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Published on April 25, 2013 18:18

April 21, 2013

Road to Mo*Con VIII: Guest Blog by Nate Southard

I invited Nate Southard to do a guest blog for this week. I knew I could count on him to have a story or two on this topic. As always, Nate doesn’t disappoint.

Guest Blog by Nate Southard

July 11th, 2012.

It was a Wednesday, and I had a plan. I’d made it through the first couple of hours at work, but I really didn’t want to be there. My boss had already told me it was okay to leave early, and I planned to head straight home. Once there, I would set up my cat’s automatic feeder. I’d run hot water in the bath. While it was filling, I would send an email to my ex-girlfriend’s home account, the one I knew she only checked once every few days, that would tell her I was sorry, to please take the cat that had once been ours, and that she was listed as the sole beneficiary on my life insurance. The door to my apartment would be left unlocked. Then, I would take a kitchen knife, shut myself in the bathroom, climb into the warm bath, and slit both my wrists. It was a scenario that I’d thought about a lot over the previous few years, but I was done thinking about it. I was ready to do it.

My reasons were pure. I wasn’t trying to lash out at anyone or make anybody feel sorry for me. I just wanted to stop. Not stop hurting, exactly. Just…stop.

I sat at my desk, putting my things in my backpack for what I was sure would be the last time, and I had this small flash of clarity. Maybe I needed to talk to somebody. If there was some chance I could avoid this, no matter how remote, I had to take it.

So I called my best friend, Lee Thomas. Through recent years, I’ve learned I can talk to him about anything and everything. I begged him to let me come over for coffee, and he happily obliged. Yeah, we drank a little coffee that day. We even ate pizza at a Target snackbar. Mostly though, I cried. I cried for hours, and he held me and told me it was okay and that everything would pass. He gave me the best advice of my life, telling me I could kill myself metaphorically, just ditch the bad stuff I didn’t want and become a new person. A better person. I’ll always be thankful to him for that. To this day, I’m not sure he knows he saved my life. Because maybe I didn’t tell him everything. I know I never told him about my plan.

Nine months later, I can look back on that day with some degree of rational thought. I was on Wellbutrin at the time, and one of the side effects can be suicidal thoughts. I’d only been on that drug for a month, though. Suicide was something I’d considered for years. Often, it was a go-to joke of mine. “I should really exercise today…or maybe I could just kill myself!” A few times, people had asked me if I ever wondered how I would die, and I always said I knew how. I’d kill myself. In a lot of ways, I still believe that. I don’t want to get sick and die slowly, the way both my parents died. If that starts to happen, I plan on beating it to the punch.

But what led me to that day? Well, there were a lot of things. I have a history of depression, co-dependency, social anxiety, and low self-esteem. At last year’s Mo*Con, Maurice showed me a room I could go hide in whenever I wanted. That was the very first thing he did when I showed up, because he knows how much crowds and social interaction scare me. Two years ago at KillerCon, somebody came up to me and said, “I’ve read everything you’ve ever written!” My response? I laughed and asked, “Why?” The idea of somebody liking me or my work still seems incredibly foreign to me. The idea that others find some sort of value in my work makes no sense. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to it. Throw in the rest and it just gets worse. How does it feel to constantly need affection, yet constantly be terrified of social interaction? Just within the last six months, I screwed up what could have been a great relationship because my social anxiety led to me cancelling several dates at the last minute.

A lot of these behaviors I learned from my mother. Or maybe you could say I was trained. For as long as I can remember, she had two basic emotional states: crying her eyes out because her kids didn’t love her enough and being angry as the Kraken because her kids didn’t love her enough. My brother Matt and I are the only two of six children that she never disowned for any reason. The other four were booted from the family for such offenses as meeting my step-mother and spending Christmas morning with their wives and children instead of her. When my sister was accepted into graduate school and had to move out of state, my mother hospitalized herself the day before she was set to move, hoping to keep my sister nearby.

A few years ago, my mother died. She made it one year longer than my father. A few months after her death, my brother and I were told that we were both products of a twelve year affair my mother had with her therapist, who later served as our pediatrician and performed my father’s vasectomy. I acted like I handled the news well, and I honestly thought I was okay with it. The news was more than a little entertaining in a macabre sort of way. That didn’t change the fact that she’d never told us who are biological father was or that she’d sued the man I still consider my dad for more child support when he was living in a pickup truck and my biological father was a doctor. My therapist often said it helped to think of my mother as a little girl, that her emotions had never progressed beyond that state. In a lot of ways, that does help, but depression was taking hold in a bad way, regardless.

Making things harder was a prolonged period of self-discovery. As a straight man, I was learning that my sexuality was more complex. In BDSM communities, I’m what’s known as a Switch. I have both dominant and submissive tendencies. While I do think vanilla sex and making love is amazing and a wonderful thing to share with a partner, I was finding that I not only wanted more, but I needed more. For years, I’d try to deny these things. The things I enjoyed were the kind of things movies showed folks enjoying for either comedic effect or to prove they were some sort of monster.

Look, I’ve never shared this part of myself on a grand scale. I’ve been more than a little afraid. I know a few people who are very open about sex, but the idea of that kind of honesty scares me to death. It scared me a lot more last year, when I was suddenly single and trying to navigate these new, kinkier waters. If a first date is dinner and a movie, and maybe the third date is the sex date, then which date is the “Maybe this time you slap and insult me during sex” date? Which date is the “I think you’d look great tied up and gagged” date? Today, I still don’t know. It’s not like I’ve figured all this stuff out yet.

At this point, maybe you’re wondering why I’m telling you this. First off, I’m trying to show you a certain part of my personality that caused conflict and added to my various emotional problems. Secondly, maybe there’s somebody reading this with a similar issue and my coming out as it were will help show them that there’s nothing wrong with the kinkier side of sex.

So there was a lot going on in my life. I needed help for all of these things, so I bit the bullet, swallowed my pride, and started therapy.

