One of the more serendipitous and downright eerie aspects of my work is that whenever a chapter needs to be completed or a certain theme needs to be explored, it feels like my real life shifts to accommodate these needs.

Let me back up a bit. So, Consequences Chapter 17 has been finished, and is available to read. I hope you all enjoy it, and as always, I enjoyed writing it, even despite the heavier themes in the piece. I won’t even bother dancing around this fact – the chapter, and the book on a whole, has some pretty heavy themes in it. In some ways, it’s my heaviest piece yet. Sure, Breathe was darker, but even though self-harm is included in both, Breathe shows it off in extreme amounts towards the end. Consequences, on the other hand, builds it up and, if I wrote it correctly, makes it not only feel more real, but like this ever-present fog that hangs over the whole piece, making readers nervous about its mere presence.

If you’re a clever reader, you’ll realize that how I just described the inclusion of darker themes in Consequences mirrors the presence of depression itself. That was a goal of this piece. One would think that, in this way, writing these themes can be quite draining, but I find it weirdly freeing, as if I can finally explore a few themes that, frankly, are baked into my life at this point.

I’m not saying I’m constantly sad. I am saying depression, to me, is like a fog that looms over life. I know that even at my happiest, it can come crashing down really easily. And honestly, I’m mostly at peace with it and if reading that worried you, I’d both like to apologize to you, assuring you that I’m doing quite alright, but also warn you that if you have loved ones with depression, they may likely feel the same way, so… y’know, be a little patient with them and their inevitable sad & mad episodes.

What’s interesting about these episodes with me is that they’ve seemed to coincide with the writing of this book to the extent where it seems they’re plopped into existence when this book requires it. Oftentimes writers will write events and then subsequently experience those very moments and themes; sometimes because they’re now actively thinking about them and notice them more easily, sometimes because they’ve put themselves in the mindset and subconsciously cause these very events in the ways they can. Weirdly, my situation seems to be the opposite.

A few nights before I wrote Adam and Nicole’s breakup, my partner broke up with me. I was planning to write the scene of their breakup a few days later, and frankly, I thought things between my partner and myself were doing great. Whoops. The breakup was not on my mind, and indeed, that was why I put off writing the scene – I wasn’t feeling it. Of course, once the breakup happened and I spent a few hours grappling with it and picking up the pieces, I just wrote the scene immediately. Why not? The feelings were fresh in my mind.

In this same way, any time since I’ve had to write a particularly sad scene, something sad happens in my life. It’s not exactly proportioned – a minor sad situation happened to me before writing the hospital scene – but it just seemed to happen, every time. Reality seems to be providing me with emotional fuel to write my stories at this point, and as I said, it’s a little eerie.

This creates a bit of a worrisome mindset in me. It kind of reinforces this idea that I exist to write stories. In some regards, that’s aspirational, but I also don’t want to measure my life in what I provide for others in the form of work. As much fun as writing is, it’s still labor, and I do not want to measure my life in terms of how much labor I give. I tried that with my old job, and if you’ve been reading these blogs for a while, you know how that turned out.

It has certainly helped before, and it goes both ways – whenever I want to write a particularly sweet or wholesome scene, the day I set aside to write, something nice will happen or a friend will do something out-of-character levels of kind. Like I said, on some level, it’s downright eerie. Obviously it’s all coincidence, and I certainly should not rely on it, and maybe it’s just me looking for it at this point; confirmation bias or something. I guess if there’s any pragmatic spin on this blog post, it’s this: if you’re a writer, never shy away from using your own feelings to fuel a work, as long as it’s healthy and helps both the work and your own well-being. That last part is, frankly, more important than the former. I hope you all had a good holiday season. I’ll talk to you all next year.

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