Craft of Writing: Timed Free Writing.

 Dear Reader,

I've moved the Craft of Writing segment to Mondays because the weekends are just too full of family business for me to find time to type much of anything up. The best I manage is a grocery list most weekends. I'm trying to carve out time to get other things going but it's not working so well. Preamble made, let's move on to the planned elements of this post.

Free writing is a big thing for me. Some people call it a 'brain dump' and use it as a time to put down all the things running around in their mind. Other people don't exactly have a name for it but they use free writing to lay the ground work of future projects and develop nuggets of gold that will be dropped into future stories. It's a combination of the two in my case.

It is pretty easy to get caught up in the process and lose about an hour of time to just rambling on the page. To prevent that, I bought myself a little sand timer. It's got bright pink sand in it (why not get the one with my favorite color in it, right?) and the time it runs for is ten minutes. I'm still getting the hang of writing out things like blog posts in ten minutes. My typing speed is slowly creeping up. So is the number of typos that I have to edit out. But, using the sand timer to keep me on task really helps.

I force myself to keep working as much as I may want to dive into a research rabbit hole to learn everything the internet has to offer about some obscure thing. It restricts how long I have to work and, as such, opens up time for me to get other writing projects done or at least making some headway on them. It also helps me get a bit more control over my schedule. Timed free writing is some days the easiest bit of timed writing. Other days, I feel like I should just write "I hate this." for the entire time limit because I can't think of anything. (Usually, those days, I'm not fully awake and am still on my first cup of coffee.)

On the whole, I highly recommend free writing as a tool to get ideas out on the page. And I really strongly encourage timed free writing (it doesn't have to be ten minutes) to help you focus on what you're working on and avoid losing time for other projects and responsibilities. After all, you don't want to be in the position I was last week when I wasn't using my timer and the kids were asking me when I was going to do the dishes. That was a little awkward.

AW: Morning Pages No. 83

 I do not have enough coffee in my body to make my brain work at 100%. I might be a bit dependent on it now. Coffee is a comfort 'food' for me. At college, I suppose we drank it by the gallon. Good coffee, bad coffee, instant coffee ... it didn't matter, we drank it to power our way through all night study sessions, wake up after said sessions, and keep moving through the day. I supplemented my prodigious coffee intake with soda as well. It was a common sight to see me bolting across campus to class with a bottle of soda in hand and my backpack bouncing on my shoulder.

You'd think that I had a number of bottles of soda explode when I opened them after such treatment but it only happened once. And the situation was so ridiculous that my instructor was laughing too hard to continue lecture for a moment. There I was, sliding into my usual seat in the front row on the extreme right about five minutes late for lecture. I had slept through my morning alarm and missed breakfast. So, on my way through the building to class, I paused at the campus book shop to buy a bottle of soda and a big ol' bag of gummy bears. I then ran up three flights of stairs. (It was a minor miracle that I didn't trip and die.)

I got to the classroom during a pause in instruction as the professor was writing stuff on the blackboard. I snuck in and slid into my seat. As I did so, I attempted to be stealthy about opening my morning wake up beverage. The bottle hissed for a bit. Thinking it was safe, I then fully opened the bottle. A plume of soda went up into the air and landed in the open bag of gummy bears instead of hitting the floor or going all over me. The instructor had turned at the sound of my releasing the pressure off of the soda bottle to say something to me about it. She watched the minor drama unfold and my look of utter dismay at the cola soaked gummy bears. Then she started laughing. A few of my classmates looked at me in confusion. 

Once lecture resumed, I thought I was safe. On my way out of the classroom, the instructor stopped me and said, "You really need a more nutritious breakfast than candy and soda." I blushed and stammered something about not having time to stop at the dormitory's cafeteria. Then she said, "Well, next time, make it a smaller bottle of soda this way you can drink it from the bag if it happens again." I regularly had similar mishaps and I think I got a reputation among the faculty and staff of where I attended college as the one to watch for a chuckle. The times where my clumsiness made me into a bit of a buffoon were plenty. The times where I narrowly avoided disaster despite my clumsiness were equally frequent.

AW: Morning Pages No. 82

 I am attempting to complete this page in ten minutes. I have this nifty little sand timer that is exactly ten minutes long. It's got bright pink sand inside it and the kids want to play with it all the time. I keep it up on a higher shelf so that it doesn't go missing when I'm looking to use it. They are, however, getting taller and that tactic isn't going to work for much longer.

