Well, as Dystonia Awareness Month comes to a close, I find myself wondering why I bother when people will actually become aware enough about dystonia to give a damn about it.

There, I said it, as someone I barely knew once wrote. 🙂

So, here’s my final shot last hurrah on the topic. Unless I decide to write more, though I can’t imagine anyone’s really that interested. Really. It’s boring. You don’t want to know. It’s horrible and best not to dwell on the whole business. So, there, you have it.

BTW, the following is something I wrote this morning. It’s just a rough draft of the “origin story” (if you will) of Identity Crisis and the Sam McRae mystery series.

Somehow, I got on the topic of dystonia and that was where the topic went next.

This was the second novel I wrote before my fiction was published. The first novel I wrote was revised a few times and eventually published as the fourth book in the series.

It’s hard to recall when exactly I started writing Identity Crisis, but it had to be sometime after November 1997. Because that was when I got a critique of the first novel from a published author, who judged my story to be “publishable.” As in worthy of being shown around to agents, say? He liked it. So, I felt ready to do that. More confident than I had been, just by getting my work vetted by an experienced author who found it good enough to merit publishing.

So, that’s what I did. For several years. Got lots of rejections. Loads and loads of them. Over a hundred, for sure. Eventually, I managed to get a short story published in an anthology. That was in 2004. In November of 2004, I had a stroke. To make a longish story shorter, I recovered from the stroke, due to getting swift treatment and a clot-busting drug called tPA. However, in the spring of 2005, my life changed forever, when I developed a movement disorder called dystonia.

It is, apparently, such a rare condition to develop after a stroke, that absolutely no one that I know of is doing any research on it. It affects my left side extremities. My left arm and leg are constantly in motion, in a way that causes opposing muscles to fight each other, like a constant tug-of-war going on within my body.

It is a constant hum of activity I have no control over happening in every waking moment of my life now. And after the initial disappointment of finding out I now have a very annoying, painful, debilitating, and somewhat distracting health problem, I further find out that no one knows how to fix it. Or is looking into it. At all.

My choices are pretty clear. I can give up writing and do something else. Something that won’t involve getting accepted by anyone. Just do nothing. Or do something I’ve wanted to do all my life (regardless of the difficulty, unfairness of it all, or pain). Or, I could just kill myself and be done with it.

What would you do?

PS: Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? 🙂 Ha ha ha …

PPS: Well, now I’ve just got to see The Lowdown.

If it’s based on this guy’s life? That’s just awesome. And so is this!

 

PPPS: I spent most of my exciting weekend organizing my office. And looking through footage. And reading as many books as possible, plus scripts (one of which I need to give notes on and one of which I’ll be discussing soon). Plus writing this.

By the way, today is Virtual You Day for people with dystonia. So, if you’re feeling generous or need a tax write-off, please consider giving to the cause of researching every kind of dystonia, except … well, never mind all that, huh?

Thinking about lying down.

Well, you know what they say?

“Self-care is how you take your power back”

— Lalah Delia

PPPPS: The Great Lock In of 2025! With thanks to the awesome Cal Newport!

 

Who’s with me on ending the year with a BIG LOCK-IN! 🙂

If you’re interested, you can learn about how I got started with writing my first novel right here!

Or right here!

How about here? 🙂