I’m used to my mind being chaos. You know that joke of “my mind is a browser with 100 tabs and one of them is stuck”? That’s really how my brain works. At any one time I have three lists running with things I need to do, a calendar constantly checking what day I’m on and what I have coming up in the near future, lists of books/movies/TV shows/podcasts I want to watch, a music channel running a random song, and about three or four story ideas that I have yet to get on paper. All trying to run simultaneously on an OS that was built back in the Stone Age.
Sometimes I can get overwhelmed with the chaos, but I’ve lived with it long enough and learned enough about “oh, this isn’t weird” as I’ve read about mental health and neurodivergence, that for the most part I’m okay. But recently I’ve really been struggling with being overwhelmed, not because of my personal day-to-day life but because of the chaos in the world. My partner greets me every morning with updates on the war or the new trauma of the moment (just saying this right now: if we spent the time, money and energy that we spend HATING/FEARING/HURTING other people and put that time/money/energy into loving other people unconditionally, it would be a different world). The local government is trying to bring in a jet fuel factory that’s going to displace a bunch of farms and destroy the environment all for ‘jobs’ which it isn’t actually going to create, but hey they get a kickback so why not. My day job is constantly fretting about the economy or what weird thing our CEO is going to do with the shiny new toys of the moment (AI). Speaking of, my Substack is filled with articles on “How to use AI to up your Subscriber list” and people moaning the deluge of shitty AI books and slop. My local writing group had talks on how there are ‘book factories” that spit out over 1,000 books a month with AI hoping that a couple people will buy each one (not read, buy) because that’s money in the bank. Then my partner comes in with “Hey this company is building this all-powerful AI that’s going to let people destroy the world (steal bank accounts in seconds, hack whatever they want, invade any computer they want)”. Which all accumulated in an anxiety attack that decided to rear its ugly head when I was in a meeting and trying to have a serious conversation about the upcoming catalog year so now I’m pretty sure my boss and everyone else thinks I’m a complete spaz and idiot. Sigh.
Oh, and I had a complete breakdown last night where I just screamed into the void about why can’t humanity just stop destroying itself and the earth for five seconds. Why we are stuck in archaic systems that tear people down while at the same time ‘inventing’ new ways to destroy normal life as we know it. How we allow corporations to rip up time and space and land because we keep falling under the lie of ‘they care for us and they’ll take care of us’ only for them to go running off in the night with yachts full of money, meanwhile our children are being born with three eyes and we’re being laid off at the drop of a hat because profits and shareholders and private equity. I even started an ‘apocalypse journal’ where I am writing a diary like the apocalypse has already come and how I’ll deal with the fallout, although to be fair right now it’s just me ranting at all the stupidity of the world in general.
I know, you don’t come here for politics and bad news. You do come here for truth though about what it’s like to be a Part Time Professional Writer. Right now, this is my truth, my reality. It’s hard to write and create and pretend like everything is normal when it’s not. It’s hard to write about science-fiction futures and apocalypses when the real thing is happening around you. What’s worse? We’re actively inventing the things that writers have been warning us about for decades (Skynet is happening right now). My mental health flip-flops so much I feel like I got whiplash.
I guess that’s what bothers me so much. In my personal life, things are going pretty great, considering. I’m about to publish my second book, I got accepted to my first book festival as an author, I’ve been doing great with THE MEWZ every month and I’ve been finding time for writing more short stories and doing art. I finally got my bookshelves up and discovering after the moving purge that I have a lot of room to fill (challenge accepted!) I am spending time in the garden and the meditation/musing time has been creating a lot of great creative ideas. Then the rest of the world comes crashing in. Gas prices. Random laws that make regular life harder to live by. New regulations that are forcing small business owners out of industries. Hate and fear and anger focused on people for no other reason than “I was told to hate you” or “I need something to blame”. All while people are going “you should fight to fix it” and I’m going “How? How do we band together and fix this in a way that’s really going to matter?” The answer is usually crickets.
Sometimes it feels like I’m living two different lives. When they come crashing together, it can take me a day or two to recover. Yet today when I woke up, the sun was shining and it was a better day. And so I start again, doing the things I need to. The nice thing is I am finding some ways to find peace in the chaos, even if they only mean something to me.
In a world of AI, be an artisan writer/creator.
There is a lot of slop out there because of AI. Everyone and their brother just threw a prompt in because ‘hey, I want to write something’. Some were curious. Some were farmers wanting to use the flood to try to get a dollar here or there playing off the trending topic of the moment. Some saw it as a way to extend their brand “Let me tell you how to use AI to get 500 new subscribers”. I call it slop, but I don’t really blame people. AI is a tool. People will always use tools to ‘get rich quick’ and scam people because it’s easy and sadly, it works. People will always allow themselves to be fleeced. Even I use an AI grammar checker for my books, and sometimes I use it to help me find out information about a topic (although I try to fact check it because critical thinking).
