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A day in the disordered #atozchallenge

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  1. My AtoZ blogging challenge reveal 2021 #AtoZChallenge
  2. A for ‘are we there yet?’ #atozchallenge
  3. B is for Books – Walking off the earth #Finalchapterinthisbook #newbook #atozchallenge
  4. C is for Can do #atozchallenge
  5. A day in the disordered #atozchallenge
  6. E is for “eeek, I overdid it!” #atozchallenge

(again, as this is backdated, I’m writing this with the benefit of hindsight).

I did actually have this rather neat post about ‘a day in the life’, but, the last few days led to a bit of an epiphany.

You know there’s an Instagram bubble? I think when we write ‘days in the life’ that we sometimes make ‘blog bubbles’. So, instead of talking about what my ideal day should look like, and what it does when I’ve planned it out, I’m going to write about what my day actually is. And for the first time, I’m even going to include some of the mental health stuff I deal with – so this post could be mildly triggering.
I’ll be possibly alluding to self-harm, definitely talking about psychosis and depression and anxiety and insomnia. And I have a favor to ask at the end of this post.

A day in the disordered

I fell asleep at 11:30pm – a year of training and working with an app called Headspace and other meditation apps (honourable mentions to Digipill and Let’s Mediate (I have them on Android, they may exist on iOs), alongside my partner, which is now 80% of how my sleep works out.

Unfortunately, about 1:30am, I wake up again. I wake up to a voice, that I always hear. She’s my constant companion, and she’s very hurtful. If I’m lucky, I take a sip of water, I go to sleep again, and I might get to stay there for a bit. Most nights lately though, I’ve been waking up and finally falling asleep again at 5am.
The advice is, of course, if you’re not able to sleep in bed, to get up. But if I do that and she starts causing trouble for me. At her worst, she can trap me in the smallest rooms in the house. She’s the reason that I can’t get out of the house alone. She’s the thing I’m fighting back with my favor, but we’ll get there.

If I don’t get to sleep until 5 or 6am, I’ll either stay asleep till 8am, or 11am, or sometimes, I’m asleep till 2pm. And because of that, my day is always harder to plan for. How do I plan to be up at 9am, and exercised and ready to work, if I’m not getting to sleep until 6am? The answer is I don’t.
Insomnia is a difficult and hard to live with disorder – couple it with anxiety and psychosis, and though meditation helps, I’m frequently operating in arrears of sleep.

And that’s why I can’t talk about a day in my life. I have half an hour when I wake up that’s a set routine (get up, unplug and box tech coming downstairs with me, plug in anything, such as my Bluetooth headphones or spare batteries that need charged, wash face, rarely moisturise (I’ll be talking about that in S for skin routine, cause apparently, I’m annoying as all hell about that), meditate for ten minutes after making the bed, then come down. At night, I either go up before Tempus and grab a bath, then make my juice/waterbottle for my bedside, plug everything in, brush my teeth, get my Bluetooth headphones connected so that I can meditate, set up the book we’re listening to on Audible. Depending on how I feel then, I either read for 20 minutes, then meditate, or lately, I’ve just meditated, and used a sleepscape to go to sleep to. And then wake up again at 1:30am.

I can’t talk about this really here, but there is going to be an I for Insomnia over on bi-polarbears (the link won’t work until the post goes live 🙂 )

And that brings me to a favor…

As many of you may or may not know, I’m an author. My major project this year is to talk about the fact that I live with a pretty severe (though not the worst, by a long shot) psychosis. I think I’m probably at the end of the ‘living in the community level of it,’ though, she’s quite hard to deal with. As an author too, it becomes difficult. I ‘hear’ my characters, and I don’t like that I hear and see things as well as part of my mental health.

On my birthday, I’ll be releasing a collection of mental health books. I’m not putting up the pre-orders yet, but I am asking people to subscribe to my newsletter, so I can start talking about the run-up to releasing them.
There may be a Patreon, there may not.

What I want to do though, is to remove some stigma surrounding both hearing voices and other psychosis, but I also want to acknowledge that authors do hear voices, and that *is not* as far as I’m concerned, is a psychosis. But I guess that’s between you and your healthcare team.

