To My Crows, With Love

For distractions on the worst of days. 

For listening to all the crazy in my life. 

For the lack of judgment. 

For silly conversations. 
For GIF spam, both with love and with wild inappropriateness.
For the shared love of explosions and murder (fictionally speaking).
For the word count races. 
For planning impossible road trips.
For the help. 
For motivation and inspiration. 
For a special brand of weird. 
For a place I feel comfortable in. 

With another hard week running, having the crows has been a life saver for me. It's been a place I spend a lot of time in now. I have discord open almost all time. The turns tabling have been pushed away. I feel better. I mean, I'm still struggling, and I can still feel the weight of the stress, but it's been easier to carry with me. Even when I don't talk about the exactness of it... Just being in there brings me a level of peace. I am forever grateful. 

The writing has been going. One of the crows in particular races me all the time. It's one of the best ways to getting writing done when you are as competitive as I am! Due to some events yesterday, I'm behind for CampNaNo. I'm going to get it back on track by the end of the weekend and hope to get ahead next week. Having a cushion in there is nice when days like yesterday happen. I'm feeling more confident in my ability to get this done. Writing Vanessa again is coming easier. I know I will have to push some stuff in the beginning around since I couldn't nail her voice down in the first few chapters, but it's doable. 

Vanessa's story means a lot to me. After writing my first book way back when, I was going through some stuff. I was struggling with my identity as a writer. I didn't write anything for years. Vanessa gave me the spark back. When I started her story, I was still struggling. A lot. buuut she was persistent. While Harley and her story will always be close to my heart, Vanessa brought back my passion for stories. 

Parenting is one of the hardest things I've ever done. Seeing all the problems she might have and knowing I can't stop them... I can't make her listen to me. I remember what it's like to have grand plans with a naïve expectation of how the world will be. No matter how many conversations we have, no matter what insight I can give her... I'm still just mom, and mom's just don't get it. The entirety of is has been weighing on me a lot. In five months she will be an adult. There is this spiral of guilt that I didn't do enough or that I should've made different choices. I guess that remains to be seen. I've had a lot of conversations with my mom about how she handled this transition. It helps some. Maybe in a few years I'll feel better about it all. We'll see. 

The music has been hitting so much harder lately too. I'm feeling everything deeper than normal, and I already feel things hard. Some of it is just my personality, some of it is being an empath, and I know some of it is the bi-polar. I live my life in extremes. I'm not happy, I'm ecstatic. I'm not sad, I'm devastated. I'm not angry, I'm furious. Even my baseline runs high or low depending on the day. Music has this ability to pull the emotions even harder, but sometimes (like now), it's even more impactful. I'm still obsessing over Taylor. Speak Now (Taylor's Version) just dropped, and I'm all about it. Everything is so good. I've got a lot of Ed Sheeran in there too. After listening to his two newest albums... I'm obsessed there too. 

Because of the crows talking all about the Steam Summer Sale... we got to talking about Terraria. One of them teamed up with me to get people to buy it lol Soooo I've been playing it a lot again. I love this game so much. It's so fantastic. I really want to play all day, but I know I can't do that. So it's become my reward for doing all the writing things. Currently working on a castle in the sky. Do you know how much stone it takes to make enough grey brick for a castle to house all the NPCs? A lot. It takes a lot. I keep running out lol 

Ok, I think that's enough. I'm a little morose this week, sorry lol

Until next week ♥

Lyrics in my head:

My bad habits lead to late nights ending alone 
Conversations with a stranger I barely know 
Swearin this will be the last but it probably wont
I got nothin left to lose, or use, or do

AND

And there we are again when no one had to know 
You kept me like a secret, but I kept you like an oath 
Sacred prayer and we'd swear
To remember it all too well