Monsters ate my work!

Never let it be said that I lack samples of my work, or attempts at work.

I estimate that in my lifetime, I've started and abandoned over one hundred written pieces, seventy-five attempts at art, ten knitting projects, four crochet projects, one quilting project, two blogs (this one is still going, yay me!). I've read close to a hundred books on improving my art and even more books on writing.

Depression is a bitch, isn't it? So is low self-esteem. What I find to be even more insidious, however, is ego. It's the biggest monster of all the monsters that eat your work.

Ego is the part of you that says, "If ony I could write the right fanfic, I could be the next E.L. James. She writes crap, and got published! Why can't I get published? I actually write well. Well, when I write at all."

That's the thing. You (and I) might be technically better at craft, storytelling, wording (if I had read one more comment about Ana's 'inner goddess', I swore that I would strangle them both with Christian Grey's bondage ropes) but if you (and I) aren't writing, nothing's getting done. E.L. James and countless other writers--whether or not we agree that their work deserves to be published--WRITE. They get the words down and out of their brains and onto the page.

I've often said during those times where I didn't feel like writing "I wish there was a machine that could magically pull the story out of my head and onto the paper while I do something more fun*!", especially on days where I was writing something at another's behest. As I've said before, it doesn't work that way.

So what are some of the things that have held me back? Well...

1. Comparing myself to others.

A while back, I had a "Hannibal" (the tv series) crossover with "Morrowind" (the third in the Elder Scrolls game series). it got some initial good tractions and comments over on an Archive of Our Own and the occasional nice remark on Tumblr then...nothing. I was still determined to keep it going, until I read some incredible fics from other fannibals (Hannibal fans) that appealed to a more mainstream group. Fine. I kept going anyway, because of course something more mainstream in the fandom will have more comments and kudos and readers.

Then I started reading a truly amazing fanfic set in the same universe, but not following a specific storyline in the games, like mine did. The author had only started hers a month or so before mine, but she already had hundreds of readers and dozens of comments, compared to my 15 readers and five comments.

This may seem to fly in the face of my example of E.L.James, but hear me out. I may not agree that she tells a great story (I'm not bashing sex and romance or BDSM here, so don't even go there) or is a good writer, but I can agree that her story resonates with a greater amount of readers. I know, objectively, that my writing is good. Not perfect, but good. My story in the example simply didn't resonate with as many readers.

Lesson Learned: Don't compare yourself to others. Just do you. Some days will be easier for this than others. Keep doing you.

2. Putting other things ahead of art and writing

I'm a lazy bitch. There, I admitted it! Now, please excuse me while I batten down the hatches against the hordes of SJW's asking me to never, ever use that word. Seriously, though, I am. As much as I love being creative, I recognize that currently in my life that is 2/3's working (nine hour days) and sleeping (eight hours or so a night) I have to cram a whole ton of Other Stuff into my life. Eating. Cleaning. Watching cat videos. Watching Nostalgia Critic, Angry Video Game Nerd, and Markiplier. Basic hygeine. Fantasizing about Mads Mikkelsen and/or Devo circa 1978. Arguing with people on the internet. Gaming (Fallout and Elder Scrolls and WoW, oh my!) Writing. Art. All Super Very Ultra Important Stuff, I tell you.

I mean, come on. Look at how adorable they were in 1980! Still are.


Being creative with any outlet requires work and effort. Gaming does not. In my brain, work is unfortunately synonymous with "The thing that I hate doing all day but it keeps the rent paid, the cat fed, the internet going, and supplies purchased." and since art and writing also require--shudder--work, my brain seems to have lumped them into the "Not fun even though I love doing them" category.

How can I possibly resist this furball? I can't. Resistance is futile.

I need to get out of that mindset. So do you, if you want to continue being creative.

3. Not making time and prioritizing

Looking at the list of things that I do daily or almost daily, you might conclude that Sheila is a Very Busy Girl and Has No Time for Being Creative. I often do. In truth, however, this falls under the category of Making Excuses.

Being creative can be scary (especially if you've ever watched 'Don't Hug Me, I'm Scared') and things like doing the laundry, watching videos, and thinking about Mads (even when he's Hannibal) generally are not scary things. They're relatively safe. Humans by nature are risk avoidant. A lot of creative sorts have very thick skins. They flip off rude criticism like it's nothing and can handle their work being ignored. I'm not one of those. I think I'd rather walk naked into a pit of hungry tigers than have my work be ignored, and the fact that I'd be more scared of being naked in front of strangers than potentially eaten by tigers should tell you something else about me.

