Over a year to write a chapter

I’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE AND THE WRITING AND I SURVIVED

I’m digging out some of my unfinished blog posts – to either finish or delete – and I find this one which is entirely appropriate, because I’m basically at the same place, but in LIMBO, not NETHERWORLD, and the Chapter is 41, not 26.

And, of course, the date is Mon., May 29 – 2023 – and Memorial Day.

Must add: I ended up quite pleased with Chapter 26!

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March 19, 2018 at 1:52 PM
I have been mentally putting off getting started on Chapter 26 for plenty of good reasons having to do with time, selling the house, giving stuff away, health (the Valsartan [heart drug I couldn’t tolerate] loss of ten days crippled me), worry…
And one bad reason: I’m scared of it.

Friday August 16, 2019 at 2:33 PM
Finished. Cut out a bunch of words. Left it cleaner.
Andrew is back to thinking only about himself as he heads back toward his rooms. Considered professional, and personal by implication. His way – fast easy travel at the drop of a hat implied – is contrasted with what he knows about her ability to travel. It is quite clear for the reader.

I have a bunch of time: this is the end of the chapter.
How can I best use the state of being more or less awake.
Unfortunately, I’m also hungry.

But Chapter 26 is over – down to She’ll be fine ’til I get back.
Which is my foreshadowing.

Saved time by not running scenes through AC as I finished them because, in all honesty, I didn’t think my brain capable of the fine decisions AND I was worried about the chapter as a whole still being in my ‘voice’ and the characters’ voices and my style…

Then the editing went stupendously well – I’m getting better at correcting a couple faults I have as a writer, from the very beginning – and it took less than a day to get the whole chapter – around 11,500 words, not untypical for me – edited, polished, and proofread.

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Be wary of accepting help from bots/algorithms/autocorrect

The rest of the original 2018 post is toast, because I accepted WordPress’ offer to turn the original Classic format into the current Blocks format – and it took all the statistics I quoted, from AutoCrit, and me writing Chapter 26 – and turned them into some kind of weird ‘Your Statistics’ in the block format because it recognized some patterns (such as the word ‘statistics’) and MISREAD them, and now won’t let me go back to the previous version.

Sigh.

I will have to delete all of them from here to the bottom.

Basically, the statistics from AutoCrit (which they no longer provide) said I had analyzed over 4 MILLION words up to that point in my use of AC: “On average, each scene went through Autocrit (online editing software) and my process about ten times after I finished writing it. I constantly edit and rewrite as I go, so this isn’t unusual for me either.”

So why bother quoting statistics from 2018?

Because, due to 1) publishing NETHERWORLD (which took until September 2022), and then 2) the aftereffects of two major problems, surgery and a big tax/paperwork project, I haven’t finished a Chapter in the new book, LIMBO, yet.

I HAVE written the first scene (which will not be shared for a while because I don’t have the whole of Book 3 organized the way I need to, and the scene MAY be missing a few key pieces), so I can’t move on yet.

And it was over a YEAR since writing the last scene in NETHERWORLD (March 2022?) and getting to the first scene in LIMBO, and I would rather not dwell on that year!

But the PATTERN – much time may go by between writing one scene and the next – is not unfamiliar for me, so it doesn’t alarm me, and I just get to work as soon as I have a usable brain and the ability to put that time to my preferred use, writing fiction.

To be clear: I’m not HAPPY about this way of writing, but it happens, doesn’t freak me out TOO much, and I’m like a police dog which has acquired a scent: I go right back to following it.

My style of writing, my ‘process’, copes fine with the breaks

Because I do everything in writing, using the many Journals and Scrivener files to keep track of minutiae (if I do anything remotely new or different, I start and date a new file in the appropriate Scrivener folder), EVERYTHING is there when I need to reload my brain.

I don’t even try to remember what I need (will, spontaneously, sometimes, but I don’t RELY on it), but I KNOW I wrote it down somewhere.

It wouldn’t work if I were writing many or shorter books; but for my complex novel trilogy about Andrew, Kary, and Bianca – characters who love and work in the movie/writer universe – this kind of compulsive tracking of details has come in handy time and again, rescuing me from having to remember any more than vague concepts, and leading me to where I can reload the pieces I currently need with relative efficiency.

I thought the organization of LIMBO was more complete

But now that I’m finally going through the spreadsheets I created in Excel and the reports from Dramatica, I find that I did NOT really finish it.

Not surprising: when I spent those three weeks at LaSalle as chaperone for our teenage homeschooling chemistry interns in 2007 (?), I was still working on PURGATORY!

Back then, I did the fully-fleshed encoded storyform for Book 1, and did a great deal with the enrobing of Book 2, somewhat less for Book 3.

When, years later, I had finished and published PURGATORY (Oct. – Dec. 2015), and plunged into writing NETHERWORLD, I found myself at the same stage I’m at now for LIMBO, where I hadn’t done as much work on NETHERWORLD as I thought I had, and it was NOT ready to ‘just write’. It took several months to get it to that state.

Well, it turns out that LIMBO is pretty skimpily encoded. I can’t write it from this state – because I don’t have each individual scene and its requirements planned.

So, after another year+ of not writing, I have to go back to planning and organizing, which means RE-READING most of the notes I wrote myself in 2016 as I put Book 2 through its paces. And finding that they help – a lot – except that the final details of the end of the whole trilogy are sketched in much less than I thought they were, so I’m having to repeat the whole process, AND the third book is actually a leveling up of a bunch of concepts, rather than a duplication of the same concepts from the previous two books.

Complicated enough yet?

All this means is that I have work to do.

With all my written notes, I can figure out what the work is, and have a scaffolding for escalating the parts of the structure that will need it.

I THINK I’ve learned enough now that this part of the process won’t take me months this time. It is OBVIOUS where I’m going with it, and I know what it needs to produce, the list of scenes with every important detail assigned to the appropriate one of them.

The auxiliary files – spreadsheets and calendar – will take a bit of time, but I know how much it helps to have them, and have models from Books 1 & 2.

YESTERDAY the pre-learning tantrum occurred

If you haven’t heard the concept, it comes from Dr. Karen Pryor’s Don’t shoot the dog, and expresses the frustration at a key point in the learning process:

The old ways don’t work, and the new ways don’t make sense. Yet.

My brain HURT, physically, as I struggled to make sense of how to apply my process for the third time, BUT to a more complicated book.

But YESTERDAY I had a brain for a while, a stubborn one, and I didn’t quit, didn’t put it off, didn’t flee at the pain, but broke it down into the tiniest of steps.

And voilà! We broke through.

I figured out what the heck I was doing (and for a bonus, WHY it was giving me such a hard time), and calmly took the first tiny step – in this case, assigning the major plot steps to the list of chapters and scenes. Starting from those fragmentary bits from 2007, I started putting up the scaffolding and bolting it into place.

So that today, when I ran into the first wall, I recognized it and started the process of getting over it. WITHOUT freaking out.

I think I’m okay now. The tantrum was painful, but it is already receding, another one conquered by method and patience.

There are plenty of missing bits, so I have plenty of WORK to do, but I also have the memory that twice before, when the blueprint was finished I could move on to the construction phase, and I am actually EAGER to tackle the project.

Then go back and revise 41.1 (LIMBO’s first chapter’s first scene if you count from the beginning of PURGATORY, 1.1 if you start numbering in LIMBO) IF necessary, and then confidently grab the next one and write IT, over and over until the words are out.

Even though there are always MORE walls.

Maybe this time it will be done in fewer years.

Is this elaborate process worth it to me?

Yes, because, with my damaged brain, I can’t write anything with any level of complexity otherwise.

And also yes, because, once the rigging is finished and I start raising sails, we fly over the water (okay, I’m slow at that, too), and I have hopes of finishing a book.

And this one IS the biggie, the third one which tests/proves the rule, the solution/end/completion to the trilogy – and I can’t wait to read it.

