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.

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Sunday Serenity - Power of Vulnerability - ROW80/NaNo Project

Power of Vulnerability: Teachings on Authenticity,
Connection, and Courage
by Brene Brown

Between this section and the goals section there is a video of Brene Brown's TED talk on this subject and I encourage all writers/creatives to take the time to watch it.

The good news is I started journaling seriously again this week.  In time to clock in with 5K words on my Camp NaNo Project.  So I wouldn't feel like a zero for zeroing out on my 20K goal.  But I was just over there and noticed that my project, True Joy, is still showing as 'in progress'.  Apparently the new system at NaNoWriMo.org allows you to start projects anytime you want year around and set your flexible goals and have multiple projects going at once.  The catch is if you are participating in one of the annual events like classic NaNoWriMo in November or one of the two CampNaNos in April or July, you must designate so when you create the project.  I didn't check the right box in the form so I created an open-ended personal project the first week of July so I will continue to update that at least through the end of ROW80 Round 3.

The impetus for plunging back into journaling seems to have been a confluence of two events.  The first being the time I'd spent reading the journal entries from 2016 leading up to the time I stopped writing right after NaNo ended and entries from the fall of 2018 where I'd been incubating material for my plan to start blogging again.  From this reading I gained insight into why I stopped.  Why I nearly started up again.  And why I didn't take the plunge. 

The second event behind the impetus to start journaling again was listening to the Brene Brown audio course on Vulnerability which according to the blurb in the entry at goodreads.com is a bringing together of everything she learned and wrote about in her first three books.  I linked the caption above to the entry at goodreads.com because I want to encourage all writers/creatives encountering this post to go take a look and seriously consider either getting your hands on the audio and/or the books because the things she discovered that has relevance for writers/creatives is that the source of creativity is vulnerability.

The bad news is that I'm all shook up, riding an emotional roller-coaster feeling like an open wound and seriously wondering if I might need to restart the prescription mood meds again.  But according to Brene Brown that is actually the good news and what I need to do is stay the course, feel the feelings and bring them into the light of consciousness.

The events in 2016 and 2018 leading up to the lapse in my writing practice and surrounding the failed attempt to jumpstart it again were of two kinds: personal and political.  The Personal was the arrival of my husband, Ed, who'd been living apart from me in the Rogue Valley Oregon since January 2013. He'd got evicted again and moved to Longview into a tent in Mom's back yard in March of 2016.

Before this current rereading of my journal I was convinced the main reason I stopped writing was that I was spending all my free time with Ed and sharing my writing space with him. I'm sure the time, privacy and space issues were big contributors but those same factors existed during the decade we shared a tiny bedroom in his folks mobile home from 2001-2011.  And you can see from the record of my blog entries between 2004 and 2011 that I managed to fit the writing in big time.

My insight regarding the personal aspect behind my letting writing fall away is that I'd given up my personal integrity by being unwilling or unable to speak the truth I could see and unable to even be conscious of most of it.  I'm sure at some level I was aware that writing itself even in my journal would force me to see things I wasn't ready to see.  For I'd known since my late teens that that was one of the reasons I wrote: to figure out what I knew and who I was, to process information so as to make connections I was unable to make in real time.  I know now this was both autistic behavior (graphomania) and a coping mechanism I'd developed to compensate for the sensory and information overload that makes my every waking moment a cacophony of sound, image, scent, and body sensations mixed with emotions and memories triggered by them.

The truth was my marriage was extremely dysfunctional and had been from the beginning.  I can't say much more about that right now.  It's not the time or place but even if it were I'm still not clear on where the line between truth and illusion is for the entire 45 years of our relationship going back to the beginning of our high school friendship in 1975.  By the time we were engaged in 1978 I had convinced myself he was my best friend and continued to believe that right to the end of May this year.  Meanwhile all my friendships that existed before our marriage had fallen away and I'd never created any close friendships afterward.  I'd never developed any close relationships inside his family with anyone over the age of 13 and relationships inside my family were strained to the breaking point and beyond. 

This inability to establish or maintain any intimate relationships outside of that with Ed may have been partially due to the difficulty the autism imposes on social encounters but only partially.  For the most part tho other relationships became untenable for the same reason I quit writing.  I couldn't tell my truth to myself most of the time but even when I could I couldn't speak it to anyone outside our dyad and there were only certain truths safe to say inside it.  I had to censor myself carefully around his family and acquaintances including landlords, bill collectors and bosses in case what he'd told me did not jive with what he'd told them.