What I do know is that she’s stolen five years of my life. I’ll never get them back, and while I’ve done some things in there, I’ve not gotten everything that I wanted to do, done. There are other things, of course, that got in the way, it’s not just been mental health, but if I can remove from the whole concept of ‘we don’t talk about this, we’ll get into trouble’, then I will.
And I hope you’ll help me.

If you’d like to, ALL I need you to do is to sign up for my newsletter and join my mental health street team. That’s it. If you also want to share this post or the post about the project, I’d be delighted.

I’ll be talking about about this at P for Psychosis, because it’s important to me. Here, and at Bi-polarbears. I’ve avoided telling people I have issues such as psychosis for so many years, that it’s a bit uncomfortable for me, but I also know I’m in a good community, that accepts me for who I am, and knows me as I am, psychosis or otherwise. I hope to help others like me – because I think in the coming years, as we come out of lockdowns and the shadows of what we did to deal with the pandemic, that mental health is going to be a major issue – more major than even now, and I want to help people that need help. So I am.


The blog of D Kai Wilson - The blog of D Kai Wilson - text by Kai

E is for Edinburgh (Alt-Edinburgh) #atozchallenge

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I’ve been writing about Edinburgh from my perspective from a very long time, but with some subtle differences.
Some of it is to do with convenience, some of it to do with memory.

Mostly though…

Mostly, I think I change Edinburgh, because if I don’t write it differently, I might write something that’s not – exactly – right anyway.
While the city changes slowly, since I’ve moved away, every time I go back, something massive has changed. And if I’m noticing those things every time I return home, then I can’t imagine that my readers might not notice.
So, I’m when I’m writing about Edinburgh, it’s the alternative version.

I thought I’d share some of the places that are especially precious to me, and I’ve definitely taken liberties with.

Goddess Falls and more…

Colinton Dell has a small grotto, with a waterfall behind it – it’s often referred to in most of my short stories, if I’m not talking about Crickley Hill or the Arboretum locally because I see them more. But, when I talk about a lot of the stories I write about Goddess Falls, I’m talking about there.
Beautiful, and important and sacred to me, I love it there, and try to convey that when I write.

There’s one other place that I write about…

There’s a bit of dual carriageway between Fountain Bridge, and Lothian Road that appeared in Banshee. But it’s not quite the way I describe it (moreso now that they’re building more and more around that area), but for more reasons than just the changes in buildings. As is illustrated in the link above, there’s a tunnel in Colinton Dell – I often use my memories of that tunnel, when it was dark.

There’s so much more about Edinburgh that I’ve written about, but these are two areas that I’ve written on recently.

Do you rewrite parts of the world you live in so you can use it?

Books by D Kai Wilson-Viola - Books by D Kai Wilson-Viola - text by Kai

D is for Darkness PD

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I guess my AtoZ of books couldn’t be complete without a mention of D for Darkness PD. It is a huge part of the worlds that I write in.

The place

Darkness PD is the main police station that Elliot, Harper and Morrigan are all based at. Darkness itself is a city of four districts, and Elliot works for district 1.

Most of Darkness PD is technologically connected, but Elliot, Harper and Morri have different difficulties with it – Elliot doesn’t like tech, Harper can’t use it due to the fact that he’s a technomage, and Morri is working undercover to expose the corruption in the police itself.

Technomage

Harper’s status is mostly explained later in the storyline, but technological mages in Darkness itself is a bit of a mystery, which I’ll be talking about in M for Magic – another area where I’ll be talking about all three book types.
You can read more about DarknessPD on the website.

Books by D Kai Wilson-Viola - Books by D Kai Wilson-Viola - text by Kai

C is for Cantrips

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I thought today, I’d introduce you to Shula, my changeling mage. She’s quite a lot of fun, and though I can’t see what the link she has to Elliot, yet, she does link through the rest of my IP’s via the latter part of AMFAR, and she is brilliant fun, meet my changeling, Shula.