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To celebrate, here is the very beginning of LIMBO over at prideschildren.com, the tiny prologue/Prothalamion which is the continuation of the New Yorker article that is the frame around the trilogy, purportedly written by someone interested in ‘telling’ The Great American Love Story, years after and with all the missing pieces.

And readers of the whole will enjoy knowing a LOT more than that journalist – and knowing which pieces in that article are truth.

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You’re never too old for writing FEAR

From my FEAR and RESISTANCE JOURNAL today:

It got me again.

I, who have published 352K words of Pride’s Children, am terrified. Again.

It’s been a year since the writing of NETHERWORLD ended and the publishing part began, and my body and I have been through a lot.

And I’m getting started back into the final volume, with a strong path ahead of me through plotting that’s been necessary since the very beginning.

I wrote the first scene and the new Prothalamion, thought I was on a roll.

I decided to not mess with a good thing, and to go back to the detailed process that gets me through each scene.

So I started updating the auxiliary files and spreadsheets and graphics and Dramatica files – finding all the pieces one by one in my detailed Scrivener projects.

Getting ready to write as quickly as I can (I HAVE gotten faster at following my own system), I readied all the surrounding bits for the second scene, 41.2 if you number from 1.1 in PURGATORY and 21.1 in NETHERWORLD.

And I froze.

Have gotten NOTHING more written in two full days – only partly brain-fogged days – when I was so sure I’d just plunge right back in.

It’s the same old FEAR: you think you’ve conquered it – until it comes back again and waylays you.

It takes you into a dark alley and tells you you’ll never do it again: this one, the denouement, has to be higher and trickier and more explosive than the previous two, AND you have to bring everything to a logical, complete, and unforeseen but perfect CONCLUSION, and just because you wrestled the lower level bosses to a standstill doesn’t mean you have it for the Big Boss.

Aargh!

I remember reading about a Broadway megastar who still throws up before every performance. 

41.1 can’t go out until I’m sure I haven’t left something important out by free-writing it.

41.2 can’t get written until I make the deep cuts in all the contributing files to get the gold – or write new gold.

It’s not going to get easier.

It’s going to get harder.

And I’m older.

And scared.

Tough. DO IT ANYWAY.

Pretending it was going to get easier is simply the mind’s way of keeping you together until you get to the starting gate.

It’s a lie, a helpful lie, but still.

I have to DO THE WORK.

I have to GO THROUGH.

There is NO AROUND.

NO ONE is going to come rescue me – there isn’t anyone who can, anyway.

It’s my baby. It was vouchsafed to me WHOLE in 2000.

ONLY I can write it.

And I don’t quit.

Just remember I’m terrified when you ask me how it’s going.

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I just paid to upgrade my ‘FREE’ wordpress blog to a paid PERSONAL blog – why didn’t anyone tell me my blog posts were larded with ads for garbage?

They said ads would appear at the bottom maybe – but today I got a taste of the horror of my post INTERSPERSED with gruesome ADS.

MY APOLOGIES if you’ve been subjected to this – LET ME KNOW if it happens again.

Now we’ve really gotten to Armageddon: you have to pay NOT to have ADS.

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2023 Update on B1 megadoses, CFS, and writing

MISSING FROM POSTING IS ENDING!

I never intended to stop writing blog posts here, and at the books’ site – it just sort of happened, for the usual reason these things happen to me: there is only so much energy left to someone with ME/CFS after dealing with it during a day, and only so much of it doesn’t have active brain fog, and stress makes it worse, never better (I don’t have the equivalent of being able to supercharge with caffeine, adrenaline, or, well, anything).

So ‘things happening’ and climbing to the top of the priorities lists (as they always do) means other things get neglected.

I’ve posted some when I had a little energy, but I have about twelve STARTED posts, six per blog, because when I have an idea I quickly create a new one, think up a temporary title, possibly even create a graphic (thanks, Stencil, for 10 free ones a month), sketch in a few quick notes… And usually follow up. Which I haven’t been up to doing lately.

Erratic is the result. Sometimes people even forget you exist.

And they certainly don’t have time in their lives to track another blogger down.

COMMENTING keeps my hand in

and serves a second purpose: getting the brain cells trained toward thought and typing.

If I find an interesting post, I will leave a comment if I have anything to contribute to the conversation. Bloggers don’t get enough engagement, and they put a lot of thought into the posts, and seem to like even my digressions (ON their topic) enough not to block me. Online I’m more of an opinionated extrovert than I manage in person. I still try to keep it civil and not sound as if I’m the ultimate authority on the subject – my rule for myself is, “If you wouldn’t say it to someone’s face, don’t say it at all.” True internet anonymity is not my style.

If I get it wrong, I apologize. Text exchanges inherently lack nuance, and more than once I’ve interpreted something my way and found out from a reply that it was meant some other way. Even with knowing the blog or FB stream, it happens. Twice in the last year the best response was to delete what I said. Not too bad, considering I flap my fingers thousands of times. And have strong opinions of my own.

But commenting doesn’t mean I’m capable of organizing and finishing a post of my own; often it means the opposite.

THE BIG ONE is almost finished

I wish it had been another piece of fiction, but it wasn’t. It was a tax problem which affected me, has taken a lot of time to resolve, and is ALMOST finished, which is why I can START thinking about how to use my time for my writing again.

I like to contribute as much as I can to problems which are partly mine. And this one was big enough that I needed to maintain as much of my usable ‘good time’ for it every day – and ONLY for it – because I have such a small amount of it that it really can’t be split and still get anything accomplished. It also took almost all of my assistant’s time in the two 2-hour sessions I had with her over months, so I got no other benefit from her time most sessions.

But the problem slowly got pinned down and then solved, piece by piece, because I CAN do that, still, if I HAVE to.

I fear for when this is no longer true.

And worry that other things aren’t getting done.

But I refuse to be a parasite just because I am disabled, and I COULD help with this one, so I did.

And I still managed to get Pride’s Children: NETHERWORLD published – by spending the money, and having my good friend Bill Peschel do the cover and formatting work. Yes, he was great. No, he’s not making a career of that part of it – he has enough work of his and his wife’s to keep him quite busy, thankyouverymuch.

Otherwise I would be sending everything I could his way. Our loss.

The PHYSICAL parts I will gloss over:

The first was necessary and long postponed surgery (due to the pandemic) last September (which is why I had someone else help get NETHERWORLD out – you never know for sure if you’ll come out of surgery). And a totally unexpected VERY painful recovery and meds mess; mostly over now.

The second, this year, for the fun of it, was a trip to the ER because of chest pain. Did you know that half of the time you have chest pain AND elevated troponin (a cardiac enzyme) levels, it is NOT a heart attack, but you’ve probably done something and deprived your hear muscle of adequate oxygen for a while? But they can’t tell without dragging you to a hospital WITH a cardiac unit, and performing an angiogram to see if any of your stents have plugged up OR you need a new one OR, I assume, something else is wrong. Big fuss. Hospitals (2). Days (3). Recovery (a good week). All of this very difficult when you already have ME/CFS. I will not be doing carpet scrubbing bent over any more. The good new was that I don’t need more stents; the bad part was that I already knew that from the angiogram required prior to surgery last September. And the final word was from the cardiologist who released me who said, “Well, that should be good for another 2 – 5 years,” and who probably wasn’t thinking that I’d had one four months before which should have meant I was okay now. I’m grateful they don’t take chances, but the effect on my tiny life was astronomical.

That’s me ‘glossing over’ anything. For Heaven’s sake, the woman likes to talk! Maybe the second paragraph will help someone else in the future…

Now that I’m supposed to be getting MY life back…

all I want to do is finish LIMBO, and see if I can shorten the 3-5 year expected time to write and publish it.

The other tasks (some of which I’ve been kicking along in little bits of time) include:

Getting readers and reviews for NETHERWORLD. Seven 5* reviews/ratings is a lovely start. Selling one copy in February 2023 is not. ARCs are slowly going out to the reviewers who said they were waiting for it, but it is a long time commitment (about 12 hours to read, plus the time it takes to review), and each ask takes me a couple of days of my tiny bits of leftover ‘second best time.’

