I meant to have just a couple days to recover from NaNoWriMo, then stressful things happened, so I meant to give myself time to recover, then stressful things kept happening, and then half the month had disappeared. I wouldn't want to get into a lot of it, but the most accessible event which typifies the kind of events we've been dealing with was our water heater broke, which revealed other issues with our plumbing and the whole thing cost us almost $2k. SO THAT WAS FUN!!!
Still, despite all this expensiveness, Tim and I were able to retreat to a cabin, partially because we'd already paid for it, so what can you do. It was up in the mountains, and we mostly spent the time stewing in the hot tub, watching the wind sweep snow off the roof and carry crows across the sky.
Of course, there was a Scrabble board at the cabin, and so Tim and I started playing and simply had to get ourselves a set after that. So I've been spending a fair bit of time doing that, and am currently writing this while Tim takes his turns.
I'm trying not to feel too bad about the general lack of productivity. I figure this extended executive dysfunction is a sign of my needing recovery. There's been a little movement regardless -- a little actual writing here and there, then some administrative stuff.
One thing that happened is that, as we'd been planning for ages, Tim and I got ourselves a printer for Christmas. As soon as we set it up, I printed out all my plot outlines, character development sheets, and worldbuilding. The thick wad of what I printed (double-sided, mind you) is below. I've written a lot of that since quarantine started, so honestly, not bad. I sure have quite a bit to show for all this.
This is just a step in what I've been realizing is a sort of arms race against my own brain. As detailed in my last post, fibromyalgia has affected my memory (and the question is, how much is some inherent quality of fibromyalgia and how much is just the effect of being in pain 24/7?). Having all this information stored in Google Docs, which is woefully clunky, and which I must navigate on a tiny Chromebook screen, really didn't help. So, hopefully this helps. Plus, it'll be much easier to edit the plots this way. Something about screen cast this glowing obfuscation over everything. I much prefer to go in with a red pen.
(Hah! I just won our game of Scrabble by over 100 points! I've normally been losing terribly).
Another step I'm taking is I made myself a pretty collaged notebook for my worldbuilding (I may put up a picture another time), and I'm going to start consolidating worldbuilding information in there. I started by diving into the miserably technical work of figuring out What's The Deal With These Two Moons?! I'm not so great at like, math theory, so I tend to wind up spending a lot of time building extensive charts when there's probably an easier way to do it. Whatever, I don't have the money (FOR SOME REASON!!) to pay to consult someone at this stage, so I just hope I'm doing a decent enough job.
Where the worldbuilding notebook goes from here, I don't know. I don't know if I want it to be structured, or just me compiling notions that are scattered across my various notebooks across the years. It probably would be good to start worldbuilding cultures in a organized fashion.
I did actually come up with a potential template for worldbuilding which caters to my ground-up approach. It only covers part of what would be necessary, but I think the results would give me something to work with.
As I've gotten older and more tired, I have been less of a vision-first kind of person and prefer to "procedurally generate" things. Throw together the plate tectonics and from there the pieces fall where they may, from ocean currents to the movements of people and the growth of their cultures.
I was contemplating it one night and came up with something like this:
1. ENVIRONMENT
2. RESPONSE TO THE ENVIRONMENT
Shelter, Food, Water, Fire, Protection
3. SOCIETY
Values, Religion, Law, Hierarchy
4. LIFE IN SOCIETY
Life, Birth, Growth, Death
Now, this is by no means meant to suggest that ALL aspects of society are a direct result of environment. But some of them are, which is how I'd like to construct things. If anyone has any thoughts on this, I'd love to hear them. I'm contemplating running it across a worldbuilding group I'm in on Facebook, but the mansplaining there can be a lot sometimes (seriously, the group is like 80% white men, a lot of whom are into military sci fi. Yikes!!)
Well, dinner will be ready soon, and I'm one hungry hippo. Be well, y'all!
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