11/13/13 9:21a Wed.

The wrimoer had had too full a day on the previous day and therefore did not get to do any writing. She would have to double  the quota this day. She hoped she could do it all in one sitting. The quick alarm was set to ring in one half hour. That had been a very useful strategy for her the other day. She just kept writing until the alarm rang after the half hour she had set it for. She kept on resetting the alarm and writing without interruption. When she had done one and a half hours of writing she was free to check the word count. She was quite sure she had written more than the daily target of 1667 words. It turned out she had written perhaps 500 more than the target. Because there had been no interruptions of aching to see what the word count was and being unable to resist and then having to go through the whole process of copying the writing over to the other software that would give her the word count, she had been able to write more in that amount of time than before.

The act of writing would perhaps be more pleasurable using this strategy. She was not yet at the point where it was just second nature to write fluently with little pausing. Would she ever reach that point? Why should one reach that point she wondered. Writing was not like giving a speech. Or rather, if writing was like giving a speech or a talk in public, one would never go on as the sole voice for such an extended period. No one liked hearing one voice go on and on. Not unless that voice was so varied that it was like many voices. If one were conversing with others, one would never be the sole speaker. One would take turns, or at least be so in tune and responsive to the subtle changes in the others, that there was in effect a mutual conversation and communication going on.

There were other benefits or effects that came out of writing /full stop(?)/madly. Such intensity of writing ..... well she was not sure. She still wavered back and forth on how reasonable or even enjoyable this whole venture was. She felt her only hope was to do it at times that ultimately did not prevent her from doing the other things she needed to do.

She was growing tired of reading about the other wrimoers who were so gung-ho into their projects that they were completing huge amounts of writing way beyond the target pace. She could not help but see this as bragadoccio. She found it quite unpleasant. But she had her own form of bragging. A quiet bragging just in the fact of having been able to at least once complete the challenge, though in her own manner of what she had called a 'novel'. She hoped that how she was doing it now was a bit of an improvement, though not that different than the last time, and that it could be categorized as 'literary fiction'.

The previous day was one of her main teaching days. She had two teaching days. It was a holiday on the day that was usually her first teaching day of the week, so no public adult class. Both of the two students that came to the tiny private class in her kitchen had been able to come this time. She had been very involved with her own painting this time. Had it been the subject matter or the manner in which she was working, or both? They had started in with practice painting on thin

9:52a

paper, working from a few reference photos of the creature they had chosen as the day's subject - raccoons. She had initially selected two animals to choose from the general theme of woodland animals - foxes and/or raccons. She had gotten both of the file folders of reference pictures out from their slots in the storage boxes. To this selection in the last minute she added the option of squirrels. Then she wrote the names of the choices onto little bits of cards stock and set it out for the two students to blindly choose one. This would be the subject of the day. One student selected. It came up squirrels. That student had been having a hard time with squirrels at her house. They were making a bad nuisance of themselves. She was not at all keen on doing squirrels. The wrimoer had originally left squirrels out of the options because she had worked with that subject several years in a row, and much as she was ok with it, she also wanted to have a go at the foxes or raccoons again. Whether they had made a deliberate choice to do raccoons or it was another lottery, she could not remember. She thought it had been by consensus. The squirrel picker had said something that sounded like she preferred to do raccoons, the other student sounded like she was fine with that. And so they had proceeded.

It had been several years since the wrimoer had done this subject and had not laid out plans for how to do it. She thought they had done quite a bit of practice direct painting before just moving on to making a composition and watercolor painting. The one student who had been coming to class for several years remembered having done raccoons and thought they had done sumi-e style practice with them. As the wrimoer wrote, the ideas for ways to approach a raccoon art lesson came to mind. What was the difference between sumi-e style painting and what she called 'direct painting"? Sumi-e used a combination of essential lines and brush strokes to express the essence of a subjects's being, form, and movement. In 'direct painting' she did not use a large brush stroke to capture a gesture or movement. She used the paint to capture the shapes she saw in the reference image but in a manner of expressing the beauty of ta shape, finding the decorative quality of that shape. These shapes should simultaneously be expressive of form in space. Lines and edges were to be smooth and clean, whether they formed intricate patterns or sweeping curves.

Students had a hard time letting go of the importance of the concept/symbol/meaning of a subject. This was indeed of great priority in creating an image. But the students had a hard time grasping that above all it was most important to be almost a conduit between one's imagination and what came out on the paper.

10:22a - that one came so quickly - had it been possible?

