11/14/13 9:48a

It was the next day. The Wrimoer had just finished breakfast, a breakfast without her usual cheese on bread in some form or another. This morning she had had to have a boiled egg, and an English muffin with butter and jam. She was out of the cheddar cheese she usually had on the bread. It might be several days yet before she could get back to the supermarket to stock up on cheese and other supplies. Her car had been for weeks and weeks sitting in the parking lot out back of the apartment house waiting for a verdict from the mechanic on whether it was ok to be driven as it was, and whether it could be repaired.

Her student had been able to find out from one of the mechanics, who it turned had had indeed come to check on the car, that the car was in such disrepair that it was probably not worth repairing. The Wrimoer had been reluctant to accept this verdict since it had not come directly from the head mechanic. It had come from the helper. The Wrimoer wanted to know if she could still limp along with the car just around town and take the risk of whether she would get caught driving the car illegally. She had been driving it illegally for 10 months already. That was when it had needed an updated inspection sticker. Now there were only two, (and by now one and a half), months left before the color of the sticker year should be completely off the road. By the first of the new year, there should be no more stickers of that color on the road.

She had been through this before. She had been amazed at how many stickers she saw still on the road. She herself had come face to face with police cars while her car still bore a sticker from over a year old. She could not remember how long she had driven that way.

One year she had finally been stopped with a long outdated sticker. The police car had accompanied her and her car to her home so that she could retrieve the insurance papers. It had been an unpleasant experience to pull into the driveway with a patrol car following behind and then waiting for her. Her insurance papers had been in order but he had questioned her social security card.

The card had the name she always went by, while her license had her official name. The card had been issued when she was in high school. She had never changed to her official name.

When she had gone to become a citizen finally, after having lived all her life since the age of one and a half years old, she had thought she would include the name she was always called in her legal name. She made it her middle name. She thought that would take care of the problem. It had not though. Any identifications always asked for the first name and the middle initial. The middle name was never used. That was how there was such a discrepancy between the social security card and the driver's license.

In the climate of identification verification that so permeated the land ever since the horrific terrorist event, card was not in order. She managed to tell the officer that the motor vehicle people had always accepted this as part of her identification. He had relented and had returned the card to her. For a moment she thought he was going to take it away from her. He warned her that she needed to get that updated. The he had written her the ticket for quite a sum.

She had been risking the same scenario occurring again for the last 10 months.

10:19a alarm

The car had been limping along around town with an unhealthy rear axle or cv joint. It had been repaired once but quickly reverted to the same bucking and skipping in the rear as it drove. She had taken it back to the mechanic once for them to have a look. The shop was 8 miles out of town, a distance she was not comfortable driving the car with those circumstances. The mechanic had driven the car to see for himself. It had not acted up. He thought the car was probably ok to drive if not too far anywhere, and they had left it that she should return when it acted up again.

It acted up soon enough but by then she no longer had funds to fix it. She continued driving it carefully just around town. She did not travel further than a few miles. It meant she missed out on the meetings of a planning committee she was part of. That had been a whole other experience for her, one that she did not like, and one that taught her a lot about what she needed and wanted. That was a story for another time though.

Not having a car meant she had to walk to the library lugging her gear in a little rolling hand cart. The library was not too far from her home. It had been a challenge to do this because she had not been feeling fit and healthy for over a year now. She was sure that was because she was so up in the air over what she wanted to do with her life. Though she obsessed over the possible physical causes of all the little symptoms, she always returned to the idea that it would all come back into balance and harmony once she found her inner balance and purpose again,

She had for years been questioning the path she was on. Her identity and role in life, life with others, was that of a visual artist.
****** this was another topic she wanted to set aside and come back to later*******
10:37am

Though she wanted to set this topic aside for now, she suddenly saw a connection between talking about her identity as an artist, and her legal identity documents, and made that further note in her writing.

There had been a flurry of postings by other wrimoers on the social media wrimo group, most of which were either about how far people had come in their writing, who wanted to meet in order to write together, questions over what strategies others used to solve their writing  and content problems, challenges to each other to meet certain word count goals, and questions over how others formatted their work. Mostly it was about meeting to write and meeting one's targets. She had indulged in reading these posts after she had gotten her own writing done the day before.

