My Words Paid a Visit - ROW80 - Preptober

 

Christina Aguilera - Say Something

Well.  I started journaling again late Thursday after Mom was in bed.  It began as an exercise in testing out my lap desk set up in bed for my new Windows Fusion Tablet with my Zagg Bluetooth keyboard.  I was writing in Scrivener but not in a file purposed to something specific.  

I had just installed Scrivener on the Fusion but had no access to files created on the other Windows computers yet and until I have a backup procedure that includes syncing files I didn't want to work on any of those files on the Fusion.  So I had created a scratch pad file called Write Now.  This is actually a thing I've done since my first computer.  

This gives me the ability to take notes, have a copy/paste clipboard for complex posts, and write for any file in any ap on any device on impulse knowing it is just a matter of copy/pasting it into the intended file.  If that file is on a different device I might email the text to myself or copy/paste into Evernote.  

When I started paying for Evernote so I could have it on unlimited devices I'd hoped I'd be able to use it as the scratchpad directly but the interface can't keep up with the speed of my typing and slowing down to accommodate it interrupts my thoughts and keeps me focused on the tech rather than my words.

So I started typing (at first it was all about the typing, the feel of the keyboard, the view of the screen, the feel of my posture) and since I needed something to type I just started typing the word 'words' and phrases with the word 'words' in it.  Soon this became me having a conversation with 'my words' about their missing status.

No conversation isn't quite right.  It was more like a cross between prayer and tongue-lashing; begging and bargaining.  Soon I had a large chunk of unbroken text with no caps, no punctuation, no breaks, and lots of typos.  My typical 'shitty' first draft.  Though calling these things 'first draft' is a stretch because 90% of them I deem word vomit and never look back.

This time though, there was something drawing me forward.  There was a rhythm and if began to feel as though it were singing to me. I was even hearing music in my head that seemed familiar but at the same time new.  And that  music and rhythm began to impose more form on the text and next thing I became aware of was the arrival of mental images, metaphors and moving pictures--all the elements of story!  Or at least how story announces itself to me.

I went with it for a total of twenty to thirty minutes and then started reading it over and looking for places for natural breaks.  Thinking paragraphs at first but it soon became obvious this was not prose but a free verse poem and possibly even a song if I knew how to make the music for it..  Five hours later I posted 'Say Me Else I Shall Not Be'.  

It was after 5am and my alarm was going to go off in less than four hours.  I was too wound to sleep.  It was a good thing Mom was leaving for my brother's before lunch.  At first I intended to at least try for a nap before my alarm went off but I had to get up to get something to eat as I knew I wouldn't sleep without that and while I was eating I sat at my desk and did a search on YouTube for phrases beginning with the word 'Say' or 'Speak' and eventually hit on 'Say Something'  

With the first notes even before the first words, I recognized it as the piece faint memories of had been influencing my poem.  I spent the next three hours listening to various versions and covers and eventually ended up with the two I've embedded here as my top two favorites which I've listened to over and over for the last two and a half days. Multiple dozens of times. 

Some combination of writing the poem and listening to this song has created a calm state for me.  I'm no longer (for now) having meltdowns.  I get weepy but I am not soaking my pillow or shirt with tears, sucking a belly full of air or curled in a ball holding my breath in an attempt to make no sound as I bawl like a tantrumming toddler.  As I had been for seven straight days.

There were some moments while writing the long unbroken text that became 'Say Me Else I Shall Not Be' that I thought I was recognizing suicidal ideation which I had been free of since the late 90s and I was briefly scared.  But then I realized that what it really was was a plea for my life with the words that had abandoned me because I'd long understood my words were my tether to reality.  

Whether I was writing on paper or screen or on that screen that is my mind I had had the habit since early childhood of composing a running narrative of the the events as they transpire.  When I loose that I loose the ability to maintain a sense of reality, to keep the daydreams and fantasy separate from 'what is really happening'.  There is no way to function in the real world when that happens.

As to my goals since Wednesday.  Failure across the board except for the journaling exercise that became the poem.  I'm good with that.  A small price to pay for a huge payoff.