What holds you back? How do you handle these three monsters that love to eat creativity?



*By fun, I mean "Something that distracts me from the scary writing and art I need and want to do."

When I was a kid

When I was growing up and making those first, essential forays into art, the reactions of teachers and peers was, to say the least, a mixed bag.

I still have a memory of being in kindergarten and having a painting session. I hadn't yet learned the art of controlling my brush or how to prevent runs and drips yet, so my 'forest with a rainbow' painting had some runny bits. I liked it, though. to me, it looked like the rainbow was 'raining colors' from itself.

(Note to self: Do a version of this painting as an adult, just for fun)

My teacher didn't see it that way, however. She called the class's attention to it. My little five-year old artist self thought 'Ooh, she liked it so much, she's showing everyone!' Unfortunately, that was not the case. 'Look at how the colors all run down Sheila's painting,' she said. Her voice alone shamed me, and then came her next words: "That doesn't look very nice, now does it, class?"

"No," my classmates chorused obediently. I wanted to hide in the supply cart. I settled for bursting into tears, as I often did in those days (Melanie Martinez might have written 'Crybaby' just for me and me alone) and I got a lecture about how 'only babies cry' and "You're a big girl now' and finally 'If you don't stop crying, I'm going to paddle you." (Counterproductive, much?) eventually, I just stifled it, like I always did, because feelings in a little girl other than happiness and agreeableness are baaaaaaad, and only bad, disagreeable children ever have any other feelings. My mother was already all but beating that into my head already.

When I'd hit the 4th grade, though, my teacher saw something different. She encouraged my talent and my art, and for a little, I flourished. I saw the potential in myself. Between 4th and 7th grade, I drew constantly, painted, did everything I could that wasn't deemed 'too messy' or 'too expensive' by my parents, especially my mother. 

In the 4th grade, we did collages, and I did mine with frabric on paper of a jungle scene, complete with monkeys, a lion (I know, they don't live in the jungle, really), trees, a leopard, and an elephant. I didn't think it was all that wonderful. My teacher loved it, and encouraged me to enter it in the school art competition.

It came in third!

My parents were proud of me, but didn't want to expend money or effort into getting me the supplies I needed to continue at home (see 'messy' and 'expensive' above) This is where I gradually began to realize that my desires, my goals, my dreams were opnly doable if it didn't inconvenience my family in some way.

In seventh grade, I discovered two wonderful things that I still enjoy to this day: Star Wars and KISS. For the next two years, I focused almost all of my artistic efforts into drawing things related to both, much to the chagrin of my art teachers and the derisive amusement of my fellow students. I was that weird girl who was into weird stuff, something which I embrace now, but at an age where fitting in is seen as something more vital to life than, say, oxygen, I was miserably unhappy. (Things didn't much improve when I moved on from KISS after discovering Devo in 1978, but that's another story!).

I want to say that I became an amazing artist doing incredible work to this day, but it was not to be. I was already deeply wounded inside. I had little to no self esteem. The constant ragging from my peers and my parents lack of support and encouragement in any aspect of my life along with my mother's continued verbal and emotional abuse had ground me under life's heel too long.

Throughout the rest of high school, I never took another art course. I told everything I've written here to my mentor (an amazing artist in his own right) and he was angry and heartbroken for me. He grew up in a family that was the polar opposite of mine, and they encouraged and nurterd talent and creativity, wherever it might lie.

It's taken me until 2015 to even begin to think I could pick up where I left off, and the struggle is real, let me tell you. But I am not going to give up on myself or my art again.

It might just take a little while, is all.

You Keep using that word...

"Dad, what does practice mean?"

"Practice," my dad told me (I was about six years old at the time) "means doing something over and over again until you get it right."

He wasn't exactly wrong to word it that way. He said it as simply as possible for my young brain to grasp it easily. But practice is so much more than that, and it's taken me this long to understand that.

Practice is much more than doing something over and over again. You can practice doing cartwheels, but until you put real, concerted effort into pointing your toes, lifting your legs high, and coordinating speed with balance, you're going to make the same half-assed, legs only halfway up tumbling
attempts that I did throughout my tenth year, until I finally gave up on gymnastics altogether. (Well, it was that feeling of making no real progress mixed with my mother's refusal to pay another dime for something she deemed 'too expensive', but that's a blog post for another day).

If you practice drawing the same thing, writing the same thing, without paying attention to lines and how shading should look or your spelling or grammar or avoiding the passive voice, you're not going to grow in your craft. You're simply going to improve upon whatever mistakes you are making, or to quote a friend of mine, "Perfect your stick figures."