Submitting to awards. NETHERWORLD was a Finalist for the 2022 Indies Today Awards, a decent showing for the second novel in a trilogy (PURGATORY won 2021 Best Contemporary novel from Indies Today last year). I’ve submitted to one other award – will know in May – but investigating awards which are good to have has taken a lot of time, and applying to them is getting expensive. I have more to say about help on that front, but won’t, for now.

Marketing. Two attempts to get help from ‘professionals’ have resulted in nothing yet; one of the companies has ghosted me twice (hmmm).

Mainstream literary fiction – the best way to categorize what I write – is a difficult sell if you’re a self-published author; even my Facebook group admin for marketing it has stated they ONLY take their recommendations from regular media (in their case, broadsheets (newspapers) of significant repute which still have review sections). Discouraging.

My somewhat tongue-in-cheek post about how to go viral with literary fiction left me with finding the right influencer as the main method, and I’m trying, but it’s even harder than finding reviewers!

I had at one time the thought of looking at the reviews of popular traditionally-published literary novels – and targeting the readers who DIDN’T like those – until I realized what a huge effort that might be (there were thousands), and decided it would be better to spend the energy writing LIMBO, as having a COMPLETE trilogy is considered far better than having only one or two volumes finished. I’m not sure I believe that – there was a lot of publicity (much of it expensive PAID publicity) for Elena Ferrante’s quartet before the last two came out – but my record for marketing up until now is unprepossessing. At best.

THE REST OF MY SO-CALLED LIFE

The pandemic – and waiting for surgery – did a number on the fun things here at our retirement community.

I’m now able to go out (when it’s warm enough) and ride around on Maggie (my Airwheel S8, a bicycle seat on a hoverboard) on and off our campus. I’ll have to build up to doing that more – and possibly find new people to do it with.

I will be going back to using our pools, including the nice warm therapy pool I love to bob in for a half-hour or less, followed by the huge but necessary time-wasting of a shower with hair-washing.

I hope to regenerate our folk-singing group, on hiatus because singing in an enclosed space turned out to be a really good way to spread the virus, but will have to find a safe way to do that (a bigger, better-ventilated room would help). It has been so many years since we sang together that it will be practically a new venture.

I’m back to using B1 (150mg of benfotiamine + 500mg of Vitamin B1, 2-3 times daily) plus B12 (liquid B12, dropperful sublingually up to 8 times daily) because they or the combination seems a LITTLE bit better than nothing for getting me to have a usable brain.

And I continue to write better when blocking the internet with FREEDOM or ANTI-SOCIAL for a given chunk of time, so I don’t get sidetracked (I’m easily distractible – shiny!).

THE REST OF MY WRITING LIFE

All the obvious:

blog posts

sales for the books

publishing Too Late, the prequel short story

marketing

finding MY readers out of the vast sea of not-my-readers

maybe some short stories about Kary, Andrew, Bianca – and offspring

the next big writing project/book

publicity of some kind – possibly including me if there is enough interest

the as-read-by-author audiobooks

the easier hardcover and large print books

applying for relevant awards

and always, finding ways to persuade reviewers whose reviews I like that they will enjoy reading MY story, and will possibly encourage me by giving the books one of their lovely reviews.

———-

I think that’s about it. Y’all are sort of up-to-date about my MIA status.

I no longer have a BookSprout account (it didn’t produce a single download or review of either PURGATORY or NETHERWORLD in a year), so contact me (comments or About for the email address) if you would like an ARC and would CONSIDER writing a review; I don’t nag.

If you like my fiction, there’s a lot of short stuff here

I am always honored when a reader recommends Pride’s Children to friends or family. Or BOOK CLUB!

Visit the Pride’s Children blog for more about the books (including questions for book clubs!) and to read the prequel. If you FOLLOW there, you’ll find out more about LIMBO and timing and sales when I send out the occasional email/newsletter.

Pray for stability to my life – it helps the writing.

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NETHERWORLD ebook is live – prideschildren (dot) com

And the print version is ‘In review’ at Amazon

If you are interested in my fiction, and haven’t signed up at its site, click on Pride’s Children: NETHERWORLD‘s announcement post for the ebook – but the print version is already up, cover and all, and Amazon has notified me it may take 3 days.

The ebook took ONE HOUR to be approved, late last night – I guess no one else was up!

Details at the link – not everyone who comes here is interested in fiction.

Check there, too, for the details of the two Kindle Countdown Deals that are set up – one for PURGATORY, Sep. 21, and one for NETHERWORLD, Oct. 19. Best way to pick up a copy of either.

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Should blogging identities be kept separate?

You can’t help but be connected!

SHOULD YOU MIX YOUR AUDIENCES?

I’m an acquired taste.

This blog has 967 followers as of today – and I’ve been at it since 2012.

I’m two posts away from 700 – and no, that’s not why I’m blogging today.

Many blogs I follow have posts every day. I don’t necessarily want to do that, even if I could.

The blog I really care about is the one for the Pride’s Children books, prideschildren.com (I did have the sense to buy the domain way back in the early years, along with this one and a couple of others I keep just in case, such as the one with my full name).

But PridesChildren.com has 40 followers, and this blog has 732, and I’m wondering if I’m somehow neglecting to get readers who come HERE to continue on to the PC blog – assuming some of them read mainstream fiction, or, Oh, Joy!, have read some of my short fiction and want something more.

With limited energy, a staple of my life, I have to choose every day that isn’t too severely brainfogged, where to do some writing:

Where does the (writing) time go?

When one of the volumes of Pride’s Children is being written, that’s where the efforts mostly go, unless I physically can’t accomplish much because the time is short.

When I have something specific to say or to record for posterity (which often includes my own odd brand of writing advice), I blog at Liebjabberings (here). I’m actually considering writing a book of advice for writers – if there is any interest in my coping mechanisms.

And when I want to look polished and professional (even though I usually write in PJs) and am reminding myself that I have one chance to make a good impression with the fiction I care the most about, I blog at Pride’s Children. Or when I have something to say about a launch, or a sale, or an award.

And there’s always something on both sites that needs updating or polishing – feel free to weigh in.

Do I already have some crossovers?

Yes, but not as many as I expected.

So I’m making an open invitation: try out my short fiction here, go follow me there (or on Amazon at my author page), and you’ll know when I have a publishing event you might be interested in.

Other things to do

Contact me (See the About page) – ask me anything, or suggest a topic for a post. I love questions, and would be happy to write about something (assuming I have anything to contribute).

Comment on a post – I look at them as conversation starters, not articles of truth. Love chatting.

Recommend me to a friend, as a blogger or fictioneer.

Read something – try out the short fiction. Or a favorite post of mine. Or dig into the old ones with the strange titles.

Why now? Because NETHERWORLD is so close, and I’d love to give it a good party sendoff. And because sales are short-term events, and I’m figuring out timing that would be most beneficial – for more people to acquire ‘the taste.’

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Scary time of absent brain

The future is boundless; our life, not so much

Not intending to be dire or apocalyptic – but often being able to write a blog post, almost any kind of a post, signals, for me, the end of a difficult period where the brain power needed to do almost anything is just not there, and I’m not sure if it’s the waxing and waning of ME/CFS – or the beginning of the end of being able to write.

Those who know me, or have been following for a while, know how close to the edge of completely non-functional I live. A little bit worse, and no creative juices flow at all.

I wait it out, deal with whatever is causing additional problems beyond chronic illness and disability, pick up where I left off when I can function a bit again.

THERE IS NO POINT

in wasting any of my energy in railing against my fate – it doesn’t help, and doesn’t make me feel better. [Note: my brain supplied ‘railing’ as the appropriate form of protest against things bigger than I can manage. I was terrified for a few seconds when Google only supplied ‘fencing’ as a definition, until I insisted further and ‘rail’ as a verb came up. Phew!]

It is what it is until they figure it out, this ME/CFS, come up with a definitive diagnostic, find the mechanism(s) that cause it, find a treatment, find a CURE!