She had had a lot of writing to make up the day before just from having missed one day. The strategy with setting the timer had worked well. For the most part it had freed her from even looking at the clock. It often felt as if the timer, set to ring in 30 minutes, rang in ten minutes. Only once had she reached a point when she was balking and stalling and wanting to stop. She had noted the time then and continued

10:49a alarm

to write in hopes the alarm would ring soon. It had rung very shortly after. It almost seemed as if she knew deeper inside when it was about time for it to ring.

Though the writing and the time had sped along and she been able to keep up resetting the alarm to continue for another half hour segment until she had done the time she needed for her goal at the words per minute pace she assumed she was doing, it turned out that the pace had been much slower. She had surpassed her goal but the writing rate was a lot less. When you accounted for 5 fewer words a minute over 180 minutes that amounted to a whopping 900 words. That was quite a chunk of writing. She wondered if the time she had spent trying to make a list of things she wanted to remember to return to had cut that much into the writing time.

Or just that time spent thinking instead of writing. She probably had stopped frequently to stare into space just to remember something or think how to say it. She had let herself slip back into that mode of writing. She knew she was supposed to just keep writing, focus on keeping to words coming. That was so hard to do. Even now she pondered over whether that was important or why. Not just pondered but questioned. She could intellectually understand the concept of it, but she had her strong doubts over it.

That had been one of the questions a wrimoer on the social media group had posed. She asked whether she should go with the story she wanted to work on and really just work at doing it the way she wanted to or should she stay with the wrimo challenge. The fellow wrimoer had even considered starting the project over so that it could be something that could more easily fit the parameters of the challenge. Advice had ranged from reavaluate why you are doing the challenge, to going with the story you want to tell.

Here she was stopping to ponder again. Now she felt she had to remember to catch herself stopping to think and make her fingers fly. Yes it did seem so stupid to just continue talking/writing when one wanted so badly to just let one's self think and reflect - to look at a question, to consider it, to think of possibilities around a question, to come up with ideas for the question, to try to remember things for it.

11:05a

She was getting edgy. This would be a tough session to fulfill. She did not want to pick up any of the topics she had listed the previous day. She was so oversaturated from the previous days lengthy writing and consequent involvement with other aspects of the writing that she needed to step back from it. She had again thought the night before that she could barrel herself, force herself, through accomplishing the challenge just so she would be done with it and could move on to doing what she wanted to do. She was questioning how good it was to put one's self through these rigours. What did it really prove or accomplish?

For a while she thought it was giving her practice in fluency, in being able to write, to generate, without stopping. But of what value if it made one so resistant that one just tread water and refused to consider writing anything that required thinking?

Part of the pleasure of the writing was the thinking. All that really mattered was that one enjoyed one's work and continued it from an inner desire. To keep forcing one's self to do it, to drive one's self to do it was like saying, " Here, play damn you, have fun damn you or else!". That was crazy.

The original purpose of the Nanowrimo event was that people try the challenge as a way to prove to themselves they could indeed get through a first draft. Taking the challenge along with others meant one had others who were trying to accomplish the same thing. It gave a sense of comraderie, a shared goal. One could feel as if one was playing with others in working towards one's goal. But that did not mean one had to do it.

The Nanowrimo website was set up not just to validate one's own wordcount but to also participate nationwide in state races for which states'  were moving faster than others in reaching their collective targets. She supposed this was all to help give incentive to motivate oneself

11:19 a alarm

From this she had learned that her state had a little more than 800 people participating. The website had sent them all reminders that they should register their locations so that they would be contributing to the overall goals of the state. This message and idea had almost revolted her. She had no interest in anything like this. She would probably check to see if she had fulfilled this just so she would not hold her state back in any way, but this kind of group or tribal identity horrified and revolted her. She had been annoyed to receive the message.

She also felt it had been hard enough to figure out how and where she was to go on the Nanowrimo website just to get her word count validated. Whenever she encountered such lack of clarity coming from those involved with communication, she questioned their purpose. But that was her cynical, distrusting, side showing its face, as it so often did. Too often she was seeing things that way, or reading that question into what she saw. That was her own bias. What part of her family history, her growing up, had led her to see things from that point of view? She tried to counteract that point of view as best she could, to at least not lock that perspective into being the only possible way that someone's behavior might be.

