Spectrummy

As I am wont to do, I started a new blog to focus on Elise's diagnosis with PDD-NOS - in other words, a mommyblog. Le sigh. 

Follow me there, follow me here, follow me everywhere. We're going places.

THAT word.

I'm not really sure how to begin this, because one of the biggest problems I have as a person communicating with people is that I don't like to share my unhappiness, bad news, or problems. If I'm upset, I try as hard as I can to hide it. If something terrible is going on in my life, I only want to share it with my closest friends, and even then I do so with reservations. Maybe it's because I don't handle other people's bad news or grief well. When someone dies, when someone loses a job, when calamity strikes - I just don't know what to say, and I don't know how to comfort, so my gut instinct is to never put myself into a social situation where people will feel the need to try to comfort or commiserate with me. It's just so damn awkward and uncomfortable.

Then, there's Elise, my daughter. I don't want to talk to you about my daughter. I don't want to talk about parenting, about being a mother, or even about YOU being a mother. I don't want your comments, your unsolicited advice, your judgments or your observations. I don't want you up in my business at all. At least I didn't. Until last Wednesday.

The thing is, I keep secrets. When I don't want to talk about something, because it upsets me, because it's none of anyone else's business - for whatever reason - I just don't talk about it. So it may or may not come as a surprise to everyone to hear that Elise has been seeing a councilor for her behavior problems for just about a year now.

Here's the story, in a nutshell:

About a year and a half ago, Elise was going to a private kindergarten that was part of her old day care. We thought it was a great program - there were only six kids in the entire class! We thought it would be great that she would be getting so much one on one attention from her teacher and that it would help her get a leg up in school. Halfway through the year, just after she turned five, her teacher not so carefully suggested that we put Elise into public school because they didn't have the resources there to help her with they thought were developmental delays.

I was shocked. Up until that point, Elise had been doing well on progress reports. She was learning along with the other students, though when it came to doing things like art projects, she never seemed to get much done. Her papers were always quite bare compared to those of other kids. Her teacher at the time said that Elise just couldn't sit still. She was always more interested in what other people were doing than what she was supposed to be doing, so she was always up out of her chair bugging the other kids.

"ADD," the teacher said. "I think she has some developmental delays, and definitely ADD."

Plus, she was hitting other kids. Hitting them, kicking them, pushing them.. almost every day.

So we did what we thought was best. I moved out of New London and into Waterford so she could go to a better school. We enrolled her in public kindergarten, and we got her a councilor, who I'll call Ms. Ray (not actually her name). Elise started school in March of last year and by May we were having constant meetings with her teacher. She was behind in everything - which, evidently, wasn't Elise's fault so much that the curriculum at her school in Waterford was so much more advanced than the curriculum she had been following at her old school. So that was a problem, but the biggest problem was that she wasn't making friends. She wasn't socializing at all, and when she did have interactions with other students, they were bad, and often violent.

Then, in June, she got suspended. A kindergartner. Suspended from school for hitting a little boy. I was shocked, again, and mortified. I went in and demanded that the principal explain why sending a five year old home from school was the best way they could find to deal with behavior problems, and I was told that the school had a strict no-tolerance policy for violent behavior.

So, we ramped up our efforts. We got through the last few weeks of school and worked with Ms. Ray over the summer to prepare Elise for her second round of Kindergarten, as they were holding her back, which was actually fine with me at that point, and best for her.

Over the summer, Elise saw three different specialist to try to evaluate her and figure out what her deal was -  and none of them could pin it down.

See, Elise is a sweet girl. She's smart, she's intuitive to other people's emotions, she's caring and gentle and funny and friendly - to a fault. Yet she's impulsive. She reacts physically (by lashing out and hitting) before making a mental connection that that isn't the appropriate response to anything. She has trouble focusing on things, but it isn't because she's hyperactive - If I've learned anything so far from this journey it's that kids with ADD/ADHD don't get near perfect report cards in kindergarten, which Elise has done so far all this year.

Really, this year has been great up until the past two months or so. She hadn't been violent towards kids, and she'd been reaching grade level and even excelling in all areas of the curriculum. But we kept hearing the same thing from her teachers. "Elise doesn't listen. She just doesn't listen."

And she doesn't, I know. You know how some mothers say, "I'm going to count to five and if you don't go put your shoe's on, I'm gonna....?"  Well, I can barely get to that point, because it takes me five tries just to get her attention in the first place. Anyway...

