Row 80 Round 4 2018 Goals

A Round of Words in 80 Days
Round 4 2018

The writing challenge that
 knows you have a life

Long time gone.

Saturday's post explains the long hiatus well enough for now.

I need baby steps.  But I need to take steps.

My goal for this round is intense personal journaling on the roots of the angst that took my words for two years.  It wasn't writer's block.  It was soul block or spirit block.  Self block?

Self-suppressing = word suppression.

It was grief, fear, despair and anger in response to current events that dredged up old memories and wounds of the psyche I thought already dealt with.

The anger was probably the most at fault for suppressing my voice as anger was a forbidden emotion throughout my childhood and I've never gotten comfortable with allowing myself to acknowledge even to myself when I'm angry.  And this anger was strong and dark and raging.  Not was.  Is.

I feel like I'm wearing an invisible hand over my mouth.

At least for the month of November for Nano I hope to apply narrative techniques from fiction to relive a number of pivotal moments in my life. I will use the October journaling to identify those moments that need this. We can call it memoir I suppose but I can't imagine ever publishing it.  In fact if I start to imagine that I probably couldn't write it.

Also, before the end of the year I want to open my fiction files and read and print new hard copy of all the best drafts of each WIP and dabble in the notes files to re-enter the storyworld.  That was the place afterall where I'd been dealing with all the issues at the root of these blocks. It may have been that having let that storyworld slide out of my daily life for most of 2016 left me without the coping mechanisms to handle the shocks I was dealt.

So to recap and consolidate goals for the round:

• Intensive personal journaling as close to daily as possible
• Relive pivotal moments in my life using narrative techniques
• Open fiction files and read and dabble to re-enter storyworld
• Make new hard copy of the best drafts of each WIP
• Harvest some poems from the journaling entries.  Experience has shown them to be a natural outcrop of journaling that goes beneath the surface.