Note to self: Don’t read fiction before breakfast.

I got almost no writing done yesterday. Eked out maybe 200 words. At the time, I felt like I was stuck because I had no idea what came next in the story. Couldn’t picture it. Couldn’t find it. Just… total dead end.

Then this morning, when I was walking the dog, bits and pieces started to come back to me. I caught a line, which turned into a thread, and I started seeing where it was going again.

When I got back home, though, I picked up the book I was reading and … swoosh, away it all went again. It’s going to come back because I’m going to stare at the open Word file until it does, but ugh, it’s annoying.

I love fiction for the escape, but I think I’m probably better off not reading while I’m writing. I need my escape to be into my world, not someone else’s.

If I count blog posts, book reviews, a thing I wrote to a friend, AND story words, I easily broke 2000 words yesterday. If I just count story words, it was more like 200. Eep.

But I had a ridiculously nice day and that counts for something, too. I had a very productive morning, a great yoga class, bought veggies at the farmer’s market, went grocery shopping, made chicken soup, read a JD Robb, had a lovely time swimming and playing with the dogs — with the thought that it was only going to be sunny for twenty minutes so I HAD to take advantage even though I needed to write, but then when it stayed sunny, I stayed swimming… Yeah. It was a little summer vacation day in November. And bad me that I didn’t get much story writing done, but good me that I took the opportunity to savor the moment.

Of course, if I don’t stop savoring moments, I’m going to wind up broke and homeless and hungry and it will be hard to savor that, but I’m not going to bother with regrets or worry today. Not when I could be spending my time more productively.

I think there was more I was going to write about — maybe my indecision about posting book reviews to Goodreads? I’m going through a little internal debate about whether I want to keep my book reviews with my blog and/or create a book review blog, because I’m not sure I want them to be as public as they are on Goodreads. Not that a blog’s not public, but I write my book reviews mostly so I can remember what I thought about a book and so that I can keep track of my reading, not because I think they’re useful for other people. But as I discovered last year, in the year of many blogs, it’s sort of a pain to have a lot of blogs — I wind up not writing anywhere and getting topics mixed up and feeling like it’s more effort than it’s worth. I think I use Goodreads mostly because it’s so easy to find the book name and information. In other words, because I’m lazy. Anyway, I’ve got a mental debate going on with that. Oh, yeah, and some people think authors aren’t supposed to write book reviews, which is sort of a problem, too. Or at least it adds to the mental debate.

Regardless, yesterday I wrote three or four book reviews on Goodreads, instead of working on my own story, which was probably not the best use of my time, but I wanted to remember that I’d read those books and yes, I would have forgotten. It put my total of books read and recorded on Goodreads over 100 for the year, which I found somehow oddly gratifying. It reminded me of 6th grade, when we got popcorn parties when the class as a whole read 500 books, which was the only time in my childhood when my peers seemed to approve of my reading. I won’t give myself a popcorn party, though, since popcorn is definitely not on my approved foods list.

I got the feedback from the sessions I did at FWA yesterday. Despite the number of presentations I’ve given in my life, it was the first time I’ve gotten feedback from the official feedback type forms, which was kind of cool. Ahead of time, I suspected that feedback would be a lot like reviews — you can’t please all the people all the time, your mileage may vary, take them with a grain of salt, etc. But I was surprised at how touched I was by the nice comments. I think it was because I was using my real name. They just felt much more personal then reviews do. It made me think that I’d like to publish a book under my real name someday, but then I realized that meaner comments would also feel more personal so maybe not.

And somehow I have wasted far more time than I intended to thinking about Goodreads and FWA evaluations so its time to move on. Today’s goal: words, words, words, of course. But this time, story words, I hope!

This month, in addition to being National Novel Writing Month, is also National Journal Writing Month, which I didn’t know until Carol mentioned it in the comments. And actually, when I went to look it up, I discovered that the National Journal Writing site wanted October to be the month; the National Blogging Post Month — aka NaBloPoMo — are using November. Whatever. Some people are writing or posting a journal/blog post every month and I didn’t know that before, but now that I do — yay, that’s a bandwagon I can jump on. So in addition to trying to make National Novel Writing Month numbers this month, I’m going to try to post a blog post every day. I suspect the latter will be easier than the former.

Yesterday, I finished the day with 1085 words. I’m okay with that. I’m slightly less okay with the fact that they were words for the same chapter that I’d written the previous day. I just couldn’t not delete. The previous day’s words… they didn’t work. It was lots of disjointed conversation, much of which could have carried the dialogue tag “explained”. The dialogue guy at the Florida Writer’s Association Conference suggested that all dialogue that should use “explained” as its verb be rethought and yeah, I rethought. My chapter had potential for energy, but it lost all that energy in discussions that related to world-building. Who spoke in what language, who understood what language, what different types of ghosts there were… yawn.

