Justine!

I was excited. I was relieved. My chainmaille obsession had finally died. I went from three to four hours of chainmaille every single day for six months to giving my hands a nice, well-earned rest. But no. Justine (best, most frustrating friend ever) introduced me to the Game of Thrones, which I have been resisting watching with an iron will for months now, and because I can't really watch something without doing something with my hands, I wound up working on chainmaille at the same time.

I had to finish this piece eventually, but hell, she started me back up again, so I wound up doing more than the one piece. I will say that it was very nice to work with my german silver that's been sitting on my worktable untouched for weeks.

 (https://www.etsy.com/listing/152275815/serpentine-hp4-in-1-micromaille-in-fine?)

I also wound up finishing the Barrels piece I've been promising Justine for ages now. This piece, and the ease of its birth, is how I know that I'm at least mildly back in chainmaille again.... because for about a month now, I've been trying to force out the last half of the above piece, and it just flowed today. Damnit, Justine.

Damnit.

This Is Why I'll Never Be a Real Author

We all pretty much know that life moves in cycles. Right now, my life is cycling in several different ways. I'm trying to find a new job because right now, I work at a high school, and school is out for the summer on Wednesday, which is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. Oh, aye, I've put out applications, both in person and online, and I've followed up, but nothing has turned into more nothing, and now I'm getting seriously worried.

Ahem. Possibly more than just worried.

So there's that.

On top of that, I've cycled out of chainmaille (see picture below if you don't know what that is, said picture being what I was going to use for a business card before I realized my mailling was drying up)

and now I'm moving back into writing for the six millionth time. Surprisingly, it's the cycle back into writing that's frustrating me for right now, perhaps because it's the problem that I can do something about that I'm not already doing. Usually when I enter a period of time of writing, I start up an entirely new book idea, and then a quarter of the way through, or halfway through, or years ago, maybe even three quarts of the way through, suddenly the drive to write is entirely gone, and doesn't come back no matter how far I slog. It's just not worth it if you have to force more than three or four chapters, you know?

What I really need to do is find a way to make it possible to go back and pick up older projects when I cycle through drawing and then painting and then chainmaille and then something random like knitting and find myself back at writing. I'm at a bit of a loss.

I'm also very frustrated, because I have a few possibilities. I could start another brand new project, which is, at the moment, an unappealing option. There are three or four unfinished books on my hard-drive. One I've gotten thirty thousand words into, and I'm only maybe a fifth of the way through the story I had planned for book one, and the world, mythos, and magical systems are so ungodly complicated that I don't think I can pick it up again a year later. Another is much simpler, but is maybe ten years old, and is terribly written and bare-bones at best on details... but if I want to go through and reread it, I might be able to rewrite every chapter, and from there I only have five or six to go. This is the likeliest option, but I'm not sure how I feel about a vampire novel, even one that introduces new ideas (such as true vampires being created, not by being bitten, but by being chained in the river Styx for three days and nights, and wild magic, which is nigh uncontrollable) at this time. Then I have a fanfiction written for Yu Yu Hakusho, but I'm not certain I can untangle it from the anime and make it stand on its own, even though the main character is original. I have another story which gets into complicated sciences, and I'm not happy about the idea of writing science fiction because I know I'll get the physics wrong. Plus it's heavy on the politics of an imaginary society and I don't even like real world politics much.

I have a couple of other options, but so little progress has been made on them that I might as well start anew.

How frustrating. If anyone's reading this and feels inclined to weigh in, please do so.