Today I had an interesting interaction with someone online who claims 1) to have had it, and 2) to have a treatment protocol that cured him. I had the strength of character to tell him I was glad for him, and not interested in arguing with someone online who has the ‘solution of the week.’ And to please stop writing to me.

As we tell new people, “Hope it’s something else – something that DOES have a diagnostic and a treatment.” If something actually cured someone, it is awfully likely they didn’t have what I have in the first place, but something with similar symptoms – and a CURE!/treatment/prognosis.

It’s vanishingly likely that he has something that can help, and I don’t have the bandwidth for another savior with a solution. I’ve been at this nonsense for 32 years.

There is a finite (ie, non-zero) possibility that now that they’re pouring money into long covid research that they will actually look enough to find a real solution. That’s where my hopes are being pinned; ask me in a couple of years if anything panned out – because governments finally realized that 10-30% of the long covid survivors were, essentially, getting ME/CFS and, more importantly to governments, turning from productive working tax-paying citizens into sick citizens needing the disability benefits they have been promised since they started working. Ie, it will COST the governments, and they may figure out a cure is finally worth putting some money into research, instead of telling people it’s all in their heads.

Hope I’m still around.

More than that, hope it works for people who are not recently ill – not that I begrudge the newbies, but I want to be at the head of the line.

Hey! Look! I’m producing coherent (okay, you may argue about that) sentences!

It’s been a rough time since I announced I had finished writing Netherworld, and now that I have finished proofing the text.

The plan was to format and then to get the cover out of my head and onto a page. It’s been weeks. Sometimes I just go read the end, fall in love with it all over again, and go back to sitting staring at the screen.

Because love hasn’t been translating into action.

So far it’s just par for the course, and I expect it will resolve itself, and it won’t hurt to get the new Airbook(name?) from Apple with the M2 thingamabob my eldest daughter says is good – not having the computer question resolved – should I format and cover on the old machine, or wait for the new one and bite the bullet and update my Scrivener which may have some of the things I needed that the previous version didn’t have?

But I can’t believe how much that tiny obstacle in my path stopped me from making ANY progress.

Physical problems have been the stumbling block

I don’t want to go into details, yet, on a public blog, but my already-strained-to-the-limit body and mind have had a huge task added to keeping us all going, it has affected sleep, pain, and comfort to an incredible degree, and taken every speck of energy I had.

Finding a solution took energy I didn’t have, and going outside my medical system, and I’m glad I did – but it won’t be over for a while, and it isn’t going to be any fun. Until AFTER September, and then there will be recovery.

And I won’t have any relief from taking care of the problem constantly unless I am very, very, VERY lucky next week.

I’m sleeping in 1-2 hour chunks. That should account for the feeling of doom – sleep deprivation is classified as torture.

So I shouldn’t worry, right?

Except that there’s always that one last straw, the one that breaks the badger’s back, and I wonder, when I have the brain to wonder, whether this is it, and hope it isn’t, because I’m not finished writing quite yet.

If I am, it isn’t because I quit. I was because I was wrestled to a standstill by Reality, which always wins.

Meanwhile, putting words on page has given me a little much-needed hope again, and getting the news my computer situation might be resolving has given me a goal in a decision I kept going back and forth on (wait – or go ahead on familiar if not completely adequate technology – wait -…).

Thinking outside the box hasn’t worked yet

but I am vastly encouraged by the fact that I figured out how to, initiated it, was fortunate enough to find a listening ear (after several tries), and it may work much better than what I have had (nothing). And in my weakened state, no less!

I’m very proud of myself for trying – hope it works out.

So there – and mysterious. The women who read this blog and are older than 50 and/or have had children may have a clue; the rest of you really shouldn’t want to know. It’s grotty and embarrassing and against all the modesty my middle-class Mexican upbringing instilled deep, courtesy of my beloved Mother.

If I navigate it successfully, you may ask privately, and I’ll name the Beast.

**********

As soon as the fog clears a bit more, and/or the new laptop is here and mastered, I will go doggedly right back to working on the publishing of NETHERWORLD, instead of just going to the file, re-reading the end, and crying into my beer because I love it so much.

I’m just waiting for two good friends to let me know if they liked it, too, to feel a whole lot better.

And if you like to be in at that stage, my contact information is in the About. I could use a few more readers/reviewers who are familiar with PURGATORY, and need to keep going.

**********

It’s that time: typo hunting time

THE PERFECT IS THE ENEMY OF THE GOOD

In the publishing of the next book, every self-published author has to face the fact that typos exist, are blamed on the author (who has ultimate responsibility), and are as hard to eliminate completely as cockroaches.

What is a practical limit for the number of typos?

A little checking provides a couple of rough guidelines:

1. A typo per thousand words is too many.
2. Three typos in ten thousand words is proofing to a professional standard.

That standard means that, in a novel of 187,000 words, one could discover 56 typos – a huge number – and still be within professional quality. But it’s a twenty-chapter book, and that is only 2-3 typos per chapter, which doesn’t sound quite so bad.

The kind of errors matters

Using the wrong word isn’t a typo – it’s a mistake. It often comes from not knowing a word well enough, and not looking up the correct usage if you’re not certain.

There are a number of these anthills to die on, and experienced writers will know the difference between may and might, principal and principle, and verb affect/effect and noun affect/effect.

No one but beginners should have problems with its and it’s, or their/they’re/there. A professional writer needs to be certain about the basics, and have a cheat sheet for the ones which cause them trouble personally.

And it never hurts to check again, reinforcing what you know, challenging what you think you know. I am getting very humble in that department, as my damaged brain keeps throwing me the almost right word, I find it slightly odd – and have the sense to check. The bigger your vocabulary, the more chances for this to trip you up.

Leaving out a short word is a typo – a good friend just caught me leaving out ‘to’ from the infinitive ‘to commit’ – thank you!

The little shorties which are the wrong word, but are an actual word, are one of my peccadilloes: it, if, is, in – it is so easy to type the wrong consonant!

Transposing a couple of letters or leaving off a final letter – happen frequently to all typists, and can be very hard to catch. Sometimes the best way is to have the robot voice of your computer or program read you your own deathless prose – and make you giggle. My current typo-in-hiding is leaving the final ‘r’ off ‘your,’ which sounds funny when read back to me – YMMV.

Paying for professional proofing

does not guarantee perfection, unfortunately. It may be worth it but I think it doesn’t teach you anything. You’ll still make mistakes and typos, and have to figure out how to make the corrections stick in your writer’s mind, if they’re the kind you can learn from such as using a word incorrectly.

If you accept the corrections made by a pro too quickly, you may not move the problems into long-term memory properly – and so will continue to make that kind of flub. It’s worth taking some time to ask yourself why they happened, and whether you can make a permanent self-fix.

And you’re still the one with your name on the book.

So wish me well on what is the final proofing:

Sending out ARCs I think are perfect, and getting back the little niggly (and wonderfully welcome), “I liked it – but on page #n, you have a typo…”

Embarrassing – but I am grateful for every catch.

And vow to learn from them.

Can’t be perfect – but I can always become better.

**********

Don’t throw me under the bus

Davis, California – February 2022

THEY PROMISED US AN ENJOYABLE RETIREMENT

As working people, the ‘system’ promised us, if we worked hard and saved our pennies for retirement, didn’t spend it all, that we would enjoy some years of healthy living, ease, family, and freedom.

Now they want to renege.

The rest of the world wants to go back to ‘normal,’ ignore any public health measures that might prevent passing on a deadly virus which keeps mutating into something even more dire (so far), has killed oh, around a million Americans directly, and, if I’m reading the statistics right, another million or so in ‘excess deaths’ – deaths which wouldn’t have happened if normal ailments had been treated in hospitals in a timely manner.

Well, those hospitals were full of covid patients – still are.

And after every new peak, ‘they’ are quick to assume it’s the last of its kind (remember after Delta, and before Omicron cases started climbing stratospherically?), and give up restrictions before people get tired of them.

