Puzzle on This - ROW80 Check-In

  

  

A Round of Words in 80 Days
Round 3 2023

The writing challenge that
 knows you have a life

Things in terms of the goals are still about where they were the last two check-ins.  Still a solid YES on the morning pages and the exercise.  But NO for all the rest.  I'm hoping that is about to change as the redo inspection with my housing on the line is tomorrow and I should be able to relax off all the efforts that have gone into making sure I pass this time.  It required a complete reorganization of  a significant area of my 400sq foot unit. 

This included all three of the areas where I would perform my daily activities: reading, writing, crafting, vid watching, Internet browsing, sorting...  And that includes all the activities associated with the GOALS except Artist Date but that requires time to prepare to go out and time to travel and time to spend enjoying the activity chosen and fitting all that time into any one day in the last two weeks has been impossible.

Well I'm going to let the photo essay below of the changes say all the rest about them for now.  But before I close I want to talk a little bit about the thing I teased at the end of last check-in.  The insight that I had about my work habits while I was stacking and unstacking and restacking 22 and 11 gallon Ziplock bags full of yarn and yarn WIP.  The insight came when I realized that I was having FUN and it reminded me of something and it took me quite a while of poking at that feeling before it came clear.  It reminded me of how I would often feel when I was in the midst of a big story WIP.

That startled me as I could not immediately see any analogy and had to sit with it for some time.  Or let my mind work with it while I worked with the jigsaw puzzle I was constructing.

Ah!  Yes!  Jigsaw puzzle.  That is what my stories used to be at a certain stage--the stage I found the most exciting and the most stimulating.  More so than the putting down of the words in rows.  But, and this is a big BUT.  The words in rows had to be there before I could move them around the arena or sandbox of the storyworld.  I used to have plenty of those pieces to move around, what happened?

Well. Advice happened.  Well meaning advice from professors, other writers, agents and editors via articles and blog posts, craft books and etc.  All of those sources explained to me that what I'd been doing for the first 20 years of my writing life was called INFO DUMP and it was BAAAAAD!  Bad as in 'You should be ashamed of yourself.'

But when I stopped info dumping I lost 99% of the words in rows that became the puzzle pieces.  I didn't stop writing altogether but I started procrastinating.  I lost the joy of it.  It felt like squeezing that last 1% of toothpaste out of the tube with slippery fingers and water dripping out of your hair into your eyes.

It was no longer any fun at all.  Why?

I had to sit with that for several days before I figured it out.  It has to do with how my brain works.  As with many on the spectrum I do not do change well at all and that includes switching channels in my brain.  And every one of the elements of fiction uses a different configuration of brain networks.  I can do pages and pages or hours and hours of nearly non stop words on the screen or page of narrative, of description, of backstory, of character sketches, of character monologues, of dialog but I could not do any two at the same time without stumbling to a standstill.

Not unless I'd already prepared the sandbox with all the elements of the elements of fiction ahead of time.  The weird thing to realize is that once I was ready to write a scene I didn't need to look at the previously written pages more than a couple of times per session, if that.  That was because by then the characters had come alive in my head in 3D technicolor and they walked onto an already intricately prepared 360 degree stage and I knew each one as intimately as I knew myself.  Maybe more intimately as I seem of late to be learning that I am a stranger to myself.

So when my living, breathing characters walked on stage and started moving and talking I felt like I was doing little more than taking dictation.  But again, I would do mostly one element at a time.  Usually I began with the POV inner monologue but only for a paragraph or two then I'd switch to action which I'd choreographed in my head like a dance and I'd get the movement in place and there might be a bit of description of people or place but not much.  Meanwhile I'd been thinking about some of the things that needed to be said before the scene ended and I would write them in a chunk or two randomly squeezed between the other chunks of elements. 

But I knew I couldn't leave it like that.  Any more than you can bunch up all the C sharp in one measure of a symphony and all the B flat in another.  So I would start making multiple passes over the scene.  Each time I would move a phrase or sentence out of a chunk of description or action and match it with the line of dialog it seemed to most enhance.

And I did all of this this way before word processors on a desk were a thing.  Cut and Paste was with real scissors and real paper and real glue or tape.  And I loved every minute of it.  Until...

Until one day I read that it was a death knell to a novel to keep rewriting scenes and fussing with them, that you needed to make that first pass thru all the scenes to the magic THE END before you started the rewrite.  But writing those scenes the way I did with random info dump chunks was also a NO NO.

Oh NO.  The shame.

So I resorted to squeezing the toothpaste dregs out of a flat tube.  Until...

