Secret Incognito Writer doing Secret Incognito Writing

 Hey.
Back again.
So... still alive. Still kicking about, being ridiculously depressed and immensely scared of people, while living in stark terror of the world, especially given the rules by which all of this seems to operate.

(Seriously, how are all of YOU not freaked the freakin freak out by how this is set up and how it plays out???)

But leaving that aside for now, I've been writing.
I've even posted some things, which you might have seen even if you didn't know it was me, because I carried through (finally) on that idea from way back when, and started posting stories under a new identity on a certain site or two.

The goal is to try to unclench my perfectionism and imposter syndrome and all of that noise and just have fun writing, also to distract myself from real life by immersing myself in creating a less awful and scream-inducing world populated by characters who are infinitely cooler, prettier, and more interesting than myself.

I tried that before, a couple of times, with the Jem/Dawn crossover, and then the retelling of Buffy Season One that I did just the one massive chapter for, but both times I fell prey to pride and posted them under my usual handle anyway, because I really liked both of those chapters and I wanted people to know I'd written them.

But, to be fair, both of those are odd and quirky story concepts, and I shouldn't have been surprised that there wasn't much response from readers, except a tiny bit of polite golf-clapping from long-time readers of my stuff.

So this time it's different. I made up a new name, I picked some pretty straightforward Buffy stuff to riff on as I threw together a story or two, and I just sat down and started going.

Annnnnd... I'm pretty happy with the result. I've had days where I got five thousand words done in basically one sitting, just powering through and trying hard not to beat myself up over every single sentence. I still want to do good work, I think this IS pretty good work, but the most important thing is that I'm not tearing myself to shreds by agonizing over making it perfect, and then hating myself because it turns out to be somewhat less than perfect.

So, yeah, that's a thing I've been doing these last few weeks, trying to see if I can not only put out a chapter without it wrecking me emotionally, but also to see if I can do it repeatedly (unlike the last two tries, with the aforementioned stories).
And, well, so far so good. I'm wondering if I'm ready to step back to one of the DreamSmith stories that people still read and still ask about.
I think the answer is 'almost'.
Maybe one more chapter under the alias, for now, to get to a stopping point, and then we'll see.
It will also likely be one of the smaller, lesser stories that I start back with, just to see if I can smoothly continue one of those long-dormant tales.

We'll see.
My mental/emotional situation, to be frank, still isn't great.
When I think about real life, I freak out, I get paralyzed by fear and dread and sheer, unadulterated horror, because that's what this life IS, when you really look at it... and there's very little I can do about it. There's very little that anyone can do about it.
Except, I guess, to bury ourselves in diversions and distractions, and for me that's always been stories, either reading them or writing them.
So why not do that, if I can manage it?

(I know, cheery stuff, for sure. Apologies for that. I'm being medicated now, for depression and anxiety, but at best that just lets me focus on other things for a few hours at a time... which is better than the alternative, so I guess I'll take it)

I'll post here again if/when I get some progress on one of the old stories. 
It is my very serious intention to NOT let another two or three years pass without update; I'm still waiting for science to deliver my immortality pill, so I'm well aware that there's a less than infinite amount of time to actually make some progress on all this stuff.

To anyone who's actually reading this, and who cares even a tiny bit about my writing, my stories, and my take on the various characters from Buffy and elsewhere--thank you. 
Thank you for existing, thank you for every time you clicked on one of my stories or left a review or a recommendation.
Just.... 
Just thanks, is all. 
Happiness is in very short supply in my life, and always has been, but you gave me something, and I appreciate it.
Hope to have more for you soon.
Alan
aka
DreamSmith (and also others, but 'shhhhh', it's a secret!)

...Back now (I think)

 Hi.

........................

Yep.

It's me.

Been a while, huh?

Well, I'm here, and I am here to say that I wrote a thing. 

Just now.

It's a SILLY thing, but that was kind of the point.

Earlier this week I decided to sit down and write something new, something with no baggage and no history with me and I was going to just see if I could write something as fast as I could while still attempting to have it not be garbage, as a sort of mental judo by which I hoped to sidestep the crippling anxiety and maddeningly unmovable impostor syndrome that I wrestle with whenever I attempt to do some writing.

And damn if it didn't work.

Four consecutive days of writing, coming at a story completely cold, and I got down over 14,000 words, finishing it up in a marathon, all-day session.

