"Last year's big accomplishment was that she had roasted a turkey for herself on Thanksgiving."
Wed. 11/20/13 9:54 am
It had been several days since the Wrimoer had done any writing for the month long writing challenge. She settled down to have a go at a writing stint and realized she had almost forgotten to implement the strategy that had been so helpful to her recently. She needed to set the timer for one half hour.

The last writing stint had been at the library working on their equipment. It had left her with such a bad taste in her mouth that she had not been able to get herself to write again until now. That could also have been because she had made so much headway before that with the new writing strategy, that she felt she could afford to take a break.

The night before she had been looking forward to getting to sit down for an uninterrupted morning of writing. She almost could not wait for it. She was finally at the keyboard and screen, with no idea what would come to her to write about. There did not need to be much when one was just writing whatever one's thoughts were, not worrying about a plot, not worrying about anything that way. She felt some twinges that she was cheating in doing the challenge in this way. But she had just wanted to keep her focus simple - to practice writing and generating thoughts, generating writing however unimportant. It seemed so silly.

Whenever any complicated thoughts came along, she wanted to put them aside to a time when she could think about them and write properly about them. She had even come up with a possible idea for how to contain this format of writing within another story - to put it in an envelope or another package. Hah - that could be done literally in the story, but that was not what she meant. She meant it figuratively. If she were to do that, it would probably be happening both figuratively and literally. Did that make any sense?

Even having to now think up how to put the writing she had already done inside of another story, was too much to figure out. She knew there was no way she could make up story madly at the constant pace of writing she was trying to maintain. She had to cast aside anything like that, any efforts beyond what just came to her ready to be written down.

She wondered how the other Wrimoers were able to keep up what seemed to be much greater writing paces than she kept up. There had been that article she had seen where the writer said it basically took him an hour to bang out the required daily quota of 1667 words. She could not imagine being able to do it that quickly. She could not imagine it so much so that she did not even really believe he could do it that quickly.

There were people who thought nothing of writing 5-7K words at a pop. Some of them had higher writing goals for the month. Others just wanted to see how quickly they could do the challenge. She'd read on the local group page, that there was at least one person reporting in a few days ago already that they had finished. That person had not been able to finish in past years, so the victory was especially sweet for them.

She was coming to a pause in her thoughts. So tired of what she had been talking about. She was looking at the clock, becoming a clock watcher.

That reminded her of the kids' drawing class she had taught the previous day. She wanted to tell about that, but it was too public an affair. She could not write about it in this context. She wished there was a way she could write about something and disguise it as something else. One could not stop to think of that though.

She just wanted to be done with this project. She felt so sure this was not a way for her to go about doing anything like this. She needed a smaller daily quota and it should not necessarily be daily. It just needed to be any pace that was regular so that it resulted in getting to see something grow.

She thought maybe that was what had been so important for her the last time - to be able to see something grow - whether it was whittling down the word count needed or watching the word count rise. That was what was satisfying she thought. She had ideas how that could be applied to a regular practice of art. Whether one made consistent little sketches and started piling them up, no matter how quick they  were, or tackled something bigger, did not matter. If one tackled something bigger, one needed to be able to track it in a way that gave one positive reinforcement that kept spurring one on.

She had felt good that she was posting these writing efforts to a blog, but was not happy that it would stop when the project was over. If she did nothing further with it, she would be unhappy about it. How could she continue writing in that blog if that theme was over with?

The author Doris Lessing had died the other day. The public radio station played excerpts of past interviews with her. The Wrimoer was not much of a reader of fiction anymore, especially not literary fiction, so she did not know Lessing's work. She liked

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what Lessing had said, (perhaps it had been in advice to would be writers). She said if one was writing authentically, writing what was important to one, one did not have to worry about choosing themes to write about. That would just naturally take place. Themes would just become self-evident in the writer's work, because the writer was writing the things that mattered.