I'm really not sure what to write about here today. I feel badly that I haven't blogged in so long. I fell guilty about it, to be honest. I don't feel like these morning pages really count. Still, I'm trying so that has to count for something.

I'm still working on NaNoWriMo. My word count is currently 33k and change. I'm at about the halfway mark for my goal. I will confess that I am cheating a little bit because I started this project last month. That, however is my work-around for the chaos that losing a week around Thanksgiving is going to cause. My kids were off from school yesterday so I didn't get much writing or anything else that I wanted to do done. Now that they're at school, I'm forcing myself to stick to my damn schedule that I put together way back in January to try to hit all of my writing goals for the day.

I can't spend all day working on my NaNoWriMo project when I have blogs to update, other books to finish, and housework to do. I'd like to just sit and write on my NaNoWriMo project until the story is complete but it's not going to happen. I'm still debating taking my laptop with me to Thanksgiving dinner. The polite side of me says that would be a terrible idea and very rude. The rest of me says that it's away to get more work done.

I'm probably going to discuss it with Beloved and get his thoughts on it. I finished the non-fiction project that I was stuck on for a few weeks. It's currently churning its way through the publishing process at KDP. When I reviewed it on-line, it looked good. I ordered a proof copy to stick on my shelf. I will be ordering another copy of a different non-fiction book that I wrote because my proof copy has gone MIA. I just want this little book I wrote to be helpful to people. There's a lot of confusion on how to worship and work with Loki (one of the deities that I am heavily involved with in my spiritual life) and I wrote a devotional to help clear up some of the confusion and give people a starting point in forging their own devotional path.

I don't know how well it is going to be received. I'm going to just hope it works out well. I'm not going to hang my hat on it being a great big success. If I sell a few copies, I'll be happy. The hard part is getting back into my tarot reading stuff. Everything's been so up in the air, that my side project of reading tarot cards for cash has been on hold for literally months. Beloved says that it counts as my losing money when it comes to considering the income questions around it. I just don't know. It feels like an excuse to say that my brain is too screwed up right now to play around with pretty painted cards and tell people what they show me. I, however, have been feeling that way about my brain being screwed up and keeping me from writing.

Mental illness sucks.

AW: Morning Pages No. 81

 I hate being disabled. My brain doesn't want to work right half the time. I'm tired because of my medications and the fact that I haven't slept well in years. (The sleep situation has been particularly bad for the last few months and I can't figure out why.) I've lived through so much traumatic crap that I've been told by a forensic psychologist that I read as a person who has come out of a warzone. It didn't do me much good to hear that. Especially considering that I was holding stuff back when I was doing some of the testing because I was afraid there were going to be problems.

Here I am, a little over a decade later, still disabled and still miserable. Sure, I've got medication to even out my bipolar and to control my panic attacks. Happy pills, however, is a misnomer for what this shit does. It just clamps down on the feelings and lets you get through the day. Sometimes people I used to be friends with made jokes about how I must be having a good time because I was on so many psychoactive medications. I smiled, I nodded, and restrained the urge to punch them in the face.

Then the diabetes hit because I was on the psychoactive drugs long enough that it popped up. Yeah, there was a genetic predisposition towards it but I wasn't on track for developing it until after I was on Seroquel and Geodon for almost seven years. Diabetes is a side effect of antipsychotic medications. Antipsychotic medications are what they use to stabilize the mood of people with bipolar disorder. I was fucked from the word go on this situation. So, now, I take handfuls of medication at various times of the day because of my brain chemistry being screwed up and my pancreas slowly degrading. It's scary and depressing because when ever I have to get my medications tweaked, I get afraid that there's going to be some kind of awful side effect.

My old psychologist was a "nice" person. Who didn't listen to me when I said that I was having problems because of the medications. The solution wasn't to investigate other options but to pump more of the antipsychotics into my system. By the time I had gotten to my current psychologist I was on a combo of the maximum dose of Seroquel and Geodon. I was a walking zombie barely able to function because of all the side effects. Fortunately, my current psychologist took one look at the situation and said "Hell no" and switched me over to a different medication regimen that really improved my quality of life. Unlike the last people I was seeking, this guy takes what I have to say about the situation going on and listens to me, then explains what options there are for solving the problem. 