I began therapy because I was depressed over my parents. I stayed because I slipped into clinical depression. Others have described the feeling of real, deep depression better than I can, but I have a comparison I’d like to make. To me, depression is like The Nothing in The Neverending Story. There’s this emptiness that you just can’t beat. You can’t fill it with anything. You can’t do anything. I spent hours and then days and then weeks on the couch, just wanting to do something, do anything. I couldn’t, though. I can’t even describe why I couldn’t except to say I was filled with nothing. In the movie, The Rock Biter has this great line: “A hole would be something. This was nothing.” That’s clinical depression. It’s nothing, and it’s everywhere, and it destroys you one day at a time.

My therapist helped me with a lot of things. She helped me navigate the breakup of an eleven year relationship. She taught me coping mechanisms for dealing with depression. She showed me that I tend to decide how things will end before I reach the end (she calls this “telling myself stories,” which I find to be a good metaphor). She gave me the courage to try standup comedy. She even did research outside of office hours and helped me find local BDSM groups. Later, I had to switch therapists when she moved, but we still keep in touch. I’m not allowed to be one of her best friends, but I consider her one of mine.

Here’s the thing: life is anything but easy. There’s nothing wrong with asking for help. There is no reason to be prideful about your feelings or those mental and emotional crises that happen to all of us (and they do happen to all of us).

If you need to, talk to somebody. It can be a friend, family member, or therapist. If they care, they won’t be judgmental. People are amazing things. We’re all different, go through different experiences. We like different things, and it took me a long time to learn that depression is nothing to be ashamed of. Neither is your past. Neither is kink. There’s no such thing as abnormal, because there’s no such thing as normal.

It’s been nine months since July 11th. I consider it my second birthday. That’s the day I started shedding the bad. Really shedding it. In those nine months, I’ve gotten off antidepressants. I’ve grown strong enough that I was able to leave therapy. I’m better in every way. Things are looking up. They can look up for everybody. Just…look.

***

Maurice Broaddus – Being Crazy, Christian, and Creative

May 3 – 5, 2013. Indianapolis, IN

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Published on April 21, 2013 21:16

April 15, 2013

Road to Mo*Con VIII: Guest Blog by Gary Braunbeck

Gary Braunbeck, a veteran of Mo*Con (I had the dude give the sermon–part I and part II–at my church back in the day) and one of this year’s Guest of Honor, begins his guest blog with this all-to-true disclaimer: ”As you may have already gathered from the theme of this year’s Mo*Con – “The Mind and Spirit of the Artist” – spirituality and creativity (and how the two inform and/or battle with one another) will be much discussed; you may also have mistakenly inferred from Maurice’s description of the event – specifically, how the writers and editors and visual artists will be examining how their own battles with mental illness in all its unkind guises have helped and/or hindered them in pursuit of their craft – that it’s not exactly going to be Happy Hour at Forest Tucker’s Chuckle-Hut. This is the first time that Mo*Con has decided to focus on this subject, and although it is one that is close to my personal heart, it ain’t, as the saying goes, everyone’s cup of lye, but I can promise you that the writers, artists, and editors participating in the programming are, in the end, waaaaaaay too goofy to allow the whole shebang to degenerate into an angst-drenched whine-fest. Yes, there’s going to be some damned serious discussion, but there’s also going to be an equal amount of tomfoolery, cooking, and RPGs. There may even be belly-dancing; it’s Mo*Con, who knows what’s going to happen?”

Within Reach of My Arm

Guest blog by Gary A. Braunbeck

With that out of the way, Maurice asked me to write this guest blog and talk about my own personal struggles with mental illness, suicidal depression, and the occasional heartbreak of the middle-finger hangnail. If you’ve read my non-fiction book To Each Their Darkness, you already know most of it, and the idea of repeating any of it here drives me to despair; so, if you’ll permit me, I’m going to discuss the single biggest concern that lies at the core of not only my work but my you-should-pardon-the-expression heart, as well: understanding the purpose of suffering.

Albert Camus said: “Everything we learn or think we know is drawn from suffering; despite my dislike of it, suffering is a fact.” No arguments here, Al, but I genuinely want to know why. No, I’m not going to qualify any form of suffering as being more important than another, because it all sucks the Imperial Big Red One. But you can make yourself crazy if you think about it too long or too deeply. I know. I’ve been a guest in the Cracker Factory more times than I care to admit to. So a while back – not that far back, actually – it occurred to me that if I didn’t find some way of reconciling my desire to figure out a reason for suffering with my limitations as a human being (which are legion), then I was never going to be at peace with myself. Or get invited to many parties. Or one party, even.

Then … I received a diagnosis of Type II Diabetes. I received it at the same age my father did, and his diabetes had no small role in helping to kill him. That’s when I realized that, for me, the Final Countdown has definitely started. I’m almost 53 and I want to live to be at least 90, or 94, or however long I can live without being reduced to a babbling bone-bag dribbling oatmeal down his chin and telling those nurses who’ll listen that, “I once wrote stories, y’know … some people even read them ….”

Wandered off the highway for a moment there. The point is that I have, for all of my adult life, tried to find some enigmatic First Cause for suffering so that I can reconcile it with the concept of a Just multiverse wherein everything we do, regardless of how small or how important, means something. Because if our daily actions and thoughts ultimately have no meaning, then suffering in all its forms is simply a sadistic joke, and I can’t cotton to that.

Okay, the diabetes thing; I remember very clearly the moment I opened the letter from my doctor and read the words, “You definitely have Type II diabetes.” My stomach dropped and I felt a chill course through my chest. My wife, Lucy, and our friend Nayad Monroe were in the room, and both knew from the expression on my face that the news was, as the saying goes, Not Good at All.

It was the moment when the 5th-decade me realized that I was going to croak before my time if I did not do something about it. And I did: all sugar immediately vanished from my diet, I take in no more than 60 carbs per meal, and my job at the library requires that I move a lot of heavy boxes full of books. Since my diagnosis on December 19th of last year I have, as of this writing, dropped nearly 40 pounds and – if my wife is to be believed – have gotten somewhat “buff” (a word I thought I’d never hear a woman use in reference to my build).