Now what would the Wrimoer write about? It had been a good couple sessions with her adult public art class and her private class. The private class had been just one student. They had not tackled the same subject as the public class had. The Wrimoer found it difficult to work in the context of giving a lesson. She either got concentrating on her own work and then felt she was neglecting her role as an instructor. Or, she could not help but want to converse when in such close proximity to another person. Then she felt she was infringing on the other person's ability to concentrate. She had discovered that there were a couple of working methods she was able  to use under such conditions.

She was able to paint directly, while also conversing, if she just treated the subject as something to find beautiful shapes in. If she tried to make an accurate drawing to paint later, she found that was too hard for her to do in that context. It almost always frustrated her. To just paint in a manner that did not allow for much correction had its own freedom. She could relax and enjoy watching the shapes come out, watching the paint come out, watching the pigment ebb and flow in the waters of the little puddles she put on the paper. It did not matter whether she worked in beautiful jewel like colors, or worked in earthtones.  She had managed a pencil sketch and two wash drawings or paintings of a little chipmunk feasting on a huge rose hip berry.

This was a photo she had taken a few years earlier. She had come across the chipmunk while out taking photographs on a property for a standing yearly commission for a Christmas card image. The subject was never Christmas. The subject was to be, if possible, a scene from the client's summer property. There was the chipmunk right in her path with his feast. She had been able to come up quite close taking photos of it all the while. She was perhaps two feet away before it finally abandonned its feast. That was the kind of thing she loved to be privy to.

The chipmunk had gotten in the painting too, though she had painted it quite small within the much larger scene. She would have preferred to be able to paint the chipmuch larger in the foreground and have the scene much more secondary.

The public class had worked with raccoon images for their warm up sketching and then chose from a variety of  woodland critters - foxes, squirrels, chipmunks, and the raccoons. The Wrimoer had done a crayon drawing of a fox family. Her intention was just to make up a quickie scene by putting together a few of the reference drawings she had on hand. She had had to draw quickly so that she could be done by the end of class. It had almost come to a point where she was stuck in a drawing that

10:57 am alarm reset

.... did not quite make sense. This was again due to not being able to properly concentrate in that context. How were the students able to work under these circumstances? But then, they did have to stop to keep an eye out on how things were going for the others. There was always a dilemma about this for her.

She loved the comraderie and the fellowship that came from holding the classes. She also felt that the in having the larger public classes, she did not really have an obligation even to herself to make any art. And yet, she did feel that obligation. She felt she had to make some kind of art, not matter how simple, quick, or crude. And if only to illustrate some aspect of the lesson. The pressure came, she felt, from feeling that a year hence meant she had to have  new images to show when it came time to write a press release.

This last press release announcing the November adult art program, she had not recycled images. She had only submitted one, as that was all she had done. Or was it that that was all she had ready for submission?

She was staring off into space quite a bit trying to gather thoughts, to think of them, to arrange them (was this a form of editing?). She was not typing non-stop. There was a ways to go with the last timer session before it would ring.

In the Western sky was a short streak moving steadily towards the horizon towards the Southwest having arced from the Northeast. She was quite sure she had seen such a streak quite often. She did not know how high in the sky this object was. Was this like whatever she saw crossing the sky at night? Was this a satellite or was it simply a jet way up there? She did not know what these things really looked like to be able to tell them apart. There was another following the same path. The white tail was relatively short. That was why she thought it must be very high. It did not leave a trail across the whole sky.

She thought perhaps she would check in with the Nanowrimo Write-In that was to be at the library that day at mid-day. She had missed the first two sessions. The first she had forgotten about, and she had not yet committed to the challenge. Neither did she want to commit to it.  The second one she had been so busy writing at home that the Write-In was out of the question. It was coming on time to at least check in with the leader and let her know what she had been up to. The last session would be the day before Thanksgiving. That was always a difficult day to do anything of a normal routine.

Going out to Thanksgiving meant she would have to cook her two dishes that she always cooked for Thanksgiving. The last few years she had not cooked them because she had not needed to or had not even gone out for Thanksgiving. Every time she had bought the ingredients for these two dishes, the yams and the cranberries, but they had always ended up rotting away.

