Well, I did NaNoWriMo, all 50k words (in fact, I hit that goal 2 days early), wrote 1,667 words a day, every day for the month of November etc. Here's my badges from the website to prove it, though the one for hitting par every single day didn't light up. Very annoying, considering I did hit par every single day. I think I misentered a number somewhere along the way, smh.
That one irksome detail aside, I guess I'd say I'm pretty proud of myself, to the extent that I'm capable of -- namely, in the I'm-A-Black-Hole way where I say I'm proud of myself to remind me to feel anything about it because I otherwise have no feelings about it whatsoever because I'm weirdly dissociated from my own accomplishments.
I decided pretty early on -- I don't remember if it was before I started writing, or shortly after I started -- that what I was working on was lower even than a rough draft. It is a document that I hope shall never see human eyes, unless I somehow become famous and want to show aspiring writers just how bad of a job I did.
In any case, the reason for this decision is that I'm in a weird stage in the process in general -- I have plot outlines into Book 3, but my worldbuilding is fairly minimal and sketchy and partly reliant on things I came up with when I was 16-17 years old, so basic things like how dragons fight and what people eat where just aren't there. So this became a dry run, an experiment to find out what I didn't know I needed to know.
The result? I have 50,000 words of me faffing about somewhere along the lines of my plot outline, but winding up nowhere near as far into the story as I would've liked...literally I'm less than 50% through the plot outline. I forgot to emphasize certain important character traits, the language is fairly bland, there's filler words everywhere, the themes I want to be there just aren't there at all, certain important objects and concepts appear when I need them rather than being mentioned when they should've been, my exposition is skimpy and what there is of it is a mess, and I don't know if I really like where I started the story or not. Even so, I plan to continue working on this mess of a dry run of a rough draft, and see where it takes me.
What I mean to say is: I've learned a lot! I thought it would be fun to write a post about what I learned. I don't know what purpose it serves, except that of documenting posterity for my sake. I try not to have any illusions about anyone else caring about it. Well, I guess I ought to do the listicle subheading thing?
The Brain and the Page
I used to think, back when I was a teen and simultaneously full of myself while hinging the escape from my self loathing on my ability to write, that I had thought about the story enough to know how to write it well without much struggle. I didn't really hold onto that notion so much as I didn't do anything to counter it (but get off my back about it, I've had to do a lot of unlearning in other, more important areas). Truthfully, it's like drawing: you can look at the shoe you're drawing all you want, pick apart which line you'd draw where, but getting the lines to connect on the page is a completely different skill. Turning what you see in your brain into something on paper (or on a glowing screen) is a hurdle all on its own.
Honestly, I've calmed down a lot since high school. Back then when something didn't come out the way I wanted it to, I was at serious risk for a total breakdown and subsequent self-harm. I had no other means of generating self-worth, so creation felt so life or death at the time. This is what therapy is for! I have a little more faith in the long term vision of the project anymore, at least when I'm in my right mind. It's so much easier for me to recognize that this attempt benefits me the most when it's bad.
I Love Being Unemployed
I seriously think that the main reason I was able to write 1,667 words a day without any sort of mental breakdown (I seriously only had one brief mental breakdown this month, and it was unrelated to writing! Well, that's other than the election stress, ofc) was that I am currently not working. What a blessing it is! I still have other things to do, like attending to the house, the rats, and my relationships, but to have time enough to write for a few hours is honestly glorious. The excuse to write a few hours is also glorious.
The other big thing is that not working means I actually have the energy. When I was at my last job, I stumbled through the day like a zombie because I could almost never get enough sleep. I was also just so emotionally drained all the time because of that honestly fairly abusive workplace that I struggled to do anything creatively.
It can't last forever, unfortunately, and I don't look forward to the day, however distant, when I have to get a job again. But I'll do my best to use my time well.
Writing Can Make Me Happy???
I think it's something about the word count goal. Shocker, goals help people. I know, I know...I've been somewhat resistant to goals because of how they, like some many things, can lead to me attacking myself. Still, it's a small and, for an unemployed person, a fairly achievable goal.
The unexpected thing that I totally should've expected is that having that concrete goal provided a sort of work-life separation for me. I could do the work and clock out, so to speak. Of course, my therapist tried to tell me to take this approach some time ago. But I preferred, for a while, to endlessly torment myself in every single spare moment by either sitting down (or standing, as I am now, due to joint pain) to write or agonizing about how I should be sitting down to write. To be fair, I continued to try to figure out how to utilize every spare moment to some end, but there was less pressure towards it than usual.
The other thing that used to stress me out was this project, which I've had in my mind literally for sixteen years at this point, in various forms, was so amorphous I couldn't engage with it. What should I do next? What steps did I need to take? When would I finally be ready to start writing it?
Well, I tore off the band-aid and started writing it. Surprisingly, I feel better just writing it, even when it's terrible. On one level, it's nice to engage with these characters and with this world, especially seeing the ways in which I love and hate these characters and wish they would get their act together while rooting for them at the same time. On another level, finding the issues that I still need to work out is clarifying my next steps a little more.
It's also just cool knowing that I can make 1,667 words happen in a pinch, sometimes in just two or so hours. They're not always good words, but also I sometimes surprise myself.
Burnout
All that being said, by the end of the month, I was so over the 1,667 words a day. It was unpleasant and uncomfortable and I wanted a break, but I could still get into the groove most of the time. The writing gets worse when I work myself to that point.
Of course, if you know anything about me, then you know that this isn't the first time I've written every day for a month. My calendar, which I mark with symbols about the day's events, shows that much. Somehow it would still be a novelty to me when I'd take a day off, or even just a morning off, and the desire to write and think about writing came back. Wow! Go figure! I'd feel more like a dummy if I didn't know precisely where all this dysfunction came from.