This was the catalyst for my at last coming to grips with my absolute, inexorable, complete powerlessness to relieve the suffering of others – but, like the realization that the Final Countdown for my life has begun – accepting my helplessness in the grand scheme of things brought home one undeniable fact; just as my own health and welfare were in my hands and my hands only, so was my goal of reconciliation: in short, I cannot relieve suffering in the grand scheme, but when I see or sense it in others, I have a new mantra: The world will not be this way in reach of my arm.

And it’s helped. I sleep better most nights. I don’t have to worry that I’m going to be assaulted from behind by memories of my sins of omission and break down crying for no reason. I can glimpse my reflection in a window or mirror or inverted in a spoon and not detest the man who stares back at me – and I never thought I’d reach that point.

And I genuinely believe that I could not have reached this point had I not been diagnosed with diabetes. In an odd way, it’s turned out to be one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. It’s given me a new outlook on the type of fiction I write, and the stuff you’re going to see coming out later this year and during 2014 is going to reflect that.

Because the world will not be this way within reach of my arm.

***

Maurice Broaddus – Being Crazy, Christian, and Creative

May 3 – 5, 2013. Indianapolis, IN

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Published on April 15, 2013 00:34

April 8, 2013

Road to Mo*Con VIII: Guest Blog by Delilah Dawson

As we countdown to Mo*Con VIII, I’m running blog posts to encourage the conversation that we’ll be having there. After Jim Hines’ blog post, (the AWESOME!) Delilah Dawson wrote to ask if she could share her story. The answer was “OF COURSE!”. I especially resonate with this line: ”I might be broken, but I’m me.”

Guest Blog by Delilah S. Dawson

As she helped my son from the car, the perfectly put-together woman gave me a sugary crocodile smile and said, “Oh, looks like your mommy put your shoes on the wrong feet.” She paused meaningfully. “Again.”

I just told my son I loved him and pulled away. But this is what I want to say to her and to anyone else who has something snarky and self-righteous to say.

Dear Carpool Harpy,

I am a writer, mother, and wife living with depression. It arrives at

the oddest times and takes over everything. I almost always expect it

in February and August, but sometimes it sneaks up or overstays its

welcome. Even when things seem good, even when I’m smiling, everything

feels wrong.

Yes, my son’s shoes are on the wrong feet because that’s how he did it

and it didn’t seem worth the fight to put down his accomplishment and

change it. He’s only four, and he felt pretty good about his shoes.

You’ll also notice a smudge of raspberry on his cheek, and his hair is

spiky because he wants to grow it out. Because he’s a kid.

And because let’s be clear: I’m barely staying afloat.

I’m giving hugs, I’m enforcing the Clean Underwear Rule, and I’m

making sure that what my kids are wearing out of the house is

seasonally appropriate, even if it’s a size too small. Because that’s

all I can handle before I drag myself back into bed. I just went five

days without washing my hair. I don’t want to eat and generally won’t

unless someone reminds me. I don’t want to watch TV or movies or hang

out with my friends. When the phone rings, I cringe. And when you open

the door of my car, that’s as close as I get to praying, because I

can’t take another word of criticism in my life, especially not from

you.

When depression strikes, writing feels like the only thing that keeps

me going. Sure, my husband takes amazing, tender, thoughtful care of

me, and my children hug me constantly, but losing myself in a story is

the only way to hold the hopelessness at bay. When I’m not writing,

right now, I want to cry. My stomach is constantly in knots. Nothing

seems worthwhile. And even though it’s a beautiful day with a bright

blue sky and flowers blooming everywhere, I feel no joy in it.

I have one book due April 1, another due June 7. Neither is done. I

have guest blog requests mounting up, reviews to write, and a social

media presence to keep up. Which I don’t mind, since the little

seratonin hits I get when someone @s me on Twitter are like tiny rays

of sunshine. In one way, I’m more stressed than I’ve ever been. But in

another way, I’m grateful. I have to keep working. I can’t give up, I

refuse to let my writing or my professionalism suffer.

Worst of all is that when I look at my life, I know that I have

absolutely no right to complain. I have every single thing I want. I

should be happy. But there’s something broken in me, some chemical

slip-up, that means I’m not. I’ve been this way since I was a kid,

sometimes manically happy and other times barely capable of getting

out of bed. I tried to take my life when I was a teen, and surviving

taught me how strong I truly am. I know now that I can get through

anything.

And yet I’m afraid to talk about it, because I don’t want anyone to

doubt my ability as a writer or my stability as a professional. I

can’t remember the last time I vacuumed or put on makeup, but I’ve

never missed a deadline.

So when you imply through your sugary-sweet words and stupid, cutting

smile that I’m failing at motherhood because my son’s shoes are on the

wrong feet? It makes me angry. You don’t know a thing about me or

about where I am as a human being; you only know that my son has a

smudge on his cheek and mismatched socks. And that is no basis for

judging either of us.

You don’t see me fighting to stay afloat. And you don’t see his

radiant smile of pride when he puts on his shoes by himself, which is

one of the few things that can make me smile, too.

But I appreciate you. Because you are a reminder that I’d rather be

depressed and fighting it, depressed and raging, depressed and

working… than judging people for all the wrong reasons. I might be

broken, but I’m me, and one day soon, I’m going to smile again. And my

smile, unlike yours, will be real.

Delilah S. Dawson is a native of Roswell, Georgia and the author of the paranormal romance Blud series for Pocket, including WICKED AS THEY COME and an e-novella, THE MYSTERIOUS MADAM MORPHO. The second book in the series, WICKED AS SHE WANTS, and a second novella, THE PECULIAR PETS OF MISS PLEASANCE, will be out in spring 2013, and her first YA, a creepy paranormal called SERVANTS OF THE STORM will be available in spring 2014. RT Book Reviews has called her “a wonderfully fresh new voice!”

Delilah is a member of the Romance Writers of America, the Georgia Romance Writers, and the Artifice Club. You can also read herproduct reviews at www.CoolMomPicks.com and www.CoolMomTech.com, where she is an Associate Editor. She’s a geek of all trades, a synesthete, and the sort of person who saw Spawn in the theater and made other people angry by laughing. Find her online at www.delilahsdawson.com. Bring cupcakes.

