time

Top 5 things about me, I didn’t realize were ADHD

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Hello Friends, Family, and Fans;

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD. WIth that came a lot of things that I thought were universal but turns out are actualy ADHD.

Just a disclaimer here. These things are connected to my ADHD but aren’t necessarily only seen in people with ADHD. (They can also be influenced by my dyslexia, RSD, or anxiety.)

5. Planners

In highschool, I struggled with managing my time for assignments, projects, or readings. I tried everything to get organized. School gave me planners and I would write everything down, but the moment it was in the planner I forgot about it.

What finally worked in grade 11 was an electronic agenda. I put everything in it and I got a reminder that day. Unfortunately, it wasn’t able to remind me to start working on projects early. The electronic agenda didn’t work in university and I made writing essays the night before into an art.

I”ve tried to look at my work calendar each day and have sticky notes to remind me of things to do. I also have a very plentiful google notes account.

4. Voices and Habits

I thought when people said they were thinking of nothing, it meant that they didn’t want to explain the multilayered thoughts that were running through their head. Same with “clearing your mind” I thought that meant focusing on nothingness to try and stop your brain from thinking of everything. Apparently, not everyone has multiple voices in their head that narrate, explain, plan, and jump around.

When someone said they needed to form a habit, I thought they were exaggerating. I thought a habit was something you managed to remember to do everyday, not that it was something you could do without thinking. If I don’t concentrate on what I’m doing, even if I’ve done it a million times before, it won’t go well. I can’t trust my autopilot.

3. Inability to do only one thing

Go to class without doodling or drinking a coffee? Not bounce my leg when doing math? Not listen to music or watch TV while working? Walk without music?

Those all sound horrible. I thought I was just really good a multi-tasking. No, I just needed to keep myself from getting bored. It was shocking to me that people could focus for a whole 2 hour meeting (no matter the interest level) without fidgeting or drinking coffee or water.

2. Time

I absolutely HATE being late. I was yelled at a lot for it when I was young. I was told that no one would take me seriously if I was late, that it was rude, that I’d lose friends.

I tried everything to avoid being late or slow but I was late for school, got distracted going to the washroom, and sometimes wouldn’t notice the end of recess because I was so focused on what I was thinking.

By high school, I had realized that the downsides of being ridiculously early were minor compared to being late. That’s why I’m more likely to be 30-60 minutes early for an event than I am to be 5 minutes late. Also why I always have a book with me.

I still slip sometimes and I still feel panicked being late, even for coffee with a friend.

1. Form Paralysis

This one is embarrassing, since I design forms for work. However, when it comes to a medium-sized form or larger, I panic. I’m fine with the ones before you see a doctor or get a shot but anything above a page fills me with dread and it swims around as I try to understand what they want.

It builds and gets to the point that I can’t do it. It was so bad that I didn’t fill some important ones and it cost me money and opportunities in my writing career. (Jen’s been helping a lot.)

It’s easier with an HTML form vs a paper or PDF form. The smaller pages and clearer separations help.

This translates to any task that requires lots of steps. It’s a real struggle to get done, or started.

Again these aren’t things that affect every person with ADHD and they might not be exclusive to that. It’s my lived experience and things that have negatively impacted my life.

Be kind and stay safe,

Éric

I’m old fashioned and I miss the cinema

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Hello my friends, family, and fans;

I’m getting to the age where technology and habits I adopted as a kid are now considered old fashioned. I still like physical media (CDs, Blu-ray, etc), I like having a watch, and I miss going to the cinema.

The older I get, the worse my vision gets, the more I prefer to avoid fancy wrap around screens, or 3D, or that kind of thing. We went to see Taylor Swift’s concert movie (fantastic btw) and it remined me of how much I miss.

Things I miss about going to the Cinema

1. No interruptions

I have trouble sitting and doing nothing for 2 hours. It makes me feel like I should be multitasking and getting some work done. So I constantly stop myself from being able to fully enjoy the movie.

There’s also the fact that I have two kids and they tend to either be completely absorbed or making a racket during a movie.

2. Popcorn

I like cinema popcorn. Its tasty, comes in large sizes, and gives me something to do with myself so that I can relax and enjoy the movie. Even if I do go now, it’ll be a little while before I’m comfortable eating in a crowd again.

Arguably I make better popcorn, but on a regular day with the kids bed times if we have time for a movie we don’t have the 10-15 minutes it takes to make.

3. The feeling of an event

It’s an event to go to the movies. When I was a kid it involved researching in a newspaper, driving over an hour each direction, and waiting in line for a ticket. Now it’s much easier but I still get that joyful excitement and anticipation when I walk into the building.