Psychologists and councilors use this book to determine diagnoses for their patients. Let's say you wanted to diagnose a child with bi-polar disorder. You'd have to be exhibiting X amount of behaviors from column A, and X from column B, etc.; for them to be able to pin down a diagnoses. Without a diagnoses, you aren't going to get any help. Elise's teachers, the school principal, and the school psychologist and behavioral specialist are at their wits end on what to do with Elise, because she isn't behaving normally even within the bounds of abnormal behavior. I'm shocked that they haven't suspended her again, because the hitting and lashing out continues on a near daily basis, but I guess it's cause they too believed all along that something was wrong, and they just didn't want to help diagnose it because it would cost them money. Yeah. Wait til I get on about that subject.

No one could pin down anything for Elise. Everyone we talked to kept saying ADD/ADHD - even though at the same time they KNEW that even though she exhibits a lot of those behaviors, that isn't the root of her problem. So we saw more people and more people, and Ms. Ray talked with more and more councilors and psychologists and psychiatrists at her group about Elise and her issues.. and then for the first time, a few months ago, the word started to get thrown around.

Spectrummy.

THAT word.

"She seems sort of spectrummy.."

"She's exhibiting a lot of spectrummy behaviors..."

Of course, they were talking about autism spectrum disorders, and I immediately thought "Hell no, not my kid!" Because when I think of autism I think about kids who can't talk, who can't go to a normal school, who can't function in society. Or I think of Aspergers kids who are socially awkward and have strange quirks - and really I don't know what to think at all, because all I know of either disorder are the things I see and hear on TV or the media, and none of it is great, and certainly none of it can be related to my kid, right?

Wrong.

So, in a nutshell, this is what this post is about. This is what this blog is going to be about. After a year and a half of weekly sessions with her councilor, with evaluations by at least four different specialists, and input from every person who has had contact with Elise at any of those offices, we've come, my friends, to an actual diagnoses.

PDD-NOS.

Pervasive developmental disorder - not otherwise specified.

What does that mean, you ask?

Whelp, I'm learning as I go. It's only been a week, and it's a lot to sink in. Is she on the autism spectrum? Yeah. In fact, Autism and Aspergers ARE pervasive developmental disorders. PDD-NOS is the diagnosis you give when a patient does not fully meet the criteria to diagnose autism/aspergers but are still on the spectrum. So far, the best explanation I have found is here:

http://www.autismspeaks.org/what-autism/pdd-nos

So, that's it. That's the news. Frankly, one of the reasons I wanted to blog about this is so that I wouldn't have to tell everyone separately - remember when I said in the beginning that I don't like to talk about things that upset me? This obviously upsets me. I hate crying, and I especially hate crying when I have to do it front of other people, and I pretty much can't even think about any of this without crying, so. This is what you get.

A special note to my local friends: No, I don't want to talk about this with you right now. I also don't want to hear about how your brother's neighbor's cousin has autism and is doing GREAT, and I don't want to hear about this wonderful program you've heard of that might help, and I don't want to hear how sorry you are and that it will all be okay. It's been a week with a diagnosis, but it's been six years of living with Elise and knowing her and what's best for her, and we have an entire platoon of people who are professionals working with us as well. But this is a big deal, obviously. It's pretty much over-taking my thoughts lately and I guess I just needed to get it all out so that when people ask what's wrong with me, or what's wrong with Elise, I can just point here and not have to get all emotional as I tend to do.

And now suddenly, I'm a mommyblogger. Oy.

My Spidey Sense

The funny thing about this blog is that it doesn't document my burning hatred for winter because I started this one in June and we didn't really have a winter, per se. It got cold, a few times. It snowed, like four times. I only had to shovel once, and only for about a half an hour to dig out my car from when Nick (bless his heart) plowed our driveway.. This winter just didn't have it in her. It didn't bring me down because it didn't bring it's one-two punch. 

Thank Christ for small favors, amiright?

But now we are in that other particular time of year that I hate and have trouble getting used to before I can really embrace summer and all of the things I LOVE about it: It's the bug season. It's started early this year, and it's making me put up quite a fight to keep my sanity.

First it was the ticks. We heard it was going to be a bad year. I pulled the first tick off of Elise in early April and have found six, count 'em SIX more so far! Luckily I was born in good old Salem, Connecticut, which borders all sorts of Lymes. Old Lyme, East Lyme, South Lyme, HADlyme and LYME. So I am very familiar with daily tick-checks and have thusfar avoided Lyme Disease for 29 years. 