***

Maurice Broaddus – Being Crazy, Christian, and Creative

May 3 – 5, 2013. Indianapolis, IN

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Published on April 08, 2013 00:34

April 1, 2013

Road to Mo*Con VIII: Guest Blog by Michelle Pendergrass

As we continue to countdown to Mo*Con VIII, with the theme of The Mind & Spirit of the Artist, I’ve been stunned by the reaction from folks. The outpouring of e-mails of support, and more importantly, reports of “you’re writing my life.” In fact, you ever run across one of those stories and your reaction is “wow, even them?” That was my reaction when Michelle Pendergrass sent me her guest blog. Michelle will be having her own show (yay!) during the First Friday event of Mo*Con, but will be back Saturday the 4th for her very popular art workshop.

Guest Post by Michelle Pendergrass

I’ve always pondered whether the abuse made me a creative, or if my creative saved me from the abuse.

Or both.

It’s a long, sordid tale of all sorts of abuse that started so very early in my life. Physical, sexual, mental, emotional, and spiritual abuse tore through the fabric of my youth and ripped it to shreds. I diligently picked up the pieces, braided them, and became a woman with a very thick coat of triple-braided cord. It was me, myself, and I who fought against them all. I wrote to myself in my journals, gave myself advice, criticized, chastised, hated, loved, loathed, wished, wondered, and wanted to die.

I read Stephen King because I watched Carrie from the same couch on which certain abuse took place. I never had pig’s blood poured on me but I did want to set fire to things with my mind. I became thoroughly focused on the supernatural–with ESP and out-of-body experiences, I could change things. I could control my environment instead of being a victim to it.

Writing fed that need of survival as well. The characters were mine. The story was mine to tell. The words, the sentences, the paragraphs–all mine. And because they came from my mind, no one could steal them from me. And it was very private. It was the only thing that I had that fully belonged to me, that was not violated. Drawing and painting manipulated the ugly reality and turned it into beauty.

And then in high school, they found my creative and they broke her. You’re not good enough for art school, they said. Writing isn’t a career, it’s a hobby, they said. Those aren’t careers. Study this calculus, this chemistry, these honors classes. Be a lawyer or an accountant, you’d be great at those. Stop daydreaming and study for a real career.

I be{lie}ved them and they won. It was just so exhausting trying to fight their opinions of who I should be. So I drank. And fucked. And drank. And got straight A’s–because I could. And drank. And graduated top ten–because I could. I went to college my senior year of high school. After graduation, I took a full course load, worked sixty hours a week, pulled a 4.0, made the Dean’s list, and gave them all the finger. I married at nineteen because I thought he loved me, but I didn’t know what love was, I knew what abusers said to little girls to control them.

During that time I went from atheist to born-again believer and then my husband left me with a God I knew nothing about, one who hated divorce and yet, there I stood. Alone again four months after our vows before God. The pastor who married us telling me I could never marry again otherwise I’d be an adulteress for the rest of my days, and God doesn’t hear the prayers of an adulteress (Obviously he didn’t hear the prayers of a scared little girl crying from violation, or a young teen wife crying over abandonment, either), but I could marry him again if he came back. I should wait for him, even if it meant being alone the rest of my days.

I wasn’t even good enough for God.

My first suicide attempt was in there somewhere. I was a coward, though. It was more because he was abusing me verbally and I wanted it to stop and I wanted to know if he valued my life (he did not.) He called my mother thinking she would think I was crazy and then he could have more power over me to lock me up. I told her with clear mind that I did it to know if he cared (he did not) and I was coming home. And she knew. I know she knew. Because she came home as a little girl to find her own mother with her head in the gas oven trying to kill herself because “he” didn’t care. Because “he” had slept with her brother’s wife and because her brother killed himself. And mom knew because dad was bipolar and had PTSD from Vietnam and tried to kill me once. She knew I wouldn’t kill myself.

I went to my first counselor at that time. He worked at a Christian counseling center. He heard me say father…bipolar…and wanted me on meds immediately. I told him to fuck off that I didn’t need meds that I needed people around me who didn’t use me and throw me away. And I read a book called Happiness is a Choice.

I made some hard choices. For me, medicine wasn’t an option. Whether it was pride or something else, I don’t know, I just didn’t think a pill was the answer to the overly complicated hand I was dealt. I felt like I needed a big, red, stacked Craftsman toolbox full of tools that I could use to navigate my path. Maybe the healing would’ve happened faster with the medicine as a tool. I can’t say for sure.

I read a lot of books. I went after healing with fervor and passion and determination. I met God along the way. The REAL God. The one who loves unconditionally and shows Himself.

That was a lifetime ago. Two decades. I sit here today, on my forty-first birthday, and know that in that time, there has been healing. I’m not completely healed. I still have a toxic family.

I still struggle. But I’ve cut off the most toxic of the relationships, I’ve moved away, I’ve traveled with my husband as over-the-road truck drivers, and I’ve learned that I am not what they say I am.

I am beautiful.

I am important.

I am loved and can love and will love.

I am valuable.

I am treasured.

And so are you friend. So are you.

I still fight these days. With words, with paint, with the girl who was born a creative. I take all of the ugly that they intended for harm and turn it over to God and pour it out as an offering. I can hold my hand out and grab yours and say, “I’ve been there. Let’s go. We’re done with that.” It won’t ever be easy. Easy is staying where you are. The fight comes in moving forward and shedding the skin of that old you.

~michelle pendergrass

MichellePendergrass.com

Visual Prayer

***

Maurice Broaddus – Being Crazy, Christian, and Creative

May 3 – 5, 2013. Indianapolis, IN

Previous Guest Blogs:

Lucy Snyder

Doug Warrick

Michelle Pendergrass

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Published on April 01, 2013 00:48

March 25, 2013

Road to Mo*Con VIII: Guest Blog by Jim C. Hines

With Mo*Con quickly approaching and with our main conversation centering on the issue of the mental health issues we writers may struggle with, I thought that I would encourage some guest posts from some of our guests, partly to raise awareness on the topic by sparking a dialogue and also to help de-stigmatize the issue. One of our guests of honor, Jim C. Hines, offers up this guest blog.

