--Updated 3/3/15--

I write like most people watch television (I figure I’m not alone in that here). I love it. And when I can’t, I feel like a chunk of my soul has been ripped out of me and the rest of it left to die (probably still not alone there). It’s like you can see it, but can’t quite reach it no matter how much you stretch out your hands. Lately, that’s been 9 out of 10 days for me. For those of you following Some Kind of Psychic, you’re intimately aware of those days. I actually have a list of 45 fanfiction ideas. Obviously, you haven’t seen them.

I’ve decided to be open about why. I have anxiety. Some of you will understand and some of you won’t.

That’s okay.

I think that the best description of anxiety is being allergic to life. I’m not sure where I read it (probably on the internet somewhere) so I can’t really give credit where credit is due, but I feel like it’s more accurate than any medical definition. I don’t remember a time before anxiety. I’ve always had it; it just got a lot worse with age.

Two years ago (give or take), it was bad. Worse than it’s ever been. I was miserable. I could barely leave the house for something as mundane as grocery shopping. It was all I could do to force myself into the living room, never mind anything remotely social. I was still taking college classes but, by that point, they were all online. I couldn’t physically go to school. You’ll recognize this time as the two years between chapters 2 and 3 of SKoP.

It wasn’t that I’d forgotten about it. It wasn’t that I’d stopped having ideas (for any of my ideas—fanfiction or things of my own). It wasn’t even that I stopped jotting small things down. But the ability to put those ideas and one-liners into real, readable words was out of reach. This summer (I guess it’s last summer now), was the first time I’d been able to put pen to paper in entirely too long.

And it was beautiful.

I felt whole again.

So I worked on SkoP and VAaB and a lot of other things (like TLL). At least until the schoolwork started piling up. In the meantime, I’d gone back to school—actual physical school and not online—and I was in my last semester. Whatever you’ve heard about the hell that is a last semester, it was a lie. It’s so much worse than that. Especially when you wait until that last semester to take your capstone. More often than not, I didn’t think I was going to make it out alive (I did, in case you’re wondering).

But the fanfiction had to be put on the back-burner for a while. For me, fanfiction is a hobby. It’s the equivalent of watching TV. Only way better. I use fanfiction to test out ideas, to see how they’ll write. I use it to practice my style, to try and build on the voice I have—to make it better. And I use fanfiction to flesh out characters. Why? Because characters come first for me. I won’t have a plot until I know who I’m writing about. So I take this half-baked concept I have for a character and put it in a universe I know fairly well. You don’t have to create a plot because it’s already there. Same to characters and relationships and all those other time-consuming details that go into creating a world. And, most important for me, I get to practice dialogue for all sorts of relationships and situations.

So, the stories you’re going to see from me, they’re going to have OCs. I don’t think I have an idea without one. At this point, VAaB is the only one with an OC created specifically for fanfiction purposes.

I hope to get back to posting up here (I have a chapter or two dialogue-drafted) but, I’ll be honest, the past few weeks have been rough. Thanks to, you know, the non-existent job market and the soul-crushing properties of student debt.

Yay, education.

This was probably more than most of you ever wanted to know but, for the few who did, here it is. I figure there aren't that many people who read profiles anyway.

So, happy reading (even if it's not one of mine).