Then, god help me, the spiders. 

I see them here and there. Lurking. They slink across the basement walls, and the big ones, I see them saunter through the grass all sure of themselves. Then two days ago I got in my car and left for work and I hadn't gotten a quarter mile down the road when I saw a MONSTER of a spider skipping across my dashboard right fucking in front of me. You know those kinds of spiders that don't so much walk on their nasty little too-many legs as they JUMP UNEXPECTEDLY EVERYWHERE? It was one of those. It was about the size of a quarter (which, to me, is collossal in size) with a thick black body and these yellow stripes on its back. 

(OH DEAR GOD I JUST TRIED GOOGLING AN IMAGE TO SHARE WITH YOU AND THAT LASTED A WHOLE FIVE SECONDS UNTIL MY WHOLE BODY WAS TINGLING AND SHUDDERING)

I have this thing where I am unreasonably terrfied of spiders. They make my body REACT. See all the capital letters I am using here? THAT'S HOW YOU KNOW I'M FREAKING OUT.

I slammed on the brakes in the middle of the road. There were no cars behind me, thank god, because I didn't bother moving over to the shoulder. I pounded my foot on the brake and sat there freaking out, looking in all directions to find something to kill the spider with. I couldn't use my hand, obviously. I considered an old coffee cup but then realized that the bottom was recessed and that would just anger the spider. I picked up from the console the envelope containing my brand new car registration, planning to hand slam/squish with that - but the fucking spider was gone. Somewhere. IN MY FUCKING CAR. 

That was two days ago, and last night the fear of the spider lurking somewhere in my car manifested itself into nightmares of unusually bad proportions. I dreamt there were two spiders in my house and neither of them were ordinary. One was menacing and black, stalking between Elise's room and the living room, disappearing and reappearing as I searched it out to kill it, always avoiding me. And then then there was the gargantuan brown THING that built a web in the corner of our entryway, spinning it's disgusting egg sac, growing bigger and bigger by the minute until finally it's legs looked more like shiny tentacles that were dripping down toward the floor and able to grab me.

I didn't sleep well last night, obviously. And now here I am, one in the morning, writing about spiders and having to stop to itch myself every five seconds because I can feel those imaginary little fuckers crawling all over me.

God, I hate bugs.

Voyeurism is for Facebook.

You know how some people like to say that to write, they need to be depressed, or unhappy, or just generally bent out of shape to be able to do what they have to do? I've heard it a lot and I've never really bought into that. I've been writing more lately than I have in the last few months - nothing I am ready to share with anyone, but still, things are coming along, and on a whim I started a new story that takes on a subject I know practically nothing about - space travel!  

Anyway, that is one thing that is making me happy lately. Just being alone and writing. Lately I've felt pulled in so many different directions, it's nice to be able to shut my door at the end of the day and tune everyone and everything out and just write. Not on the blog obviously, because that's the thing, I guess. Some say they can only write when they are depressed, and maybe I can only blog when I'm really happy, which, all things considered, I haven't been lately.

I hate complaining on my blog, so I won't, other than to say: Stress sucks. Right?

I wasn't even going to post anything today. I thought about it, I logged in and thought about it.. and then I thought, who cares? No one is really reading anyway, right? So I wandered up to my site statisics and found something frankly distrubing. It looks like in the last week, someone has read my entire blog - including the poetry, including Vampire Zombies From Space. I don't know if this person was just clicking through or not, but dude. DUDE. Whoever you are out there, stop being a creeper and just say hello. Voyeurism is for Facebook. 

***

Oh, and another thing. I've been reading like a fiend and haven't been reviewing a damn thing. I must have read at least ten books since I updated my 52 Books challenge, and not having a list of what I've read is making me twitchy, especially since my friend Chana just started blogging and reviewing books and movies. Perhaps I will get my act together one of these days.. perhaps not.

Shame Has Its Place

 Why is it so hard? Because it's a white piece of paper. ~ Sam Seaborn

For the last month or so, despite what I may have told anyone, I haven't been writing. I haven't written anything since the last part of the Hannah Sketches, and I though I have started and stopped so many times, nothing has happened. Well, I can't even say that I've started and stopped. I've tried to start, and then I stopped trying. Yesterday was the last straw. Seriously, I can't take this crap anymore.