Things I don’t miss

1. People

I never liked crowds and people are the worst. At the Taylor Swift movie there were several people in front of me that decided to check their phones every ten minutes. They also seemed to have their phones set to the highest brightness level.

2. Travelling

It’s only 15-20 minutes away but it feels like forever and I hate the anxiety of feeling like I’m going to be late for the movie. It’s a small thing, I know.

3. Closed Captions

I wish they put CC’s on all movies. There was a time where radio and cinema was highly influenced by theatre and public speaking. This meant the actors were encouraged to speak loudly and clearly. Now there are directors who prefer mumbling and who don’t care about dialogue, not to mention incorrect sound mixing.

I feel like I miss 10%-15% of the movie because I don’t have subtitles.

I look forward to returning to the cinema, but I’m still not comfortable going as often or in the same way. That being said, I hope to see The Marvels sometime soon.

Later days,

Éric

Location and Time

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Why Westmeath?

It’s set in the city of Westmeath, Ontario, which is a real place, but in real life is a small farming area. In our book, something significant was discovered there and a very large city popped up very quickly (think 3/4 the size of Montreal, about 1.1 million people) in the 1970s. The sister city is Demers, Quebec, which is about the same size. There are about 60 high schools in Westmeath.

We wanted a fictional city so that we could add areas, streets, and stores without worrying about real locations. There are certain areas that are based off of real-life locations (Kennedy’s apartment is based on the apartments at Lees in Ottawa, for example).

The characters were originally from a table top role playing game we played in 2010 and at the time, Éric wanted to have a city that could be a pastiche of Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, and Gotham.

Why 2002?

The book is set in 2002 to avoid conflicting or crossing over with too many elements of the rest of the Aetherverse, specifically events that will happen in summer of 2016 in book 7 of Elizabeth Investigates Her Last Bow.

Beyond wanting to avoid giving away the series ending (not to mention not wanting to deal with the pandemic) we also were in late high school and early university at the time and have some fond memories.

Being an Author is hard but worth it

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Hello My Imaginary Friends,

Being a author is hard. You are constantly bombarded by articles that say things like:

Ok that last one was a trick and actually pretty positive.

Borrowed from Usborne Books.

The point is that even when you’re published you have to work your ass off to get your book in peoples hands and only 25% will actually read that book. (These statistics are my educated guess.) From those that read your book they’ll tell you they like it and then put it on their shelves and forget about it. Until you publish something else and if they actually liked it they might buy the next one.

That’s the life cycle of a regular book. One that doesn’t get turned into a TV show or movie, explode in sales, or cause a kerfuffle with its content.

I see what some fantastic authors do to encourage their book sales and I feel like I should be doing more. More writing, more advertising, more promotion, more writing, more events, more submitting to review, and did I say more writing?

An excellent guide to the care and feeding of a writer by Agarthan Guide.

The real problem with writing, novels specifically, is the speed of return. I so envy my friends who write fanfiction and can receive almost immediate feedback and love. A book takes me a year or two to write, another year to edit and pitch, and (if I’m lucky) another year to edit and publish. Sometimes it’s longer. This week marks the four year anniversary of me starting to write Everdome. It will hopefully be published in either 2019 or 2020.

So being an author is hard but there’s nothing like the feeling of holding your book after all that time or having someone tell you how much they loved your book.

Long story short or as the kids-these-days say TL;DR, it’s not easy but I love it and I’m not going to stop.

 

Later days,

Éric

Blush Guest Post: Polyamory

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Thank you to the contributors to all the guest posts for Blush and Fandom Travel! If anyone else is interesting in writing for either of these topics (and it can easily be kept anonymous!) please send me an email to jenericdesigns@gmail.com and we can discuss which topic you’d like to write about.

This week’s guest post is written anonymously. Please respect their privacy by not trying to guess who they are.

Image from www.polyinfo.org
Image from www.polyinfo.org

Being Polyamorous isn’t about sex; I think that’s a preconceived notion many people have about it; it’s about having a relationship. More specifically it’s that I have multiple relationships, some of varying degrees, but they’re all relationships with some kind of emotional connection. I think a lot of people assume that being poly is the same as having an open relationship, or being a swinger; that at the end of the day it’s just about having multiple sexual partners, it’s about “free love” and the likes; and while we are free to love, it’s not about all the things that 60’s anti-hippy propaganda films think. Our relationships can vary from being very good friends to marriage.