The view from the vulnerable block is pure astonishment

In the US and in much of Europe they are already preparing to ‘live with the virus’ – everyone will eventually get it, THE OLD, SICK, VULNERABLE, IMMUNOCOMPROMISED, FRAGILE WILL DIE, and the world will go back to being a lovely place for idiots to party and catch covid at a concert, restaurant, or bar.

And take it home to Grandma.

Who needs Grandma anyway?

People who might have lived for years, decades

Because what they had, while not fun, is manageable: diabetes, heart disease, obesity…

Or potentially curable: some forms of cancer, getting a replacement kidney or a part of someone’s liver or a heart transplant…

are incredibly susceptible to getting covid.

They don’t just fade away: death from covid is painful, exhausting, humiliating – and with little support from family and friends – lonely.

And people dying of covid in a hospital cause other people not to be able to lifesaving surgery or care – and die, too.

Let us get rid of one of these right up front:

Obesity. It’s an ugly word. It’s a word of our time. Before, the chubby of us had reserves for surviving – and potentially fighting off – some diseases, and lasted longer.

Be that as it may.

It is not something that someone can change quickly. Or at all.

Doctor-supervised diets have a 2% success rate after two years.

And it is a cop-out. Just because a doctor doesn’t like it, and blames everything on it, and says, “If you just lost weight and exercised, you wouldn’t be sick,” doesn’t make it so.

And back to the important qualification for being useless: there isn’t a person on this Earth who can lower their weight consistently and safely QUICKLY.

Another is exercise

For post-viral illnesses such as long-covid, ME/CFS, and possibly any others such as chronic Lyme disease, exercise is CONTRAINDICATED. Read that carefully. It means: “Doesn’t help and DOES harm.”

The exercise-and-it’s-all-in-your-head brigade have been thoroughly debunked, their statistics shown to be bad science, and guidelines are changing everywhere. Not fast enough – and with rearguard actions by the biopsychosocial cabal trying to claim their methods actually work (they don’t want to lose all that lovely research money, ‘treatment’ money, and prestige; and in some cases knighthoods or damehoods (sic?)).

New people with our diseases are needy and desperate. They will grasp at anything that offers hope, and they are not good at separating the quacks from the legitimate scientists. They are given something and told it works, and they try over and over, blaming themselves when non-proven methods actually DON’T work.

Worse than that: they make themselves sicker. For every post-exertional crash, the baseline lowers on what a person can safely do. Enough of those, with the very best intentions, and people end up bed-ridden or worse.

Exercise is dangerous for people recovering from these viruses. DANGEROUS.

Compassion fatigue

I always thought, when I was younger, that I would be able to work my way out of anything by just putting the effort in.

As an old person, I would keep walking, keep doing yoga, have the time for more exercise.

And that people who ‘let themselves go’ had brought it all on themselves. Well, some of them have. But I’ve been trying for over three decades and guess what? NOPE. You can’t work yourself out of CFS.

You DO stop going to doctors because they don’t like illnesses without a cookbook approach. They don’t like mysterious illnesses that somehow have normal bloodwork – for the tests the insurance companies will allow.

They don’t like taking into account one of my widely-shared symptoms: intolerance of medicines. We are the people who get all the side-effects of almost everything that works for ‘normal’ people. I actually went through four of the five classes of blood-pressure medications after getting stents (and both Plavix and Effient – which made me deadly ill). My last cardiologist in New Jersey said the fifth kind of BP drugs would most likely make me quite sick, so we skipped them.

The protection of the booster shots for the immunocompromised

should be extended to the elderly if it is warranted.

I’m in the vulnerable category – I got my fourth shot, considered the second booster shot, four days ago. My arm still hurts and a day after the shot during which I felt as if I had the flu was followed by two days of not getting much done because of being a bit woozy and brain-fogged, and I don’t care at all.

In a week and a half or so, I will have whatever immunity my body can build up from the shots, and I was the one who nagged my doctor’s office as soon as the CDC said people like me should have another booster.

We are back, cautiously, to congregant dining – but the husband and I are taking it very slow because I don’t want to get covid at all (I already have the equivalent of long covid; online friends who have had covid on top of ME/CFS are struggling). Everyone here wears masks, distances socially, and avoids as many group activities as possible – except for today, when we celebrated the lives of those fellow residents who left us this past year with a short ceremony and two songs – sung through my KN95 mask.

We are all wondering what will follow Omicron and its B version.

It will take a long time before people like me will feel safe – and seeing mask and other requirements vanishing left and right, when the scientists tell us it is NOT over, doesn’t help.

PLEASE continue to be careful and smart even when the official rules relax.

The life you save may be someone you love.

**********

I’m hoping my brain will be usable for writing fiction tomorrow.

Please pop over to prideschildren.com and follow if you are a fan of mainstream fiction of the ‘big book variety.’ There is a short story prequel there and a sample. PLUS the first scene of NETHERWORLD, and reports of how close it is to being published.

This post was composed while not completely with it – may be a bit ranty.

**********

One way to encourage a writer

When you are reaching the end of writing a novel, it looks as if you’ll never finish.

Encouragement comes in odd places:

• a reader wanting to know when the next one is out
• sales you didn’t expect, didn’t advertise for
• the writing going particularly well
• a tough section written
• and a review that blows your metaphorical socks off (one gets so jaded).

This morning, my inbox contained a link to that kind of review, and I encourage those who are here for the fiction to take a quick look at the books’ sister site, Pride’s Children . com, and sign up there if they haven’t – because NETHERWORLD will be here early next year, and that encouragement keeps me focused.

An encouraged and supported writer (thanks to all my visitors and commenters and fellow bloggers and friends from FB and GR – you know who you are, and I hope you know how important you are) is a happy writer, and is probably writing much better than a discouraged one.

I don’t buy the drugs-and-alcohol motivated writer narrative (one reason being because my body doesn’t process alcohol fast enough and I don’t tolerate most meds), so I have to go on HAPPINESS, the universal salve.

**********

Sleep and lowered stress would be nice, too, and research to treat and cure this dratted disease (ME/CFS). I’m doing the best that I can.

Reduced brain fog would be ideal.

I’m doing the best that I can.

**********

How NOT to treat disabled patients

Medical personnel providing a service.

JUST BECAUSE THEY ARE HEALTHY AND WE ARE NOT

When did things become BACKWARD???

When did THEIR time become more important than ours?

When did CLIENTS become patients?

When did their needs to be in control become more important than the clients’ rights to timely and adequate and compassionate service?

When did their convenience supersede ours?

When did taking care of disabled clients become a burden to them, an inconvenience to their mission?

When did their control become more important that our PAIN?

When did it become acceptable for them to frighten patients, to threaten them with dire consequences for not obeying instructions to the letter, to TELL them they will end up in the ER with a massive attack of something? (This has now happened twice.)

When did THEY end up with all the cards – and the self-righteous belief that they know best for OTHER people with REAL LIVES?

This is the letter I would LIKE to send to my medical services group – if I dare, once I have carefully weighed the consequences to my future treatment.

Think about that: I have to worry that they might be bothered by something I, the person responsible for paying them, might say. As nicely as I can.

First, though, I would like to say: don’t mess with a writer – they are good at nuance, both reading it and writing it. Not on the spot, of course – that’s for narcissists and sociopaths and politicians and comedians – but afterward, when they’ve had a chance to think.

And to realize what just happened.

And rewrite what you think just happened into the correct narrative that takes the CLIENT into account.

Except rewriting the narrative created by the thoughtless ‘professional’ requires 1) rereading it (I won’t – too negative), and 2) putting in an enormous amount of my own time – knowing it probably won’t work. Or change anything.

THE LETTER TO MEDICAL PERSONNEL AT XXXXX which I may never send.

Because I need some kind of medical care, and all of these are similar in that they think they know it all, and they OVERWHELM you.

My mind keeps nagging about the letter I should write to my medical providers about energy, visits to specialists, and fear-mongering. Which was applied to me, a disabled person, at the end of a too-long-for-a-disabled-person day.

And the tone of the after-visit summary took my breath away – and made no mention of or accommodation for that disability which caused so many of the problems.
Bullying a disabled person is NOT nice.