It's still hard living with invisible chronic illnesses. I have people who forget that I'm a social phobe and will randomly be like "Hey, let's go do something." at the drop of a hat. I have people who forget that I am diabetic and try to feed me stuff that I can't eat for fear of making my blood sugar run too high. It's really exasperating when people forget that my bipolar can incapacitate me with depression and they get kinda mad that I'm not 'better' yet. I've gradually moved away from the people who actively expect me to perform like I'm not disabled. I worry at times that my invisible illnesses coupled with my efforts here to write leads to the false impression that I'm lazy when I go radio silent.

I know that's my emotional baggage talking. Growing up in a trumatizing household where there's all kinds of fuckery going on, you come away with it with some challenges and emotional wounds. Writing these morning pages is flying in the face of the garbage that I had literally beaten into me. It's raw, it's scary, and it's honest. I try to just put down what I have on my mind and hope that my readership base doesn't get too annoyed with the regular sob stories. I've got a lot of trauma I am working through and it influences all of my writing. I just hope that these morning pages reaches someone who is struggling like I was, feeling like a freak and all alone in their misery. I hope that they bring someone some little piece of comfort.

Some of the reasons for the morning pages is selfish. It's to get this garbage out of my head so I can function for the day. But, the bigger reason, is the hope that it could help someone in some fashion. Because if I can help someone by describing the crap I lived through and how I'm doing my best to cope with it, maybe it makes all of that garbage worth something.

AW: Morning Pages no. 80?

 It's NaNoWriMo and I've been hyper focused on my book project. As a result I have found myself within striking distance of 30k words but it has been at the expense of things like blogging, housework, and a few other things. So, I'm forcing myself to slow down and only work on it for an hour each day. I want to get my blog writing back in gear. (I feel like these morning pages don't really count as blog writing, just a brain dump/rambling in the morning.) I do have another problem with my blogging right now that goes beyond the issue with my forgetting to do it because I'm sucked into a novel.

My notebook that I was using as a writing focused bullet journal is literally falling apart. I'm having difficulty keeping track of my notes for projects and outlines for blog posts. This is what I get for buying a cheap notebook to really first give the bullet journal an attempt. I am about halfway through my pile of notebooks but I don't have any the right size to use for bullet journaling. I am stumped as to how to solve this problem with out going and buying another notebook. I told Beloved that I wasn't going to go pick up more notebooks until I had used up most of the ones that I have.

I've been trying to incorporate some of this planning into my daily planner but that just makes it a confusing mess. I am trying to come up with content but my brain is stuck in book mode. It's making writing for different topics difficult. I realized that being stuck in book mode is a problem when my kids asked me this morning when I was going to be doing the dishes. On Monday, I added 12 pages to my manuscript. Yesterday, in an effort to restrain myself, it was four. But it was difficult to stop and go work on housework. I want to see how the scenes I've been writing are going to unfold but I have to write them to do that.

The perils of NaNoWriMo. I was going to do NaBloPoMo but I'm close to two weeks behind. I honestly don't know if I can accomplish that. Not with multiple blogs. I don't know what I'm going to do on that front. I may save the NaBloPoMo effort for December and just focus on writing a novel in November. I am seriously contemplating bringing my laptop to Thanksgiving dinner this year so that I can get more work in on the book. The way I see it, it's not too different from sitting there knitting as people are talking about subjects that I have zero interest in. I'm going to consult Beloved and get his thoughts as to if this is beyond the pale. I did bring a NaNoWriMo project to Thanksgiving one year but that was a book I was writing out by hand in a notebook. It wasn't quite as obvious that I was working on something then. A5 sized notebooks are great to hide in a bag of knitting projects.

AW: Morning pages No. 79

 I am undecided as to how long I am going to do these Morning Pages. One part of me says it is a useful free-writing exercise and I get only good things out of writing it. Another part of me says that my rambling, raw words are just a waste of electrons and that no one really wants to hear another sob story or about the mundane details of my life. It's a tough debate. I am tired and that doesn't help much either.

My tiredness isn't a result of a lack of sleep. I actually slept fairly well last night, though I would have appreciated not having recurring dreams of being short on time to get everything I needed to do done. It was ... unpleasant. It wasn't a full on nightmare because there was no real terror involved, just a great deal of exasperation and frustration. Also, I would have slept better if my new sleep medication didn't have the side effect of causing chills during the first few hours it hits your system. I kept waking up and adding blankets. Then I got overheated and had to put a few away. It was really irritating.