Now, through those four days I had every intention of posting this thing under a new pen name (I picked one out and set up the email for it and everything).

But, well, by the end of it I realized that although parts of it are very rough, there are also sections of it that I'm actually proud of, and I can't bear to throw this child out there into the world as an orphan.

So yeah, a silly story in a fandom I never imagined I'd visit, but there you go.

Now I just have to see if I can repeat this little experiment with a story that I care about.

We'll see.

----Alan

Working

Hey.
Just a quick note to let people know that I'm still here, and still doing my best to move back into a creative place.
It seems like I needed more time than I thought to get past the situation with my father's death. I suppose that won't surprise those of you who have dealt with this kind of thing, but this is my first time losing someone that central to my life, and the aftershocks were both more intense, and more persistent than I'd thought they would be.
And then of course there was the holiday rush, which is always worse than I remember it being.
(I load cargo aircraft for a worldwide shipping company, and the month of December is IN-SANE for us).

All that being said, I'm well into a chapter, and my plan is to get it to you soon after the new year.
Hopefully, once that creative dam is broken, I'll be able to actually be a writer again, and post things again, on a semi-regular schedule.

For those of you still interested in my work after all these years, thank you.
Really, sincerely--thank you.
I'm so sorry for letting those stories and characters sleep for so long; I hope you can still recognize them once I start waking them up.

More news soon, including my thoughts on the latest Patreon controversy.

In the meantime, be safe and happy.
--AJK

Time for some honesty

Hello, gentle reader.

All right, I've been putting off posting about this until it was all over, but now it basically IS over, so here goes.

I'm not known as being a prolific writer. I'd love to be one of those hyper-productive sorts, believe me, but I've several personal issues that get in the way of that. That doesn't keep me from trying to do better, and sometimes I manage to put together a pretty good string of chapters in a sort of reasonable timeframe.

...Only that hasn't happened for around three years, and there's a reason why.

My father died last week, but before that he'd been living with me since the end of 2015. He'd suffered from a slowly advancing form of dementia for some time, and even though he tried his best to remain independant and live on his own for many years (helped by the fact that his house was just a few hundred yards down the street from mine), eventually it became time for him to move in so that I could take care of him.

It was... rough.

Not so much at the very beginning, but he was steadily getting worse, and the situation was complicated by the fact that I've never gotten along with my father. It's safe to say that we disagreed on very nearly everything, and the stress factor of trying to give him his space while also trying my best to give him all the help he needed was... well, it was what it was.

Because there wasn't anyone else. I don't have brothers or sisters, and the rest of his family have their own problems, and weren't interested in helping. So... it was just me.

And that's most of why I've only posted one story section since, nearly two years ago.

I tried to do the thing where the writer can escape the not-so-great real world and lose themselves in their storytelling, but apparently I'm not that sort of writer; I have to be in a better place than that, emotionally, before I can find my daydreams and write them down.

Several times I thought I'd found a groove, and promised new chapters were just around the corner, but inevitably the stress and daily drama of the situation would derail me, and I'd find myself shutting down and groping for words and stories that refused to come.

Anyway, at the end of May my father took a sharp turn for the worse, and it got very, very bad. All the stuff you see in an Oscar-bait film, where a person suffering from a disease like this loses the pieces of themselves one by one, till all that's left is confusion and fear and despair... it was very much like that, and you don't want to hear those details any more than I want to describe them.

So, three months of that, and doing the best I could to be there for him, and try to deal with the bureaucratic details involved (I'm terrible at that stuff, but I tried) and then last week he got even worse, and then he died, and just like that, his story was over.

I've been taking some time to process this, since then. My father didn't just die, he died badly, suffering horribly, trapped in a failing body and a broken mind, and it's left me shaken.

That said, I feel like I'm starting to find my balance now. These last few days, I've discovered my daydreams again. I've started turning those various stories over in my mind, dusting them off and imagining scenes, and dialog, and it's started to seem like there are things those characters want to say, and hidden corners of their worlds that I want to discover and share with you all.

So look for some things to be posted soon.

They might be small at first, as I dip my toes back into the water after a long while away, and there might even be some random snippets of other stories in there. I'm basically just going to open myself up and see what happens.

It's been a long time, and everything has been awful, but now it's time to take a breath, pick a fresh path, and start moving forward again.

