Writing Inspiration

Got a crazy amount of TAPAS stuff ready for this week... I don't want to give any of it away here, it's insider information... so, after I've composed this blog, I'm gonna compose a big list of all our accomplishments and upcoming goals for the team!

Creating is a funny thing. Characters, world, theme, sometimes it's the easiest thing in the world, other times you strain and struggle with it and it feels miserable. But my oh my, we are crawling ever closer to some goals...

Had some thoughts about literature a couple weeks ago... shared them on Facebook at the time, but screw it, they'll last longer here.

Like a lot of people, I grew up with Harry Potter, and of course it inspired my own writings, though it never made its way onto my official list of inspiring things that I'm currently running down on the TAPAS podcast. And, you know, that's a bitter thing to look back on these days. Not only is remaining a fan of Harry Potter impossible to separate from being anti-trans, but people are looking more critically at aspects of the story that, well, always drew odd looks from people, and in retrospect are clear signs of Rowling's true nature.

There's house-elves; Hermione realizes midway through the series that their situation is in all senses slavery, and this defines most of her motivation from then on. At no point does any other character begin to consider she has a point; house-elves are happy with their lot, after all. Marietta is permanently disfigured for an act of schoolyard betrayal. Generally, the atmosphere and the sense of justice are all rather mean-spirited. And Harry... while we all connected to him, seeing him as a nerdy underdog and a revolutionary, on second glance he's clearly a trust-fund jock who never fights the status quo because it doesn't make any difference to his life.

So, the messaging was faulty, but what about the quality of the writing? I think the lasting impact it had there was related to the fact that for many readers, both children and adults, it was their first exposure to many of its standout features as a work of literature. The character names had tangible meaning derived from myth and history, the creatures were a wild combination of the mythical and the original, tiny atmospheric elements came back as huge plot developments later to reward you for paying attention, and the characters were both diverse in a real-life sense and examined diversity from a fantastical perspective.

And the reason most readers noticed these things? Well, that'll be because they were done with all the subtlety of a big red sledgehammer to the face. But the damage was done, in a good way: people thought about these tropes, and how neat they were, and took note when they were done more subtly, and better, elsewhere. No one can deny that Harry Potter is responsible for the current generation of readers, yeah? Readers who, in a dizzying display of irony, learned a better grasp on literary tropes and social issues from Rowling's writings than she herself ever has.

In short: her success was because she had an approach to literature that looks extremely clever if it's in the first book you've ever actually read - leading us all to a greater understanding of stories of all sorts, to grow beyond where we began.

Time

Today is the 4th anniversary of TAPAS and Stuff Productions! ...And it's very late at night, so there's no way I'm actually finishing this post on the anniversary. Ah well. Didn't really have anything planned for today. I just spread around last year's anniversary special. Very fun Jackbox game video.

Lots of topics for today! Let's see...

Well, there's my EMDR, that's progressing nicely. I've always known that it's like, I watch my therapist's fingers going back and forth as I think about stuff, and it imitates REM sleep allowing me to process my traumas and anxieties. What I didn't expect was how it's developed into me pretty much having waking dreams and trying to process those.

We spent six weeks working on my executive dysfunction, my feeling of being trapped inside my own head, unable to drive my body... so we held onto that image. I placed myself in my brain, and... just let things play out from there, with some instruction from my therapist.

The first time, I was really trapped in my actual brain. The only way out was to make my brain disappear a little bit at a time, freeing first my arms, then my legs. This left me in despair - free to move, I was now in a dark cavern with no exit. My therapist encouraged me to find a door, and so we encountered a piece of imagery that's remained ever since: the cavern, always representative of the inside of my skull, now had two bright lights where my eye sockets were, and a door in the vicinity of my nose.

Weeks went by, and the dream was always different, but it held on to a few recurring themes. Always I started at the back of my head, now a huge empty cavern instead of a small room. Always, it was difficult to make my way across, and boy howdy did I have to fight like hell against the door to get so much as a glimpse of the meadow beyond.