Shula is a late teenage changeling, running away from her ‘destiny’ – as a elemental fire hag’s daughter. But when her questing companions each discover they need to return home to deal with various issues, she realises a more powerful force is moving against them, and has to deal with all of the issues that are building to a change that cannot be.

I’ll be talking about her more, in a post called H for Houses, where I introduce her first trilogy.

Books by D Kai Wilson-Viola - Books by D Kai Wilson-Viola - text by Kai

B is for Books – Walking off the earth #Finalchapterinthisbook #newbook #atozchallenge

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I’ve had many ‘this is my hardest’s to deal with – probably more than anyone my age has any right to deal with in some ways.  But this one hit the hardest about three days ago, and I thought there was going to be a bit of give, a bit of wriggle room, but no.  I finally encountered the words that just broke me in two.  And I won’t repeat them.  I’ve deleted them.  But I came to a screeching halt, and I’m not sure how things will change, but change they absolutely will.  

But first – I have a heck of a lot of grieving and coming to terms with things to do – and I need to build an actual, sensible plan to sustain my businesses.  And I have to accept that part of that is digging out my work ethic and dealing with everything that’s gone on lately and putting things right. And I’ve come to the conclusion that to do that, this book needs to end.  This story, no matter that it’s not a happily ever after needs to become something that we relegate to the ‘not touching’ drawer.  Not everything that’s happened – no, they’re elements that can be reused.  But the tale of the sad girl that lives inside her house and does nothing…that’s a bust.  That’s so much of a bust we’re not making it past the first draft.

I’m not ashamed but…

When you’re where I am, you’re not *supposed* to admit bullying gets to you.  I’m the moderator of one of the biggest indie communities on Facebook, I run a lot of things for a lot of different people and I find myself, daily, waking up and dreading the comments that appear here, and on the other blogs, I run.  In my inbox, on Twitter, by PM on Facebook. And, in with that realisation is that I’m as unkind to myself as all of these people.  My self-talk is terrible.  I’d rather sleep (or try to) than work.  And I hate admitting that, but my sleep is disturbed again, and it’s getting difficult to do *much* of anything.

I do have one ray of light though, beyond my family, who are just the best, and my friends, who equally rock, and that’s my books. I’ll be talking about them more naturally in the coming days, but for now, I just wanted to thank anyone that’s supported me as a writer. I don’t always get to write, but it is one of my few places of solace. And if I’m walking off this earth to another, I couldn’t do it without knowing that I was writing the story as I went.

Today’s other AtoZ’s on the blogs I take part on.

Books by Kai – Black Monday
Fiction by Kai – the Knight of Coins
Bi-polar bears – Being, not doing
These our Fandoms – a quick skimmer onto the things in Battle Ground by Jim Butcher.

Oh, if you want to keep track of all my posts in one place, I set up a syndicated blog again. It’ll have everything in it, eventually, though it does take a few hours to catch up with stuff!
See you tomorrow!

The blog of D Kai Wilson - The blog of D Kai Wilson - text by Kai

B is for Black Monday #atozchallenge

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Black Monday is one my series’ that I wrote, starting in 2004. It span off into Salvagers and some other books, but at it’s core, it was the first place – ever – I found and created Farran.
It’s a book though I can’t really talk about right now. Mostly because it’s a bit hard to write about the Apocalypse when you kinda feel like you’re loving through it in some ways (see A for Almost, or A for Are we there yet?)

Talking about why the earth still ends…

I gotta be honest, the core premise for Black Monday is an actual explosion on Earth that wiped it out…entirely.
So. One of the major things that I discovered, is that I didn’t want to write about it when I was worrying about Tom and his kidney surgery. Then…well, the world did kinda go into various versions of lockdown.

It’s been tiring and scary the last few months especially, so I thought I’d ease back into Black Monday and talk about the Captain and 2IC.

Captain Gedren and Lt Farran

One of the main character pairings in Black Monday is Gedren and Farran. Gedren is the Captain of the Grey Shadow, which is one of the five ships in the colony group. That colony group was originally set to inhabit a new part of the universe, knowing they could come home. So when the earth is destroyed, as they leave, the reactions of Gedren and Farran are almost polar opposite.

