The Elephant's Child

I Think Facebook Buries Outside Links: An Unscientific Investigation

Participate, if you will, in a little experiment. Like this post on Facebook when you see it.   (No actual endorsement of cats assumed on your part.)

I suspect that a lot of my blog post links on Facebook aren't getting thrown into the main Facebook feed algorithm and that Facebook is burying them.  Perhaps FB has decided I have little chance of going viral, since I'm not writing about any trending topics, and so doesn't bother with my links. 

Baking Poetry

I baked cookies this afternoon while I was avoiding making myself work on organizing this mess of miscellaneous poems left over from college projects and the little bit (oh, such a very little bit) of stuff I'm managed to eke out in the two decades since. 

I hate baking. 

I keep digging around in this pile of poems, hoping that they'll magically turn into a finely crafted angel food cake with spun sugar fairies on top, but the more I stir, the more they feel like a chipped mixing bowl from your hoarding aunt's kitchen full of broken pieces of Happy Meal toys and headless Barbies waiting on the curb for even the homeless guy who collects scrap to buy cigarettes to pass over. 

Between shuffling pans of cookies, it occurred to me that I should take apart the bindings on the two college poetry projects I did, in order to "de-sanctify" them and make them a little more willing to be rehashed and re-edited, but then I got all sentimental about my poetry prof's notes all over them and I couldn't make myself do it. 

Then, I thought, oh, I should just re-type them into a new manuscript where I can fiddle with them and edit them while leaving the the original papers in their silly sentimental format, so I opened Scrivener to start that, then realized that it's been so long since I worked with Scrivener on starting a new document (my book. My poor, lonely, unfinished mess of a book) that I wasn't sure how to go about setting up a new project.  I was about to go Googling to figure out how best to set up Scrivener for a poetry manuscript when I realized what I was really doing was baking cookies, or, er, "baking cookies" and what I should really do is get to work on that stupid manuscript even if I have to write it in Google Documents come here and 'fess up about ridiculous I'm being about all of this so you all can laugh at me. 

Now it's four-thirty in the afternoon, and tomorrow's a really busy day that won't allow any writing time at all, and I've basically nothing to show for my afternoon of work, okay, okay, "work" except a few self-deprecating lines in my journal, four rhyming phrases completely unrelated to each other, and this blog post.  

At least supper's done.  If you can call cookies "supper."

Restarting Poetry.

There's a poetry contest that closes in two weeks, on May 24th. I had it in mind to try to enter, just to make myself do it, with no expectation of anything coming from it. The prize is $500 and publication, which is a pretty substantial prize. Tempting. 

But I don't think I can manage it. I'm trying. I really actually am. I'm trying to sneak in writing here and there, which works better with poetry than with my Giant Horrible Unfinished Mess of a Book. But it's going too slowly. I need another month. Maybe two? 

Although I joked on social media this evening that a fountain pen's chief usefulness to a writer was the opportunities it presents to procrastinate, I'm finding that picking away at stuff, even with procrastination, isn't a bad way to go about it. Poems get scared away easily. It's best to sneak up on them. 

This not, however, a fast way to get much writing done. 

More Done Than I Thought.

I'm approaching Chapter 26 in the book (there are 35 all together, so far) in this go-round of editing and re-writing. So far I haven't encountered any holes or great gaping places where I need to write linking passages. 

I'm shocked about this.  Shocked. Because I was sure that only the first 7 chapters or so were substantially complete. I think I can cautiously posit that at the very least all of Part 1 (chapters 1-19) and Part II (20-28) are basically complete. 

We'll see what happens as I get into Part III tomorrow. (I should be able to finish editing chapters 26-28 this evening.) 

I'm working hard to remember my goal of having this book done rather than having it a perfect. Or even good.

Playing 80s music too loudly while writing is working fairly well to keep me from taking the book, and myself, too seriously. 

Afternoon Person

I have the week alone, as kid and husband are away for business. My schedule is my own. I am working on two very big projects this week: one, remodeling our back hall, which requires very little serious thought, and the other, finishing my book, which requires hours of intense focus. 

It turns out that I am not a morning person. (Which I knew.)  

But I'm not a night person, either. (Which I thought I was, since I knew I wasn't a morning person.) 

I used to think I was a night person cursed with a deep need for a minimum of 8-1/2 hours of sleep a night. (Just a few nights of 7 hours of sleep and I experience personality changes and what looks an awful lot like depressive thinking.) 

But after a few days of only myself to worry about and nobody else to cook for, it turns out that I'm an afternoon person. I can turn on that intense concentration and focus beginning around 4 pm. And I can work until about 9:30pm, after which I need a break and I'm starting to feel like maybe I would like to start thinking about bed time. Knock off the heavy focus around then, goof around online a bit, unwind with tea and book, and get to bed by 10 or 10:30 or so.  I cannot, as many of my night owl friends can, work well past 10 pm with any usefulness.

This explains part of why I've found it almost impossible to write while kid is home. I can't focus deeply when I am worried I'm about to be interrupted or before the late afternoon. The late afternoon and early evening hours are the prime hours for meal prep, interaction with family, kid's bedtime, etc. 

