Twenty
Back in the 1980s when I was just a teen, I had a lot of mental health issues before I even knew what they were. They were my normal – being agitated, or having unexplainable bouts of melancholy, or feeling a disconnect from everybody else. It wasn’t until they exploded into panic attacks that the public hospital psychiatrist was able to give me some muddy clarity. But the worst of those mental health issues, the meltdowns, came at important times developmentally – when I should’ve been making my way out into the world, I was dealing with anxiety, cluster panic attacks, and OCD; when friends were marrying and working steadily,…
87,642
When I began writing Just Another Week in Suburbia, I already had this scene in mind – well, not exactly this scene I’m going to post, but the gist of it. Just because you’ve gone over and over a scene in your head doesn’t mean it’s going to fit perfectly into the story when its time comes. Sometimes it needs renovation. In this case, I was just over 50,000 words into the story. The story had evolved beyond what I’d envisioned in those early stages. So had Casper. Casper had grown and developed a life of his own. I’ve seen in reviews people label Casper as ‘weak’. That irks me.…