Sunday Serenity - Write Noise - ROW80

Surf Breaking on Sand and Rock
White Noise to Write By
or Read...or Sleep...
or Muse... 

Last Sunday's check-in was the first one this round that I got a 'satisfactory' or better on all the goals but in the process of putting together the check-in and then posting it on social media I broke the seep rule by nearly staying awake until dawn.  Then I had to cut my coffee intake by half twice in the next four days because I was running out and my Amazon subscription wasn't due until Friday.  This was a double-whammy in that I couldn't compensate for the sleep deprivation plus ended up with caffeine withdrawal headaches with fog-brain all week.

I did keep journaling though but that got intense and my mood tanked.  I'm sure it didn't help that one of the topics I was journaling was my #MeToo stories that I'd started writing in the fall of 2018 but the sleep deprivation and the caffeine withdrawal had to be part of that but it is hard to untangle how much the journaling exasperated things, intensifying the dark mood like when your tongue can't stop wiggling that rotten tooth.  With my mood spiraling down, sleep also became elusive.  It was an infinity feedback loop.

I wrote off making the Wednesday check-in post but I kept writing in my journal and did a sorta check-in directly in three social media sites.

Thursday afternoon through Friday afternoon I had to put serious time into preparing my computer for a restart as it had been up without one for over a month.  The restart prep consists of checking on every open tab on every browser window and application to either complete a task, put the task with any necessary links and cues into a 2do list or choose to pass on it.  Between having so many things open and having done no restart in like five weeks at least my computer had been slow switching between windows and tabs and slow in loading new tabs and slow in completing tasks for a week already and it only got worse as I prepped for the restart.  So frustrating.

Then finally Thursday night I got a decent sleep.  

I got the restart accomplished after lunch on Friday and as soon as I was back on the desktop I prepped the post for the Friday/Saturday #ReverseReadathon sponsored by Dewey's 24 Hour Read-a-Thon.  'Reverse' refers to the fact the begin time is 12 hours ahead of the usual begin time.  For Pacific Coast time that meant 5pm on Friday afternoon instead of 5am on Saturday morning as per usual.  I got the post published just in time and then I had to spend the next two hours fixing, serving and monitoring Mom's dinner followed by kitchen clean-up and then Mom's bedtime routine.  Though I got a bit of reading squeezed into odd moments during those several hours it wasn't until after 9 when Mom had light's out that I was able to have a couple hours of uninterrupted reading.

The rest of that story is on the thon post My Brain on Books.

The gist is that no writing other than the updates on Joystory and social media got done since I closed the writing aps before the restart Friday morning. Tho I'd gotten three or so hours sleep in the wee hours of Saturday morning I was past ready for sleep well before the thon ended at 5pm but had several more hours to muddle through first.  But I was crawling into bed myself as soon as Mom was settled.  It was close to ten.  I slept until 4:30am spent an hour trying to get back to sleep.  Gave up and started reading an ebook in bed until 7 when I switched to video, watching two episodes of Parenthood on my DVD player before it was time to call Mom at 9am.

Throughout that whole time I kept trying to talk myself into moving back to my desk and opening the writing aps and write while I had the huge window of time in a quiet house.  But I could not budge myself.  I felt lethargic.  I'm sure that's partly due to not having caught upon sleep yet.

Once Mom was up and having her morning routines with my sister, I did move back to my desk but not to write.  I spent the entire time until lunch switching back and forth between my ebooks and watching That Girl on Amazon Prime.  Had started from the beginning while Mom was in the hospital last month and am now in the middle of season 3.  I usually watch one to three episodes per day and usually no more than two in a row.  But today I watched 7 and at least once it was three in a row.  I feel like a bowl of mush.  Tho one that is well jiggled by laughter.

There is a strong element of nostalgia in watching That Girl.  And not because I remember the episodes from when they aired.  We didn't have a TV at the time and it was more than a decade after their original air dates that I encounter some of them in syndication.  Where the nostalgia is coming from is the stage sets--the clothing and accessories, appliances, furniture, architecture, vehicle models, billboards, toys and games and so forth and so on. All of it from the era that I was in elementary and middle school.

I'm not going to call this mindless vegging as I feel it working on me on at least two levels.  It is helping to fill in the culture knowledge gaps created by my fundamentalist upbringing that discouraged if not forbid most of the stuff depicted in the stories as well as watching TV.  And because I am a visual thinker and visual stimuli will often unlock memories for me, seeing the things I listed above is triggering a lot of memories.  Most of them neutral if not good and that is helping me by reminding me that those good times and even those neutral times were just as real and just as meaningful in making me who I am today as those moments of trauma. 

A Round of Words in 80 Days
Round 3 2020

The writing challenge that
 knows you have a life

2020 Round 3 ROW80 goals check-in:

* Sleep 7.5 hours Daily Minimum --  Unsatisfactory effort

* Move/Breathe/Meditate 15 min Daily minimum  -- Satisfactory effort

* Storydreaming with note-taking tools at hand. 15 min Daily Minimum -- This is a technique I learned from Robert Olen Butler in the book From Where You Dream. -- Unsatisfactory

* Read Fiction 30 min Daily Average --  Above and beyond

* Read/Study Craft 15 min Daily Average --  Above and beyond

* Social network activities 30 min Daily Minimum (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) -- something I've a strong resistance to.  --  Satisfactory effort

* 30 min Daily minimum engagement with a scavenger hunt though all my creative writing files including Joystory looking for better than shitty first draft scenes, sections, stories, poems and essays and edit, organize and make hard copies. --  Unsatisfactory

* To prep for self-pub: Gather all my poems into a single Scrivener file. Minimum one poem per day until all accounted for.  Adding new ones encouraged. --   Unsatisfactory

* Personal Journaling 45 min or 1000 words whichever come first Daily Minimum -- This is the heart of the writing challenge.  The preceding provides the structure and the nutrients that nurtures and honors the work which I've learned over time must exist to ensure that this becomes more than just dabbling.  --  Unsatisfactory

For an explanation and links to backstory see the ROW80/Camp NaNo Goals post.