Friday, 11/07/14  1:37pm  

Writing process, discouragement, voting,

After having written for two hours the previous day on her ‘Nano’ project, and stopping to take a break thinking surely she would resume the work later, the artist/writer/Nanowrimoer ended up having lost her enthusiasm and motivation for writing on that day. She did want to finish chronicling what she been working on when she stopped, but the motivation to keep on with the November writing goals was slipping away. She had gotten quite far behind by not having written for the previous four days. That would be a lot to make up. That alone was overwhelming to think of. She had not yet found another or better way to look at the whole project.

Originally she had been thinking it would work for her if she used it as a place to incorporate images that could lead to card and print sales. That sounded so crass. There just was not enough purpose or meaning to that to satisfy her. The images and the writing would not necessarily go together. She never liked the idea of doing something just for money. Now if it was an experiment to see if it could work as a selling venue, she might be more open to that.

But the bigger thing she was having problems with, was the constant state of writing about her own events and thoughts in the third person. That was what made her writing ‘fiction’ for her. It was how she justified to herself that she was doing the Nano project as per the rule. But it just plain felt creepy. She did not like the feeling of stepping outside of herself, pretending she was someone else in a way, not being able to own the ideas, events, and feelings that came from her. To have to let them go so quickly and give them over to this other character. It made her wonder if this was a way that madness started. And she did not want to become conditioned or habituated to this mind state. As it was, she found herself thinking in the writing voice. 

Writing about things that had actually happened, could be so overwhelming. It could feel like a huge task to take care of, as it did on this day. She had gotten so far into the telling on the previous day, that she knew she wanted and needed to finish that section. It was so much ground to cover. It was not the same as making stuff up.

To make stuff up for human characters still seemed impossible to her. The artist/writer was still not ready to try that. She would try maybe to include making up some more of her little animal stories. The problem was that they could not be written stream of consciousness. Her Nano writing had so far been somewhat like stream of consciousness writing, but not even that. She could not or would not write with out some editing as she went along. It was too engrained in her to scratch things out and correct whatever she could as she went along.

That was one reason she preferred writing longhand – the errors were of a different sort than the typing errors. Typing errors were so frequent, as if running quite fast but tripping almost every other step. Not as good a flow as writing longhand. Typing had a life of its own too. The letter characters just appeared on the screen like characters in a cartoon. They were characters alright. That made her wonder what the story behind the word ‘character’ was. What was the meaning of the word? There were story characters, letter characters, and number characters, (but those were called ‘numerals’ she thought).

Now she really seemed to be losing connection to where she had left off her writing on the previous day. She had not reviewed it so she did not know where the story had stopped. Here she had just wanted to get into the writing so she could get on with her day.

As it stood now, she only planned to try to finish the chronicle she had started. She would not yet try to get caught up. From there she would do another attempt at staying with the daily target. Yes, she planned to put it on her ‘Nano’ blog. She had not decided if she would add it to last year’s or start a new one. As she went along she might find herself gaining ground on making up what had been lost. 

She had looked in her longhand journal for last November to see how she had felt about the writing then. Now she could not remember just what her reactions had been to the work. She thought she just mostly could not wait to be done with it. She never really knew what she got out of doing it, especially in the way she was going about it.

It had been no big deal when she finished with it. It was just done. She really wanted something proper to replace it as an almost daily practice or as a writing practice. This continued to elude her.

She had written several little animal stories over the winter and into the spring. That very much pleased her, but then the laptop crashed, and one of those stories was locked in it. She had not had a chance to post it on the blog because there were some big parts missing or that needed fixing. 

2:20pm 918 words

She felt too lazy now to resume her chronicle, which so far was mostly the story of why she had not done any Nano writing from the storm day thru her two teaching days. It was always hard to do that writing on her teaching days. That Tuesday had been election day so she’d gone to vote after the last class.

Giving two classes, followed by the excitement of a voting day with so many townspeople turning out at the polling place, left the artist/writer too spent to be able to write. There was also the excitement of listening to the radio’s election coverage for the rest of the state and the rest of the country. And, she needed the time to reflect on the day’s experiences. It was usually like that for her.

The townspeople turned out in good force it seemed. The polling place had had to be changed to the City Hall from its usual place at the Rec Center, because of the storm’s power outages. City Hall was packed with people waiting to vote. Not only City Hall but the parking was packed. It had been exciting to see so many people gathered and to run into people one had not seen in a long time.

She had asked her neighbors on the waiting line what some of the ballot items were since she had not educated herself about them. She had expected to be able to skim the local free newspaper to get a feel for the issues, but she had not found the time to do that. Her neighbors told her what they could remember. She also asked them where they stood on these issues, or what they wanted for them. For some issues she really did not care and could go by what they wanted. In the end there were items she left blank. She did not vote on them. 

Voting for the governor had been a hard one to swallow. She found the current governor a boor, but his opponent, though perhaps not a boor, not much of an improvement. The unlikely candidate seemed to come with his own drawbacks. None inspired confidence.

2:38p 1282 words

She needed to write up a little side note she could refer to keep track of what she had written about and what she wanted to write about. At this point she was finding herself at a loss again. The chronicle she had started was lost for now. She needed to check on where she was with that, and she just did not want to stop to do that. She just wanted to keep writing, even if it meant she was writing about nothing. Was this like a writing marathon?

Could she say she felt the companionship of all those other people who were doing their writing? No, it had not felt like that for her in the past, nor did it feel like that now. It was simply part of the challenge to be doing this in November. The theory being that another month was as good as the next but that one had to have a month that came with its own challenges. November came with its huge interruption of the Thanksgiving holiday. Somewhere she had recently reread how many people of those who started the project actually finished it.

She never felt like finishing it or doing it was a problem. The problem was the why of it. She just could not find a good enough reason for it. If she could feel pleased with what she had accomplished. Did she really enjoy the actual doing of it? She had to ponder that a bit. Yes, that could be part of it. She did think she enjoyed the actual doing of it. She knew too, that for one of the times she had done it, when she had had a printout made of the month’s writing, (had that been last year?), she had been surprisingly pleased to have the writing in a physical form in her hand. Not that she’d gone back to read it. The sheer physicality of that wad of writing made her feel good, very good. Perhaps the next step should be to make use of that offer by one of the book printing services to print out a free copy of any completed manuscripts. That would feel even more thrilling, even if it was still in draft form, full of errors. She wondered if that included images. Images did not matter at this stage though. Yes, the book format could be an incentive to continue. 

2:55p 1687 words

Now she did have to stop as she was getting a pain in her right wrist in the tendon. This was not good.

2:56p  1714 words