I will NOT have the procedure unless I decide it is necessary, there are several more worrying symptoms, and they don’t respond immediately to medication.
And do NOT appreciate how I was treated so cavalierly.

I need to write the letter so it appears in my medical record, and I can point to it, but I don’t expect it to have any effect on anyone there.

Do NOT treat disabled people the way you treat normal people – we can’t take it.

And no, it doesn’t NECESSARILY help to bring someone else along. Then I have to deal with THEM, too.

The calculus of what I can take vs. what I need is ongoing: don’t assume, ASK.

And more than asking, could you make a climate where I will think of asking myself, EVEN when exhausted?

Thank you.

CLIENT (person who pays the bills)

The above is not coherent – I’m still going to let it stand, because the incoherence is generated by the system.

I’ve let this one stew for almost a month, and I’m still angry. I was going to just let it drop, leave the unfinished post among the almost 100 draft posts I never finished.

Not naming names – and I’ve decided it isn’t SAFE for me to let them know what I really think, so I’ll keep tweaking the interactions (as in my previous state – which was as bad or worse) instead of taking them head on.

Other options to minimize the problems

One is to do as much as possible via video visits; those are usually on time, one-on-one because the provider isn’t popping in and out or pawning you off on a nurse.

Another – based on my last visit to another city for treatment – is to make sure you have done the paperwork part of a visit SEPARATELY via video BEFORE the in-person appointment. I find it a major problem to have filled all the paperwork before the visit, and to be grilled over every single thing in my medical history again anyway.

I will explain that it is very difficult for me to do BOTH in a single visit – and, by the time I get the service, I am exhausted and frazzled and not being as coherent as I tried to prepare to be.

LEAVE the minute it gets to where I can’t keep going. I keep trying to respect THEIR time, at the cost of trying to continue to talk and even be awake and coherent when things go on too long. Going back is not a great option, but maybe I can finish by video.

Stand up for myself in some small way each time.

Say, “This is not helpful.”

Risk being labeled difficult.

Complain to higher management – with specifics (respectfully – that writer nuance).

Suggestions?

Because the stress of doctor visits has gotten to the point that all I want to do is avoid them.

**********

Writing a silk purse from a sow’s ear

I DON’T WRITE CLEAN COPY

For my kind of extreme plotter, you might think everything would be planned down to the last jot and tittle – before writing.

It seems that way for some scenes I’ve written – I know exactly what I’m doing when I go in, and then I do it, polish a bit, and get out – and we’re done.

Because having the content and the outline and the knowledge of where a scene will go can make it easier to see what fits and what doesn’t, as I go.

Unfortunately, they’re the minority of my scenes.

Another set of scenes takes more work because there is a lot to include, and the correct path through all the necessary points can take me a while to organize.

And then there’s 32.2.

The sow’s ear of the title.

Oddly enough, a scene for which I had plenty of content.

But it came out of my head very oddly, as almost a single long piece of dialogue, a phone call no less, with the banter between Kary and her best friend writing itself as I eavesdropped.

Very realistic – I could SEE them talking, SEE the little connections, the friendship, the gentle poking when one person thinks they know better what the other needs, a scene you might overhear at brunch, or in a park, or while watching the children on the swings at the playground…

And it was wrong

Very wrong.

Boring – to me!

And I could see a reader doing the thing writers dread: skimming. Skipping ahead to see where the meat starts again. Not seeing the content because it was in the form of a dialogue between two women.

Just getting to the realization of what was the problem took me days.

Because there was nothing obviously wrong, and I write dialogue all the time, and it wasn’t particularly bad.

Good dialogue doesn’t guarantee great scenes

Almost a thousand words of good, realistic but compressed dialog.

You hate to give that up – and it took quite a bit of practice to be able to do that in the first place, create dialogue that gives the reader necessary knowledge in the form of a story.

I almost did what I never do: let it stand, leave it to the beta reader, move on and come back to it later, live with what I knew was highly imperfect (in my standards) because I had no idea what was going on that produced it.

But I did know:

The brain fog was thick on the ground and I couldn’t see over, through, or around it.

And this is what I produce when I can’t think: ‘almost’ writing.

It depended too much on the reader’s previous knowledge.

There was not enough scene-setting.

And it repeated things the reader already knew – a capital sin if done in any quantity: do NOT give readers an excuse to start skipping!

I bit the bullet, lowered the dose of a medication I thought might be the culprit for the recent fog increase (it was), waited for a couple of days until, thankfully, the head cleared.

Then I took all of the scene except for the initial paragraph, and put it in another file in the Scrivener project, fully prepared to dump the whole thing if necessary.

And I was able to get back to work – because I was darned lucky.

My greatest fear in life is that I will reach one of these points, know something is wrong, and never more be able to do what I’ve been doing to analyze, understand, and, fingers-crossed, improve what I’ve written, from the first gasp to the final zinger.

I’ve had this happen before to a smaller extent – I had to learn to write every kind of scene (and there are more kinds, I’m sure) – and since I’m still writing, have emerged every time.

But brain fog is more insidious than exhaustion, and you can’t just rest it away.

Brain fog scares me

It alters my essential self.

This time I found the cause, and it was something I could change. There are consequences, of course – in this case more physical pain – but I have other alternatives for physical pain, even if I’m trying not to use them (to spare liver and kidneys from having to disassemble those molecules and get rid of them); in the worst case, I can just tough it out, do some of the physical things such as stretches or (in non-pandemic times) immerse myself in the therapy pool’s warm water, wait until it passes if it has a specific cause…

Do not recommend your favorite remedy for brain fog – thanks, but I’ve tried an awful lot of things over the years that didn’t work, and I don’t have the stomach to try more. Assuming you even have one – brain fog is a particularly difficult ‘symptom’ to treat because it is so vague and amorphous and non-specific.

It’s a Catch-22: you need to be able to think to work yourself out of brain fog, and you can’t think until you’ve worked yourself out of brain fog.

Sometimes the passage of time helps.

Sometimes the disappearance of a physical illness, or its successful treatment or management, helps.

Sometimes – the scary part – you’ve lost that part of yourself and it isn’t coming back.

And sometimes you figure it out.

Once that cleared

I took a hard look at what I had been ‘creating,’ that conversation that repeated things unnecessarily.

And I got to work.

I went back to process: I’ve detailed my Left Brain righT method before; I still use it, tweaked a bit but usually to add a detail, not change something already there, seven-and-a-half years later.

Step by step I followed my own prompts for considering, choosing, refining – including much smaller amounts of that big chunk of realistic dialogue – listening to the bits as I locked them in (to make sure the language flows), defining the structure, doing the work I call writing fiction, and little by little, 32.2 emerged from the shadows of a disaster.

It started doing what it was supposed to do, and I got less scared.

Until the next time.

**********

Taming brain fog and the vagal nerve wave

Surfers

WORKING AGAINST THE INEVITABLE IS EXHAUSTING

The instructions for getting to shore safely when caught in a riptide are to let the current take you where it will, while swimming slowly across, until you’re out of its grasp.

If you try anything like fighting the current, you will drown after you become exhausted, unless one of those nice fit lifeguards sees you and gets to you in time.

Because the current is stronger than you are – by many orders of magnitude.

What is brain fog?

If you have to ask, you haven’t had it. I’m glad for you.

It is feeling, within your own skull, that you just can’t think.

That your brain is in there somewhere, maybe, but you can’t get to it. Other names are chemobrain, fibrobrain, stupor, …

No matter what you seem to try, you can’t get out of the fog – and you can’t think.

It can be caused by illness. By medication. By sleep deprivation. By eating or drinking too much or the wrong thing.

It is a huge part of life with ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomielitis/chronic fatigue syndrome).

It robs you of hours of time.

Healthy people may have ways of exercising through it. Some people can take a stimulant like caffeine to focus and wake up, or ADHD meds.

Rest SHOULD help, but for people like me is often not restorative.

And what is this thing you’re calling a vagal wave?