Some weeks, I made it into the meadow, and in time the meadow stopped being lush and green, but all black. No more leaves on the trees, no more water, just black grass beneath a black sky - but the grass still felt dewy and alive even though it looked burned to a crisp.

Beyond the blackened meadow, everything changed from black to yellow - an endless desert with some sort of light off in the horizon. And it was a struggle to cross that boundary as well - unable to walk, I could only get into the dirt by crawling - not pleasant, as I don't like dirt and dust on my hands...

For about six weeks we worked with that. It was nothing more than dreams to me; like all dreams, it was meaningless, frustrating, out of control... but it helped. Only when my therapist spelled it out to me did I see the metaphor applicable to my life: getting out of my head represented exactly that, the meadow being my ability to finally achieve tasks, which I had been able to do every day since first reaching the meadow.

The difficulty reaching the desert beyond? Well, that represents a much longer-lasting problem: how after achieving a single task each day I mentally shut down for the rest of the day - the proverbial "one spoon" I possess. Being able to get back to doing one thing every day is incredible - but I want more.

As much as I'd like to see what lies beyond that desert, what that light on the horizon is, and hope that it does indeed lead to the pathway in my head to being useful for more than an hour each day - that may not be what I have to look at right now. The one thing, that might have to do. Beyond this, I need to address my fear - why, when I approach any application, any paperwork of any kind... why it feels like an insurmountable burden, and why I can't emotionally cope with any sort of burden.

Seeing myself collapse under the weight that everyone else is taking, I feel weak, unworthy... and feeling that way just makes me hate myself more, it's all cyclical. Part of me doesn't want to fill out applications because I know, with absolute certainty, that it will amount to nothing, that I will not receive any of the calls or services I'm applying for. It's my crippling fear of wasting time and growing old - and in being crippled by it, I do nothing else but waste time and grow old.

Suicidal ideation is when the pain grows beyond our ability to cope. Everything brings me pain beyond my ability to cope. Everything that's ever happened to me, everything I've ever done or thought about doing, has traumatized me. Why am I so weak? What can be done about it? I don't know. I can't imagine. But that's the foundation I laid at my last EMDR appointment, for the next one... which just presents another problem. One hour a week I'm in therapy, and so I can't help but feel like all the other hours of every week are a complete waste of time or worse.

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Something I definitely thought would be informative for the blog: last week's newsletter! Er, week before last's, at this point. It just seemed to be a good update that ultimately should go here now too!

Well, during that week, I got together with Mason and AJ and we successfully started our gaming series Grease, Gum, and Mud, so that's officially in production, I'm beyond excited, it's been many years that I've been itching to get this particular flavor of gaming videos made. Taking a little break from it now while Mason works crew on Mame.

I've recorded two guest segments for the TAPAS podcast, one with AJ and the other with Stacy and Casey... and I really gotta work on finishing those episodes, that's... hard stuff, man.

And I also finally got the photoshoot for the Keys & Kingdoms teaser done, and I've tasked everyone on the team who can hold a pencil to start working on some concept art for the characters and creatures in these stories! Hm, need to figure out something similar for set designs. Still working on my procedural bible for putting the stories together, and prepare for what's waiting in the wings, like songs and sound design.

Also sketching some cover art for Grease, Gum, and Mud... prepping the "Best of Phase One" video, I've gotten a little way into that... and yeah, taking those photoshoots, turning them into pre-animations for the final product of the teasers...!

For myself, I have five big priorities... hm, what were those again? Well, there's podcasts 55 and 56... more Best of Phase One... plenty of IRF things counted as one; the photoshoot, the songs, more audio editing... much proceeding with the making of the procedural bible... oh, and the final The Little Mermaid retrospective, dear God, that's been left hanging for an eternity.

The Keys & Kingdoms fundraiser has ended, and reached its $500 goal. Got five hundie from the fundie! Now... what am I gonna do with that $500? Largely just hang onto it and try to save it for when it's time for finalizing the art, gotta pay some freelancers for that.

Also, I had a birthday party for my cats, I made a video out of that and it was adorable, I'm gonna release that real soon.