I don’t use it to write. I don’t use it to create my book covers. I’ve played with it to create art, just out of curiosity, but with my growing knowledge of the environmental toll data centers take, I’m shutting the door on that curiosity.
I’ve been reading a lot on Substack of people crying out for fiction and other writing beyond the deluge of “Have AI (insert thing here”. People claiming their editors want them to take all these emotional and grammatical things out of their writing because the AI checkers are saying it’s not an original piece. So the want is out there for real, human-written writing. Some people might want junk food. But others are looking for a five star meal.
I’ve decided that I’m retiring the term self-publisher. I am going to call myself an artisan writer. I handcraft my stories from the ground up, my fingers touching every word, every comma, every period. I make my own book covers, I draw my own art. It might be more expensive. It might be harder to find. You want junk food? Go for it, there’s a million McDonalds on Amazon right now. My works are a five star meal when you’re craving something written by a real person. I’m not saying my books are masterpieces either. I LOVE cozy mysteries and simple stories (especially if they have cats in them). But I want a mystery written by a human. That’s five star to me. That’s artisan.
Writing is Therapy
I’ve already talked about my apocalypse diary. It may seem like an odd exercise, and I doubt I’ll ever publish it, but it is helping me release the anxiety and fear, even if only for a moment. I suppose it’s no different from journaling.
Humans have always used stories to help us cope with the unseen, the insurmountable, the unknown. When I was researching ghost stories last year, it was interesting (and made complete sense) to find that the theory behind why ghost stories started was as a way for humanity to understand the unknown scary quantity of death and what happens to us after. They were a way for us to come to terms with something that even to this day with all our scientific discoveries we don’t really know for 100% certainty what happens to us after death. Writing and sharing stories that deal with emotions, fears, anxieties, and uncertainties not only help us explore those topics within ourselves, but if we choose to share them with other people, understand the broad spectrum of those things in other people. By exploring these ideas in an external manner, we a) get them out of our heads (internalizing can lead to bad things), and b) we bond with other people who wonder/deal with the same issues and we don’t feel so alone or overwhelmed. You also never know when what you write, might just be the thing that someone needs to hear that day.
You also don’t have to share your writing with anyone. It’s for you. I’ve recently started ‘writing poetry’ (I put it in quotation marks because I’m sure to pure poetry people it’s awful because I follow no formal rules or structures, just writing emotions on a page) about the world around me, how it makes me feel, the observations of nature and life because it helps ground me to the now. I don’t claim to be a poet, or will probably ever share any of it with anyone. But it’s another writing exercise that helps me find another piece of joy during the day.
In Conclusion
The world is pretty chaotic right now, and can be overwhelming. Especially to creatives, empaths, people who see beyond the rigid rules and social structures that some people cling to. We feel the fear/anger/hate, see the pain, feel the emotions and don’t know what to do with them. We are drowning in AI, surrounded by staleness, loss of color. Yet color is still all around us. Nature is still around us. People who we love and cherish are still around us.
Every day is a day to ground yourself, to find a way to use your creativity of choice to help yourself deal with the emotions, whether it’s letting them out privately to yourself, putting them down on paper so you can see them, or reaching out to the world with a message, whatever that message might be.
I personally feel (hope I guess would be a better word), that the reason the world is so horrible right now is because things are breaking down. The labels that keep us separated and fighting each other. The ideas that feed hate/anger/fear/racism/bigotry. I hope world views are changing for the better, and that the reason that the world is so scary right now is that the people that cling to their world view no matter what because the other option is so SCARY to them, are doing whatever they can to deny, but I hope that they start hearing these stories of people who live on the other side. Who have challenged their world view (mine growing up was the standard Christian midwest one that I’ve been recently deconstructing) and found that there is so much more fun and joy and acceptance in a world where people are just people. It doesn’t matter who you love or how you express yourself. There is no one right way to live, but that we all can live together if we set down the rules/labels that divide and conquer us. That we don’t need corporations and billion/trillionaires to save us. That they are the problem, not the solution. My ultimate dream? That people can understand that we can work with the earth, not against it. That we can stop fighting group to group, nation to nation and understand that we are ALL HUMAN, every single one of us on this planet. We may have different cultures and traditions, but we are all HUMAN. And we don’t need to fight. We don’t need wars. We need true communication and understanding. That right there is what I think utopia means.
But for right now the larger world is scary. New things popping up every day and it’s exhausting constantly being put on edge. AI is not only exhausting with all the slop and misinformation, but threatening what fragile existences we had as creatives. Yet all we can do is keep each other close, keep on creating, and hope that our voice becomes a light that pushes the world into a better place. Keep grounding yourself and finding your form of self-care, your form of expression.
As the wise man Red Green once said “Remember, I’m pulling for ya. We’re all in this together.”
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