Mental and Emotional Prep for NaNo - #ROW80 #Preptober

Kate and Abbie Emmons Writing Podcast
Re: Prepping Mentally for NaNo 

Prepping mentally for NaNo is about all I can manage right now anyway so I found it really helpful to listen to this during a brief break from cleaning and packing up Ed's apartment. This Kate and Abbie Emmons Podcast gives me permission to see the mental and emotional work I'm doing as equally valid to preparing my files and making outlines and character sketches which I have not and will not have time for this Preptober..

I hope to be done here by Friday so I can get everything I'm bringing back to Mom's unpacked or stashed, all my electronics and lamps returned to their proper locations and my writing workstations reestablished and a solid 8+ hours of sleep before NaNoWriMo kickoff at midnight Saturday night.  It has been my tradition to start writing at midnight and I will do so this time even if all I can manage is a paragraph or two.

But I've learned that hope isn't always enough.

One way or another tho, I have to clear out of here by midnight Saturday anyway as first thing the next morning they will change the locks on me and anything still inside will be forfeit.  So I need to find a way to be OK even if we're spending most of Saturday schlepping things out of here back to Mom's and to the dump and wherever else.  

Thus I may not be back at Mom's in time to get everything arranged to my liking and have a good solid sleep under my thinking cap but all my devices are portable and I have a Bluetooth keyboard that works with all but the HP laptop.  So I can sit anywhere there is a plug nearby and write into whatever ap is at hand and later I can copy/paste the result into Evernote to make it available to any other device.

To refine that plan tho, I think my best option is to create my 2020 NaNo project on a thumb drive that I use on either of my Windows computers because both of them have Scrivener on them.  That way I can use the Windows tablet with the Bluetooth keyboard anywhere I can find a seat.  If I make sure they are both fully charged I could have several hours of writing without worrying about plug-ins.

There.  I have a plan for how if worst case scenario is in play.

As for what, I have had a plan for that for several weeks but have not been able to work with my files so I've been playing with the concept in my head while working, trying to sleep or sitting and staring at a wall while resting between spurts of cleaning and sorting.

My plan as laid down in the goals section of A Sad So Big is:

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.  All 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.

So as I work at scrubbing, sorting and stuffing bags I'm playing with ideas on how and why Bray and Lor or possibly just Lor, end up at Hope Estates.  The fact that I never completed their story in Storyteller's Spouse makes that difficult. Especially working from vague memory.  I may have to write or at least outline in the original story a bit but then I'm up against the quandary of whether it is kosher to count the words for NaNo.

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Meanwhile on the scrubbing, sorting and stuffing front:

Yesterday I finished the first pass through all the papers identifying three categories:

• definitely of importance
• possibly important but I can't take time with it now
• definitely garbage.

I spent four or five hours on that.  I will be closing up that box tonight and leaving any further dealings with it until after I'm back at Mom's. Probably after NaNo unless some issue comes up requiring me to find something specific for a specific task related to settling his estate.

I spent another three hours last night on sorting his clothes and made it the rest of the way through the 4ft by 3.5ft by 20in pile.  First pass that is.  I still need to refine the laundry loads by type and stuff into bags. Some will probably head straight for the bins in the parking lot, though not nearly as much as I expected.  

Over 90 percent of the items where under two years old and gently worn. As most had been provided via vouchers by the homeless vet programs that were helping him since 2017.  It seems he wore them for public occasions like meetings, interviews and volunteer work and then changed into his grunge clothes to hang out at home.  His grunge clothes are headed for the bin.  Some of them could just about walk themselves down there on their own.

I also fussed a bit in the kitchen yesterday but only to keep the dishwasher going and to prepare food and clean up afterwards.  I put in over 8 hours on the kitchen Saturday during the readathon as it was the only chore lending itself to listening to stories while I worked as it took very little thought.

Today was a different story.  I have not done any work on the apartment or its contents because I had to take a hiatus to go pick up the death certificate and Ed's ashes.  My brother-in-law and his family are heading down to the Rogue Valley for the grave side service for Ed's mom who passed on September 1st and they are going to bury Ed's ashes in the same grave.  

They are leaving early in the morning so this had to be done today.  My mom had a speech therapist appointment this afternoon so Ed's brother played chauffer for me. So my morning had to start with cleaning myself up and getting dressed to go out in public.  Then there was the visit to the funeral home, then a visit to an ATM so I could provide the money for Ed's burial and then to my Mom's to pick up a bag of things I need--food supplements and food.  I packed for three days and it will have been a week by tomorrow afternoon so I'm low on some essentials.

The food supplements I picked up at Mom's included immune system support which is probably a good idea to keep on top of when handling what I've been handling here.  But more importantly was the 5HTP which is the serotonin support that has replaced prescription meds and is essential to keep my sleep stable so that my mood is stable.  This is not the time to fudge on that either.

The food was a pouch of potato flakes and another pouch of shredded cheese.  I requested these because on Saturday among the food Carri had brought over for me was a package of sauerkraut and another of organic sausage.  I commented then that if only I had the potato flakes and the shredded cheese I could make the sauerkraut casserole.  And that's exactly what I'm going to do as soon as I post this.  It will be big enough for three to four meals so by putting in the effort this evening I'll have to interrupt the work fewer and shorter times for meal prep over the next couple of days.

Sauerkraut Casserole

1. Layer chopped up sausage or hotdogs of you choice on bottom
2. Layer sauerkraut
3. Layer mashed potatoes
4. Cover with shredded cheese
5. Bake at 350 until sauerkraut is boiling and cheese is melted but not too brown