In context, the loss of energy was very literal, if opposite in its effects. Energetic ghosts suck the warmth out of the air. That would mean that they slow down the molecules in the air. My ghosts were not effectively stealing the warmth, but they were definitely slowing down the action. In yesterday’s chapter, they did a much better job of making it cold, and without slowing everything down. (I’m amused by the different meanings/uses of energy, but I suspect I’m not making sense here — sorry!)

Word count wise, I decided not to freak myself out. I’m including the words from both days in my count. I wrote them and I could include them in one long terrible scene for the NaNo word count purposes without feeling any sense of dishonesty, if I wasn’t worried about my novel being awful. It does mean that I’m already behind. Not going to worry about that, though. There’s plenty of time to catch up and maybe I’ll find the current today and have it whisk me along.

Meanwhile, it turns out that October 30th was not the last swim day of the year. Yesterday, in the peak of my frustration, unable to figure out how to fix the scene, I went outside, decided it was warm enough, and spent a very pleasant, very lovely hour or so floating in the pool. I am fairly sure I’ve never swum in November before but it was exceedingly nice. I’m grateful for the day.

In the evening, I went and hung out with my niece at the library. We went to Denny’s for dinner and Denny’s has added gluten-free indicators to its menu. I was so pleased that I ate gluten-free french fries with ketchup, disregarding the fact that nightshades cause joint inflammation which cause pain. Last night, when I was trying to sleep and my hands were throbbing, I thought it was still worth it, but this morning, when I tried to get out of bed, wow, not so much. Joint pain was at “not sure I can walk right now” levels and even as I type, part of me is aware of how much I hurt. It feels like I did an intense workout yesterday, but since I didn’t, I’m blaming the french fries. Alas. But I mostly write this as a reminder to myself — don’t be stupid. Potatoes aren’t worth it.

Today’s goals: words, words, words. Getting out of this chapter and back to Noah’s POV. Going to yoga if I can loosen up enough that I think it won’t be more pain than it’s worth. Walking the dogs and making my bed and eating only AIP-approved foods. All good goals! I’m hoping for a good day, despite its rocky start. Good luck to my fellow NaNo and NaJo ‘ers — I hope you find the current!

Yesterday’s writing was… well, abysmal. Lots of ideas, but I couldn’t put them into any kind of coherent order and I kept going off into weird sidetracks and getting stuck. Imagine being lost in the woods, where every path circles back to the same clearing where you started. Yep, that was my writing yesterday. Seriously, seriously annoying. But I went to evening yoga and it was great. I think evening yoga is just a little bit harder than daytime yoga, and apparently I’m at the place where that feels good. When I got home, I tried to make some order out of the words that I’d written including ruthlessly deleting all the ones that I truly hated. It’s a bad NaNo strategy but it felt great.

I had some shred of story thought in the middle of the night, something about why I’m going wrong, but I can’t quite grab it now. I think it had something to do with kayaking. Like I’m getting caught in the weeds, and I need to remember to steer toward the current? In the middle of the night, it felt profound and revelatory but then I went back to sleep.

I like what I’ve grasped of it, though. Today I’m going to try to steer toward the current. Aiming for 2K words to make up for yesterday’s lack. It can be done!

Reminder to self: don’t read reviews. I know this and then I forget it. Back in May, I made a version of A Lonely Magic with fewer swear words and it’s the one that’s posted on Amazon now. I checked Author Central today, because I like to check the review count now and then, and the top review was complaining about the swear words in A Lonely Magic. Perfectly nicely, and I don’t mean to complain about the review itself. I appreciate everyone who bothers to write reviews. Certainly the fact that Wedding Guests only has five reviews is far more demoralizing than any one-star ever written.

But I thought, well, okay, I could make her or him a version of ALM with no swear words whatsoever and I opened up the file and started deleting swear words. And then I reached one where there is simply no substitute. There is no other word that could possibly be substituted for “fuck” and convey the same meaning and tone. So I stopped myself and thought, “What am I doing?” At a certain point, Fen’s voice is just gone. She becomes just another bland heroine. And why? The world is filled with objectionable words that Fen doesn’t use–racist terms and names for body parts and derogatory words for people with disabilities. At this point, the story contains 35 uses of fuck, 51 uses of shit, 50 uses of damn, and 76 uses of hell. 212 swear words out of 70,000+ words. If that’s really a problem, then okay, it’s a problem, and I need to let those readers go.

