Now that NaNoGenMo is over, I'm slowly getting back to speed with writing.

Emotions

One of the things I noticed about myself is that I can't identify my emotional state most days. Either I have don't have strong emotions, I'm dead inside, or I'm incapable of seeing past specific details to general trends. I've found little indicators to give me an idea of what I'm feeling but I spent most of my life looking for some blinking sign that said “you are angry” or “you are in love”.

My spouse saw that when we were first getting together because the first time I said “love” it was “I think I love you.” Yeah, not very romantic, but I honestly didn't know if I was in love. I mean, almost seventeen years together and still want to be near her just became my definition of “love”.

Because I'm looking at details, my writing shows emotions more than saying “he is jealous”. The little signs that show up, such as rapid heartbeats or being flushed, are from my attempts to understand my own internal state.

Jealousy

There is probably only one point in my adult life where my spouse said I was jealous. It was when we got a windfall and decided to buy computers out of it. I was going to build a Frakenstein (home-built computer) and she got a brand new Dell. As I was unpacking her computer, I realized I didn't want to build machines from components anymore, I wanted something that just worked.

She said I was jealous.

I said that I was lazy.

But it pointed out, I don't know if I'm feeling jealous or not. Of course, a lot of it comes down to “I don't really get jealous”. It doesn't matter if someone is admiring my spouse or I'm looking at something I'd like but don't have. It doesn't really matter, life has set me on a path and “things I can't have.”

And that's okay.

Except it makes it really hard to write jealous characters. I struggled a lot with this chapter because it is about Kendrick working through his jealousy and how Lily comes to terms with her own desires for Kendrick (and her longing for Hasan).

I've rewrote this chapter six times but it is a important point in the story, so I couldn't easily defer it.

Second-Hand Dresses 29: Drinking Alone

Worried about Kendrick, Lily rushed to the port area to rescue him. What she finds is a drunken water mage trying to drown himself with the memory of her hanging over his head.

Read the chapter at https://fedran.com/second-hand-dresses/chapter-29/.

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