Yesterday I slept in since Elise was at her grandma's and I wasn't picking her up until the late afternoon. In that time, I skimmed through the entire novel that I wrote last year around this time, The Eternals, I've been calling it. It comes it at around 64,000 words (as if I can pretend I don't remember that it's actually 63,396 words and I'm just rounding up to make myself look better), proper novel length. It has a beginning, a middle, and a cliffhanger ending. It has characters that I sort of love, and some characters that I don't know probably as well as I should, but I think they are interesting enough to want to get to know. It has a plot that plods along like an old person on a Sunday morning, lazy and slow, and for a while you can't really tell which direction it's going in.

I wrote The Eternals in 46 days. Wait, you know what? Let me quote from my old writing blog about finishing the Eternals:

Writing a book, the entire act of writing and publishing one, whichever route you may choose, is fucking hard. Excuse my curse words, dear friends, but it's the truth. This is fucking hard, and I have an embarrassing little fact to reveal:

I never thought it would be this hard.

I finished writing the Eternals on May 29th, just ten short days ago, after a whirlwind of 46 days of pounding out the words and trying to make them resemble a book. It took seven days to realize what I had was NOT in fact a book, but just a pile of words printed on 232 pages of pristine white paper - paper that didn't necessarily deserve the punishment or the printing.

So there it is. 46 days to a completed novel. Technically completed. And you know what? It was fucking hard. But it was also exhilarating. I only wrote at night after Elise was in bed, and usually was armed with at least one can of Monster, and I stayed up until 3 or 4 in the morning regularly, on purpose. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and I had no outline. Just ideas flying around in my brain that came through my fingers and ended up in a document that was eventually printed and left to get dusted up on a shelf. 

After finishing it, I thought that I hated it. I thought it was total crap. I didn't look at it or think about it or touch it until November when I failed at my first NaNoWriMo attempt in three years and I picked up the Eternals where it left off, sort of as a consolation prize to myself, but that didn't work. I wasn't inspired, it fell flat, I didn't know where Leila's story was going. There was a whole bunch of other stuff going on this year - short stories, a couple of which I successfully published and got paid for, my zombie epic which has also gone stagnant, also because I don't know where it's going and I can't outline because outline kills my love of writing nearly instantly, and of course, there's been the Hannah Sketches. But none of it has really felt like enough for me. I'm busy all the time with projects that involve extensive writing, and I've been reading more than ever (and unfortunately not keeping up with my book list) but I haven't had a spark.

"They" say that you don't need to be inspired to write. You just do it. And I do, I do it, but I don't love it and I don't cherish it and it's not getting me toward my final destination. Well, everything is I guess, but this is not the time for prolific sentimentality. 

Yesterday, I re-read The Eternals, the whole shebang. And oh, it was crap. But in that pile of crap, I swear to god guys, there were some diamonds. There were bits that just frankly SHINE, and I'm not afraid to say so. Maybe you or you could read The Eternals and just dismiss it as crap, but I know I'm on to something here, I know it, and I'm not ready to give up on it - I'm ready to move on and I finally get why.

When I finished the Eternals last year, I felt like a rock star. Seriously, I felt on top of the world, I felt like I had slayed a motherfucking dragon. And now, almost exactly a year later, my self loathing has reached the tipping point. Funny, no? I finally hate myself enough for not writing to start writing again. I don't really have an excuse or an explanation for it, but it just works. Last night, I SHAMED myself into writing, and what came out of me was sort of miraculous. 

On another note, I haven't blogged much in a month. I suppose that's because I made the crazy decision to share my blog address with the world, which may or may not have been a good idea, but then today, after the blast I had last night, I say, FUCK IT!! I'm signing up for NaBloPoMo again. It can't do anything but good for me. 

Liars, Both of Us

I hated Moe's bar. I hated the way it smelled, like day old spilled beer and sweat, with a token hit of cheap perfume. I hated the dark and the drabness of it, that the floors were black linoleum tile and sticky, that the  booths were poorly lit, and the walls blood red. Dead blood red. You know what I mean.

I went there anyway, right on schedule every Tuesday and Thursday nights, and sometimes even on a Saturday night, late. Past the time a nice woman like me should be in bed with her husband - that is, as long as he wasn't already out with his whore.

The last time I saw her was a Tuesday. The past weekend I had been in the bar, drunk before I even walked through the door on nips of rum and whiskey that I downed with Shannon in the parking lot, like teenagers. The liquor made my throat burn and eyes water, but I loved the confident haze I settled down into whenever I drank to any excess.

