pros and cons of each tense and perspective, but we never really explored it except for how different perspectives could reveal different setting information as a way of building tension. Or, maybe we did discuss it and I just genuinely don’t remember it ╮(￣▽￣””)╭. I think I need to do more study on writing. I have an old worry that the more I study writing the more I lose my sense of identity as a writer and the more likely my work starts to sound like others. This is really an old concern from when I was a much younger writer and I’ve found that, outside of a school/academic setting, reading the advice or process from other readers about technical parts of writing has actually been helpful, encouraging and motivating … I’m really just not doing enough of it. I’m hoping to fix that after I get myself into a better position. 

I think the problem with reading “formal advice” (classes, books etc.) is that I often get caught up in one that doesn’t translate well to me as a person and so I worry the rest are going to be like that. Which is honestly a disservice to the great minds out there and a disservice to myself who could benefit from reading them. 2024 has really been the year for me breaking down my mind and trying to knead the dough into something a bit more functional ( ˶o´ ̫ `o˶). I’m also hoping to start engaging in writing communities as that’s something I lack in many aspects of my life. It’s probably a general fear of being excluded and not wanting to commit to what I think community expectations might be. I enjoy being around other people who share interests, but most of the time I prefer to be on my own and some people find that to be “fickle” and don’t like it. I had too many bouts of people who would tell me I “don’t fit the mould” or aren’t good/enough to “be part of the group”. It’s an anxiety that’s not going to go away quickly but I keep telling myself that applying my anxieties to others is doing them a “disservice”. I literally repeat that word in my head because it seems to help me drill in that pinning my anxieties to a person when I haven’t interacted with them or those anxieties haven’t happened. In the past, I’ve been proven right a lot about how someone might react (¬_¬”) and so I’m going to be careful about it. It’s not really about stepping out of your comfort zone, it’s about expanding it.

Happy writing everyone! Take care of yourselves ヾ(＾ ∇ ＾).