If I could carry a tune I would sing this song to Ed:

Lyrics to Say Something
by A Great Big World:

Say something, I'm giving up on you.
I'll be the one, if you want me to.
Anywhere, I would've followed you.
Say something, I'm giving up on you.
And I am feeling so small.
It was over my head
I know nothing at all.
And I will stumble and fall.
I'm still learning to love
Just starting to crawl.
Say something, I'm giving up on you.
I'm sorry that I couldn't get to you.
Anywhere, I would've followed you.
Say something, I'm giving up on you.
And I will swallow my pride.
You're the one that I love
And I'm saying goodbye.
Say something, I'm giving up on you.
And I'm sorry that I couldn't get to you.
And anywhere, I would have followed you.
Oh-oh-oh-oh say something, I'm giving up on you.
Say something, I'm giving up on you.
Say something...

Say Something - Pentatonix

Backstory highlights and high and low notes:

2013 Piles of Painted Echoes

2013 Our Broken Valentine

2013 Together We Are Amazing

2015 My Heart is the Lake of Fire

2020 Who Am I Without You?

2020 Sunday Serenity - Sorting My Stuff

2020 Of Truth and Words and Rude Epiphanies.

2020 Sunday Serenity - Sads & Hugs - LOLcat Therapy - ROW80 Check-in

2020 In Memorium: Go Forth Ed and Be in Peace

2020 Sunday Serenity - Wallowing - ROW80 & NaNoWriMo Goals

2020  A Sad So Big- ROW80 - Preptober

A Round of Words in 80 Days

Round 4 2020

The writing challenge that

 knows you have a life

NaNoWriMo 2020

2020 Round 4 ROW80 and NaNo goals:

Sleep 7.5 hours Daily Minimum --  This used to be a major challenge for me but I've got it managed since mid March.  Or at least I had until this past week.  Grief has taken a toll.

Move/Breathe/Meditate 15 min Daily minimum  -- proven to provide a high yield return on investment as whenever I've practiced any of them it stimulates creativity, memory, and insight; lowers anxiety, and increases energy, stamina and a positive mood.

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.

Read Fiction 30 min Daily Average

Read/Study Craft 15 min Daily Average 

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.  The autism diagnosis helps explain this but doesn't let me off the hook.  If anything it makes it more important.  Plus this is preparing the ground for future promotion once I'm ready to publish

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. --  It's been years since I've made clean copies of manuscripts in my portfolios and for most of the noveling writing challenges I've never printed hardcopy.  That is a lot of words to mine as between 2004 and 2015 I participated in more than one such challenge per year-- Nanowrimo, Junowrimo, Camp Nano, ROW80 and Sweating for Sven.among them.  That is a lot of novella length WIP just gathering electron dust.  A conservative estimate is over 20.  I've been wondering for sometime now if the neglect of these stories after the challenges were over is at least partly responsible for the storyworld's elusiveness over the last several years.  I'm hoping that this exercise in honoring their existence will cure my character's recent shyness.

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.  This will take most of the Round as there are over 80. See Poems by Joy Renee Portal.  Another exercise in honoring old work to encourage new work.

Via the above mentioned Scavenger hunt: Collect everything resembling personal essay into a Scrivener file.  Either this will be added to the self-pup poetry ebook or will become the second ebook.  Or a combo of those options.

Personal Journaling 20 min or 500 words whichever comes 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. 

NaNo Novel 1666 words per day on average. Am going to rebel a bit and bring back a previous NaNo WIP and rework it.  It is fitting because it's premise was rooted in the dynamics of my own marriage. I'm hoping this can be an exercise in grief processing. It's title is The Storyteller's Spouse and it was an exercise in 'unreliable narrator'.  The wife in my story is a YA novelist and the husband is a life-of-the-party natural born storyteller aka raconteur aka tall-tale-teller. I think the reason I got discouraged with the effort after that NaNo ended was because I had tried to lay all the unreliableness at the feet of the husband not realizing how much the wife's denial about the extent to which his storytelling was not confined to social gatherings put her squarely in the same camp. Older and wiser now. 

 Am tweaking this goal to combine Storytellers Spouse with another story.  I had forgotten that I've made it a tradition since 2008 to write my election year NaNo in the same storyworld as Mobile Hopes which is set in a mobile home park called Hope Estates.  Each of the novels is set during its election year and the families in the park are living the issues that dominate the campaigns: health, jobs, housing, immigration, women's rights, law and order, climate change, race relations and so on.  Alll I have to do is have the characters move into Hope Estates and share the novel with several other families and I don't have a reworking of an old NaNo but a new story in the Hope Estates series.