As part of that expression one had to love the actual motion of one's body doing the expressing, the wielding of one's tools, the flow of the medium as it came out of the end of one's hands/fingers/ brushes. She felt the experience should be as if one watched actors on a stage or the dolls and toy cars one moved around the little play area world. One made them talk but they came alive as one did so. One had to pretend. If one got too caught up in how to make it look a certain logical way, it lost its magic. It had to have life of its own.

This was why some performers were so much better than others. Someone who read a speech in such a way that it just droned on and on was delivering words that could be of interest, but in such a manner that they would be very hard to listen to. The wrimoer had been so surprised to hear someone read poetry in almost such a manner. The sound did not actually drone, but the rise and fall of the pitches were so regularly and predictably placed as to have a droning effect. She always considered this a near mechanical or robotic form of reading. One would do just as well hearing it from the new 'voices' that the computers could talk to users with. When the wrimoer had heard that coming from someone she had expected to know better, she had been very disappointed. Especially since this had been at a time when she had wanted a deeper meaning and experience to express the reverence of that moment.

It had been an occasion she could say nothing about. She could affect no real change upon the occasion. She had had no idea going into it what it would be like or what it could be like. She had not wanted to participate in it at all but had felt an obligation to do so. Once she was involved in it, she had seen what could be done, but it was too late by then. She had asked for a little change in direction. Others had been open to that. Later someone criticized her for having wanted to change it when she had not even wanted to participate in it.

Here she was thinking about the event without  being able to say directly what the event had been, because it would reveal too much even in this wrimo project context. The wrimoer had started putting  her writing efforts out where they could be found and read, not that they would be found and read. For that she would have to let at least a few people know where the writing was to be found. They could at least be stumbled upon, She knew how that so far it was unlikely for people in her own circles to come across the writings. People just did not do that unless they were highly motivated,. There was just too much in everyone's lives for people to follow up on every bit of information that came their way. Still, it was possible. In that it was possible, she was unwilling to reveal more than she had.

And that was one of the problems with writing publicly. There was just so much one could not write it seemed, or that she felt free to write. On the other hand to write fiction, a whole long continuing story of fiction, seemed like one would have to know so much of how people actually fit together. She knew

10:52 a the alarm seemed to have rung even sooner this time..

people as they actually fit together in specific circumstances that she was witness to, but to rearrange them into invented circumstance - this was like trying to make up a lie and knowing deep down inside that there was no way to completely hide a lie or to not be found out. Best not to lie. She was always astounded at how many people thought it was ok to falsify a circumstance in order to get something they wanted or to do something they wanted. They assumed they would not be found out. She felt it was one thing to not reveal something and another thing to misrepresent something. Now she wondered whether she did indeed misrepresent lots of things about herself, or did she just keep them close to herself. She wondered whether there was a line between the two.

Her writing had really wandered from one point and question to another. She could not remember where she had wandered from. She had thought that morning that this time she would really start off by scribbling or typing a little list of things she could write about. In her longhand journal she just started with a morning warm up of relating some morning details. What time she had gotten up. Now  those details were including how it had been to go get the cat, who still had no name.

She usually continued with the journal writing of the day until time and schedule dictated she had to stop, or until she'd made an account of everything that had been of relevance to her from the previous day and even night. Sometimes she'd said all she had to say, but still wanted to keep writing. With the Wrimo project though it was not yet a matter of wanting to continue writing and having nothing else to say. It was a matter of a purposeful intention of continuing to write even though one had nothing to say. And then, she would remember some little thing she had heard and thought about, and that would give her something to write about.

What had just come to mind was the interview she had heard the night before with a humorist/writer who also suffered from depression. The writer and interviewer had talked quite a bit about the depression experience the author had gone through. The author even got upset on the air as she described certain aspects of the experience. The wrimoer had not sorted out all the author was saying. As the wrimoer understood it, it seemed that was most insufferable to the author was the inability to feel anything. Initially she had been feeling a lot of sadness. And that had then turned to numbness and deadness. And that was worse to her than the sadness. She was firm in her belief that this was something physically wrong, something gone haywire. The wrimoer was not convinced.

The general view of the nature of things, of the world, of existence, in the day, was that all one's ills were causal rather than calamities of the soul or spirit that had to express themselves in one way or another. Depression was something gone wrong in the brain chemistry and could be righted with the proper medicine. One need not have any responsibility within one's identity. That presupposed that having a responsibility was equal to being 'to blame'. Why did people assume that one presupposed the other?

