I’ve had a bad time with depression over the last week or so. It happens, and eventually I do pull through. I’ve suffered bouts of depression for a very long time. When I get depressed I find my OCD gets a lot worse, so the house is reasonably neat, clean and tidy. I suppose that’s a good side effect of my OCD.

I’ve been trying to force myself to do things to take my mind off the depression. When depression strikes, motivation can be extremely hard. I don’t become suicidal these days, instead tending to curl up in bed and switch off for days on end. That is bad, and I realise that so I’ve been trying to find things for me to do. But that isn’t always easy. The writing and editing that is supposed to be my work has slid a little bit. Over the last day I’ve managed a little bit of editing of a book (which is long over deadline now). I’ve written absolutely nothing new in around a month, which sucks for a writer. I find myself staring at a text document with my hands hovering over the keyboard, and that’s where I’ll stay until I give up and turn the computer off.

I’ve had just enough energy to occasionally read my emails, and even more occasionally read the odd blog post. Apart from that, my computers have been mostly turned off. I tried rekindling other activities, and have managed over a couple of days to spend time laying out an oval of model railway track and test running a lot of locomotives, some of which haven’t run in five or six years. It passed some time, but it always felt like something was missing because of the depression.

I’ve also bought some marine plywood for finishing the renevation of the ASC that I was working on over the summer. Hopefully I can throw myself into doing that over this next week, and that might just cheer me up a little.

Still, I can feel I’m getting better. I’ve had tons of rejections back from agents for my book. There’s still a few replies outstanding off submissions, but it seems that every agent is just turning around submissions unread in the main for whatever reasons (usually full lists is the explanation given). I find this deeply frustrating given the rave reviews the book gets from everyone who does read it. Unfortunately none of the people reading it are agents or publishers *shakes fist* I have a list of editors to send out to next, though I’m not being helped by printer issues. I think I will have to bite the bullet and get another toner cartridge to replace the one which managed barely 500 pages before it died. I shan’t be buying from the same supplier again (and yes, I would have sent it back except that I tried to fix the problem – which technically I did – but the toner leaked out in the process)
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