The issue is that I hardly know what to do when I'm not writing, or cleaning the house, or cooking, or engaged in various "productive" activities. After dinner tonight, Tim was like "What do you want to do?" and I of course didn't know. Considered coming to my desk to work on this or some other writerly thing. Wound up starting a game of Skyrim as a hard-bitten elder butch wood elf woman named Buttons. No matter how much I hone the skill, however, chilling feels so weird.
How I will partition my work and life balance and what I do in the life part remains a mystery.
I Have a Lot of Worldbuilding to Do
This is sort of alluded to at the beginning, but the extent of the issue is truly massive. I realized that, if I force myself to come up with some worldbuilding detail in a pinch, I will just fall back on whatever I know best -- which, due to the social programming I try daily to overcome, is Western history. Yawn. Not that everyone's mind works this way -- I hear Garth Nix, for example, worldbuilt the Abhorsen series on the fly -- but it's small wonder so much fantasy is so standard.
Still, I came up with some cool things by pantsing it, though of course I can't remember off the top of my head what they were right now. Which brings me to my last, and most personal, point.
Fibromyalgia Has Done a Number on My Brain
Even without taking into account fibromyalgia's symptom of brain fog, chronic pain has been scientifically proven to have effects on your memory. At times, this fact has been a motivation towards frenetic activity, because I know that it will only impair me more and more with time. It has, at times, felt like a race against my own inevitable deterioration. Fantasy is a genre that involves juggling a lot of made-up names and facts, which makes this prospect even more daunting.
I guess I hadn't fully realized the extent to which I am already cognitively impaired. To be fair, I was able to recreate most of the stuff from my plot outline without even looking at it, but a lot of the things I'd tell myself to remember would simply evaporate. Important points went missing, ones that I can't even access right now. I'd create someone or something, then forget it. Words and letters I meant to put in just disappear, leaving me with agrammatical nonsense. Literally at one point I made a note about the song "Ready, Able," in my notebook, and since there's no spellcheck for pen and paper, I looked back to discover that all I'd managed to write was "Read, Abl." It's so bizarre, like someone else is blundering about in my life, making inexplicable mistakes.
It feels like my mind is divided, split up into modes, and it's hard to get those memories about what needs to be done, what I just did, what happened a long time ago, to travel between those modes. One of the highest compliments I've ever received is that I have "a mind like a steel trap," but I'm having to come to terms with the fact that this is only the case sometimes, and there will be substantial portions of time when I am unable to retain something I just read, or reach basic facts like plot points, made up names, made up cultural practices, and, for some reason, especially what age my characters are supposed to be.
I have, at times in my life, felt tempted to give up. But one thing that's become clear is that even though my brain is as holey as Swiss cheese at times, I still really can write through the pain. Again, it might not be good, but again, sometimes I surprise myself.
Something I'll have to figure out, alongside the worldbuilding and how to insert exposition and themes, is how I'll overcome this. Fixing my brain is probably out of the question. I'm meditating, which theoretically should help, and maybe someday in the future I'll get to try neurofeedback. The best I can do for myself, however, is figure out my crutches. Probably put my character's ages up on the wall above my desk, along with whatever basic facts continually elude me. Good news is we're ourselves a printer this Christmas, so I'll be able to print out the probable hundreds of pages of plot outline and character histories and worldbuilding I have trapped in my Google Drive. I think that'll help a lot.
And Now -- Some Non-NaNoWriMo Miscellany!
I happened to actually finish Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book today, so that's two things rounded off at the same time. I love the book, even if it involves Sei Shōnagon being horrible to/about poor people and being unnecessarily prissy about everything. It's such a human glimpse into a life lived long ago. My favorite part is the piece where she talks about first entering into Empress Sadako's service -- she was so relatably nervous, even though Sadako was like, 14 at the time, and Shōnagon was, I think, 35? It read like how I feel on my first day at a new job.
I have no idea what I'll read next in the realm of history/non-fiction. Most of those sorts of books that I intend to read are out in my shed and I have to work up the grit to go out in the cold and sort through them. I really wish I had a copy of The Tale of Genji to follow this up with, but I just haven't gotten around to getting one/being gifted one yet.
I've also been in this interesting place of re-watching two shows that have been with me for a long time: Twin Peaks and Battlestar Galactica (the early 2000s reboot, naturally). My dad showed me Twin Peaks when I was in 8th grade, and my sister showed me Battlestar some months later. Somehow, Twin Peaks has never lost its shine for me, while Battlestar, with all its fun condoning of regressive and even fascist notions (the episode 'Dirty Hands' is especially bad), sometimes really galls me. Both shows and their soundtracks affected me equally, in terms of aesthetic, humor, taste, etc., but I guess Battlestar trying to make remarks on politics really falls disastrously short of the mark in places. (Farscape is better. It's consistently anti-imperialist, anti-military, and 99% of the time pro-diversity. I love it so much.)
The other thing that's been looming large in my mind lately is a friend of mine turned me onto Pathologic 2, a video game that defies usual classification. I guess it's survival horror, but cast aside all notions of being chased by monsters in the dark -- you just have to make sure you get enough food and sleep in a town that is being ravaged by plague and haunted by supernatural entities from the steppe and goodness-knows where. It's more than a bit stressful but I'm so in love with the aesthetic and story so far that I can't get it out of my mind. I had to deliberately not play any today because, the night before last, I had a haunting, plague-threatened dream about being in the world of the game, and last night, I kept waking up thinking about it and what I wanted to do next in the game.
I know a piece of media is good when it messes with my sleep. Maybe, someday, I'll be able to do that to other people.
(Note: this post was over 2,000 words long. Sorry! I promise I'll try to take an actual break tomorrow.)
