Awkward In The Woods

The other day I went on a walk and learned that I'm even awkward in the woods. There's a river I like to go to near the house, and it's maybe a twenty five minute walk. Right next to it, though, there's this nice house where these two tiny, angry dogs are always in the yard, barking, and when they bark at me their owners come out and like, snap at them, and it makes me so awkward. Like, let your dog bark itself out without reminding me of your existence. Human interaction messes me up.

I think mainly I just wasn't prepared to see so many people out, since it's the middle of nowhere and I was in the mood to be alone (hence the walk to the secluded river and all) but overall it was still nice, even if walking by people doing yard work is cringe-worthy to me for some reason. And I worked through some plotting issues while I was walking, so that's a plus.

When I got to the river I was walking across the rock wall that stretches across it, like a damn or something, and someone had caught and decapitated a fish and left it's head there, and a swarm of flies was buzzing over it. It wasn't exactly pleasant. But it will probably make it into my next book, nonetheless.

It's weird to think it's almost summer again. Like, it's been an entire year since last summer. I am twenty. So much has happened - I've put out my first couple full-length novels, I've started on anti-depressants again and quit drinking. I've lost a lot of weight. At the same time though, things are mostly the same.

This winter was really hard in a lot of ways - there were a lot of times where I honestly didn't expect to make it through.

But now that the warm season is here and things are slowly but steadily getting better, I feel like I'm reclaiming pieces of my identity every day, and coming back to myself. It's nice. And I keep reminding myself that I'm not in that place I was, but it hasn't fully sunk in yet that I got through it.

The thing is, every time you fall into that black well of depression, there's a part of you that doubts you'll make it out.

I'm learning to tell that part to shut up.

And, in other news, writing a bunch. I want to do a blog every day in X one of these months, I just haven't picked the one yet. I meant to blog a lot more once Shadows of Ourselves came out, to promote it, but I haven't had the time as I jumped right into drafting the sequel to Blood of Midnight. The thing is, Shadows has been doing pretty well on its own (thank you to everyone who's bought the book!) and it's even gotten some good ratings on Goodreads, which is nice.

I actually just got a new writing desk the other day that I kind of love. It's made the idea of sitting down to work a lot more appealing actually.

So when I haven't been being awkward in the woods, I've been listening to Astrid S and writing this vampire book. You can check it out on Pinterest here if you like pretty pictures, and I do: https://www.pinterest.com/writerlyprince/tears-of-sunrise/