It's only been just over a week on 1500 mg of Depakote and that old, familiar feeling has come back. You could say I feel like I was taking 2 mg of Risperidone and 1000 mg of Depakote, but it's different than that. There's no energy, zero, zilch. There's nothing there. It's like being in a warm pool of salt water. You just float there without a current to move you along. You're going nowhere and there's nothing to stop you from getting there.

Yesterday I wrote 3,000 words, but it was mostly therapeutic. Dialog mostly, very little narrative, but the dialog wasn't close to playwriting, which I enjoy, but haven't done in years, decades. It was Chapter 3 of Children of Eden. In Chapter 2 there were a lot of loose ends that needed to be tidied up, but when I finished Chapter 2 I didn't continue on with another chapter, so I went back and over the course of two days wrote nearly 5,500 words. I figure there's another 2,000 to do and at the rate I'm going right now that should only take another week. Once I get that done I can go back and work on what is now Chapter 5. But, right now, I'm at a loss as to where the story will go from there. I suppose my biggest problem with Children of Eden is that there are so few antagonists. Even the bots have become nice, aggravatingly nice, but nice all the same.

I think I want to do some sort of a sequel to Remembering Tim, which is moving right along and should be completely posted in six weeks. The story takes place in 1965/66 with two boys in high school. If I do a sequel, it will take place today and the characters will be in their sixties. Of course, those would be the main characters. There could be a full cast of supporting characters, maybe even an antagonist or two. You need good guys and bad guys or you're just telling a tale about pablum. But, where to place it? As I see it, I have four possible choices. North Park, Washington, an imaginary city carved out of the northwest corner of Seattle; Fort Okanogan, Washington, which, if it existed, is located at the confluence of the Okanogan and Columbia Rivers in North Central Washington where the Hudson's Bay Company had a post in times long past; Warnton, New York, a small college town in apple country of Upstate New York; and, somewhere in LA, where a few chapters of Remembering Tim take place. There will be a small, liberal arts college, either North Park, Fort Okanogan, Warnton, or something in the LA area. And, quite likely, there will be disease and death.

It's kind of nice thinking about stories like this. It keeps the creative juices flowing, even though they may be a bit sluggish these days. Well, I go back to the psychiatrist on 3/3 and we'll see what can be done. I've been reading about adding another anti-psychotic to the mix and maybe I'll suggest that. The only problem I can see with that is the VA seems to think Abilify is a great anti-psychotic and who wants to take a pill that has immediate, unexpected death as a side effect. I want to get better, not die. If I wanted to die, I'd commit suicide.