Until NaNo gave permission to write messy first drafts; to info dump all over the sandbox, letting the words flow like arterial blood as fast as I could move my fingers.  But at the end of each challenge I had a messy file full of words I could not find again without wading thru dreck.  By November 31 I was in no mood for a reread of all those words I'd dumped on the page willynilly according to whatever mood I was in in the moment.  There was little order to any of it.  And few glorious scenes semi-polished to point to as the heart of the story upon which to build by plugging in the puzzle pieces.

So my intuition was onto something when I devised the idea of a storyworld bible.  I just didn't understand why the colossal mess had been created in the first place.

In the next session I want to explore the shame as there was another BIG insight yesterday afternoon when I started thinking about an incident between myself and a teacher at age 12.  I thought I'd already unpacked all the baggage around this incident.  I even wrote a flash fiction piece and devoted a NaNo to developing a YA novel expanding on that.  But apparently I left some seriously stinky laundry in the bag because as I started thinking about what I planned to say in the post while I was working the stuff shuffle in my room, I found myself reliving that moment in emotional technicolor and then I was weeping.  And I couldn't stop for four hours. 

I finally reached out to my sister Jamie via fb messenger and we chatted for over an hour and she helped me sort out that it was the shame that incident imposed on me and the shame of keeping the secret.  And now in reliving it that shame was resonating with the shame of failing my housekeeping inspection and the shame of failing to keep up my ROW80 goals.  And those are just some of the layers.

Photo Essay: The New Configuration
Stuff stowed
Inspection ready
Space functional

Looking from the kitchen down the long wall showing the now nearly 9ft desk.  With my Dell laptop set up on the couch bed where I'm now working this post.

From the back of the alcove beside the table looking directly at the long wall showing 3/4 of my desk.  This configuration is only until after tomorrow's inspection.  It is because the rolling table in the middle now is directly in front of the outlet they need access to and is easier to move away than the tray table loaded down with electronics and a file box weighing down the legs.  I much prefer the two long section of the same height to be side by side.  And I prefer to be closer to the couch and the window when working on the computer.

Looking from the front door at the L desk created by the couch and 1/2 the long desk.  The Dell laptop which is my primary writing machine will be stowed on that box under the blue tray table when I'm not working on it.  That tray table is now my bedside table at night and part of the desk during the day.  That box facing out like a shelf holds my LOC talking book machine and it's cassettes.  That was one of the things that got left on the grey shelves last week and was trapped behind the table as described in last Wednesday's checkin

From the kitchen door again looking over the beanbag/tramp now sitting where the table once stood and the table where the beanbag was tho pulled two feet away from the window instead of 3in.  The cooler and it's hose attached to the window is visible and point just right so it doesn't blow directly on me when I'm sitting beside it.  But boy does it's motor kicking on and off give me a start like a kick in the ribs. I still can't crochet, read tree books or use pen and paper on the beanbag as I won't plug in my lamp until after the inspection.  So I can only use devices on batteries and only if i'm willing to hold them as there is no place to plug them in and no place to set them down.  I can watch TV tho which I couldn't do before.  I'm standing beside the TV so it is not in the picture.  Another plus is that the couch where the beanbag has to go when I use the tramp is now three steps away to the right instead of twelves steps in an L shape.

Standing beside the beanbag looking at the spot where the closet full of yarn once stood.  It is now a mishmash of things that lost their homes.  The bottom left is the plastic 3 drawer dresser full of small crochet WIP and atop that is the LOOM I bought in 2014 and have never broke out of the box.  I still want to learn to weave and every time I handle it while shuffling it from one home to another I feel a bit sad.  Beside the dresser is a stack of 3 boxes facing out like shelves and are 4 of the 8 such containing my notebooks for note taking and morning pages and rough drafting as well as those used up or partially used from the last twenty years of such scribblings.  The other four are under the table catacorner.  They used to be side by side under the table facing out into this area and I could roll to them on my chair whenever I needed something off those shelves.  I need to pull that top one off tho for the inspection as it is blocking access to that pesky outlet.  I had it on the table but put it back for the picture op.

Looking over the swapped out craft table and back edge of beanbag at the window and cooler.  So ugly and unfunctional now.  The table and the grey shelves and the stack of yarn and WIP behind the table..  I can't get to anything behind or under the table except on that one side.  To get to anything blocked by the table I need to put the beanbag on the couch and the tramp in the kitchen and pull about 10 eleven gallon Ziploc bags out from under the table and pile them beside the couch and then move the table over where the beanbag is just to get something off the shelf.  So I probably won't.  Oh how I miss my cozy nook