Gedren is more than a little over the top in his reactions, and basically becomes the worst of whatever he had been before he and the ship left. Slightly controlling before, he becomes a despot, and creates the beginning of the flotilla split. the worst of his character flaws lead to the destruction of not only the earth but one of the landing sites for the original flotilla, and sets up book 2 of the series, though as both the destruction of the Earth and the original flotilla spot is discussed in flashback, it’s not too much of a spoiler :).

Farran, on the other hand, basically ends up convicted of the destruction of earth, and becomes less cocky and sure of himself. Before where he was a fine, if flawed second in command, he becomes someone that needs to make things right. Farran’s story ends in the middle of Black Monday, as he’s placed is Stasis, and is picked up again in Salvagers.

I guess Black Monday will be back on the docket soon – we do have a cover for it after all, but it’s still a story I’m struggling with. Ending an earth that had a near miss isn’t really something I’d like to do right now.

Books by D Kai Wilson-Viola - Books by D Kai Wilson-Viola - text by Kai

A is for American Gods #atozchallenge2021

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Kicking off our AtoZ for 2021 is American Gods. And I’ll be talking about the book, the show and why they, like a lot of [...]

Kai Viola – These our Fandoms - Kai Viola – These our Fandoms - text by Kai

A for ‘are we there yet?’ #atozchallenge

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Late start to the AtoZ I know, but I’ve had work and other stuff to deal with today. I think the title of this might give you an insight into me, more than anything else. I’m not… exactly … a patient person. I love to know where we’re going, what we’re doing, and be there. I do not do well with waits. Waiting is anathema to me in fact. My impatience is so bad that I’ve actually made up games just to get through hard meetings. I think part of it is because I’m anxious (which I’ll mention later), but part of it is just that I can’t stand being still. Even for a minute. And I hate that my body lets me down so that very often, even if I don’t want to be, I am. A also really stands for a couple of other things. I’m an animal lover – I have two cats, and would adopt more if allowed. I want a dog, though, practically, I’m not allowed them. I’m also anxious. If you want a bit of background on that, I talked a little and will talk more about it on my mental health blog, bi-polarbears. Anxiety does, however rule my life. I’m also also, an author. That, I’ll be showing off on both fiction.bykai and booksbykai. Writing is life for me. As evidenced by the fact that I’ve linked to all of the AtoZ blog posts I’m doing this month by mentioning I’m also sharing an AtoZ with a friend, and my post today was American Gods. An amazing book. With all that awesome ‘all about me’ A entry, I think I’ll close with adieu 😉 (because I’m not sleeping and I’m a goofball). (later in the month I’ll just link back to each post ;)) Tell me something beginning with A about you?

The blog of D Kai Wilson - The blog of D Kai Wilson - text by Kai

A is for Almost….

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Almost. In the UK, we’re ‘almost’ there. 30 million vaccinated. Almost out of lockdown. But we’re also almost at the point where many of my books will be anathema for a while. It’s not easy being a post apocalyptic writer when the world goes all… near apocalyptic.

Were we really that close?

I think we were in a quiet sort of way. Had vaccines not become a thing, had one superpower pushed one way instead of another, I don’t know. A lot of the ‘I don’t know’, though, is very much because last year, we were getting over a rough few months with Titanboi, and preparing Artenapan to come home from college, all against the backdrop of a world almost at the brink of what we could cope with.

So how does this relate to my books?

I guess it’s why nothing has really happened this year. I’ve almost signed with places. I’ve almost gotten organised. I’ve also almost been so anaemic I could barely move. Well, no, I was actually so anaemic…. anyway. Almost is an important word for what I’ll talk about in the coming month. Because all of the ‘almosts’ are going to be here soon. Which means I have a whole world to explore with you! Because while I was dealing with all of the ‘almosts’, it became obvious that my universes – all of them – are linked. So… I have no reason to feel bad about what I’m writing, it’ll all come back to Elliot in the end. Ready for a ride?

Books by D Kai Wilson-Viola - Books by D Kai Wilson-Viola - text by Kai