***

Guest blog by Jim C. Hines

About a year ago, I walked out of my doctor’s office with a prescription for Zoloft, an antidepressant.

I had put that appointment off for months, because I believed my problems weren’t that bad. It’s not like I was suicidal or anything. I told myself it wasn’t really depression. I was stressed, but there were real and valid reasons for that. I just needed some down time. I could tough it out. Eventually it would get better.

Somewhere along the line, I stopped believing things would get better. Life was about getting through each day. I wasn’t living; I was simply enduring.

I was a psych major, and I’m married to a licensed counselor. I’ve watched people close to me start antidepressants, and I’ve seen how much of a difference it can make in their lives. I’ve never thought of them as weak, or of antidepressants as a sign that they’ve somehow failed at life.

It feels different when it’s you. There’s a double-standard. I know perfectly well that depression isn’t something you can simply will yourself through. But walking into that office felt like admitting defeat, like I was conceding that this thing had beaten me.

I told my doctor what I was dealing with. A full-time job and a writing career. A special-needs son and a pre-teen daughter. A partially disabled wife. When I laid it all out, I could see why I felt stressed, but there were plenty of people out there who had it worse. I had so much going for me—a wonderful family, eight books in print from a major publisher, a stable job with good benefits—it felt like the height of ingratitude to complain. Besides, it’s not like there was something chemically wrong with me, right? This was just stress.

To which my doctor replied that yes, he thought there were plenty of external factors causing my depression. And what made me think that over the long term, those external stressors hadn’t had a real chemical effect on my brain? The point of antidepressants wasn’t to suppress emotions; it was to help me get back to a normal, healthy neurochemical balance.

I know antidepressants don’t work for everyone, but damn if they didn’t help. A month after that appointment, I was starting to feel like me again. I started working with a therapist, talking about changes I could make to try to better manage my life. I was fortunate to find someone I clicked with right away, and she’s helped me to improve my relationship with my family, to try to find a bit more balance in my life, to look ahead at my dreams for what I want my life to be, and more.

It’s not all happiness and rainbow-farting unicorns yet. I have bad days, and to be honest, they freak me out, because I’m still learning to distinguish between a normal crappy day and the return of the Depression. Nobody gets all good days, and I know that, but in the back of my mind, I start thinking that maybe the meds aren’t helping as much, or maybe the therapy hasn’t done enough.

Depression is like the Stephen Hawking of screwing with your head, and before I know it, I start thinking I’ve failed. If I were doing a better job in therapy, if I was able to better deal with the different parts of my life, the conversations at home wouldn’t spiral out of control. Stress over writing deadlines wouldn’t spill into other areas of my life. Things that made sense in the therapist’s office wouldn’t get all murky and messed up when I tried to apply them to real life.

In other words, it’s been a year. Why the hell isn’t this fixed yet?

When I write it out, I recognize that it’s a ridiculous question. This is a process, not a quick-fix. I’ve still got a relatively stressful life. The therapist and I both recognize that there are a lot of factors we can’t change, and we’re working on the things we can. And my life is better than it was a year ago.

I made the choice to talk publicly about this, and I was amazed at how many people came up to talk to me about their own battles with depression at conventions and other events. I’d like to tell everyone that once you take that first step, it’s all downhill, but that’s total goblin dung. Medications don’t always work. A fair number of therapists suck, or simply aren’t the right fit for you and your problems. Even when everything clicks, it’s still a process, and there are good days and bad.

I have far more good days than I used to, and most of the bad days aren’t as bad as they once were. I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me, but I’ve learned some things, too. Specifically:

· Depression isn’t about having a bad day, and it’s not something you can outstubborn.

· Depression is a sneaky, evil, manipulative bastard. The worst thing you can do with a dude like that is ignore him.

· There are people who will look down at you for admitting to needing antidepressants and/or therapy. Fortunately, at least in my case, the antidepressants and therapy have put me in a space where I can recognize that those people are dicks.

· Those people are also rare. Most have been incredibly understanding and supportive.

· I feel like me again. I missed me. It’s really nice to be back.

Thank you, Maurice, for letting me talk about this on your blog, and thanks to everyone for reading.

***

Maurice Broaddus – Being Crazy, Christian, and Creative

May 3 – 5, 2013. Indianapolis, IN

Previous Guest Blogs:

Lucy Snyder

Doug Warrick

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Published on March 25, 2013 00:56

March 19, 2013

Road to Mo*Con VIII: Guest Blog by Doug F. Warrick

We continue our countdown to Mo*Con with a guest blog by Doug Warrick. Actually, you probably have Doug to thank for the theme for this year’s Mo*Con. After my blog last year about the possibilities of me being bi-polar, he and I had a series of conversations on the topic. He thought it would be great for other writers to discuss how things like this play out in their lives and art. Doug will also be debuting his amazing collection at this year’s Mo*Con, Plow the Bones (Apex Books, but this isn’t the final cover).

MentIl

Guest Blog by Doug F. Warrick

Migraine sufferers are touchy about people casually co-opting their malady. It’s why you should be careful about blithely announcing to a room full of people that you have “such a migraine right now.” Because no, you don’t. What you have is called, in the professional parlance of the medical community, a fuckin’ headache. Maybe it’s a bad fuckin’ headache. A real, real bad one, even. But for anyone who has ever nearly or actually crashed their car when their vision whites out on the highway, or whose body has purged itself of the day’s food out of sheer bewilderment at the intensity of the pain in its uppermost extremity, or who has woken up with crescent-shaped nail-marks in their temples from the previous night’s desperate digging, your occasional headache ranks astoundingly low among things about which they feel compelled to give a shit.

Same story with depressives, by the way. Which is more germane, and harder to say.