Last year's big accomplishment was that she had roasted a turkey for herself on Thanksgiving. She only bought it because they were so inexpensive to buy at this time. She almost was not able to buy it in time. The store had been out of them when she went shopping. She had had to return at a later date to get  a turkey at that price. It was questionable whether it would defrost in time. It had not completely defrosted in time

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....  It had been so late in the day before she could put the bird in the oven. The package of innards had been frozen to the cavity. She had to wait until she could get that out before she could put the bird to roast.

The bird had barely made it under the midnight wire of Thanksgiving before it was cooked

11:31 am...another short tailed object following that path in the sky....

and then she had to get the bird carved up - aach - she did not remember just how it had all gone. She just remembered that it had been the tastiest bird she had tasted in many years. She was very proud of that, since it was the first time in 15 years that she  was roasting a bird or any large piece of meat.

11:34a two objects crossing the sky, one short tailed, one a tail across the whole expanse as it moved in that path. What were these things? Was this the hour of many flights?

The Wrimoer was eager to look up her notes about last year's turkey cooking. She always wrote notes or accounts about the cooking of the yams and the cranberries. Now she worried over whether she had made an account of it. She presumed so. She had taken a lovely photo of it because she had been so proud of it. Whether she had written up how she did it, was another question.

The heater that had run all morning and making the apartment overheated, had shut down for a bit. It had not taken long to be able to feel the chill and the drafts behind her. The thermometer just behind where she sat writing now said 76ª, but that did not mean one did not feel cold drafts just inches away from the thermometer. Any moving air gave the impression of coolness and made things feel colder than they actually were.

There were actually so many things to write about but none of them could be used in this context where she would post her writing efforts online.

When she went to the library the other day with the intention of writing there, she had advised herself that it would be good to go there exactly for the purposes of having something possibly come up that she could write about. A kind of going out in hopes that one would find something to write about. Journalism on a very small scale. She was not going out the way those wonderful Naturalist writers did. They trekked out into the 'wild' and wrote about the little dramas in the woods they came across. She supposed she could do that too to some extent.

The walk to the library was not a great distance. She had to busy herself staying warm. She could hardly stop to truly observe anything. Now she was remembering what it had been like to sit writing in the library using unfamiliar equipment. It was not so much that the equipment was unfamiliar, but that one knew one had limited time on it. Any time spent fussing with the equipment was time not spent using it. It put a crimp on things. There was always this conflict between not wanting to have one's use of a thing curtailed or restricted on the one hand, and on the other hand not wanting it to be so open ended. That ended up being a bottomless pit of time spent. Where and how did one draw the line, she wondered over and over again.

The alarm would soon be ringing. She had read a lovely article that morning explaining why one seemed to often wake up a few minutes before the alarm clock rang in the morning. It was that the 'brain' hated to be startled with the alarm ringing. The 'brain' hated to wake up that way. It much preferred waking up naturally. So it sent out whatever chemicals it needed to in order to wake one's self up ahead of the alarm. There was much more to the article and she was not sure she was even relating it properly.

11:56 am alarm (reset 10 min)

Now she was at the freedom point. She could just keep writing as she wished without setting the alarm, or she could set it for another stint. For the moment she had just set it for 10 minutes.

She knew she should get up and get herself ready for the day. Now she was feeling stubborn and resistant about that too. Whenever one finally got going on one thing, one just did not want to stop that activity.

She had the insight the previous day that the true purpose of 'practice', (she hoped she had not written about this here - she was pretty sure she had written about it only in her longhand journal), was to develop a habit for an activity. A habit that made one love doing the activity. Just the repetition of doing a thing could make one used to doing it and make one like doing it. As long as one started with small amounts of it and gave oneself some kind of positive association with it, an

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activity one found unpleasurable, could be made pleasurable over a bit of time. One got conditioned to it. She thought this was also a very useful strategy for getting anything done.