The vagus nerve enervates much of your body, from the spinal column up to your brain, and out to your limbs. Including innards you don’t have conscious control over, such as your digestive system.

It covers so much territory, it’s hard to know exactly where the sensations are coming from sometimes.

I get periods of time, long ones, when it feels like a wave motion is going on in my body, and all I can do is sit there and let it do its thing. Sometimes painful (the meds after stents caused a horrible case of constant waves of pain in the gut), sometimes not.

When I sit in front of the computer screen, ready to write or focus or think, but the waves are going, all I can do is to grit my teeth and live through them, hour upon hour.

But I’m a problem solver by nature and training

and I finally was able to pay enough attention to the combination of not being able to think, and feeling as if I was in an aquarium (the modern kind with waves).

Data is essential for problem solving, both to identify what’s going on, and then, when you come up with solutions, to see if you’ve managed to change something.

And I finally collected enough data (over months of not being able to write very often), to see some correlations.

I have to eat. We all do. And I can’t think starving, so I can’t postpone the eating TOO much, plus I seem to get these shaky periods of low blood sugar if I put off eating too long, and then it’s an emergency to eat something.

I don’t eat many carbs, so it baffled me – sugar messes with my brain, and the day after eating sugar there’s no way any thinking is going to happen. I don’t even bother trying any more.

But I FINALLY noticed

that 10-30 minutes after I EAT, the waves start, and the brain fog.

I used to try to push through – and the only result of that was to spend hours in that state.

I tried taking naps when I got tired – but they weren’t organized or planned, and the effects didn’t seem to correlate with anything; it was just something I HAD to do.

And I finally figured it out:

My damaged and severely limited energy metabolism doesn’t have enough at any given time to do BOTH: keep me awake and functioning (or even get there), and digesting my food.

It took some tweaking, but I have found a system which takes advantage of my need for napping and my need for food, and times them so that they don’t conflict.

So now I run a time-share

I get up, drink First Diet Coke, and try to get a bit of writing or organizing done before I eat anything.

When hunger tends to shut me down – anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours later – I prepare for the next phase: I eat something (mostly protein), but I start getting ready for the changeover from thinking to digesting. I take notes so I can pick up easily when I come back.

And when I feel the waves starting, I get into my jammies, pull the shades, turn the lights off and add an eyemask to block external stimuli, and get in bed.

I set a timer for 35 minutes.

If the wave approach is gentle, I’ll do a quick range-of-motion set, a couple of minutes worth.

If the approach is sudden and severe, I just crash. I used to fear this part – now I just realize I dragged my feet too much.

Lights out. Body temperature drops abruptly (ergo, the jammies). Sometimes deep sleep, sometimes a coma-like state.

The digestive part of the vagus nerve’s control takes over – and I don’t get in its way. No reading. No TV. NO COMPUTER. No trying to think, or push through it, or ignore it.

Just give in.

And when the alarm goes off

I get up, stretch a bit. Get some water, and Second Coke, and NO FOOD.

And within minutes I’m functional again (inasmuch as I’m ever functional), and I can usually work/write for an hour or two until I’ve used up my nap energy, and need food again.

I try not to do Third Coke after Second Nap – that’s too much caffeine for the day (each can is about 45mg of caffeine – peanuts compared with a cup of coffee or an energy drink, but it’s about as much as I can tolerate at a time without getting scarily shaky).

What I should do is not drink First Coke until after First Nap, but that has other physical problems related to it that I prefer not to go into here.

For years I’ve taken 3-5 of these 35 minute naps every day.

And I ALWAYS wake up in a better state than I laid down in.

But this is the first time I’ve coordinated all the pieces, and added the realization that DIGESTION TAKES PHYSICAL ENERGY.

And that my energy supplies are so low, I can’t afford to have the processes of thinking and starting digestion going at the same time.

I’ve been testing this system for the past week

I’m only taking 1-2 naps most days – probably because they are at the right time.

Eating is the trigger – every time. I hadn’t realized how strong it is as a trigger. Though it makes perfect sense: you eat, your body starts digestion. Duh!

Not having a good night’s sleep can cost me the first workable period, and, on a bad sleep night, I may not be able to recover the following day at all.

If I exercise at all – and right now we’re only allowed to use the pool in a predetermined half-hour slot during the 8-11am time – even if it’s the gentlest possible stretching in water – most or all of the rest of the day is shot, because I can’t make up that energy. So the two swim days a week are going to be non-writing days, most likely. Evening would work, but the county rules for the pandemic require a staff person supervising, and the facility is only providing that on weekdays in the morning. Before, I used the pool alone whenever I wanted to, and it was usually in the late afternoon or evening.

If I try to defeat the system and push through, all I do is foul everything up, and get neither rest nor functionality nor good digestion. Timing is critical, as is diversion of energy from one stream to the other.

I might have figured it out sooner

if I had a readout somewhere on my body of both energy usage and remaining stored energy.

I’ve been fighting this battle for years, but I never got quite the data until I noticed the crash after eating – and thought about it. And then it made sense: I’m broken, but I still have some small amount of control.

What I need was all this pandemic isolation and time, and the frustration of the crashes, and some insight that I still don’t know where I got. I have time – lots of it – but was not making much progress in writing NETHERWORLD, except what felt like randomly.

And when the brain was there, I could write for a while – and then it would go.

The PRINCIPLE is the key

I have only enough energy for one process at a time.

I’m lucky I do. I think aging takes its toll, too, and I’m probably producing less energy, total, every year.

Many people with what I have don’t have even this amount to work with – and spend their days playing catch up, with task after basic task barely getting done.

I’ve written this in the hopes of saving someone else with this kind of severe energy deficiency management the years of figuring out how to make the most of their energy creation and storage capacity.

Please let me know if this is of any use.

And pray it makes me a faster writer – I really do well with my brain on!

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My thanks to Stencil for the capacity to make interesting images for these posts. Give them your business if you need to produce this kind of image – they have lots more stuff available than the free accounts use.

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The point in writing with care

EVERY WRITER ANSWERS THIS QUESTION

It has become common for writers to tell other writers how to write.

Unless they are discouraging other writers deliberately to keep the competition down!

And every writer who has any control (beginners can often see only one way to do things) constantly makes choices:

• Is this word the best word for this use?
• Will MY readers think this is pretentious – or the reason they read ME?
• If I use a sentence fragment as part of my style, or this particular character’s mental processes, or [select reason] – will MY readers get their panties in a twist?
• Can my intended readers follow plot complexities?
• And – most importantly – am I limiting myself by the way I prefer to write?

All of these are valid questions, all have to be answered regularly, all have many answers.

How to choose?

I’m asking myself these questions, as usual, because I just finished the last two scenes in a chapter, and it took me two whole days of using AutoCrit (my online editing program) to get the text the way I wanted it.

Two whole days of whatever brainpower I could muster is still a lot of hours.

And they are hard work. Choices come down to nuance, nuance to familiarity, familiarity to everything I’ve ever read – and processed.

For an example, I’ll put up a section of these scenes, and show the differences:

There are hundreds of little changes between when I’m finished with the story and when I’m finished with the language.

Why change?

The original was fine, with nothing hugely wrong.

But I’ll find I overused a particular word or phrase.

Or a piece of dialogue doesn’t sound like the character (Cecily, like Andrew, is Irish).

In fact, just as I finished checking the above comparison, I realized I’m missing two places where my tiny intimation of the speaker being Irish is incorrect (I use ye’re – but still have you’re) – and that will be checked several more times before publication.

This section comes from Scrivener – and is missing italics. I’ll have to check to make sure those are as I want them, as discussed in a post on my stylistic choices.

I do my own editing

This is a statement of fact, not a battle-cry.

I found early that my brain is too damaged to do the negotiating, arguing, back and forth, discussing – that goes with having someone else edit your work.

And that it was easier for me to take on the task, plus it forced me to improve my bad habits immediately.

I like the control. I accept the responsibility. And the mistakes I make will get corrected asap if egregious, with the next major revision if minor.

