So…
I’m back.
Sort of.
Um, sorry for basically just disappearing for the year. I at least have a pretty good excuse this time around. Two of them, even! I had a mental breakdown in January and it lasted for a little while. I recovered from it and then I learned something fucking MASSIVE. I have ADHD! I’ve been considering this as an option for a couple of years now, but an obvious side effect of ADHD, anxiety, and depression is that…you don’t really get shit done because your brain is so broken. So it wasn’t until this year that I finally figured out how to determine this.
Then I got medicated. And that…changed things. Mostly for the better. Like, I feel a lot better in general. I can finally fucking focus on things. Unfortunately for my fan fiction, I had incurred quite a backlog of other shit I needed to get done in my life, and in truth, I’m still dealing with it even now, months later. This is compounded by the fact that I’m still grappling with depression (though thankfully not as much) and also readjusting to life medicated. I had kind of hoped it would just, you know, fix most everything. And honestly, for a time? It did. But my body and mind are still adapting and we’re still figuring shit out.
So, this was definitely one of the big puzzle pieces I was missing in my life. The diagnosis answers some of the bigger questions, enough so that it’s shifted my internal landscape and it has caused me to reconsider a couple of things. One of the bigger side effects, ironically, seems to be an acceleration of my wanting to leave things in the past. For most of my life, I’ve found myself revisiting things: games, books, movies, songs, old fan fic ideas. I’m still doing this, but it’s obvious to me that it has been slowly fading out over the past half decade or so, and since I’ve become medicated, I’ve noticed it seems to be accelerating. I think this is because people with ADHD tend to get anxiety, which was clearly the case for me, and people with anxiety tend to gravitate towards the familiar, which seems to have a side effect of more intense nostalgia. The obvious problem here is that more of my time gets taken up retreading the same material instead of experiencing new things.
I guess now I should give an update on the general fan fiction front.
STARCRAFT - SURVIVAL: This is back online. I reread the entire thing (and made some edits), and now I’m back to writing it. I’m going to try and be better about more regularly updating it. When I started finally feeling like I could (or at least SHOULD) get back to writing something for Obsidian Thirteen, I knew it was going to be either this or The Callisto Protocol. I was leaning towards Callisto, but then, I dunno, this story just sort of reached out and grabbed me. I’ve got a rough idea of the path forward, and I’m liking it. I’m looking forward to working on this one again.
THE CALLISTO PROTOCOL: This one will be the next one I fire back up. I need to do a reread of this as well, refresh myself, do some touch ups and edits. I’m not sure when, but I’m intending to fire this back up before 2026. Part of the issue is that I still have a lot going on in my life, enough that, even medicated, I’m struggling to find time or, more accurately, energy, to tend to my fan fics.
THE DOOM CHRONICLES: It’s looking like I’m going to have to wait until 2026 or thereabouts to fire this one back up. I’ve been having thoughts and I’m actually playing DOOM 3 for a friend of mine right now, as she’s never seen it, and that’s sort of rekindling the fires. Right now, I’ve got the tentative idea to fire up Episode Four on December 10th, DOOM’s 32nd anniversary, because why not? But we’ll see how that works out. I’m also considering getting some official artwork done for the fan fic. Get proper drawings of Jack, Jennifer, Kyra, some of the others, get some actual artwork made for the individual episodes for cover art. Hopefully people would like that, I know I would. I probably won’t reread everything I’ve written so far for this story because…that’s 400,000 words. Or about five novels worth of content. But…maybe. Might do me some good.
As for the rest of it, what I said in the previous update still more or less holds true. Still wanna write for Far Cry - Primal, Halo, StarFox, and KoTOR. Still kinda want to do something for Quake 4 and Red Faction. Although Quake 4 might end up getting rolled into a bigger fan fiction. Still noodling on that one. It always made me sad that I lost so much in terms of interest for old fan fiction ideas, but now that I’m on the other side of being medicated, I kinda feel better about it. Almost like holding onto hope that someday I’d find the spark to write Half-Life again or another of the other couple of dozen IPs I wanted to write for was weighing me down, and finally letting go of it all has sort of made everything less complicated and generally better. Ironically, even with dropping probably ninety percent of my old ideas, it will still take me a long time to get through those that remain. Half because my real life stuff takes priority and half because I simply do not write short stories anymore. I don’t even write novel-length stories anymore. Everything apparently has to be an epic-length series with me and I don’t really know why. I’m trying to find something of a balance, but it’s difficult, even now.
Anyway, that’s it. That’s my update. Sorry for how bad I am at it these days. Hopefully I’m not just talking to a void by now.