She wondered if that too had been part of what made her Nanowrimo involvement that first year so important for her. And she wondered if it had also not been a very depressing effect to suddenly have that routine stopped. That was the problem with it. That pace was unsustainable while also hooking one in so deeply. There had been, she supposed, a real withdrawal over it.  This year she had better be ready with something to replace the Nanowrimo effort when it was over.

She thought that doing this challenge made her more productive in other ways too. Just the act of seeing one's almost daily accomplishment efforts pile up had a wonderful effect on one's psyche and emotional well being.

Now she was indulging in day dreaming. There was nothing inherently wrong with that, but she was all too aware of how widely her word rate could vary at any one writing session. She had not figured out what caused her writing to be so much faster at some times than at other times.

12:18p object crossing the sky with tail across the whole expanse


She ached to find out what those objects were that crossed the sky. She thought they were on the same path she had seen lights travel at night.

She was growing a bit drowsy she thought. Now she longed to lay down.

There was a sound at the door as if mail had been dropped through. It was too early for mail though. And she did not see the mailman cross the road as he usually would after leaving her house. That was not quite true. He would go across the yard to the neighbor to the North and then dom down the street.  There she saw the deliverer. She thought he bore the tri-colored post office stripe across his jacket. But he came from delivering to the house across the way, something she had never seen before. And then he had crossed back to this side on a diagonal. This must be a different mail carrier if it had been the mail carrier.

It was Wednesday. What mail would she be getting on a Wednesday?

The other day she had received the good news that the children's art classes that she gave at the library, would continue to be funded, apparently for another year. Her patrons were very proud to be sponsoring the class. She was very relieved to know this.

A session like yesterday's class had been troubling and difficult though. She simply had to write up something that would clarify just what she expected from the participants. Either that or she had to find a different way to work with them all. It still shocked her to what extent children were infantalized by almost everyone around them. Were these children going to grow out of these behaviors that were being established and taking when they still had the ability, the flexibility, to quickly adapt to more useful behaviors? She was envisioning legions of children growing into adulthood with behaviors that served them poorly, served each other poorly, and were so deeply engrained that though they could be changed, they would be difficult or problematic to change.

The behaviors were allowed to continue. Not only continue, but seemed to be constantly reinforced.

12:37 pm - wow! It was time to stop.
3607 words

12:50 pm resume w. 10 alarm reset

She had not been able to resist. She felt she was so close to reaching 4K words for the session that she just had to set the alarm for a few more minutes and see if she might make that target in 10 minutes. She had done the basic administration work of setting up the document in the program that did the word count. She had entered the information in the spreadsheet. She had entered notes on the running side note she had started keeping for the writing.

None of that changed that she still did not have anything else to say, not under this kind of pressure. She really should be coming to the writing with some kind of notes on things she wanted to remember to include in her writing. She had just read a piece on some kind of online 'coach' who had recently had to do a live radio interview call. This meant that the two people did not sit face to face but just voice to voice. They probably had not even known each other. The Coach described how she had prepared herself for the experience. She had made some notes about some things she wanted to be sure to cover. They were points that came from a book she had written. Something about the whole process was that there was to be a spontanaity about it. How was one spontaneous at the same time that one was prepared? What did that ever mean to be spontaneous? One had to be so well practiced in a skill that one could do it at the drop of a hat as if it were effortless, as if it seemed to come right off the top of one's head.

1:00pm the 10 minute alarm (reset 10 minutes)

The Coach described opening the window blinds to reveal the scenery outside that she would look at while talking with the interviewer. The Wrimoer had forgotten what kind of coach this person was, what their book was about, what their topic was about. She just had the memory of a short list of salient points to cover, and the calming scene to watch while talking.

The Wrimoer wondered how she would do giving a public speech or an interview as described. She did know that though some people read their speeches, they usually read them so poorly that no matter how well written they would put her to sleep or to turning off the radio. It was not much better to have a speech memorised if one could not deliver it as if one was coming up with the thoughts for the first time. Now she remembered - this woman did something with singing and song as a way to develop one's public speaking ability, or even just for  speaking up in any situation.

The Wrimoer was dawdling again, staring off into space..
1:10 pm alarm 4104 words
She had made it!