That night, I had screamed at a waitress to turn up the music; I danced around the pool table until Shannon led me home.

The last Tuesday wasn't like that, though.

I pushed open the bar door and pushed my glasses up the brim of my nose at the same time, head down as I pretended to struggle with my purse and the laptop I was carrying in my arms.

"Hey there, Hannah," Moe said to me. The bar was empty, and he was sitting perched on the edge of a booth at the back of the bar, playing a game of Solitaire and looking like he didn't want to be bothered. His fly was unzipped, but of course I didn't tell him.

I sat down in my usual booth, the one that gave me a view of the whole bar. I knew she was there if Moe was playing his cards. I was expecting her.

I opened my laptop and started skimming over what I had just written at home, but it was only moments before I heard footsteps coming out from the kitchen, and I looked up to see Amy's stupid face.

She didn't slow her steps. She didn't pause or jerk, her eyes didn't stray from mine once they'd connected. She didn't flinch or falter. But from across the bar, I could hear the sharp intake of breath that my eyes hadn't seen.

It's that moment when your heart contracts suddenly. When the shock of something steals your breath and sets your heart to racing.

I smiled sweetly. "Hello, Amy."

"Oh, hi Mrs. Mulraney."

I narrowed my eyes at her.

"Sorry," Amy stammered. "Hannah, sorry. I always forget."

"Come on, we're like old friends now, we see so much of each other," I said.

"You've been coming in a lot lately."

"I find it a very relaxing place to write in the evenings. Not much business this early."

"Right," Amy said, and blew a big pink bubble with her chewing gum.

Bubble gum. It was so tacky, such a disgusting little habit, to be chewing something constantly and popping it in people's faces. I pictured her suddenly in a cheerleader's uniform, her bare, perfect young ass peeking out from beneath a pleated miniskirt, her hair in pigtails, her mouth stretched wide open and her head bouncing up and down on my husband's cock.

"I'll take my usual," I told her, and went back to my writing.

I couldn't concentrate though. How could I? I wasn't really there to write that day, I was there to observe. To intimidate, maybe. To threaten.

I had suspected that Amy and Evan had been sleeping together for a while at that point. It had been three months to be exact, but I had never had any proof. For the longest time it was only speculation I had as to where Evan was going all those nights. Evan said he had joined a bowling league, and for a long time I believed that every Wednesday and Sunday nights he left the house for the lanes just like he said, to drink beers and knock pins with his work buddies. He would come home late smelling of cigarette smoke and have beer on his breath, then that changed.

He started drinking vodka around that time, and the scent of beer had left him. Sometimes he would come home having not drank anything at all, I could tell. Those nights he came home wired, laying in bed awake next to me for hours. I would catch him with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling and smiling. That's when I began to wonder.

Evan kept going to bowling league, but then he started coming home and didn't smell like cigarettes, he smelled like powder. It was only the slightest hint at first, and then since I noticed it I kept on noticing it. Baby powder has such a distinct smell. You think it's subtle, probably, but it isn't. Not when your wife is suspicious.

Finally, I called Jeannie Harper, the wife of one of the men Evan bowled with.

"I'm so sick," I told her. "I just want Evan to pick me up some medicine on his way home but I can't reach him on his cell. Do you mind calling Bill at the lanes so Evan can get it from me?"

She called back ten minutes later. Evan wasn't there. He hadn't been there in three weeks, he hadn't even called to say he was leaving the league.

It was easy, finding out who she was. I just decided to follow Evan out one night, and he had come straight to Moe's. We both acted surprised to see each other, husband and wife meeting as strangers. I told him I just wanted a change of scenery to write, he told me that the guys in the league were taking a night off. Liars, both of us.

And then she walked up to the booth we had sat down at, she had taken that same gasping breath, but that first time she didn't hide it as well. Her face had flushed and she had smiled at me too hard and too often.

Amy walked up to my table holding a tray with a little metal tea pot and a mug. I smiled at her and pulled out my own box of tea bags and set it on the table.

I wonder what she thought of me, then. I wonder if she laughed at me behind my back, knowing that she was fucking my husband and I was a dowdy little housewife whose glasses were always slipping down my nose and who carried around her own bags of tea like a grandmother. That was not who I was. It was just who I wanted her to think I was.

"How's college?" I asked as she poured hot water over my tea.

"Really boring," she said, not looking at my face. "I just have back to back English and history classes this semester. I hate writing."