*****
(This was getting
11:22a !!!
into a topic she wanted to delve into but also wanted to hold off on because it could be a long one. This 4th writing segment had flown even faster. The half hour alarms were doing their trick. Was she going to continue? If she were to get caught up with the missed writing, she needed at least another hour of writing she believed.)

....Why should one be to blame for one's ills? Why wasn't one allowed to experience the range of what it meant to be human? All experiences, good, bad and indifferent, were part of the human experience. The wrimoer did not believe that one

***message coming thru on the message machine?

... needed to do things 'correctly', that one needed to follow certain expected rules and roles. So often those expected rules and roles were so limiting in what they allowed people. Where and how had they come about? How did people keep adhering to them and not questioning them? They just kept following along in prescribed fashions instead of honoring their own visions. They lacked faith that their own visions had any worth. How had this come about that so many people were like that? They held tight to their small beliefs as if everything depended upon this.

The wrimoer thought this came down to believing that the outside of something, that which one could see and touch was all that was real. If one went as far as still believing all the visible things came from a greater or deeper source, then for some reason they usually also still believed that it was not one source but two sources - good and evil. The wrimoer believed that could not be either. If the visible came from the invisible, then why did it also supposedly follow that the invisible was divided? How could an invisible be divided? She believed it could only be one. There could be no good and evil. They were not the source but two necessary forces that worked together to create the visible. All of it was an unfathomable unity, and as many religions through the ages had said, unnameable, undefinable, and perhaps even unmentionable because it was so enormously awesome and sacred that it should not even be mentioned. Nothing could be separated from it. Everything had its source in it. Everything was a constant manifestation of it.

11:47a she wanted to rest. She wanted to write more on these thoughts but she needed to step back a bit. Now she was wishing the alarm would ring. Her previous line of thinking still had much more to go, but she needed to take a break from it.

She wished she could remember the term the Nanowrimo write-in group leader had for that strategy of reverting to certain standard scenes such as dinner table talk whenever one hit an impasse in one's writing. She would look it up later. It was a useful technique the wrimoer believed. She did not remember having used it before. She had passed on the advice to others when they spoke of reaching their own story impasses.

What would be
11:52a Hah! she had not been too far off schedule when she wanted to step back.

.... a comparable strategy to use for image making? Image making was so different. There one had to solve visual problems to keep the unity of the image while still being faithful to the so called reality of what the image represented. The visual problems happened through parts of a scene not lining up in harmonious ways, or details standing out too strongly. Did one reach a point in creating an image where one could not think of what else to say? That usually meant the image was completed, as long as it was whole and conveyed ones' meaning or intent. Often, one was not making image so much as using image making to deepen the experience of seeing, understanding, and absorbing a subject. This was another aspect that students did not want to believe. This to them often seemed like idiocy. It seemed like they just did not want to believe that. They could not see how or why such a thing was important. And because they mostly believed in the importance of judging something good or bad as soon as possible, they believed that everyone else had to hold the same beliefs (or disbeliefs) and would thereby never accept their attempts at such crazy new views as being valid or allowable.

There was the fear of being responsible for one's own authority, for trusting one's own authority. Where and how had people so lost sight of their own authority? This had been going on for centuries and centuries she believed. She supposed this was all part of the human experience. She often believed to that Man was here to learn to be a Human creature - to be a God as a Man. Man's struggle was that he believed either in only the Visible, or that he was separate from the source. That the  Visible was from outside of the source rather than always emanating from the Source.

***** She wanted to
        continue with
            the beliefs
            painting practice ideas
            telling of the day
            guidelines for kids classes
            author's depression story, wrimoers views on
            cat and winter nights worry about
            cooking story - borscht to potato cabbage dinners
            arrival of marzipan from overseas cousins
            ideas for similar art image making sessions

She was getting edgy for the time to be over. She thought certainly she had reached her limit for what she could handle. At least she had written a list of what she wanted to get back to.

She had been considering dropping in on the Write-In at the library, just to check in with the leader. She could perhaps borrow a library laptop. At this point there was no guarantee one would be available. One could call ahead. But she could not imagine writing with others in such close quarters in a windowless room on a sunny day. It had been one thing to write at the library on their laptop in the evening hour and to do it so that one was in the midst of activity, the comings and goings of others. But a secluded room in close quarters with others? She did not think she would be able to concentrate like that. She would be too interested in what was going on with others, or of posing questions that came to her. That room felt like a dungeon to her. One sat around a large table that filled the whole small room...

12:22p wow! she had made it.
3436 words - wow wow wow - even more than the target
but back to 19/wpm!