I won't lie to you, Blogger, I'm not exactly having a great time in my personal life right now. My new day job is extremely stressful (quite apart from my admitted, ah, Type A tendencies*), and I've been feeling a little ragged over the past six weeks or so. To put it mildly. The last time I went through a dark period like this, it culminated in two straight nights sobbing on a bathroom floor and my friends calling me every hour on the hour to make sure I was okay. I never want to go through something like that again.
I also did some of the best writing of my life. I think you have to go through despair in order to write it; it's like trying to describe green to someone who's never seen it before. While going through a deep depression might have made me a better writer, more importantly to me, continuing to write even though I was going through a deep depression kept me sane. A similar situation arose last fall, though my dark period wasn't nearly as bleak. Upon being told that I would be laid off, I jumped into my NaNoWriMo project with a zeal and wound up writing one of the most viscerally creepy villains of my life. Likewise, in the middle of this meltdown-in-waiting, I've been able to distract myself by working on the fifth Super book, Bulletproof. Channeling Bonnie's PTSD and issues has helped me both deal with and distance myself from my own. Also, I get to blow up a lot of shit.
What? It's hardly a secret that I have some rage issues.
I'm starting to see the other side of this particular bad spot, and thank deity-of-your-choice for that, because I'm not sure how much more of it I could have taken. I did some pretty good writing during it, if I do say so myself. More importantly, though, continuing to write even when I basically just wanted to curl up in a ball and let people poke me with sticks made the depression endurable until it started to lighten. Screw my sales figures (actually, not really, people buying my books makes me really happy), I'm never giving that up.
(No, that's not sarcasm. I really don't know how I could cope if I couldn't write.)
*The words "chinchilla on meth" have been used before.
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