In which I talk about how there's not familial abuse or anything in my novel and why this is cool.

A rather big reason I like my current novel: the way it portrays family as experienced by someone with a mental illness. I'm aware that family intolerance and abuse exists, especially in cases with mental illness, but I'm also aware that there are many cases where the family isn't intolerant, abusive, or otherwise harmful towards the family member with the mental illness, even they don't understand the person's experience or know what to do about it.

I don't know for sure, but I'm willing to bet that there are less families that are abusive/toxic towards people with mental illness than there are family that are abusive/toxic. And even if that's not the case, I've seen a lot of abusive or dysfunctional families in fiction, to the point where I'm beginning to think they might be just plain overrepresented. (Which doesn't mean realistic representations of abuse are not necessary; they are, but representations of another kind of reality would also be good.)

And another thing I don't see a lot of in fiction: family members or relationships that are toxic but not necessarily abusive or caused out of ill will on the part of the toxic person. The novel I'm writing has a character - the mentally-ill protagonist's aunt, who looks after him for most of the story as he undergoes recovery - whose actions have a mostly negative affect on her nephew until it is made very clear to her the effect she's having. When it's pointed out to her that she needs to change, she does so to the best of her ability. Furthermore, all her toxic actions are born from the fact that she has an inherently nurturing and protective personality and doesn't know what to do with it when she's finally presented with a target for her nurturing and protection. All of them. It's not because she's bad/selfish/dysfunctional/bad at dealing with people/[insert other negative trait here]. It's because she really, really wants someone to look after (preferably in a mother/child kind of relationship but with aunt/nephew being acceptable, too) and when she's finally put into that kind of situation, she's ill-prepared for it and she doesn't realize that a mentally-ill young adult (and thus, from her perspective, vulnerable) shouldn't be treated the same as a child.

Maybe I don't read/watch enough things with families in them, but I honestly don't remember the last depiction I saw of a family that wasn't dysfunctional or significantly not-ideal in some way. Which isn't to say that I'm trying to write an ideal family or anything - I'm trying to write a family that I think is realistic - but many of the families I've seen in real life aren't like the families I see in fiction, in that they're not as dysfunctional. (Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I can think of some examples of families portrayed in a positive light, where none of the members are or were harmful to each other in any way, but a lot of the time, one of, if not the, main message of the piece of fiction was about how families are or can be good.)

I don't know, I'm just really happy about portraying something that 1. I don't think is portrayed very much in fiction, or 2. isn't likely to be portrayed in this kind of story.

NaNoWriMo

I - I've a bit of a confession to make. And a bit of an apology.

As of now, I have quit my NaNoWriMo novel to write another project.

NaNo was too stressful for me to keep up with - I should have known it, I should have known that my anxiety is too much to have me successfully write a novel AND deal with school and live and people and et cetera - but I AM still working on something. I've got another novel idea, one that I think has much more "heart", so to speak, than the last idea did. And given that I'm only setting myself a 1,000-words-a-day daily wordcount (as opposed to a 2,000-words-a-day daily wordcount), I think I can make it. And the subject matter is something that will prove sort of relaxing/enjoyable/pleasant for me (while still making for a good plot, of course).

Sometimes, you've just got to know when to give up, you know? And here you go. This is me knowing when to give up. This is me trying to ignore my limits for the who-knows-how-manyth time and of course being pushed too far. This is me knowing what to do with my time regardless. This is me taking what, for me, was a stupid idea and making it better.

Cheers.

Telemarketers

A telemarketer called while I was eating ice cream and watching Monty Python (something I haven't done for a while). I was quite irked but I went out of my way to be nice to her. I like going out of my way to be nice to telemarketers. I hear people talk about how they like antagonizing those people, and I don't think that's very nice because telemarketers have a rubbish job, and they KNOW it's a rubbish job, but it's theirs, and I don't know how many people are kind to them (not many, I imagine), so I make it my job to be kind to telemarketers.