She had just lost the other thought that had flitted through her mind as she was considering the previous. One could not catch them fast enough. They would flow as they wished. One could just capture whatever one could capture. Little fragments here and there or big chunks and sections, or both. One had to trust that if they were important enough they would return in another flow. Was it like a stream or a river that kept flowing or was it like the ocean's tide that ebbed and flowed in and out of the shore? These were both qualities of water. Were these also qualities of certain physics particles (the names of which she did not remember). They had certain patterns of movements/activities and the patterns they could be measured by physicists for, were dictated by the nature of the experiments or measuring devices physicists used for measuring. Thereby the particle nature could not be separated from the experiment, perhaps for that matter, (no pun intended), from the physicist. The wrimoer did not know how correct her description of this was. She might have gotten this all wrong.

11:39a

She felt as if she was really at the end of her rope for writing. When would this be over? She had not checked with the last alarm reset whether she was resetting for the third time or even the 4th time. At least if it was the 4th time, she should be way ahead in the word count.

Hah! The Wrimoer's flash of inspiration was that she should disguise all the word count talk as some other kind of game. Then perhaps she could feel ok about using up writing time in endlessly discussing word count.

What could word count be a metaphor for? On a certain level it was a bit like everyone's obsession with the accumulation of stuff, of money, of status symbols, of winning. What was the real meaning of all that? What was at the heart of that? One was doing it to measure one's value against each other, against and ideal commonly held by oneself and others. But were these ideas and values that then prevented one from reaching a truer potential? Man had such a tough time believing in that ephemeral potential and inner value.

She remembered what she had wanted to mention. Some advice about  writing addressed to would be writers by Ernest Hemingway. A friend had posted the article this appeared in to the social media.

11:49 a alarm 
... and the wrimoer had seen it on her newsfeed. There were two basic premises of the advice. One was 'don't judge'. The other was to observe observe observe. Go into any situation and really watch what is going on. What is making each being/character involved in the situation act in the way they are acting. Watch yourself. What is evoking in you what feelings, reactions, and behaviours. It did not seem as if Hemingway was even saying to write on these things. It seemed he was saying to see  - to practice seeing. That meant holding back one's judgement of what was good or bad, or of what one wanted to happen. She had felt when she read this that it was powerful advice not just for writing but for living. It brought such new meaning to the experiencing of everything in one's life, whether pleasant or unpleasant. It all became a subject  to know more about.

And this reminded her of a piece she had hear on the public radio and had yet to find again. This was an interview or a story about a professor who achieved outrageous amounts of work while also being almost completely accessible to his students for guidance. She could only remember the gist of  his story. He operated by trying to treat every problem presented to him, whether by student or in his life, as a data collection project. It became something to observe and set up to gather data around. He had found in the process that this was also how he kept the hounds of anxiety at bay. He had enormous problems with anxiety over almost anything apparently, and this was the only effective method for keeping himself distracted from obsessing over a problem or feeling paralyzing  anxiety.

The Wrimoer knew she was not remembering the story accurately. She had search for it over and over again in vain. She had wanted to read more about this professor's ideas. She was at least glad she had seen a parallel between the professor's methods and what Hemingway advised. But what had made Hemingway so dark that he had had to commit suicide? That much she did not know.

Ugh - it looked like there were quite a few writers/authors who had committed suicide. Sylvia Plath, Virginia Wolff, Hemingway. That was a shorter list than she had thought. Had there been writers before the turn of the century who had done so? There were probably not that many writers then. She wondered if it had to do with the beliefs in Modern Times of the futility of it all.

She believed this was a huge issue that people were now holding onto as deeply as they had previously held onto their Gods and religions, This belief came without a sense of purpose and meaning though. She thought that was a very unnourishing mental and emotional environment for humans to thrive in,

12:15p
and that it was detrimental to one's health and welfare. The Times had come down to either that view or the opposite view of very rigid beliefs in tightly held identities of specific Gods and religions.

12:19 p alarm at last. She had gone way over.
3185 words
3185/151 min = c. 21 wpm