Drama Overload -- ROW80 Check-In

I wrote a couple poems [poem 1 - poem 2] and many overwrought emails  this month but I haven't looked at my fiction at all for two weeks or more. Too much drama in my personal life.

Except I did fiddle with Candy Kiss for awhile as I was preparing to close Scrivener to prep my computer for the trip Friday.  I noticed I was a bit calmer afterwords and wondered if that was because I'd interrupted the drama playing out in my life and replaced it with 'Let's Pretend' for an  hour or so.  But Candy Kiss is not completely pretend. It's based on real events and Greg and Iris are based on Ed and I and have our personalities and our communication issues.  So basically I was immersing myself back into a two decade old trauma-drama of ours.

So maybe it was close enough to the current crisis I was OCDed on to allow my mind to go there with little resistance but removed enough to bring some distance and a bit of objectivity into it.  Interestingly, I came away with a fairly profound insight that shed light on the current crisis.

Worth contemplating.

That got me wondering what the relationship was to personal drama level and the drama in writer's stories, the quality of the writing and their ability to finish them.  It would be interesting to do a study on that. Can there be too much drama.  Too little?  Or is there no observable relationship at all?  How would any of that be measured meaningfully?

Does anyone else have problems working on their stories when there is significant drama in your life or someone else is barraging you with their personal trauma-drama stories?

I also wondered about the influence of personal drama on the content of a writer's stories over time.  But that's a whole other post.



My Round 1 intentions: seek to regain my joy/Joy in writing and to prepare the soil for its blooming with these time investment goals:

• Storydreaming 15min Daily (I never lost this one since instating it in my first round in 2012.  A ROW80 win!) 100%
• Read/Study Craft 15min Daily 50% (reading blog posts on topic and Jeff Goin's book You Are a Writer So Start Acting Like One.)
• Move/Breathe/Meditate 15min Daily 20%
• Personal Journaling 15min Daily 0%  [still have not added this.  there's some resistance I'm not conscious of apparently.]
• Read Fiction 30min Daily 20%
• Social network activities 30min Daily (writing Joystory posts doesn't count only social reaching out like reading/commenting on other blogs, guest posts and posting to fb, twitter, pinterest etc) 20% 

Current Joy Meter: pushing 50%  Mood very volatile for weeks.  Hard to sort out the cause and effect between the state of my mood and the state of the personal drama.