And the good thing about reaching that “fuck” that was unreplaceable was that I also realized that I was making a huge mistake. I don’t want the readers who can’t handle 212 swear words, because Fen’s sexual history, past and present, should not be right for those readers. I fully intend to take Fen to a place where sex is important to her, but she’s starting in a place where she shrugs off casual sex. And yes, I think that’s because she’s been damaged by her past and I want her to get to a (IMO) healthier place where she believes in love, but she’s not there now. And a reader who can’t handle fuck should also not be reading about a heroine who thinks sex is trivial. Or at least I don’t think so. Those swear words are protection for readers who should stay idealistic. Not all readers are the right readers, and I’m not going to change ALM to appeal to everyone, because not everyone should be reading it.

Oops, and my time is up, I need to be leaving the house ten minutes ago. Eleven minutes ago! Sorry, Lynda. 🙂

But great writing yesterday, over 2000 words, and I’m planning on the same for today. Many, many words!

My dialogue experiment was pretty much a failure, because as soon as I started writing, I slipped into Grace’s POV and there I stayed. However, today, I am almost positive that I’m going to write a scene from Dillon’s POV (if I finish up the Grace scene) and I’m looking forward to that to a surprising degree. I like Dillon and his voice feels all bubbly in my brain, like he’s been restraining himself but is ever-so-ready to talk now. We’ll see what happens later, I guess.

I’ve also decided to go back — not yet, but when I’m done with my first draft — and give Rose a POV scene at the beginning. I spent months working on that scene before I decided to throw it out, but with my new freewheeling POV ideas, I want to add it back. It gives me a chance to introduce the ghosts so that the reader isn’t always trying to figure out who they are. I think I’ll wind up needing to completely rewrite it from what I had before, and it will still be the same struggle — too many characters! — but that’s okay.

The big decision in relation to that scene that I was incapable of making before is that it might be Rose’s only POV scene. I kept getting stuck because I felt like the POV characters had to be the main characters of the book, and if I gave Rose a POV scene, then she should have POV scenes throughout. That made the story feel unbalanced to me, because Noah and Grace were getting sidelined to the ghosts. My new resolve to do whatever works for me is very freeing.

This morning when I was ready to sit down to breakfast (mixed greens with white, red, and purple radishes, plus cucumber, kalamata olives, half an avocado, and roast beef — the radishes were exciting), I wanted to read, and I knew exactly what I wanted to read, it was that book I hadn’t finished. And then I woke up a little more and realized that I actually hadn’t finished writing the book I wanted to read. It was a great feeling, though. It’s the first time in a while that I’ve had that craving to know how my own story turns out.

Word count yesterday was 1496 on the story, plus 596 on a blog post. And yes, I’m counting blog posts in my word counts, because they help me get my fingers moving. Goal for today: to beat yesterday’s story word count. To reach NaNo numbers (and yes, I know it hasn’t started yet), the minimum daily goal is 1666. If I reach that today, it’ll be the first time since February 2014 that I’ve done so. But I can do it. No self-doubt allowed.

My rumination exercise has been working remarkably well. Whenever I catch myself drifting into thoughts of the past (not just of the Apple interviews, but of all the things that the interviews brought up), I stop myself and think, “You’re having a thought about X. What’s the emotion that goes with it? Are you trying to control a feeling?” Half the time I’ve moved on to some other thought before I work the feeling out (so typical of me) but it’s still a really interesting exercise. It feels like I’m actually processing stuff, not just endlessly spinning it around in my head.

I just looked up ‘processing’ because it’s a word we use a lot, but does it have an actual therapeutic meaning? Not according to the dictionary. But I found this at Simply Psychology:

(1) information made available by the environment is processed by a series of processing systems (e.g. attention, perception, short-term memory);

(2) these processing systems transform or alter the information in systematic ways;

It’s obviously not the right meaning, but it defines processing as an act of altering or transforming information. Yes, that’s what happens when I pull back from what I’m thinking about and consider it as a thought that my brain is giving me for a reason and then try to decipher the reason. The act of trying to understand my thought transforms it. It stops being a trap that I can’t get out of and starts being a signal.

Of course, I haven’t really figured out what to do with the signals I’m getting yet, but sometimes it seems sufficient to realize, “oh, yes, I’m sad about this,” and give myself permission to feel sad instead of trying to rewrite history in my head.

Okay, this turned into a long blog post when I actually just meant to write about my dialogue experiment, so time to get back to the real writing. Words, words, more words, but good words, I hope. No, good words, I believe. Time for some optimism!

The Apple Store rejected me as a part-time specialist, which is their title for the people who wander around the store and answer questions and sell you stuff and never seem to have any time to help if you just want to grab something and go. I feel… well, rejected. Obviously.