I am tired of being stuck. Emotionally, I am not at a great place right now. There's some troubles happening on a couple fronts for the extended family and I functionally can't do a damn thing to help anybody. As much as I want to say damn them all, there are some members of the family that I am involved with and I care very deeply for (the ones who got screwed by the rest of the family, basically). It's hard being estranged from your birth family for the most part. 

When things get challenging, you don't have that resource for advice, guidance, or possible fiscal assistance to turn to. You have to figure out how to make it work on your own. For the family members that I'm involved with, I'm basically it for the people on this side of the family for them to turn to. I wish I had enough money and resources that I could help all of them out. I wish I was smart enough to say "Here's the solution to this problem." or at least had the ability to do something more than give advice that as I look at it just looks even more shaky as time goes on.

I'm not the matriarch of the family. There is no matriarch of the family. And the family of my birth is disintegrating due to internecine conflict. My grandparents were the ones who held that family together and when they died, things started to unravel. Relatives started behaving badly and showing their true colors after years of keeping their real feelings under their hat for fear of angering my grandparents. It's disgusting and disappointing. As a result, the younger generation has walked away like I did.

I have no idea how to help these young women navigate young adulthood. I've got some suggestions based on my own screwed up life experiences. I can spot relationship red flags a mile away, usually. But there's a lot that they have going on that I just can only say, "We love you. We support you. And if you need us, we're here for you." Those words feel pretty empty right now because I can't do anything more than that.

It's pure torture. I was raised in a household where I had to help parent my brothers at a young age. The expectation was because I was the eldest child, I naturally had to do so and it was my training to be a mother and a wife when I grew up. The age gap between my brothers and I is less than a decade. I wasn't qualified or even remotely old enough to supervise them. Still, there I was a few years out of diapers changing diapers on my baby brother instead of a baby doll. There I was, just shy of being old enough to be in elementary school and I was monitoring my younger brothers' behavior to make sure that our violently unpredictable mother didn't fly off the handle because some arbitrary (yet mutable on the basis of her mood that day) rule was broken. And I got into trouble for doing it even as I was expected to do so. I grew up with this deep seated feeling that I was personally responsible for the welfare of the youngest members of the family.

Here we are, approaching my forty-third year on this rock, and I can't shake that feeling. I can't shake the feeling that I failed my brothers because I went off to college and didn't stay home to intervene when things got crazy in my parents' house. I can't shake the feeling that I somehow failed my brothers because they grew up to have serious issues themselves and have proven to be unreliable and toxic people. I look at my sons and somedays I see my brothers. I flashback to being a kid and terrified that we're going to collectively be punished for some whim that went awry of my mother's that we had nothing to do with but being in the physical proximity of her when it happened.

PTSD is a bear, y'all. It's been making it really hard to write. I've got the old fear that someone is going to punish me for writing down 'lies' and the newer fear that someone is going to use my journal entries against me to try to destroy my family. I try to write. Then terror grips me and I delete entries. It doesn't matter if it's fiction or not. This has been happening for months. It's why my blog entries have been so few across the multiple blogs that I run. (Except for the reading blog, that's just got nothing because I haven't read a book in about a year. Again, trauma colliding with stress. Hard to relax with a book when memories of people throwing stuff at your head to get your attention while you were reading roll over you. And it was things like shoes and slippers. There was a reason why I'd take my books with me when I went hiking and hid in the woods to read a chapter or two as a kid.)

I suppose I wrote something on this blog for today. I didn't want it to be ugly or depressing. But, this is what's been worrying at my mind for months. And as I learn more about what's going on in the lives of people I love, it just gets more intense. At least I am sort of sleeping now. At least I'm only mildly depressed. I'm sure that this awfulness will pass. I just have to hang in there like a kitten on a window screen, all claws deployed.

AW: Morning Pages No. 78?

 Well, I'm no longer flat on my back with bronchitis and a sinus infection. I have a lingering cough and a bit of sinus drainage but it's a lot better than when I last posted. Yesterday, I felt well enough (and the kids were healthy enough) that we went out trick-or-treating for the first time in about ten years. Over the last long period of time, somebody was sick or the weather was down right awful. We lucked out yesterday. It was a strange experience to go trick-or-treating during a pandemic. 

