Life with Dystonia Archives - One Honest Indie

My Post-Production Update

09/08/2026 by Debbi Leave a Comment

Hello everyone. And as Paul Downie might say, I need a haircut. Yes, I do need a haircut, but that’s not what I’m going to talk about. I spent [last] Tuesday making the movie, my second film, directing, and wow, we came in under budget in terms of time. I mean, we really brought this thing together in a very efficient way, all of us collectively working together. It was wonderful.

Check out our 1st AD (and one of Charm City’s head honchos) Wes Throneberry on the big screen!

I had a great big monitor that I could see the action on. I actually yelled “action!” instead of just like, “(barely audible) action.” I don’t speak loudly enough ever, it seems. But having said that, I really had a wonderful time. It is hard for me with dystonia to do this, but I enjoy it so much. I can’t help myself almost. I really did love working with the people on set this week. All of them are wonderful and I want to email all of them and I have to get the emails.

There’s so many things I want to do. But having said that, I’ll get to that. I will. I will. I’m reading this Middleman by Brendan Flaherty. I’ve dipped into this, Shrink Solves Murder, Philippa Perry, and I am well on my way toward finishing this. I’m way behind on my reading. This is Kim Sherwood’s Hurricane Room. James Bond is alive. Yes, he is. And it’s very, very interesting reading and I’m enjoying it very much. I also have a bunch of scripts to read, but apart from that, the only thing I’ll add is the following.

I bought this for myself because I figure if I’m going to do movie reviews, I want to keep track of what I’m reviewing a little bit better in a more organized fashion. Thank you. Got hair hanging in my face. Sorry. And also the always good advice to be curious, be curious, not judgmental. Yeah. Kitty cat.

And what can I say? Really, this is great advice. Time spent with cats is never wasted. Or kites for that matter, but cats especially. Yeah. Time spent with cats is never wasted. All right. Have a wonderful week and I hope you enjoyed Labor Day. I intend to enjoy it. It’s Saturday right at the moment, but I’m making this for Tuesday. So happy Tuesday when this goes up. Thank you so much and I will be seeing you. Be seeing you. Let’s start that Prisoner Discussion Club, huh? Take care. Be seeing you! 🙂

PS: September is Dystonia Awareness Month. ~~Reading all that just exhausted me.~~

There, I said it.

May the Fourth Update

05/04/2026 by Debbi

Still carrying happy memories of watching *Star Wars* back in the day. 🙂

Hi. Yeah. I think what I’m trying to do today is talk a little bit about quality of life, how to live your life happily, even if you have awful things you have to deal with or bad things happen. Because believe me, dealing with dystonia for the last 20-some years has not been easy. So I have managed, and I manage to see people now and then. That’s nice when I can do that. I’ve tried to be more social lately. I’ve tried to go out and do more book signings lately.

I’ve tried to … I’m now directing the second short film or will be. I’m still in the process, the pre-production process of doing the readings and doing the rehearsal and doing … all of a sudden, I still need to get some props. I’m like, “Oh my God, it’s May and I was hoping to do this in June and I’m not sure that’s going to be possible. And I don’t know how quickly people can … “

Adopting ‘Zen Habits’

02/10/2026 by Debbi

Hey, so I’m engaging in a new habit. I have this book. I’ve had it for some time. I’ve read through it. I have tried to follow some of its advice. And actually, what I thought I would do is be a little more deliberate in my use of this book. What I’m going to try to do is use one of these tips every single day and see how it works out, how much progress I make. And actually, I have to admit the very first task he has in here, not task, but item, I guess. I don’t know.

Decluttering. Decluttering has been a huge problem for me. I have a tendency to keep old articles that I think would be great sources of potential ideas for stories. I have a tendency to keep old research and old drafts. I keep things in the interest of showing my work, so to speak.

This is Just a Rough Draft

09/30/2025 by Debbi

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.