I have lived with depression and anxiety since I was a kid. I have resolved (and ultimately failed) to kill myself twice in my adult life (a truth not known by even those closest to me, and which I type now knowing cognitively that I am confessing, but feeling emotionally like my secret’s still safe… we’ll get to that…). The first time, I was prepared to toss myself off the top of a building when a custodian decided to take a smoke break at pretty much the exact moment I was perched on the ledge in dramatic cruciform (like, seriously, it was a straight-up homage to that “All for you, Damien,” scene in The Omen… Being suicidal’s one thing, but did I have to be so cliché?). I was so embarrassed that it didn’t even occur to me that had I jumped right then, I wouldn’t have had to worry about feeling embarrassed. I slunk off to my filthy apartment and cried over a sack full of Chalupas I couldn’t really afford. The second time, having never sipped a single drop of alcohol in my life, I attempted to chug a bottle of rum and swallow a bottle of pills. Ultimately, I fucked up the appropriate order of those two, and vastly underestimated my tolerance for alcohol. So all I succeeded in doing was drinking myself sick and throwing up all night. Never did get around to those pills.

There is a very particular, very specific flavor of shame associated with failed suicide attempts in which the word FAILED maintains its literal definition.

All of which is to say, I have some experiential familiarity with crazy-town-banana-pants. As a white heterosexual male writer who suffers from mental illness, nobody could blame me for crowning myself King Cliché of Trite Premise Mountain, presiding over the sovereign kingdom of Boo-Hoo-Ya-Big-Fuckin’-Baby.

Living with depression, with anxiety, with delusions and dementia, with the malfunctioning of the meat that sloshes around in your skull and makes you who you are, is an exercise in constant embarrassment. Your mantra becomes, “I should be able to do this.” You watch yourself, trapped inside your own eyeballs, sabotage every opportunity presented to you, be they professional (anybody remember that anthology I was supposed to be editing?) or romantic (there is a mysterious white stripe of skin on the third finger of my left hand made pale by a ring I no longer wear there) or interpersonal (oh the phone calls I’ve screened, oh the nights I’ve spent with a pillow over my head so I could pretend I didn’t hear my friends knocking on my door). You watch your family and friends transform, watch them go from pounding their fists against the wall and wailing at you to get your shit together, please, please, please, to shaking their head and shrugging at your latest failure, trying not to spend too much time dwelling on the potential they once thought they saw in you, the trust they put in you that you betrayed. The worst part is, you eventually hate yourself for so long that it no longer feels sharp. It no longer hurts to hate yourself. You look at yourself in the mirror, and your reflexive disgust feels familiar and common.

This is why I tend to get angry at the misuse and misattribution of the word “depression.” No, the last episode of The Walking Dead was not “depressing.” No, you don’t listen to The Smiths and pack away a pint of Ben & Jerry’s on days when you are feeling “a little depressed.” No, you are not “so fucking depressed” over the fact that Barack Obama was elected to a second term. I understand intellectually how unfair it is to make this distinction, how casual usage of the term has in some ways redefined it and made it broader and more populist. But emotionally, I can’t help but feel that it marginalizes and trivializes the experience of actual depression. Because those situations are, at worst, fogs through which one drives on the way to clearer conditions. Depression, or at least my experience of it, is a corner into which one is backed. Like the person-shaped holes in Junji Ito’s The Enigma of Amigara Fault, depression is a you-shaped space that contorts and twists and deforms the further you go.

I often tell people that depression forces you to choose between three options. Option one: live with it. Live in misery, in agony (because, yes, depression does physically hurt, deep down in the solar plexus, tugging at you in every direction at once, like some secret organ inside your chest has burst and you are now doomed to hemorrhage to death over the course of seventy years or so), scratching notches in the wall to document your various failures until old age or disease or blessed disaster make your decision for you.

Option two: kill yourself. Nobody wants to die, by the way. Especially not those of us who can’t accept the proposition of an afterlife. I’m reminded of the depressive woman in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest who says, “Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. The terror of falling from a great height is still as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and “Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.” Wallace, as he almost always did, said it better than I ever could. Better than I ever will. And incidentally, this was Wallace’s eventual decision. I can’t fault him for it. I don’t subscribe to that bitter axiom exclusive to the living that suicide is the sole dominion of the selfish and the cowardly. How could I? My own Omen moment aside, I’ve seen more than one friend trade the flames for the fall. People I loved. People that loved me.

But then there’s option three. By far the most difficult and the most rewarding. You get help. You do what you must and you fight the motherfucker, because the motherfucker is worth fighting. You stare upon the strange and the miraculous and the unlikely and the gorgeous, those moments of true beauty and joy and wonder, no matter how how rare and infrequent they may be, and you ask yourself if you are really willing to never experience them again. Reading about or witnessing the capricious elegance of evolution and physics and astronomy, or the triumphant elation of watching truly talented live musicians, or the transcendent fun of really good sex, or those moments when your brain stops experiencing temporal conveyance because the piece of food between your molars is so goddamned tasty, or the wonder at discovering a piece of art that does something you didn’t know art could do. The songs that made you cry, and the songs that saved your life, as Morrissey once sang. Even if you have never experienced those things, other people have. And they aren’t any better or more deserving than you. If you want those things (and you do, trust me), then you need to fight for them.

Get some pills, or some vitamins, or some supplements, or some exercise, or all of those things. Talk to somebody whose job it is to neither love nor hate you. Stop telling yourself that you need it, that your misery is your fuel or your engine, because you don’t, and it isn’t. And make stuff. Before, when I confessed to attempting to end myself, I mentioned feeling like I wasn’t confessing at all. I feel that way because I’m not telling you this. I’m typing it. I’m narrating it. I’m stumbling around grasping at the right combination of words to create something. It’s what I do. I’m not the best at it (I ain’t Gary Braunbeck or Flannery O’Connor or Gabriel Garcia Marquez or the aforementioned Wallace). But when I write this stuff down, when I transmute it into narrative, it becomes (for a frozen moment) external. Ta-da. Home surgery. Reach in with gloved hands and extract the offending organ. Call your friends and have them take a look at it, offer their perspectives. Take a few photographs, jot down a few notes. Then set it back down where it belongs and sew yourself back up and remember what you saw when it wasn’t a part of you. Remember what it was when it was fictional, when it was external. Remember that your psychoses and your neuroses are not the same thing as YOU.