It took me a long time to realize all of this. My dad meant well, but he hadn't accounted for how words our parents tell us and that we in turn tell our kids impact how they think and how they relate to the world.

As regards my art, I dreaded the word. I wanted to be where I wanted to be--right now!--with none of that boring 'draw the same shapes' and 'shade the same shading' over and over 'until I got it right'. The word 'practice' took all the fun and joy out of it. It made me focus on my mistakes and see art as "Well, I just have to keep slogging through the 'Oh my god, I suck at this' stage until one day, magically, I was suddenly 'good', and then, only then, could I enjoy what I was doing.

It doesn't work that way.

If you look at honing your skills and perfecting your work as 'slogging', and don't enjoy the process and its results for what they are, you're going to be where I was until I decided to stop being there: slogging along, getting impatient, and quitting, over and over. If I'd have keep drawing the way I'd been a year ago, I would have vastly improved right now. Instead, I let myself get overwhelmed by 'practice', saw no progress, and my depression and wrongheadedness got the best of me. Again.

One of my favorite artists--who is also a fellow 'spudess', or Devo fan--told me she got to where she was by hard work and practice. I at the time stubbornly insisted to myself that it couldn't just be that--she obviously had tons of talent which made it loads easier, talent that I didn't have. Recently, I asked her about her feelings on the word 'practice', and this is what she had to say:

"My answer would be that depending on what the particular skill involved is, sometimes 'practicing' isn't really what one needs.
One just needs to keep doing what they enjoy doing ( say for example, drawing or playing music ) and that will in itself be your 'practice'.
Letting your skill develop over time naturally is what is really needed, not a 'forced' regiment or process.All too often that drains the enjoyment out of what you are doing.
Let it flow naturally through you and out into the physical world.
Don't stop, and don't let others opinions discourage you.
Keep going and know that anything is possible." --JW

Detail of her drawing of Devo she posted recently on Facebook. this is Alan Myers, aka the Human Metronome. Pretty sure he didn't get hung up on what practice means, either. And he was AWESOME.


Over and over, I let myself talk me out of something I wanted.

There's reasons for that--some of you will call it excuses, and I am okay with that; healing is a process, not a 'Gee, that happened so long ago, I'll will it away, poof! it's gone!" like some wish it could be--and I'll be getting to those as this blog moves forward.

Ask yourself this week: What are three things that I constantly talk myself out of doing?

Off-topic Saturday--The End of an Era

I'm an avid (well, as avid as a non-raider gets) World of Warcraft player. Recently, I broke up with a friend of ten years (another story for another day) who also played. Because of how Blizzard has battletags set up, changing my battletag would do no good to conceal my identity, and even putting this person on /ignore would not suffice for me. When I break ties, I tend to enact a 'scorched earth' approach.

So I had to take the very hard step of completely cancelling my account, and purchasing the game anew.

Side note: my friend is not a bad person. She has a good heart. But she has severe Borderline Personality Disorder, and I stuck by her for ten years. I finally realized that unfortunately, I have to take care of myself. Our friendship has never been a healthy one. I reiterate, however, that she is a good person, even if her illness makes it too hard to continue being her friend.

I started playing WoW ten years ago this March. My first-ever character was a human female warrior. I was new to the game, and decided it knew best when it came to selecting a server. I had no idea what 'PvP' even was, so when the game suggested the Gul'dan server because it was low population, I took its advice. Hooboy.

I constantly--and I mean constantly--got ganked (attacked and killed) in contested areas, often by players 20, 30, even 40 levels higher. Despite the constant annoyance, I managed to level her to level 40, said 'Fuck this', and rolled a human paladin.

On the same sever.

You know the old saying about insanity and doing the same thing over and over, right? (I've never claimed to be sane.) I leveled her to 72, said 'Fuck this' again, and rolled a character on the opposite faction, this time a Tauren Hunter on a PvE server.

That was when I turned my back on the Alliance and forever embraced the Horde.

I named my hunter Ehallanee. Her one and only pet was a savannah huntress lion she tamed just outside of the Crossroads named Puma. I rolled her back in 2009, shortly before Wrath of the Lich King went live. at the time, there was no Dungeon Finder, so you either hoped to round up some friends or hoped your guild mates weren't too busy to group up and go. Mounts had just become available at level 30 instead of 40, and both the mount and the training to ride cost a fuckload of gold. Mounts weren't yet account-wide, either.

