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dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/38k96z4
I’ve been pretty blocked on writing. Not really like, writer’s block. Never sitting there with the blinking cursor and the blank page, that’s not how I get blocked.
No, I get blocked by, gotta work 40 hours this week, gotta cook dinner, gotta do the laundry. i have an hour to look at the computer, I’m gonna tab over to the writing doc i had open, look at it, and maybe stare at the blinking cursor for a moment, and then I’m gonna tab over to Tumblr and hit refresh, or put my computer down and watch Stupid Youtube on Dude’s computer.
(Last night we watched some extremely feral college boys make peanut butter cups except with baked beans inside. we laughed helplessly through the entire thing, it was full of Feral White Boy Energy radiating off in waves.) (That same channel had already done an experiment with how much of the Rice Krispies in Rice Krispie Treats you could replace with sawdust, and also had used a laser cutter to construct a bust of Vin Diesel out of deli ham. By comparison Gourmet Makes is high cinema. The Internet is a wonderful awful place.)
(Left to my own devices, I do not watch videos. But Dude does, so I watch them with him. We do not own a television so half the pleasure is that we have to lean our shoulders together to look at the little laptop screen.)
I also get blocked by, I gotta work on this idea, no i can’t start anything new until I’ve run this into the ground. Sometimes that means I stare miserably at a thing I was For Sure Going To Finish for six months and don’t write a word.
Lately I’ve been full of ideas, but nothing concrete. There’s been this sense of voracious interest in various strange things. I must know everything about turf longhouses, this moment. I must know all there is to know about capping springs and digging wells. Explain the extraction of bog iron to me, I need to read every resource on the Internet. I have a stack of library books sitting next to me at this very moment, actually leaning against me on the couch because they were on the table and the cat wanted to be where they were and the pile was too high to suit her. A book about leatherworking. A book about Vikings.
Last night I read all of Astolat’s Witcher fanfiction, and no, I did not know who any of the people were, except Geralt. It did not particularly make sense. It didn’t need to, of course; I just treated it as a standalone, though it occasionally annoyed me that clearly I was supposed to already care about this character that had just been introduced and about whom there were no context clues.
But it knocked loose an idea in my head, and now I know what I want to do with that novel I wrote 300,000 words of in 2004. I’m writing a prequel, and no I’m not changing any of the worldbuilding, and no it’s got nothing to do with the Witcher, but I’m going to make the character spend a while as a knight-errant instead of just going straight into being a cavalry captain. Is it related at all? No, but it knocked the idea loose.
Do I have time to write it? No. Do I have time to write anything? No.
Am I going to do it anyway?
Well, only if I don’t get sucked back into the Solarpunk Mammoths thing first.
Orrrr well the other new idea where the girl in the remote border town who’s carved out a place for herself and her nonverbal autistic brother as the best bog iron smelters in the region gets captured by Vikings and carried off to have her heart slowly, reluctantly won over by a sword-wielding lesbian marauder with a heart of gold. I might write that one too, if I can figure out the brother well enough. (It’s super important to me that he doesn’t die or get conveniently vanished.)
But I gotta work 40 hours this week and i gotta do the laundry and we’re getting the doors replaced on the house so I gotta clean the place up a bit and make a space to store the doors I’m salvaging for the possible tiny house in the woods. And I have to plan this week’s meals, and Dude has a cold and is miserable, and I think we’re out of cat food, and I’m tired, and I really want to learn The Mermaid on the banjo.
So. Who knows.
I’ve been pretty blocked on writing. Not really like, writer’s block. Never sitting there with the blinking cursor and the blank page, that’s not how I get blocked.
No, I get blocked by, gotta work 40 hours this week, gotta cook dinner, gotta do the laundry. i have an hour to look at the computer, I’m gonna tab over to the writing doc i had open, look at it, and maybe stare at the blinking cursor for a moment, and then I’m gonna tab over to Tumblr and hit refresh, or put my computer down and watch Stupid Youtube on Dude’s computer.
(Last night we watched some extremely feral college boys make peanut butter cups except with baked beans inside. we laughed helplessly through the entire thing, it was full of Feral White Boy Energy radiating off in waves.) (That same channel had already done an experiment with how much of the Rice Krispies in Rice Krispie Treats you could replace with sawdust, and also had used a laser cutter to construct a bust of Vin Diesel out of deli ham. By comparison Gourmet Makes is high cinema. The Internet is a wonderful awful place.)
(Left to my own devices, I do not watch videos. But Dude does, so I watch them with him. We do not own a television so half the pleasure is that we have to lean our shoulders together to look at the little laptop screen.)
I also get blocked by, I gotta work on this idea, no i can’t start anything new until I’ve run this into the ground. Sometimes that means I stare miserably at a thing I was For Sure Going To Finish for six months and don’t write a word.
Lately I’ve been full of ideas, but nothing concrete. There’s been this sense of voracious interest in various strange things. I must know everything about turf longhouses, this moment. I must know all there is to know about capping springs and digging wells. Explain the extraction of bog iron to me, I need to read every resource on the Internet. I have a stack of library books sitting next to me at this very moment, actually leaning against me on the couch because they were on the table and the cat wanted to be where they were and the pile was too high to suit her. A book about leatherworking. A book about Vikings.
Last night I read all of Astolat’s Witcher fanfiction, and no, I did not know who any of the people were, except Geralt. It did not particularly make sense. It didn’t need to, of course; I just treated it as a standalone, though it occasionally annoyed me that clearly I was supposed to already care about this character that had just been introduced and about whom there were no context clues.
But it knocked loose an idea in my head, and now I know what I want to do with that novel I wrote 300,000 words of in 2004. I’m writing a prequel, and no I’m not changing any of the worldbuilding, and no it’s got nothing to do with the Witcher, but I’m going to make the character spend a while as a knight-errant instead of just going straight into being a cavalry captain. Is it related at all? No, but it knocked the idea loose.
Do I have time to write it? No. Do I have time to write anything? No.
Am I going to do it anyway?
Well, only if I don’t get sucked back into the Solarpunk Mammoths thing first.
Orrrr well the other new idea where the girl in the remote border town who’s carved out a place for herself and her nonverbal autistic brother as the best bog iron smelters in the region gets captured by Vikings and carried off to have her heart slowly, reluctantly won over by a sword-wielding lesbian marauder with a heart of gold. I might write that one too, if I can figure out the brother well enough. (It’s super important to me that he doesn’t die or get conveniently vanished.)
But I gotta work 40 hours this week and i gotta do the laundry and we’re getting the doors replaced on the house so I gotta clean the place up a bit and make a space to store the doors I’m salvaging for the possible tiny house in the woods. And I have to plan this week’s meals, and Dude has a cold and is miserable, and I think we’re out of cat food, and I’m tired, and I really want to learn The Mermaid on the banjo.
So. Who knows.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-18 05:23 pm (UTC)I hope you can find time to do All the Things (including more stupid video watching with Dude) and can still manage to grab one of those ideas and run with it
no subject
Date: 2020-01-18 06:34 pm (UTC)I had forgotten about the cheese.
I hope I get some time and focus to write too, coming up; winter is the season I get to do it at all, and feeling I don't have time for it is not a helpful thing. this summer will be even worse, there's a commercial kitchen going in at the farm and i've been interested in that for years but it's clearly gonna be more shit for me to do, argh.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-19 01:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-18 09:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-19 01:00 am (UTC)I think a big part of being able to switch around on projects is having your workspace, mentally and physically, set up for that. But if she can do it, my ADHD ass can do it.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-19 01:23 am (UTC)She has a place to record word count for each day so she can look back at it and see what she's gotten done.
That's the gist of it!