Ghost-of-a-Chance

My brain does the weirdest shit sometimes.

A little-known fact about PTSD: even when it’s ‘managed,’ it can affect your ability to concentrate and focus in entirely awkward ways. In my case, this often means losing concentration when there’s background noise, getting distracted, and visually blending words, sentences, and lines together when I’m struggling to focus. Blame hypervigilance and its many little cohorts.

Stressful? Very.
Annoying? Definitely.
Amusing? Sometimes.

This is one of the funny moments. I’m doing research on TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) for the next chapter of Shifting the Paradigm, specifically looking for details about common materials used for cranial plates. (...I may need help.) I hit a generic article, beginning...

Quote

Brain injuries can be acquired in a variety of ways, including:

...and I began scanning down the bullets on the list. I stopped – THAT doesn’t sound right! – I double-checked.

...yep. I seriously managed to read

• Haemorrhage; 

and

• Disorders (e.g. Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis)

and visually combined them into Hemorrhoids. The funny part? There are folks I know IRL for whom TBI by hemorrhoids could be a valid threat...because...you know...they’re such massive buttheads.

...I’m gonna shut up now.  

Fair warning: next person to call me "Gimpy" gets my cane up their ass. 

(...I'm looking at you, ColdWarriors. I know where you sleep.)

The state of the world has finally convinced me: humans are too ridiculous for words.
From here on out, I choose to identify as a porg...

...because I, too, am small, awkward, chunky, incredibly useless, frequently in the way, and undeniably adorable, and I, too, make obnoxious sounds to communicate with others of my species.

Next chapter of A New Lease on Life – “61: Forgiveness Goes Both Ways” – is complete, sent out for beta-reading, and with a little luck, should go live on ALL SITES (except Tumblr because Tumblr is run by censor-happy dickbags) by the end of the month! 

And just think: it only took almost a YEAR to get that chapter completed.  Kimber Bryant is, again, a very large part of the delay. She’s so hard to write, I swear, sometimes I want to just give in and kill her off AGAIN. Forget second chances in other worlds, it’s too hard to get in her headspace to deal with writing her often. At least we only have two more Kimber-centric chapters before we can get back to our regular programming.

...why did I commit myself to her arc? I must be a masochist or something.

THIS is why I have no faith in Reverse Dictionary. Granted, I suck at summarizing phrases and that doesn’t help the AI anyway, but its best guess for “Someone who has had wrong done to them” is VIRGIN?!

...I can’t. I just can’t even.

Quote

 

For the first time in his life, Leon was entirely, utterly alone, and with no end in sight. Unbidden, he recalled his brother’s final words to him: it was always you or me...now it’s just you. Yet again, he wondered what Norton meant by that; yet again, he wondered if, in some backward way, it meant only one of us will survive this life, so I’m choosing you to do it. The suspicion always left a twisting, burning, aching feeling in his gut—something somewhere in the messy middleground between resentment, heartache, and resignation. That middleground was nothing new – before Norton’s sudden and grisly death, it was where Leon’s heart inevitably landed after any length of time around him.

...and that, Leon admitted if only to himself, was what hurt the most.

 

 

Excerpt from A New Lease on Life – 61: Forgiveness is for the Victimized (WIP)

Sometimes when I read back over what I’ve written, it feels like I just vomited up words on a page, swept it into a pile, and called it good. Other times, like this, I wonder if I carved them out of my chest and walked away without realizing a piece of my heart was missing.  All I meant to do was get into the groove of the chapter and I stabbed myself right in the feels.

*From a WIP/rough draft, no checking done yet – expect mis-comma-ing all over the place and maybe a spelling/grammar error or two.)

Grammarly had a blonde moment. Grammarly identified “blonde” as two different incorrectly spelled words somehow jammed together. 

This is why you always, always, ALWAYS either do your own proof-reading or have a beta proof-read your drafts instead of just running them through spellcheck and accepting all corrections. Grammarly’s free checker is, so far, the best I’ve come across, but it works best in combination with proof-reading. No checking program can replace proofreading.