For those of you keeping track at home, I had two periods in October, and I haven’t had any so far in November.

Yay go me?

The month isn’t over yet. There’s always a chance. But I’m not convinced that I’m going to have another period.

Yay go me?

I probably just cursed myself by typing that. However, we’ll see.

I did have four days earlier this month when it felt as though my period was going to start at any time.

I’m now in day two of a similar cycle. We’ll see if anything actually shows up. I don’t know.

However, this pseudo-cycle has brought with it all that lovely anxiety that I’m now experiencing every other period. I find it difficult to differentiate between external stress and hormonal stress.

The holidays, for me, tend to be inherently stressful, in part, I believe, because of the expectations that everyone has about being joyous. I’ve started planning for year-end taxes, which is also stressful. Then there’s my ever growing to do list, yet another cause of stress.

None of those should be enough to make me not even want to look at my email because I’m afraid of what I’ll find there. None of those should spike my heart rate so hard when the phone rings. None of those should make me feel completely overwhelmed when faced with the tiniest conflict.

I slept tense last night as well. When I woke up, I realized that I’d been sleeping with my eyes squeezed tight and my jaw clenched. (This is partially why I have a headache this morning.)

I am combating the anxiety as best I can. I still generally follow a ketogenic diet. Sure, I wasn’t completely compliant this weekend. It was Thanksgiving. I still didn’t go too crazy. I think there was only one day when I was completely out of ketosis, and the rest, I’ve been skating on the edge.

I’m also taking extra vitamin B on a regular basis. (There’s a reason that one brand of B vitamins was called “Stresstabs”.)

I figure these two things are why I’m only having anxiety right now, and not a full blown panic attack. I’m really hoping the hormonal anxiety passes soon, though, as I have enough stress in my life currently, thank you very much.

In other news, I “won” NaNoWriMo this month. I’ve already finished 54K. Planning on doing as much as I can the last few days of the month. Will probably finish the new short story this morning. Then, instead of changing over to a different novel, will keep writing this piece.

As I said before, there’s SO MUCH more story here. It’s a novel worth of story. However, this story is going to be told like “The Immortals’ War” – as a series of novellas. Unlike “Immortals’ War” this piece is going to have more than one POV.

The first POV was the warlock. The next POV is going to be a wizard. Then we’ll see. At one point, I think I’m going to need the POV from one of the corporate directors, who may or may not be mundane.

It’s been fun but weird writing this piece. It’s science fantasy. The beginning is a paragraph of hard science fiction (living in a colony on Mars) followed by a paragraph of fantasy (he’s a warlock), then back and forth. It’s been really interesting following both of those lines so hard.

I hope that you’ve had a marvelous weekend, and that your week is going to be just as lovely.