Warning: This is a longer post because I have FEELINGS about this particular topic. TLDR: I’m getting all my research madness together, words is happening, Turkish Corsair is happening.
Hey Everyone,
There’s a reason I called this post what I did. My brain, on its best days, is a crow brain — endlessly hoarding shiny objects (facts, half-overheard conversations, weird historical footnotes, unsolved ancient mysteries, 1,400-year-old Byzantine gossip) and stashing them in caches I may or may not remember the location of later. On bad days, it’s still a crow brain, except the crows are all drunk on mead, I’ve lost the cache entirely, and I’m screaming at a stranger who looks vaguely like someone who once wronged me.
Welcome to writing with AuDHD.
What a crow brain day actually looks like
Here is the thing nobody tells you about writing with a neurodivergent brain: it is not the same job twice. I’ll wake up thinking I am going to write that chapter today, genuinely excited, coffee in hand, playlist queued… and then I sit down, and the words simply refuse to come out of my hands. My fingers are on strike. My brain is elsewhere, still on a tab I opened at 2 am about the Siege of Malta or the chemical composition of orichalcum.
So I adapt. I get on the walking treadmill at the standing desk. I take the dogs out. I do yoga. I scream into the void and go into a meditation to scream at the gods. I dictate, and on a good dictation day, I can get five thousand words out before my voice gives up, and then I spend the next day editing the glorious mess those words made.
I write on my Freewrite to close the distractions (lolol, I cannot close my brain tabs). I take the laptop downstairs to the couch because apparently, the couch knows something the desk doesn’t. Sometimes I write an entire chapter out by hand because that’s the only way the sentence will consent to exist.
If you have a crow brain, the rule is simple: you do whatever it takes to get the words down, anywhere, any time, in any form. Hospital rooms. Grocery store queues. The bathtub. Float tanks. Saunas. The passenger seat. The notes app is always open and always ready.
People who don’t have this type of brain love to tell writers there is One True Way. Show up at the desk. Same time every day. Discipline. Butt in chair. And look — for some brains that works, bless their hearts. For my brain, “discipline” looks like being willing to dictate into my phone while walking the dogs because that is where the words decided to turn up today, and I’ve learned not to argue with them when they do.
The high-input problem (or: why my TBR pile has its own postcode)
I am a chronic researcher. This picture is a honestly about one third of what’s currently stacked around my desk like a paper fort. Italian folk magic. Stregheria. Alchemy. Kitchen witchery. The Knights of Malta.
What lights me up the most are what I call crossroad cities — Venice, Istanbul, Alexandria — places where centuries and civilizations stack on top of each other until you can’t tell where one ends and the next begins. I love mythology and syncretism, the way gods borrow each other’s clothes across borders. I love folk traditions and unsolved mysteries. I love that technology keeps pulling things out of the dirt, forcing historians and archaeologists to rewrite what we thought we knew about human origins. I love magic and noetics and the increasingly unignorable fact that the seven Hermetic principles keep turning up in quantum physics, wearing a slightly different hat (it’s okay, science, we magicians knew you would catch up eventually).
The trouble (if it is trouble) is that I’m really high input (if you’re a Clifton Strengths person, I am Context, Learner, Input, Intellection – all brain, all history, all the time). I gather fun facts the way crows gather bottle caps and eat random garbage, and very often, I don’t know which book or JSTOR deep dive is going to give me the one thing I am looking for (and no, I don’t know what that thing is either). Then I have to figure out how to work it into stories, because my intuition knows it does, but I can’t see how. Sometimes I don’t find it for years.
Eight years of Magicians notes, and a Turkish corsair
Which brings me to the other side of the desk book fort, and what I’m actually working on right now: the Alexis novella. A Turkish corsair story. A tie-in that connects The Magicians of Venice and The Order of Anubis.
My Magician’s notes are, to put this kindly, distributed. They are in journals. They are in Scrivener. They are in phone notes. They are scribbled in the margins of books on Venice, Istanbul, and Alexandria. They are on receipts I found last week in a coat pocket.
When I wrote the original Magicians books I hinted at a hundred stories I didn’t have space to tell, and I always meant to come back to them. Then I read Magicians of the Gods and my head exploded with another hundred ideas on top. I started The Order of Anubis inside the same world because I loved it too much to leave, and I fought like hell to get my rights back from my old publisher because I could not bear the idea of someone else deciding I couldn’t write about Alexis anymore.
Going back through eight years of notes is intimidating. It is also, unexpectedly, comforting. I wrote the original series during a previous season of extreme change, loss, and emotional upheaval, so there is a certain rightness to the fact that I’ve returned to this world now, after losing both my parents within a year. The Magicians world has always been my Venetian mind palazzo. Past me left current me a lot of breadcrumbs to follow back to it. Current me is very grateful.
