"Although I possessed the capacity of bestowing animation,

yet to prepare a frame for the reception of it, with all its intricacies of fibres, muscles, and veins, still remained a work of inconceivable difficulty and labour."

Dear Gentle Readers¹, I hope your austice² is treating you well.

Here you find me, going to bed late (or early), waking up at odd hours of the early morning, going back to sleep in an attempt to get 8 hours and not cheat my mostly-recovered body from absolutely anything it needs to be healthy.

I am finding it a difficult return, as I have a full slate of freelancing right now, the emotional distractions of my offspring’s back-to-school and off-to-university time, and normal but typically intermittent energy. Going off one medication to keep things simple during anti-viral treatment has further meant the return of symptoms dating back to my first bout of the unmentionable illness we’ll call Justacold³.

For now, I struggle to put one mental foot in front of another. The constant compensating blessing I feel, as a writer for whom every variable has been excessively variable for many years now, is that honestly, usually no one can actually recognize your disarray in the final product. Not if you don’t want them to.

Your plot makes no sense

John Koenig’s The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows has the words you need (link is to the website that was the origin of his whole project). Such evocative wonders as `nyctous’, ‘aesthosis’, or ‘fawtle’. Or fiction-friendly terms like sonder (a noun or verb referring to the awareness that everyone has a story, one in which they are the protagonist); vellichor (“the strange wistfulness of used bookstores”); nodus tollens (the sense that your life doesn’t fit into a story, that your plot makes no sense); or the sinister epistrix (a disconcerting feeling that many things—lives, relationships, TV series—seem to be ending all at once, which “leaves you anxiously aware that the author of your story seems to be wrapping up an awful lot of loose ends”).