I hope you'll come along with me.

---Alan

Advancing towards victory

All right.
By which I mean--everything is going to be all right.

I had a good, productive weekend of writing on the Ship of the Line chapter, and I made fair progress on it today as well--
--This leaves me feeling fairly cheerful.

Even better, Michael C. has helpfully read the first half of the chapter, and pronounced it 'pretty good' (or possibly he lied shamelessly to spare my feelings--both possibilities are entirely fine in my book :-P ).

So, yeah, I'm feeling sort of not-terrible about things at the moment.
There's still a ways to go on this, but now that I'm moving forward in a semi-consistent way, it might not be that long to have something ready to post.

(Ye gods, I really don't want to admit to anyone how many times I've started, stopped, restarted, and re-written this chapter to get it where it is now).
But yeah, I think I'm okay with how it's structured and how it's progressing now, and I think this will end up as a story I will be happy with.
And once I'm happy with how a story is going, I tend to get very excited about it, and eager to get it finished and out to you guys so that you can (hopefully!) be happy about/excited with it too.

Also, as an aside, there's another thing that's got me little excited too, which is that I've started work on an original fantasy novel. Things are still in the early stages, and I don't plan to do much on it until I've gotten a huge pile of fanfiction into your hands, but I like the ideas I've come up with so far, and I'm looking at maybe publishing this on Amazon early next year.
Until then I won't bother you with details on something that you've never seen before, except to say (in a whispery, Citizen Kane sort of voice, one single word): MistLight.

(Which, to shatter the mystery, if there was one, is the working title of the book).

Anyway, Taleene story soon, Dawn/SG:1 story soon after that, Harmony story when you least expect it, random fantasy novel sometime after that.

Carry on carrying on.
--AJK

Delayed Progress is still progress, I think?

Hey there, reader people.

All right, I just got a fair bit written on the Ship of the Line story, so that's good news, but the downside is that this is the first time I've been able to work on it for close to three weeks.

Not long after my previous post, I managed to hurt myself pretty badly. The doctor's best guess is that it's some kind of pinched nerve sort of thing, but if that's true then it's far and away the worst case of it I've ever had. Basically it hurts ALL the time, and it hurts quite a bit.
My neck, upper back, left shoulder, arm, wrist and hand, lots and lots of pain that rises and falls, but basically never completely stops hurting.
Ow.
So that's been a problem, when it comes to getting things written, but I think that it's finally, slooooooowly starting to improve.
It still hurts to sit in my chair and use a keyboard, but today was the first time it felt manageable, and I got several hours of work in, which felt pretty great.
If I can put together a few writing days like that, I'll have a chapter for you pretty soon.

Since this section of the story is kind of weird, with all the things that are converging on Sunnydale right now, I'm not really sure how long these chapters will go.
It definitely feels like multiple chapters, but whether that will be two, or three, or five, I can't really say.
I guess I need to go ahead and write it, before I know how it will look once it's written... or something along those lines :-P.

So that's what I'm doing.
Sorry it's taken so long, but I seriously made more progress on this story today than I have in two or three years of noodling around on it several dozen times, so I think things are finally on the right track.

I'll update again when I'm further along on things.
Take care, people.

AJK

How about some Star Wars?

Yes, I am alive.
Yes, I know it's been a long damn while since I've been around; sorry about that, depression is a real thing, kids, and it can steer you into a very deep and dark sinkhole if you stop paying attention and let things get out of hand.
::woof--deep breath, and release::
::Claps hands, once::
So, yeah, okay then!
I'm glad to say, I wrote today!
And I did that after reading through what I have on the Darth Buffy aka Taleene story, and deciding that, in the clear light of day, I DON'T actually hate it.
(Stupid depression grumblegrumble stupid self-sabotaging inner voice rakkafrakka grumplerumple)

Anyways, yes; I feel a little better about things.
And it felt good to make a little forward progress on a story again.
So, I'll be working towards getting some chapters out there to you guys; likely some stuff with the Taleene story first, then going back to finish up the first arc of the Dawn/Stargate one, then swinging back through for more Taleene, plus some Harmony Supergoddess (unless Harmony gets her way and cuts the line, to get in front of Dawn; we'll see).

Again, apologies for dropping out on you like that; I'll get back into posting updates as progress is made.

Later all.

Alan
aka
DreamSmith