Realizing this also relieves me of some of the guilt over "but I should be able to write while kid is home with me!" It means that maybe it's ok if I only do writing when I'm completely alone at home.  The tricky thing is, these opportunities do not happen very often at all.  But kid is getting older, and will be traveling more with husband for business as the years go on, so it should gradually improve.  Having kid travel with husband or to visit family and friends is certainly nicer than me paying big bucks to go away to a writer's retreat or a rental cabin somewhere to write. Cheaper, too. 

 

 

PS: Perhaps what I'm describing is actually a classic "night person" pattern, but all the self-described night owl I know describe working until the wee hours of the morning, somthing I cannot do. So I'm calling this an "afternoon person" pattern.

Getting Hung Up on Book Progress.

1. I think one reason my book writing ground to a halt was learning that the hideously popular A  Number of Shades of a Nondescript Color also opened with a woman meeting an apparently well off and somewhat mysterious man in an expensive car. All of a sudden I felt like anyone reading my book would assume I was copy-catting that stupid travesty of writing. Grossssssssss.

2. The longer you go without looking at your manuscript the easier it is to convince yourself that it's awful and terrible and not worth bothering to finish. You become afraid to look at it, for fear of being proven right. 

3. Life went from "kinda tight financially" to downright scary (for me at least. Perhaps others of a better attitude and more calm mind might have managed better. But that is not me.) 

4. I was well and truly stuck with the book. There are missing transitions that I don't know how to handle. There are some unresolved plot issues. There's a miscarriage that I just don't know what to do with, and there's an unfinished and underdeveloped religious element that I just can't decide whether to keep or dump. 

5. While I have finally been able to quit my Crappy Retail Job (TM), thanks to a very good husband who takes very good care of me, I still feel some pressure to Make Some Money. As I was thinking about this today, though, what I'd really love to do is completely ditch my Etsy store, which has never really been even a modest money maker, in any way, and simply do. nothing. for a while. No sewing for money, no trying to make a go of my little car-consulting business (which I started and then was unable to do anything with due to my Crappy Retail Job.) 

So, there is sort of where things stand, four years and five months since I wrote that first burst of a blog post back in April of 2011 that started me on a book-writing journey. 

Hope for the future: 
a. My kid is now thirteen years old and starting to write significant amounts herself. I can actually talk with her about the "little mouse" that is shy to come out and write and she understands what I mean. 

b. Said kid is old enough to sometimes go with Daddy on business trips, leaving me in an empty, quite house with no meals to prepare for anyone. 

c. At the moment, and for the next two months or so, I don't have to triage the grocery list. Amazing how much more clearly you can think when you can buy a proper amount of groceries. 

d. It's going to be fall and winter soon, and the outside work will go away, and weekends will have more inside time. 

I don't know what to do about #2 above. I'm still sort of scared to really dig into my book, since it's been so long. I think I need to seek out some ways to change my scenery and "get away", in order to find a fresh start.  I have standing invites from friends in several parts of the country for visits; the trick is arranging care for my 13 year old (family she can stay with all live 180+ miles away) and figuring out travel costs. 

And I need to figure out how to chain the social media beast without also cutting myself off from all the people that actually want me to finish this book. More about that later. I have an idea or two, but I want to try it for a few days or a week before I talk about it. 

 

Old Poems

I took a quick look through my college senior honors project just now. 

It's awful. My poor professors. 

The Haze

I'm able to write poetry again. That's a hopeful sign.

I haven't written but 1 or 2 poems in over a decade. Haven't been able to. I really thought that perhaps I was past being able to write at all, given what our past year has been like.

I'm not sure what has changed. I hope it means that I'll be able to get back to editing my book. I hope whatever changed, stays changed. 

I'm a little afraid to even say it out loud, for fear of scaring it off. Is it like a little shy mouse? Should I whisper?

Can I leave out cheese to trap it? If I could, would that be a good idea? Or would it die if I did that?

 

 

Maybe I should use a live trap. 

 

 

Switching Gears.

I've had trouble "getting my head inside" my book on short notice. That has made it difficult to get much writing done in the margins of daily life, as Kurtis Scaletta describes. 

But a week ago, that friend bought that car. That coincided with a shift in the length of days. The light has changed. The sun now crests the house to my east and shines directly into my office in the mornings. It's still light out now when husband gets home from work. I don't feel as "heavy."  Yesterday was the beginning of a thaw. Although it's still cold, I can now get the mail out of the mailbox without bundling up. The sunlight is a bit stronger, the sky a bit more blue.

I also stopped listening to the radio and to talk radio about a week ago. I'm not listening to as many podcasts, either. I'm driving with the radio off more often. I'm doing small tasks around the house in silence. I'm getting a little better at managing social media. My head isn't as full of clutter. 

It has made a tremendous difference in my ability to switch gears and simply write even when I know I might be interrupted. at. any. moment. 

I made a promise to myself to simply "touch" the manuscript each day and to stop counting words (computers can be evil, what with their easy statistics). I also decided to try not worrying about "making enough progress." (Harder than it sounds for this person who is so demanding of herself.)  I was going to count it progress if I opened the document and did anything at all with it.  

Now I've made it eight days in a row of a little bit here, a little bit there.  That feels good. 

 

 

Happy Things 20

This is a photo from last August, when the draft of my book was around 70,000 words. Soon after I had this printed and I took this picture, writing stalled. Badly. Very badly. For months. 

But this week, I made a little real progress, and progress on "connecting parts", some of the parts that link together the great flash-of-inspiration scenes that are much easier to write than the nitty gritty stuff that pulls it all together. And that makes me happy.