I personally learned about poly the old fashioned way, word of mouth. My partner and I made new friends, who led us to more friends, and through them we learned about it, and just how common it actually was, finding almost a network of different poly relationships, and that we were far more connected to it than we realized. We spoke about it and realized that it was something that caught our interest; we’d been together for a long time, and felt we were ready to take the plunge.

I can’t say that we have any specific labels for our version of poly, my first partner (the one I’m married to) is someone I generally refer to as my primary, but otherwise it’s pretty simple. Other people I’m with are partners, but not referring to them as my primary doesn’t mean I care about them any less. We get asked how it works fairly often, the answer is the same as for any relationship: communication, honesty, and time. Talk with each other, if something’s bothering you, let your partner(s) know. Be truthful, lying doesn’t help anyone, especially when more than two people are involved, and make sure you have time for everyone; if you can’t give someone the time they deserve, you might need to reassess and make time for them. Poly isn’t easy, but no relationship is. Give it the time and thought, and anyone can make it work.

If you’re enjoying the Blush blogs, consider learning more with Blush: The Card Game from Renaissance Press. 

Screw Money Time is Knowledge

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John Lennon

You were only killing time and it’ll kill you right back / Come on! come on! / It’s time to burn up the fuse / You’ve got nothing to do and even less to lose
– Meatloaf “Out Of The Frying Pan”

Wasting Time

Have you ever thought about a project, game, tv show, series of movies, or book and thought, “Dang! That was a large chunk of my life.”

I read an average of 15 hours a week (Fiction, articles, news, facebook). I read much more fiction in grade school and high school and almost finished an English degree in university. If you stretch that over my entire life (24 years of which I read regularly) that’s 18,720 hours or just over 2 years of my life (It’s probably a little higher than that). Some would say I’ve been slacking that’s only 1/18th of my life.

I’m sure if you looked into my other hobbies (Writing, TV, Movies, Tabletop games, Video games, Tabletop role playing games, acting, and talking) you’d find that it’s a huge part of my life as I am a “ GamingBuff”

Is all that a waste of time? Does my deep seeded love and obsession with stories “Wasting Time”?

If you know me you’ll already know that I don’t think it was but I hear so many people accusing activities of being a waste of time.

I’ve seen every Star Trek episode ever aired (Yes including the Animated Series) does that mean I’ve wasted over 600 hours not counting the movies? I don’t think so, I think it made me think throughout the 6 series. It challenged my idea of humanity, morals, and various other concepts.

“Well that’s Star Trek,” I hear you thinking. It’s not. Any story has something in it to make you think and challenge your preconceptions about the world. Even if all you have to think is how bad this story is and how you could fix it.

I think for something to be worth your time, it needs to have two things:

1. An idea or lesson (Something to make you think)

2. Fun (Something that you enjoy)

If you read my book or movie reviews you know I’ll talk about “important” stories that I didn’t enjoy but that I believe are wonderful. It means I didn’t enjoy it but it made me think. These are often great works that are too painful for me to re-watch but I feel that I’ve grown while watching/reading them.

So my imaginary friends, next time someone tells you to get your nose out of a book, your ass off the couch, your head from a game, or your hand off the polyhedral dice, and stop wasting time. Ask them what is more important than learning about your world and yourself through its best, worst, and average stories. (I’d also apply this to Sports, Travelling, and Creating.)

Until later, remember to see your world through a critical eye.

Analyze, Understand, and Grow!

John Lennon

Time and perception = Time Travel

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The subjectivity of time fascinates me. It’s kind of like time travel and you know how I feel about time travel (I love it).

A good example of how mind boggling this concept is, think about the bus. Let’s say, 2 people take the bus at the same time and get off at the same time. The trip lasts 35 minutes. Person 1 is a bus-reader, like me, and sits down to read a good book. Person 2 suffers from motion sickness and doesn’t own a music player.

Person 1 fought dragons or whatever they’re into reading, while Person 2 fought with nausea. They both experienced things but Person 1 would say that they’ve experience more while Person 2 would say they didn’t experience anything.

As for time, Person 1 barely noticed the trip. Maybe they even got frustrated that it didn’t last a few pages extra. Person 2 noticed every excruciating moment.

If we were going to do this in pseudo-scientific math stuff:

Person 1: Time Noticed < Real Time < Experience

Person 2: Experience < Real Time < Time Noticed

Isn’t that cool?

How a character experiences time is extremely important and is rarely exploited by authors. The reason is simple, playing with character subjectivity, is difficult. Not to mention the fact that the human mind will try to compensate while reading.

Does anyone have examples of an author doing this well?