There were several bowls of candy set outside of doors for children to collect from. They were mostly full by the time we got there. We only saw one other set of children out collecting candy, they were coming home. I honestly thought we missed all the other kids out trick or treating (which the CDC said was a relatively safe activity as long as people maintained social distancing). The kids, however, weren't aware of the weirdness of virtually no one out. They were too happy to wish every possible person they met, regardless of if they were giving out candy or not, a happy Halloween. They decided that the doors with no candy were the 'trick' doors and the ones with candy were the 'treat' doors. They had a pretty good time, despite a minor scare with a little dog that was freaked out by smaller than adult humans.

The kids decided that they had a good time because we got to get away from some of the street lights and do a little star gazing despite the patchy clouds and, hey, there was candy. For my part, I was recollecting the times where I went out trick or treating as a kid and how just about every house along the street in the town next door (I grew up on a farm just outside of town, no sense trick or treating at fields full of cows.) was lit up and people were at the door giving out handfuls of candy. We even had gone out in a blizzard to go trick or treating (my brothers insisted, I was freezing and got the least candy because I was too busy trying to keep warm). Despite the snow and blowing wind, people were still just as warm and good hearted about throwing candy into pillow cases and plastic bags.

This year, people were peaking out their windows and only opening the door up a few inches to either hand out offerings or tell us they had no candy. We stayed back a good distance to keep everyone safe. It was surreal. So many people around my neighborhood are clamoring to unmask kids at school and insisting that the vaccine is enough to protect us from the covid-19 variants out there. And yet, they were hiding indoors and basically throwing candy out from the safety of their home to the kids looking for it. My family were practicing safety measures as per usual for going out in public. The boys insisted that their covid-19 masks were keeping their faces warm despite the chill breeze, so there were no complaints. 

I have a feeling that there's going to be a sea change in how people look at this pandemic. The school district is operating on a 'substantial transmission threat' status, despite the fact that there is no evidence of covid-19 spreading in the school. This is because of a combination of the fact that our county is in the 'high transmission threat' status and the fact that there is a cluster of students that are sick with covid-19. No evidence via contact tracing that they caught it at school. All signs point towards parents refusing the mask up and taking their kids maskless out in public as if the pandemic ended last year.

We're entering the beginning of cold and flu season. A nasty cold (which gave me the damn bronchitis and the stupid sinus infection) blew through the school at the same time that cohort of students came down with covid-19. It's going to be a long winter. I'm trying to figure out how to schedule the flu vaccine shots for the family. It's challenging right now because we're in a position of waiting for our car to get fixed. A damn deer decided to use the hood and the windshield as a trampoline a few weeks back. It's at the repair shop right now and theoretically it'll be fixed sometime around the end of this week or the beginning of next week. They're waiting on a windshield and a hood to come in. In the meantime, we're borrowing a car from a generous family member so that Beloved can go to work. It's been a bit crunch here.

If Halloween is any evidence of how people's attitudes are changing, I think we're going to see more people wearing masks again. Over the last few months, while the weather was warm, there were a lot of people running around with out masks despite the high transmission status of the county. Meanwhile, we've been getting dirty looks for our masks. We've taught our kids to keep their heads held high and wear their masks with pride because they're keeping themselves and their family safe. When school pictures came along, the kids had the option of taking off their masks and they kept them on. I have a feeling there's going to be some grumbling by some family members over the fact that they can't see the kids' smiling faces behind the masks. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to say if that happens. I can't exactly be sure that it's going to be something tender and coddling their outraged feelings about how masks are 'oppression'. 

We make a point of not discussing this stuff with them. And yet, Thanksgiving is coming up and I know, down deep in my bones, they're going to be ranting about this. I'm going to have a hard time keeping my tongue in check. It's been grating on me over the last year or so to listen to people bitch about how they can't go to church because of Covid-19, how they have to wear a mask, and they can't get right up close to people in stores when they're in line to check out. I swear, if that plague doctor mask fit me properly, I'd be wearing that thing everywhere. I would be the specter of death on the street. Because apparently they need a visceral reminder that this shit is killing people. This is the new normal. There is no going back to pre-Covid-19 life.

I've accepted it. A lot of my neighbors and a good number of relatives haven't. There's a reason why I don't talk to a bunch of them. They claim oppression and then fuss about the people who are involved in BLM, insisting that their mask oppresses them more than a systemic policing problem that is killing black people and people of color way out of proportion of the rest of the population. But, you know, they can't breathe comfortably in their mask and their glasses fog up so the inconvenience is more important and immediate than some black man who got murdered in police custody. /rant