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Day: July 24, 2012

July 24, 2012
JennyTrout
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Depression is a mean fucker.

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I hate depression. It makes me into a different person, a person I don’t like. A person who snaps at her kids, a person who takes everything too personally. A person who googles “Jennifer Armintrout sucks” just to see if anyone agrees with her.

I get stuck in these deep grooves with depression, where I think I’m worthless, and I consider quitting writing. I feel absolutely no drive or passion to write, I open up old projects I’ve abandoned and tell myself, “You’re so lazy and worthless. You could at least finish this and self-publish it. You’ll have to, because no one will buy it, since you’re a shitty writer. You should just quit. Today. Contact everyone involved in your career and tell them to throw out your contracts and just quit. Go get a real job and stop being such a loser. Look at what you’re doing to your family. You’re never going to come up with any good ideas again, and if you do, you won’t follow through on them. You should just give up today.”

How can I let myself talk to me that way? That’s insane. If I heard someone saying that out loud to another writer, I would punch that person’s teeth in. I would be outraged beyond words.

But I suspect I’m not alone. I bet any number of writers struggling with depression have said those exact things to themselves. I bet I’m not the only person who struggles with this, even at the best of times. And while my career is certainly not enjoying it’s “best time,” things aren’t the worst they’ve ever been, either. So, what do I have to be defeated about? Nothing. It’s just a trick of my diseased brain, telling me mean stuff to knock me down a peg, just for kicks.

I don’t know why my brain chemistry hates me. I don’t know why it tries to destroy my confidence and mess with me, but I know that tomorrow I won’t feel this way. If that’s enough to get me through today, maybe tomorrow I’ll have confidence again, maybe something will smack me in the face and say, “Suck it up. When you google ‘Jennifer Armintrout sucks’ the first page of results is mostly shit you’ve said about yourself.”

That’s the carrot dangling in front of me right now. I’m going to just survive today. But if you suffer from depression, please feel free to share your stories in the comments, if that helps you.

July 24, 2012
JennyTrout
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Apologies times

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I got snappy with some of you this morning, in comments on this blog, twitter DMs, and an email. And I want to apologize. I’m astounded by the enthusiasm with which you guys have passed this blog around the internet, and my silly little recaps have become much, much bigger than I thought they would. I’m overwhelmed, and I reacted badly to readers because of that. There’s no excuse for an author who routinely rants about bad author behavior, to participate in bad author behavior. So, I’m really sorry to the parties involved, you know who you are.

July 24, 2012
JennyTrout
2 Comments

Let me show you the best fish in the world.

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I love animals. I have lots of pets. I have two cats, two dogs, and some fucking amazing fish.
You may recall that in my book Blood Ties Book One: The Turning, I used the goldfish’s infamous three second memory as a metaphor for… something. I don’t remember. That was like six years ago. I can’t even remember my husband’s birthday half the time. But the point is, goldfish actually have memories. Mine, for example, remember that my cousin D-Rock is bad news, because she reaches into their tank to terrify them. They are also loving and awesome.
I get more attached to fish than to probably any other animal. I always have. I have a long history of awesome fish, but these are my current awesome fish:

I like to think they are saying, “Jen’s back! And she has a camera!”

That picture gives you a sense of their awesome scale. That is a thirty gallon tank. They are enormous.

They have some stuff in their tank, which I change up every now and then so they don’t get bored. The pirate ship and the octopus are in there all the time, but the chicken is sometimes swapped out for a glow-in-the-dark zombie. I like to think I’m broadening their experience by including non-aquatic themed tank decorations.

The two fish on the bottom came from my great-grandmother’s house. She kept them in what I believe was a light fixture she mistook for a fish bowl. They were about half the size they are now, and great-grandma was afraid her cats would eat them, so she deviously promised them to my children when I was not around to stop that from going down. I was pretty mad, but in hindsight, it was one of the best things to happen to me, because they are awesome. The one on the top belonged to D-Rock’s niece, who gave me the fish when she left to live in Seattle. That fish was even smaller than the other two, due to bowl living. I was pretty convinced he’d be eaten by the other two, but thankfully that didn’t happen. Probably because I introduced the Plecostomus, the tank nemesis.

You can see the Plecostomus behind the pirate ship. He is also enormous. We got him at the same time as a little whip-tail, who didn’t survive the first week in the tank. No one ate him, I think it was overcrowding, though on paper the arrangement seemed like it should have worked.

You may have noticed that the goldfish have missing scales. This isn’t due to any kind of sickness. It’s from the nightly tank wars, in which the goldfish fuck with the Plecostomus until he attacks them in a rage. They will pick up rocks and swim over to where he’s hanging out and spit them at him, until he can’t take it anymore.
See that fish? That fish is a bully. But he’s so cute!

This is what the Plecostomus looks like in rage-quit mode. My kids call him Bowser (because they think the fish all have Mario names), but I’m the mom and I say that his name is “Cthulu’s Mom.” 
Those are my fish. I videotaped the fish wars, so I expect I’ll be posting those to YouTube soon. You better believe I will provide a link.