The diagnosis, the medication, and the word I had to learn to say
Here is the other bit I have been struggling with for the past year. I got my AuDHD diagnosis late (Feb 2025, when I was 39), and I got medicated for the first time in my life in the middle of grief and caregiving, and then suddenly… I could not fucking write. The brain fog was so complete that words would leave my sentences halfway through and never return. The exhaustion was bone-deep. And writing — the one thing that had always been there, no matter what else was happening — simply wasn’t available to me. That was terrifying in a way I still don’t have full words for. It was like my Northstar had decided to fuck off into the void, and my dramatic ass was stuck in the underworld doldrums like Jack Sparrow. The fear was bone deep, and it’s still there, even though words are slowly coming back.
What got me through the seven stages of blinding panic was listening to other authors. Specifically, authors with chronic illnesses and disabilities talk openly about how they create inside bodies and brains that don’t cooperate. I’m learning a lot from them. I also had to come to terms with a sentence I had been avoiding for a very long time: I have a disability, even though people can’t see it from the outside, it’s still fucking there.
That was hard to say. It’s still a little hard to type because to everyone else, I look so capable. So successful. So calm. So….masked as fucked?
Writing while neurodivergent means fielding a lot of opinions from people who have appointed themselves referees of your career (this is true across all jobs, not just mine). A small, non-exhaustive sample of things actual people have said to me about my writing:
Teachers, early on: you are too dyslexic and don’t have enough life experience to be a writer. You can’t even break down the proper analysis of a sentence, you won’t be able to write a whole book.
A manuscript assessor and several editors back in the 2000s: your writing is too weird, it reads like an anime, nobody will want to buy it. It has too many characters and POV swaps. It doesn’t fit properly into any genre.
Assorted voices when I went indie: You’re going to ruin publishing with your tsunami of crap flooding the market. (Sounding very similar to current arguments now that the industry is having another big change, isn’t?)
Assorted voices when I got a trad deal (apparently everyone’s end goal): still somehow not a real writer because they aren’t a Top 4 publisher.
Fuck. That. Noise.
A lot of this industry is still disappointingly ableist, and the loudest voices tend to belong to the most privileged. I have spent most of my career being told I was doing it wrong — too weird, too indie, too much, too much swearing, too dyslexic, too neurospicy, too whatever. I built my own seat at the indie table when the other tables wouldn’t have me. I publish consistently. I sell consistently. I have readers who show up post after post and book after book. And at this stage of my life, after everything, I’m making peace with the fact that what I actually want is to build my own specifically neurodivergent creative table, and be left the fuck alone by everyone who has an opinion on what I “should” be doing.
On authenticity, or: getting back on my bullshit
I heard Russell Nohelty say something in a recent interview that has not left me alone. To paraphrase: your authenticity as a writer is basically whatever your particular bullshit is. You know what your bullshit is. Lean into it. What is authentic will flow out of you to the point where it becomes painful to contain.
So that is what I’m doing. I am getting back on my bullshit. I’m leaning all the way into the crossroad cities and the Hermetic weirdness and the corsairs and the syncretic gods and the eight years of scattered notes and the kitchen witchery and the Knights of Malta and all of it. I am following the crooked paths like a trickster god, because that is the map my brain actually came with.
The neurotypical rules — the ones that insist Real Writers must be on social media, must post daily, must perform, must have a content strategy, must never admit to the brain fog, must show up at the desk at 7 am sharp with a word count target everyday — can kiss my neurospicy ass.
I am going to write the Alexis novella. I’m going to serialize chapters of it here. I’m going to keep reading voraciously, hoarding fun facts, dictating into my phone on the walking treadmill, use new software to clean up my messy grammar and break down brain blocks, and writing by hand in the bath when that is where the words want to go. And I’m going to stop apologizing for any of it.
Words of advice for any reader or writer out there: If you like the taste of the sausage, don’t ask how it was made. Everyone has their own creative process, and it’s their own. Don’t judge writers for doing things differently. We just want to tell stories the best we can, anyway we can. They shouldn’t be ‘punished’ for doing it differently from the norm. Let’s focus on the stories, because that’s what counts.
Thanks, as always, for being here. For reading. For letting me be this version of a writer rather than the one I was told I was meant to be.
And don’t worry, Alexis really is coming, the early chapters just need some editing before I start posting. I’m also designing the cover because that’s another rabbit hole I’ve flung myself down, but that’s a story for another day.
Ames x