I definitely had my self-protective instincts kick in right away, with the whole range of “well, they were so chaotic — late and no-shows to the interviews, not answering phone calls, sending emails with no way to respond — all for the best” and “it would have distracted me from my writing, just as well,” thoughts. But I’ve still been stuck, for days now, in ruminating. Most people probably think of ruminating as the cow-chewing-its-cud form of thinking, a slow pondering, but in psychology, it’s more specific than that. From wikipedia:

Rumination is the compulsively focused attention on the symptoms of one’s distress, and on its possible causes and consequences, as opposed to its solutions. Rumination is similar to worry except rumination focuses on bad feelings and experiences from the past, whereas worry is concerned with potential bad events in the future. Both rumination and worry are associated with anxiety and other negative emotional states.

So my ruminating has been rewriting and regretting my answers to the interview questions, of course. And, in the answers, a ridiculous amount of reflecting on my past. Oh, but wait… “ridiculous” is a value judgement, a self-condemnation of my thought process. My ruminating feels unhealthy. Regret is pointless. But it’s not ridiculous. It simply is.

One of the principles of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (as mentioned previously, the kind of therapy that I would have liked to have practiced if I’d made it through therapy school), is “cognitive defusion,” which means learning to accept your thoughts as just thoughts. My thoughts have been stuck in rewind and I keep trying to break myself out of that by self-judgements. Stop being so stupid. Done is done. Etc. But those are CBT (cognitive-behavioral therapy) thought processes, trying to break out of my thought patterns by substituting different thoughts. (As might be obvious, “stop being so stupid” would not be the CBT therapist’s message of choice: a CBT person would suggest something more like, “there were other strong candidates.”) But it’s time to try a more ACT approach, which would be to look at my thoughts as what they are: reflections upon the past as a form of emotional control to avoid the feelings of sadness and rejection. So. I feel sad. I feel rejected. I feel disappointed. My hopes for that path to a richer life — one with more structure, more socialization, more activity — have been dashed.

I had dinner with C on Saturday night. We talked a little bit about my… career path? I suppose that’s the best way to refer to it. Apple hadn’t rejected me yet, but I was very much already ruminating and regretting my answers to certain questions. My first interview had a couple questions that I’d wished I’d answered differently, but my second one — well, I would have liked to re-do pretty much everything about it. I was really thrown off early on by trying to answer a question that should have been answered with, “Are you kidding me?” with honesty and depth instead, and then never quite feeling back on track. They were not hard questions at all and I don’t think my answers were particularly bad, but I guess I’d been expecting something different. Less bland, less questions with answers that seemed so obvious that they felt like traps. Oops, ruminating again.

Anyway, C pointed out that just because I’d decided not to be a therapist in the past didn’t mean that I couldn’t change my mind in the future. But it feels to me like my reasons for not continuing in therapy school are just as valid now as they were then. I thought back when I started that I was emotionally healthy and strong enough that I could help other people and then life hit me with a tornado of pain and I realized I wasn’t. C said something kind, along the lines of me being plenty strong but also really sensitive, that I would be an excellent therapist — in fact was already for my lucky friends — but that she could see that such an intense job might break me. She’s the only person I’ve ever known who seems to use “sensitive” as a compliment, not a pejorative. “You’re very sensitive,” in my life has mostly been delivered with sighs of annoyance, and she says it as if it’s a compliment. Digression, I suppose, but maybe not.

So where was I going with all this? Oh, right — being rejected by Apple has made me very sad, but in turn, it’s reminding me to work on my own stuff with the ACT tools that I learned years ago. Maybe I’m not ever going to be a therapist, but that doesn’t mean I can’t practice on myself. So I’m allowing myself to ruminate, trying to step back and look at those thoughts as what they are, simply thoughts, nothing that can hurt me. Well, no, that’s wrong — they can hurt me, because thoughts can cause pain. But I don’t need to let me damage me. I can just experience them for what they are and then let them go.

The “me damage me” was a typo. I meant to write “them damage me.” But I am leaving it for the potent reminder of what it is: any damage my thoughts cause is me damaging me.

One of the ACT elements is defining “emotional control” as a bad thing. It’s super important not to use the tools of cognitive defusion and acceptance as ways of feeling better. The point is not to control your emotions that way, but to experience your emotions and then move on to your actions. That said, though, I do feel better after having written this all out. And yes, probably as soon as I get in the car to go to yoga, I will start ruminating again. And when I do, I will notice myself doing so, and will label my thoughts as thoughts (an ACT technique where you literally think, “I am having the thought that…”) and when the thoughts bring up feelings, I will not tell myself I am stupid for having such feelings, but simply let myself feel them, however unpleasant they are.

Yoga time. Yay. It’s just what I need right now. I suspect it will make me cry, but hey, that’s okay, too.