I remember farming the hell out of the centaurs in Thousand Needles for the money and silk they dropped to raise funds. Yeah, I could have made a blood elf chick and had her dance naked in Orgrimmar for gold, but I don't dig that (no offense intended if you do). Ehallanee and Puma farmed for two weeks and finally got the mount. A week later, a new patch dropped that put the gold and level requirements even lower. D'oh.

I remember running out of arrows for her halfway through the Sunken Temple dungeon and having to switch to my very loud rifle. I got complaints about the noise and eventually kicked, but I didn't care. I got to see actual dungeon content! This was back when missile weapons required ammo pouches and ammo.

I used to imagine her flirting with the tauren guy who ran Camp Taurajo, and the little, progressively more difficult 'Hunter, go and kill this creature to show your worth' quests. I remember killing Washte Pawne, because I was sure he would have a good drop, being a rare and all, only to instead get a quest that led to me (and presumably, Ehallanee) pondering the price of impulsivness.

I remember the search for Mankrik's wife.

I recall my early Outlands quests, and how excited I was to get those early gear upgrades, and how excited I was to lay eyes on the Howling Fjord for the first time.

I stopped playing her for a long time afterwards, as I got wrapped up in alt after alt, but she was still my favorite.

Now I have to give her up. Forever.

It may not mean anything to most of you. "it's just a collection of pixels and data," you say.

But just imagine, for a moment, something that did mean a lot to you, that you had to give up, because of a friendship or marriage or relationship or hell, even a job that had suddenly and irrevocably soured. Or it was never good to begin with, and you finally got the courage to just let it all go.

I will never see her again. But maybe after I'm done mourning that collection of pixels and data on a screen, I'll make a new Tauren, a son or daughter, because Ehallanee did hook up with that handsome Tauren after all, and they had a young one.

Maybe, just maybe, he or she will be a mighty hunter, too.

What this blog is about

As I said in my introductory post, I struggle with various issues. Some of these are due to my innate brain chemistry. Others have been induced by mental and verbal abuse, most of it caused by my mother and poorly chosen partners.

This isn't a forum for whining. My goal is to reach out to others who have found that their creativity and belief in their craft--be it art or writing--has been impacted by the actions of and reactions of others and their own inner pain.

I have started so many creative works in the past. Nine out of ten of my stories falter before completion. I've produced art, and I have some degree of talent and skill, but I abandon it due to not being where I want to be. If I didn't keep giving up, I'd have been there years ago.

This isn't going to be a thing where I'm constantly using my past and my scars to not progress and grow as an artist or writer. I want nothing more than to actually finish what I start for once. It is my hope that in sharing my experiences I can help others who are in the same boat, and also, move beyond my stuck points.

Where do I come from, and where do I go?

No, this isn't a new verse for 'Cotton-Eye Joe', though I tend to make references to that song a lot (Too many episodes of Mystery Science Theater: 3000, I suppose). I'm supposed to be introducing myself, so let's jump right in.

My name is Sheila, I'm 52 years old, and for most of my adult life, I've struggled with depression (varying degrees of severity), Bipolar II (thankfully mild, as such things go) and most recently as I age, increasingly severe issues with body image. I'm a survivor of childhood emotional and borderline physical abuse (my mother is Bipolar I, and would never take medication for it) and emotional and verbal abuse from various relationships. I might also have Generalized Anxiety Disorder and adult ADHD. these conditions have not yet been diagnosed.

I struggle daily with severe low self-esteem. I beat myself up over doing things that most people just shrug off and move on. Because of my self-esteem and body issues, I haven't had a relationship since 1999, and my last attempt at one was in 2002 (he ghosted on me for a month, then reappeared just as I moved on. I said no. I have at least some self respect). Mostly this is due to the aforementioned body image and self-esteem issues, though some of it too is I am just too afraid to try again.

My issues have affected my friendships (both in creating and maintaining them), my ability to find and keep conventional employment, my aspirations as a writer and artist (I tend to think that everything I do is fail and lose compared to everyone else's work) and i have abandoned enough projects to fill a library and art gallery.

I am not saying all this to whine. Whining is talking about your issues with no goal of bettering your situation or to attract sympathy and attention. A little whining now and then is okay. Sometimes, you just gotta vent. Maybe I'll set up a post on Wednesdays called 'Whining Wednesdays', hehe. My goal here though is to share my experiences so that those of you experiencing the same thing won't feel so alone, and offer suggestions, advice, and processes to get past it.

So. Tell me who YOU are, what you're dealing with. I won't judge.