SAD Days

Seasonal Affective Disorder is a thing. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/seasonal-affective-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20364651

Luckily Colorado averages 300 days of sunshine each year. https://www.gocolorado.com/how-many-days-of-sunshine-in-colorado/

It’s never been a chronic issue with me. I feel for anyone who suffers diagnosed manic-depression in any form. This is not a commentary on that.

But on those occasional overcast days I do feel moody, gloomy, and if there is a low pressure system coming in it plays havoc with my nasal passages and I get those low hum headaches that kick up my tinnitus and are just enough to annoy me, but not enough for an aspirin.

And you can feel occasionally feel blue. As the poets say, melancholic.

And the Irish are known for their melancholy – https://www.city-journal.org/article/this-st-patricks-day

Yesterday was one of those days. Even Smokey could feel it.

Work is the perfect distraction. Physical or mental. If you are focused on a project you don’t take the time to notice the annoyance, and your sense of accomplishment as you complete each task gives you tiny inoculations of meaning to your life necessary to stave off any real despair.

Luckily, my life is never short of creatures or projects needing my immediate attention. Claire waits on no man.

So it is never good to wallow. Pick yourselves up, get yourselves out. Do something. Find an immediate purpose to your life, something that demands your attention. Create one if necessary. If you don’t have chores or work commanding your attention, get outside and take a walk, preferably with an animal tugging on a leash.

But, as a creative, it is important to experience the despair of emotional valleys along with the exhilaration of the peaks, in order to capture the full range of feelings necessary to make any story compelling. It can’t always be sunny and smooth in every character’s fictional life. You’ve got to take the bitter with the sweet.

IMHO, if a writer never feels both extremes personally, he/she cannot share those feeling authentically in the words.

Luckily, I have always been a quick learner with a long memory, so I can plumb the depths of an occasional grey day for all the creative melancholic inspiration I can possibly need. You don’t have to tell me twice. I may be t[h]ick, but I’m not stupid.

And I know I’ve needed to channel the emotional depths more than a few times in The Claire Saga. Even in the world of fantasy and science fiction, you need those authentic human elements in order to connect with your readers. You have to keep it real on some level. Laughter and tears. But even during the darkest of times, in literature as in life, you must always offer the characters and the readers that element of hope.

Where The Ley Lines Meet is a primer for the cathartic experience of the meaning of life, there is spirituality, with a lot of white knuckle action and adventure thrown in to keep the readers on the edge of their seats. If you have read the other four books, this is the cherry on the cake. Do not miss it.

And over this next month plus of time before WTLLM drops, reread (or read for the first time) the other four – TWA, AAA, KMAG and FJM – in that order, seriatim, so you are all teed up with Claire and the gang, to leap with all of your feet, into this final hurrah with this mystical, motley crew.

Just remember, in life as in literature, through the good and the bad, where there is love there is hope. And there is always hope. That is where the magic is found.

Now luckily, today is Friday.

One can never be blue on a Friday.

So you fine, five readers have that extra cuppa to prime yourself for the Friday magic that inevitably presents before you.

Then get out there and steal the weekend.

I’m going to go cuddle some kitties and make my rounds.

Then see where the law takes me.

But I know Claire will be there to demand my attention, require my service, enjoy my company, and I hers.

Whatever else we get up to, let us all make today a great one.