Falling Short -- ROW80 Check-In

A Round of Words in 80 Days
Round 3 2023

The writing challenge that
 knows you have a life

I may have to reevaluate my goals.  I am currently trying to decide whether I over-estimated my capabilities or let frustrations dictate my mood and thus my choices.  What is reasonable to expect of myself and how do I respond to failure without feeling like a failure and then self-fulfilling that expectation born out of frustration.

I was riding such a high late last week as I got ready to take the plunge back into NaNo and ROWer again.  And I remained on that high as I made my goals list, signed up for Camp NaNo and described my project, did prep work for the ROW80 Goals post  including decluttering my 8ft desk and doing a photo shoot and all the way through writing the post and publishing it.

And then I looked at the published post and discovered there were no paragraph breaks.  I checked the code and the P tags were there and adding another 'enter' at each point did not add a space to the published version.

I was too fried to work in the code and try to find where it was broken.  I'd been writing and editing for hours and it was past dawn and I hadn't slept.  I needed to sleep first.  So I returned to it on Sunday afternoon and fiddled with the code for two more hours.  Finally found a solution that was more of a fudge than a fix as I had to use the 'shift/enter' 'break' and make what looked like an ocean of space between each paragraph for it to show up as normal paragraph breaks on the published page.

By this time my eyes, my brain and my mood were fried.  And I started second guessing myself about the whole project.  I tallied up the time I'd spent on that one post and it amounted to at least 8 hours. 

What?  I just committed to four posts a week.  How could I fit 24 hours a week into my schedule and still have time for the creative writing and the work on the main project for Camp NaNo which is creating a storyworld bible to tackle the overwhelm resulting from having set over two dozen stories in it and never keeping track of all the established facts.

That was the project that had captured my imagination and I'd set a bite sized goal for it of 30 minutes a day to start.  And there I was on Sunday evening too fried to work on it and also too fried to do the blog hop to show my support for other ROWers.

Oh boy! My Stella got loose.  I named my inner harpy Stella after the Stella Mudd character on classic Star Trek about a year ago so I could talk back to her.  It felt silly at first but after several months I found vast improvement in the negative self-talk and then one day I told her "One more word and I'm going to tape your mouth shut."  She hushed for a few days and then she got snarky again and I kept my promise, saying to her "I hope you don't have a cold."

I hadn't heard a peep out of her for months.  Until Sunday evening.

Well I realized that I was sleep deprived and I needed to remedy that before I made any decisions.  Monday was another day.  But I would not be able to work on creative projects until after my caregiver left at five.  Mondays are especially busy with chores after the several days I've been on my own.

So Monday was going better than Sunday and hope was building again.  I even got the walk outside in that was one of my goals.  My caregiver has been helping me practice and memorize the routes to a cluster of benches in front of my unit and a gazebo that is several units away.  The hope has been that I would gain the capability of making those walks alone on days she is not here so that I am not required to be shut inside where after a few days of that my 400 sq ft unit begins to feel like a jail.  Especially in good weather.

I had even started to feel confident about it last week and that confidence got stronger as we finished up the walk on Monday and I was leading the way up my front walk to my front door when I cut the corner and stepped off the walk into the flowerbed and fell out flat on the porch slab.  On the way down my cane jabbed me in the belly.  I'm not sure if it was my belly or my knee that took the brunt but were only two of the points of contact.  There was also my right hand and wrist and elbow.  And since the worst of the pain now over 36 hours later is in my neck I think there was a slight whiplash effect.

I swear I heard Stella laughing til she choked.  And then a clear "Serves you right!  Shoulda listened to me."

The Corner I Cut bottom edge
and the Edge of the Bench up top

ROW80 Round 3 Goals:

• Morning pages daily.  Average 40 minutes (ala Julia Cameron The Artist Way and Writing For Life) YES
• Storydreaming with notebook for noting ideas for characters or scenes. (ala Robert Owen Butler From Where You Dream)  30 minutes per day NOPE
• Working on the Fruits of the Spirit (aka FOS) Storyworld Bible at least 30 minutes per day at least 5 days per week.  I'm sure this will expand as I get involved but I need to set a minimum for that jumpstart. NOPE
• Weekly Artist Date (ala Julia Cameron)  This is about doing something to recharge your creative battery.  I'll go into more detail in one of the check-ins. YES (went to game day at social center of my villa)
• A minimum of 5 minutes of physical activity.  Either a walk outside with my caregiver or a session on my mini-tramp, or pacing the floor between front and back door. YES
• I want to reengage with my blog so: Two blog posts per week besides the two check-ins. One about encountering other people's stories via print, video or audio which can include formal reviews.  The other about a current fiber art WIP or about one of my personal challenges: widowhood, independent living with visual impairment and autism and issues related to health and aging among them.  NOT YET (but still time before week over)