So by ending my relationship with Ed I gave up my only remaining 'friend' and the only person I'd been able to talk to about 90% of the topics I have a strong interest in including everything that would be considered taboo to even think about by the evangelical/fundamentalist church I was raised in and thus most of my own family.  Politics is one of those topics and in 2016 politics and every topic tangential to it became my obsession again as it had been from 2000 through 2008.  For the same reason: my fear that the very fundamentalist mindset I'd escaped from in 1996 was about to be imposed on the entire country.

When I zero in on a topic (obsess) I research as tho preparing for a term paper or dissertation: reading, watching vids, listening to podcasts, taking notes, creating bibliographies, musing and ranting in my journal.  It can't be an accident that this latest plunge into all things politics all the time began about the same time I suddenly couldn't find the time to blog or continue writing in my storyworld.  And I suspect why: I'm terrified of conflict and the whole social media sphere including the blogs just got ugly in 2016. 

One of the last pieces I worked on seriously before I jumped into this round of ROW80 was my own #MeToo stories two years ago during the Kavenaugh hearings.  I came very close to posting it here but in the end I lost courage and I'm near certain that's when I began to choke on my words.  I started adding to it and reworking it this week and the words started flowing again but I doubt I'm any closer to taking it public.  But I'm pretty sure that it will become necessary to share it somewhere, somehow with someone as part of the healing.  Because as Brene Brown points out, shame is the gremlin that prevents vulnerability and vulnerability is the only thing that makes healthy relationships possible.  And I suspect that includes the relationship with yourself.

A Round of Words in 80 Days
Round 3 2020

The writing challenge that
 knows you have a life

Camp NaNoWriMo July 2020

2020 Round 3 ROW80 and July Camp NaNo Project goals check-in:

* Sleep 7.5 hours Daily Minimum --  Satisfactory 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. --  Satisfactory

* 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. --   Satisfactory

* 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.  --  Satisfactory

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

Read more...

Retrieving the Words

Source: via Kris Jurski on Inspired to Reality

Sounding Central Truth
by Joy Renee

What do you mean by denying a
Truth that is right before your eyes?
Just because a neighbor neighs a lie
And it seems easier to agree than to
Say the emperor has no clothes?
It is the naked truth that we must see
And we must say what we have seen.
We must retrieve the words from that
Place where they reside, where they
Are not yet hide-bound, where they
Abound in unsounded musings. And
Tell it from the crazy place where truth is.
Write it from the dark place where light burns
So hot it consumes itself. Where the weight
Of reality draws real things into the
Hole of no escape--the Event Horizon--
Where abide the convent of Graces
Hidden from those who know their places,
Who scorn play for duty, who know they are
Safe only where none can accuse them
Of abusing their faces by exposure
To pleasure and beauty. Beware of
Safety if you mean to defy the
Word of the herd and speak from the place
Where none worship the face. Decry the
Lie that others live by and live to
Conspire with Creation’s desire for
Passion and wonder. Embrace the All.
Consummate the meaning.
Sing the secret from your center.

(c) 1998-2018 Joy Renee

I posted this poem previously with an explanation of its history, inspiration and personal meanings so I won't repeat it here tho I encourage anyone interested to check it out as it might enhance the experience of reading the poem and it will add to the understanding of what this poem means to me in the context of today and going forward.

I am re-posting the poem as the intro to this post which I hope will be the first in a return to regular blogging after over two years of sparse posting.  I'm allowing the poem to stand in as both declaration of intent to 'retrieve the words' and hints as to why I have for so long been avoiding 'the place where they reside'.

To be slightly more explicit:

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NaNoWriMo 2017 Kickoff at Midnight

NaNoWriMo 2017
Participant

For the last three presidential election years my NaNo novel has been set in a mobile homes park named Hope Estates featuring residents whose lives are impacted by current events.  . First Mobile Hopes 2008 then Occupy Hope 2012 and then Living Hope 2016.

Since my head has remained enveloped in last year's election cycle and storytelling is my way making sense of things, I'm walking my Hope Estates characters through the last year with Trumping Hope. (That's a triple entendre BTW)

Economic, racial and gender issues will continue to be showcased but also (for obvious reasons} abuse of power, including the subject of the viral Twitter #MeToo and bullying in its many manifestations will have equal place.  And as always of course--hope!

I'm hoping that I can channel all the angst overwhelming me since mid-summer 2016 into this storyworld and maybe make some kind of sense out of it that will help me make sense out of my own life, giving me back the hope necessary for coping with my own daily challenges.

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