***

Maurice Broaddus – Being Crazy, Christian, and Creative

May 3 – 5, 2013. Indianapolis, IN

Previous Guest Blogs:

Lucy Snyder

Doug Warrick

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Published on March 19, 2013 00:56

March 10, 2013

Road to Mo*Con VIII: Guest Blog by Lucy Snyder

With Mo*Con quickly approaching and with our main conversation centering on the issue of the mental health issues we writers may struggle with, I thought that I would encourage some guest posts from some of our guests as well as interested observers. One such observer would be author Lucy Snyder.

I wanted to be a writer pretty much from the moment I learned how to read; my desire to be a speculative fiction writer was firmly cemented after I started reading books like Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time.

Books like that were my respite from a world where I felt as though I did not belong, and worse, would never belong. But I’d lose myself in a book, and for a few hours the universe changed into a much better place. And I thought to myself that if I could write something that made another person feel that same shivery sense of wonder and excitement, then that would have to be the best job in the world.

But books couldn’t make everything better; I went through my first suicidal depression when I was 12 years old.

Part of it was a matter of brain chemistry, sure. But the other part was circumstantial: I grew up in a conservative military town in Texas. A town out in the big empty part of the state. There was the mundane stress of being female in a culture where girls were told at every turn that they were inherently less capable and worthwhile than boys and that their only true value lay in being decorative. That’s pretty depressing if you’re a girl with an ounce of ambition.

But there was also the matter of being a queer kid in that culture. I knew one boy in high school who was out as gay, and it’s a miracle he survived to adulthood. I don’t know any lesbians who came out then. It just wasn’t accepted. And bisexuality wasn’t a concept anyone discussed. It was a black-and-white world. Either you were straight, or you were a homo, and if you were a boy who kissed just one boy you were a homo for ever and ever after.

So I was effing terrified of being a lesbian. When I started having some “Hey, she’s cute” type feelings when I was young, I squashed those suckers down as far as they would go. This, of course, affected things. Badly. I became standoffish, and afraid of touching anyone or to be touched lest There Be Feelings. I kept to myself, and felt totally isolated.

So, yeah. I spent most of my teen years struggling with depression and anxiety. The depression part got somewhat better in college, only to return with a vengeance in the academic pressure cooker of graduate school. Which, perhaps not coincidentally, is when I started trying to write for publication.

For me, depression is like having a huge monster constantly looming over you. This vile creature breathes out toxic gas that clouds your mind and saps your energy, and with every breath it tells you, “You don’t deserve to live. Everything you do is a joke. You should have never been born. If you had any guts you’d take that bottle of pills in the medicine cabinet and wash it down with some Drano. You pathetic loser. You girl. You don’t deserve to live.”

Who the hell can write under those conditions? I know I sure can’t.

I went on meds for a while, and they alleviated my depression considerably. But the side effects nearly crippled me physically. I decided I’d rather be able to walk than be in a good mood, so I stopped taking my prescription and started trying other tactics.

My depression is a chronic illness that I will have to deal with for the rest of my life. The symptoms might subside for a while, but I can count on them coming back if I’m not careful.

The toxic monster I described above? My first goal of every day is to wake up before it does, go down into the basement where it’s sleeping, and beat the thing unconscious. And then I can get on with my day.

Here are my weapons against depression:

1. I know my triggers, and take steps to avoid them. A big trigger for me is loneliness. I know that I probably can’t ever live by myself. Further, once I start slipping into depression, the monster will tell me that nobody really wants me around, they’re just humoring me, etc. And if I listen to those toxic thoughts, I will isolate myself and make the situation worse. So, I know that when I’m feeling the urge to withdraw, that’s exactly the time I need to be with people.

2. I know I need backup. The thing about depression is that once it starts, your brain isn’t working so well anymore. You might have an idea that seems perfectly lucid and rational to you, but in fact is neither. So, it’s important to have people around who will give you a reality check (and get you to a doctor when things get bad). My main backup is my husband, but I also have other friends I know I can count on.

3. I take care of my brain chemistry. Most people have heard of St. John’s Wort as an over-the-counter antidepressant. But that herb also gave me unpleasant side effects. After doing some research, I started taking Vitamin C, Vitamin D, and fish oil along with my morning coffee. And you know what? That combination works about as well as the prescription meds I was taking. I take 500-1000 milligrams of Vitamin C, 1000 IU of D, and 1200 mg of fish oil every day, plus probably 90 milligrams of caffeine from the coffee; the worst side effect I’ve had to deal with is the cats being super-interested in sniffing my breath.

I hope some of you found this useful. Write well, and be well.

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Published on March 10, 2013 23:13

March 5, 2013

A Couple of Story Sales

I have a couple stories appearing in upcoming anthologies:

Eulogies II: Tales From the Cellar

Tom Piccirilli – The Thing With Nothing To Give And Nothing To Lose

Gerard Houarner – Touch

Gary Braunbeck – What Once Was Bone

The Great James A. Moore – No Title Announced

Maurice Broaddus – Awaiting Redemption

Lucy Snyder – Spare The rod

Matthew Warner – Muralistic

Steve Vernon: Captain Nothing Story – Neck Bolt Lynch Pin

Keith Minnion – On The Hooks

Gary McMahon – Kitty

Eric Dimbleby – Chuck

Rose Blackthorn: The Lilac Hedge

Michael Boatman: Born Again

Thad Linson: Writers Block

Janet Joyce Holden: Song In Absentia

Wesley Southard: By The Throat

Nicole Cushing: The Cat In The Cage

T. T. Zuma: Chiyoung and Dongsun’s Song

Brent Jenkins: Meepy

Theresa C. Newbill: Three poems

Abra Staffin-Wiebe – The Miracle Material

David Schembri – The Black Father Of The Night

Magda Knight – Footnotes

Malcolm Laughton – Puttyskin

Jonathan Templar – The Second Carriage

Mary Madewell – A Mean Piece of Water

Eric Guignard – A Serving of Nomu Sashimi

Arthur Crow – Three Poems

Rebecca Brown – Jasmine and Opium

V. M. Zito – No Title Announced

John McIlveen – The Bore

Sean Logan – Dissolution

Next up, the anthology Vampires Don’t Sparkle from Seventh Star Press

“A New Life” by J. F. Gonzalez

“What Once was Flesh” by Tim Waggoner

“The Darkton Circus Mystery” by Elizabeth Massie

“Robot Vampire” by R. J. Sullivan

“Beneath a Templar Cross” by Gord Rollo

“The Weapon of Memory” by Kyle S. Johnson

“The Excavation” by Stephen Zimmer

“Skraeling” by Joel A. Sutherland

“Dreams of Winter” by Bob Freeman

“Dracula’s Winkee: Bloodsucker Blues” by Gregory L. Hall

“I F*** Your Sunshine” by Lucy A. Snyder

“A Soldier’s Story” by Maurice Broaddus

“Rattenkönig” by Douglas F. Warrick

“Vampire Nation” by Jerry Gordon

“Curtain Call” by Gary A. Braunbeck

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Published on March 05, 2013 21:10

March 3, 2013

Mo*Con 8: The Mind and Spirit of the Artist

May 3rd – 5th, 2013

-Official web site

-Schedule

-Accommodations

Mo*Con 8: The Mind and Spirit of the Artist

Mo*Con has always been about the “intersection of art, faith, and social justice” and this year is no different. There’s no easy way to describe the Mo*Con experience, except as perhaps as a convention room party extended for a whole weekend, except held in a church. Its aim has always been to be fairly small and intimate, yet retaining the feel of a family reunion.

Part of what makes Mo*Con a different sort of convention is that it revolves around a series of conversations (and food and art). Mo*Con has a two part vision. The first, inspired by many a late night at conventions, is to provide a forum for publishing professionals to get together and discuss some of the larger issues which affect their writing and their social conscience. Discussions can be had in a spirit of respect. The second is that too often the artist is underappreciated and here they are spoiled.

This year’s theme is “The Mind and Spirit of the Artist,” revolving around a discussion on Saturday the 4th about the struggles many writers have with mental health issues and what that means for their craft, their lives, and their community. The featured writer guests of honor have all written publicly about their struggles with issues from depression to anxiety to other issues. As the countdown for Mo*Con begins, several will be posting part of their stories.

This is the first year the event will be held at Broad Ripple United Methodist Church. The convention has expanded to include a First Friday event featuring the art of Steve Gilberts and Kristin Fuller. There will also be a spoken word performance from prominent poets: DDE the Slammer, Devon Ginn, Pope Adrian, Bless, Theon Lee Jones, Dizz, Reheema McNeil, ParaLectra, and Mr. Kinetik, hosted by Ill Holiday. These events will be open to the public. The spoken word event will be a fundraiser event for the local non-profit group, Second Story.

We’ll be debuting a few projects at this year’s Mo*Con. Seventh Star Press is the featured publisher this year.

The event is expected to draw over 100 writers, artists, editors, and publishers and many networking sessions. A half dozen workshops will be offered ranging from topics like privacy issues for writers to post-apocalyptic fiction to hands on demonstrations.

Our Guests of Honor:

Jim C. Hines began writing in the early 90s, while working on a degree in psychology from Michigan State University. His first professional sale was the award-winning “Blade of the Bunny,” which took first place in the 1998 Writers of the Future competition and was published in Writers of the Future XV. After completing the goblin trilogy, Jim went on to write the princess series, four books often described as a blend of Grimm’s Fairy Tales with Charlie’s Angels. In 2010, he signed a contract with DAW Books for the Magic ex Libris series, which follows the adventure of a magic-wielding librarian from northern Michigan and a certain fire-spider… http://www.jimchines.com/

Saladin Ahmed

Saladin Ahmed was born in Detroit and raised in a working-class, Arab American enclave in Dearborn, MI. He holds a BA in American Culture from the University of Michigan, an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College, and an MA in English from Rutgers. His poetry has received several fellowships, and he has taught writing at universities and colleges for over ten years. His short stories have been nominated for the Nebula and Campbell awards, and have appeared in Year’s Best Fantasy and numerous other magazines, anthologies, and podcasts, as well as being translated into five foreign languages. He is represented by Jennifer Jackson of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. THRONE OF THE CRESCENT MOON is his first novel. www.saladinahmed.com

Gary Braunbeck

Gary A. Braunbeck is a prolific author who writes mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mainstream literature. He is the author of 19 books; his fiction has been translated into Japanese, French, Italian, Russian and German. Nearly 200 of his short stories have appeared in various publications. He was born in Newark, Ohio; this city that serves as the model for the fictitious Cedar Hill in many of his stories. The Cedar Hill stories are collected in Graveyard People and Home Before Dark. His fiction has received several awards, including the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction in 2003 for “Duty” and in 2005 for “We Now Pause for Station Identification”; his collection Destinations Unknown won a Stoker in 2006. His novella “Kiss of the Mudman” received the International Horror Guild Award for Long Fiction in 2005. Gary is an adjunct professor at Seton Hill University, Pennsylvania, where he teaches in an innovative Master’s degree program in Writing Popular Fiction.

Publisher Guest of Honor

Seventh Star Press is a small press publisher located in Lexington, KY. SSP specializes in speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, and horror). The company was established in October of 2008. Stephen Zimmer is an award-winning author and filmmaker, whose literary works include the epic urban fantasy series The Rising Dawn Saga, as well as the epic medieval fantasy Fires in Eden Series. The Exodus Gate, Book One of the Rising Dawn Saga, was Stephen’s debut novel. His novel, Crown of Vengeance, received a 2010 Pluto Award for Best Novel in Small Press. Further information on Stephen Zimmer can be found at: Website: www.stephenzimmer.com

With more guests and surprises to be announced! Keep an eye on the web site!