In a recent blog post about my emotional tone in my writing, I used a phrase that inspired this blog post, the above image that I created, and the poem I wrote over it.

Mental Atmosphere.

“I finally have hope after years of struggling to find the right words to describe the issue. I felt the mental atmosphere around me changing as I read my editor’s words, and along with the thoughts I’d already been having, I can’t wait to see what happens next.”

When I was writing that phrase it felt right. I imagined my hands waving around me, me head, my torso, at the atmosphere around me.

I’m not talking depression. It’s more like a writing mental space. Just as we have a personal space physically around us, and don’t like it when people get too close, we have a mental space around us too.

For me it was heavy and dark with my burnout, and slowly dissipated with all of the thinking, cultivating, and doing that I went through in order to get rid of it. It gradually lightened and is now sitting around me, clear, and clear-minded. But all of the thinking I had to do trying to figure out what was wrong with my writing, oi, the hard work of it all, when all it needed was my editor’s input.

I’ve been trying to figure it out for nearly four years, and I only just considered asking my editor back in mid-March after she edited a novel duology. She’s edited all of my fiction and most of my non-fiction, she knows my style and how I’ve progressed and she’s been incredibly insightful, but I spoke about that last time.

Right place, right time for when it was needed most, I guess.