And there isn’t an ant’s chance with an anteater that I’ll have to defend my own choices: nobody can possibly know my style better than I can.

I have the sense to use an excellent beta reader – and always pay attention to what she catches or notices (she’s usually right).

For someone like me, it even saves a lot of time (a relatively expensive commodity for me). Because I handle a single scene (up to maybe 3k) at a time, and it’s familiar to me because I just wrote it, so I don’t have to reload anything into my memory.

The pitfalls of that are obvious: the mistakes will get overlooked because they are so familiar. So I have many passes for just one thing. I have checklists. I keep a list of the things I haven’t mastered.

Nothing’s perfect, but that does get a lot of the little typo buggers.

Is it ‘good enough’?

Yes – after I put the hours, the work in.

Is it getting easier? Yes – if I still put the hours in, and the work, and don’t try to shorten the editing phase by getting impatient to finish.

I think it matters.

It does make me very slow.

I think it’s worth the effort.

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Does lack of editing in published work irritate you? Do you notice it?

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Thanks again to Stencil for the ability to create graphics – and their free account. If I ever need more than ten a month, I’ll get their paid subscription!

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Preparation and then things just click?

WHETHER YOU’RE READY OR NOT

And we are so definitely NOT ready.

But the last flooring was installed, the staging ladies have done their thing, and our real estate agent is now our real estate agent (all the advice up front doesn’t count until you sign on the dotted line – at which point all kinds of things start happening, like open houses and a lock box on your front door…).

We haven’t recovered from the trip.

We have no place for our stuff – the stuff we need to function as inhabitants of a house (where is my skillet, and how will I make eggs when the gas isn’t reconnected yet?). Which may be a problem, as the period between when you put a house ‘on the market,’ and the time when you are removing your last belongings so you can hand over the keys, is an unknown variable.

I don’t know where anything is

It happens to everyone, but it is especially hard to deal with when you have ME/CFS and daily brain fog: and now it’s far worse because some of the stuff in this house was put away by someone other than me, in a hurry, and without labeling either the box or the corresponding card in my card file. Or worse still, labeled as ‘miscellaneous.’ Aargh!

I located a few of the critical items in very odd places. Not sure I have everything I need, as distinct from the comforts, even yet.

And the dryer vent, taped by the painter, is loose – so I’m not sure I can do laundry (I’m living with the absolute minimum amount of clothes out).

Everything is to be kept tidy

And by ‘tidy’ we mean the way the staging ladies left it (a model home look), or restorable to that condition on short warning, when someone uses the system to ‘book an appointment.’ Aargh!

Meanwhile, we do have to be allowed to eat. Other Half and his good friend are down there trying to reconnect, safely, the gas to the stove.

But the forever home may be available soon

Don’t know exactly when, as they actually have to get everything they asked us for, and decide whether they want us. It is possible for them to reject us.

And it is possible for us to be legally required to leave our ex-home because it belongs to someone else after all these years, before we have a place to land.

It’s a first-world type problem – and I’m not whining – except complicated by my limitations. Residence Inn America for two months? We probably could survive. Rent or buy an RV? Ditto. I think.

So we’re adjusting.

Again.

And I’m marveling that I’m still standing – and taking a nap every chance I get so that I can be coherent for the next crisis event. Such as talking to the people at our brokerage (Vanguard) and being able to satisfy them that I’m me, so we could transfer money. By phone. Since the money has actually been received at the other end by the right people, I did it.

A bit nerve-wracking: you will be asked a series of questions, based on (?) publicly available information, and if you miss one, you’ll have to go the long route of being identified some other way. I’m still chuckling over one question about a boat we owned. And wondering where husband hid it all these years.

I love Vanguard. They get things done, and always have alternatives. I am currently furious at one of our banks for the way they made a decision (which led to the nerve-wracking phone ID). And at the other for the fraught way they handle wire transfers, as if you were a criminal actively trying to circumvent laws. Why is it that the people the laws are intended to protect always feel the brunt, while the people who should be caught and punished never even feel a thing? Being law-abiding is becoming more difficult every day.

There is a For Sale sign on my yard. After 37 years.

Life is interesting, but I’m finding the watershed point was signing those papers, and I’m strangely free.

That and the deposit wire-transfer going through on the same day is… unexpected.

Off to the Gray Havens.

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I didn’t see the wild pineapples

BUT MY CHILDREN DID

And brought back photos. (Not this one.)

There is an oddness to the idea of pineapples in the wild that pleases me.

The modern pineapple is a huge, heavy fruit, supported by a strong stalk. Much like modern melons, watermelons, and papayas, it is hard to believe (okay, impossible) that they are the way we see in the supermarket solely due to evolution.

Evolution produces fruit which attracts animals that eat the fruit and scatter the plants’ seeds, with their poop (fertilizer) somewhat farther away than the plant can throw. In our case, the pineapple, continents away. Shop Rite has pineapples.

Why pineapples, and why now?

Because I have to get back to writing blog posts.

It has been a desert for a while, as all the chores crowded in to vacation and retirement community decision and coming back to a house where everything was in boxes (for the painters) and the staging ladies had transformed the now-sparse contents into a model home.

So many things that HAVE to be done crowded out the optional ones.

The lack of window shades on most windows makes it like living in a fish bowl, only fish are not required to clean their own bowl. It’s nice if they do (by eating the algae, etc.), but that’s asking for perfection. Husband has done marvels with something I didn’t even know existed: temporary paper shades from Amazon which get cut to the right width with scissors, and attached with temporary mounts.

Sleeping has been possible, at least in our bedroom.

Where did THIS pineapple come from?

Stencil – I was looking for an image to write some words on, and the pineapple grabbed me, since I know I saw a picture the kids took on a hike with a wild pineapple growing in a fields (might have been a former Dole plantation).

Today is the first day in a while that something major and required didn’t take over all the energy for the day, but I have gotten out of the habit of putting my thoughts into some kind of order, and I’ve been a total slug all day.

And now we come to the single part.

I check my emails several times a day. Just habit. And hoping there might be an interesting thing to read, or a tidbit of a conversation setting itself up. And one not purely utilitarian and needing an answer, like the email from the woman at the solar company who needs my monthly input to get me the solar energy credits (SRECS) from our installation.

With me ignoring my blogs, and all, I am reduced to input (you don’t get much if you’re not writing) from two people today who saved my brain from the mush: a patron on my Patreon who commented on the new scene available there (the finished scene from Book 2 that I’m serializing). A very favorite patron.

And one of a kind I hadn’t seen in a while: a reader on Wattpad who commented, and is reading the beginning of Pride’s Children which remains there as a sample, as allowed by Amazon’s KDP for books in KU.

With limited promotion for either of these sites, I don’t often get comments. But getting one – from someone discovering my writing for the first time – was a kick in the seat of the pants as to how much I need feedback.

Single project authors can get lost.

Forever.

Stories of authors saved by someone else: John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces, (whose mom insisted on getting his manuscript accepted for publication after he committed suicide in despair – and won the Pulitzer – posthumously). Austin Tappan Wright, Islandia (whose wife typed up his 2400 page manuscript after he died). Even Stephen King, whose wife rescued Carrie from the circular file.

How many more are there out there who spent years, decades on their creations (Tolkien) AND (the more important part) created something of great value?

Rescued by a single act of feedback from a reader?

Computers, word processing software, and the internet now make it possible for writers to create works which are massive and available to many – if the many only look.

As in everything, I fear the great majority of the epics are not great fiction (wouldn’t know, haven’t read them) simply because of Sturgeon’s Law: statistically, they can’t be. But those many projects include a few good ones for some reader somewhere.

Readers keep us writers working. It’s that simple.

Unless the writer has many other sources of support as a writer, the projects can seem hobbies, dilettantism, something to do that is not video games or watching TV.

I thank today’s two readers. It had gotten a bit parched. I’m still here. I love readers.

Must get moving both on writing – and promotion – to find more. I am not unhappy to admit I need them. Even if I claim to write for myself.

Do you ever feel invisible? What gets you out of that state?

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