I stared up at her blankly and caught her eye, then smiled slowly.

"Sorry," she said. "I didn't even think."

"Oh, Amy, it's fine. What are you majoring in, again? I keep forgetting."

"Liberal Arts."

"Ah," I said. "That's what my husband, Evan, majored in. It seems to be just the degree for people who can't make their minds up about things. Evan never knows what he wants. He told me the other day that he just wants to take off, leave this town and disappear somewhere. Whisk me away to some tropical island or something, isn't that crazy?"

Amy chewed furiously on her gum. Her eyes were widened and her limbs looked stiff as she stood there holding the tray.

"Sounds pretty great to me, actually."

Was she jealous of me? Was she picturing her lover with his wife on a beach, scantily clad and in love? Was she wishing that it were her instead of me?

"I admit, it would be very romantic," I said. "Not to mention thrilling, to just take off like that, to just disappear. And sexy, those islands. Have you ever been to the Caribbean? Evan and I actually just went this past fall. There's something so... erotic about it."

Amy's cheeks flushed and I could see her working the gum in her mouth, spreading it around over her tongue. She took a deep breath and blew another enormous bubble.

"Our sex life is great anyway, though. Evan just can't seem to get enough of it at home."

The pink bubble burst and splatted back onto her cheeks and hair, and Amy dropped the tray she had been holding.

I covered my mouth with one of my hands and tried to not have an outburst. I wanted desperately to keep my cool.

Amy picked up the tray and straightened back up, pulling strings of bubble gum out of her hair and off of her furiously red face. "I, um.."

"You'd better go take care of yourself, Amy. You're just a mess."

For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Carrie challenged me with "The pink bubble burst and splatted back onto her cheeks and hair." and I challenged Kelly Garriott Waite with "There was a dark shadow crouched in the corner of the room. It looked human, but how could I be sure?"

This story is part of The Hannah Sketches.

I Offer Unsolicited Writing Advice!

On Thursday I will be submitting my latest piece to Indie Ink, a website that takes writing submissions based off  writing prompts that are matched with authors. I have submitted to Indie Ink in the past - nearly of my Hannah Sketches are based off of the Indie Ink challenge prompts, and this week I will add another, my first since the end of January.

I'm not sure what it is about writing prompts that make it so much easier for me to write a short story. Though I've been writing for years, what I write tends to swing between short blog posts and 60K+ word novels. I have never considered myself a master at the short story, and I am only starting to believe I have any talent in it at all based on the feedback I've gotten from Indie Ink. Hannah's story has become really important to me, though. I guess I am just musing that perhaps I am creatively blocked lately, and without a little push from a prompt or a friendly suggestion, I may not write anything at all. 

Working for Scope, it seems that it may be the same for a lot of other writers. I've heard a lot in the past few weeks, "I really want to write, but I just don't know what to write about!"  Could it be that we all work better under a little guidance and pressure? Can the expectation of others be what is really driving me to create?

At any rate, I am thrilled with the burst of creativity I've seen among my friends and peers lately. People are starting blogs left and right, submitting to Scope all sorts of great opinion articles, blogs, and amusements.. It feels really great to be at this place I am in right now, surrounded by like minded people who seem to actually get it, you know? 

We aren't all going to be published. We aren't all going to win awards for our writing, or be paid for it, or be recognized outside of our own little community.. but in my opinion, that isn't the point. Well, it's not the most important point. 

To be creating - to be putting oneself out there to be seen through words and pictures and ideas - it's awesome. And we should be proud. Because we are the brave ones. 

Writing, like all forms of artistic creation and expression, takes time, patience, and determination. To those who have tipped their hats to writing, you are my comrades. So, if you are struggling with self-doubt over silly things like talent, I give to you the best piece of writing advice I've ever encountered, from Brian K. Vaughan (who was a writer for LOST!)

WRITE MORE, DO OTHER STUFF LESS

That’s it. Everything else is meaningless. You can take all the classes in the world and read every book on the craft out there, but at the end of the day, writing is sorta like dieting. There are plenty of stupid fads out there and charlatans promising quick fixes, but if you want to lose weight, you have to exercise more and eat less. Period. Every writer has 10,000 pages of shit in them, and the only way your writing is going to be any good at all is to work hard and hit 10,001.

By my estimation, I've only purged about 2,999 pages of shit out of myself. I have a long way to go, but at least now I get to make this page shitting journey with friends.