A month of Tea Scribblies: Day 1
I shall start by pondering how I would be using this block of time if I wasn’t Putting Writing First every weekday this month.
My first impulse is to deprecate my Doings by saying, “Nothing much,” but I am determined to do better about valuing the things I do with my time even when—perhaps especially when—they are non-productive activities aimed at increasing only my own happiness.
That mind trick isn’t as easy as I feel like it would be in a perfect world. Alas, I am an imperfect person living in the imperfect world. Not nearly as much fun as being A Material Girl. Aaaaand now I will have that earwom of a song in my head for the next little while.
ANYway. I digress, as I do even in my most determined attempts to stay on task (stay on target, stay on target) I was writing about what I was planning to write about today. Very meta of me, but not Meta, since I am only using Facebook to share things and play “whack a sponsored post” when I have a need to mindlessly click things and have run out of other idle games.
So anyway, what WOULD I be doing if I wasn’t writing first thing in my day?
Ha. TRICK QUESTION because of course I didn’t follow my own plan and sit down to write first thing today. It’s about 4 PM, and I just sat down with the Writing Maching, aka the laptop. And of course I used it to do some bills and check in with friends before I opened the lovely writing-focused program that won’t let me do anything else with the computer until I’ve reached my designated goal.
Who has a tendency to make plans and then immediately change them without remorse or warning? Ohai, it me. It so much me.
But now I am finally writing, so that’s a victory of sorts. I’m counting it as one, at least. Almost as satisfying as checking off things on a to do list, which is so satisfying I will write things only the list just to check them off.
But where was I? Writing.
I never did NaNoWriMo. November was 100% the busiest month of my year until 2011, not just due to holiday ramp-up in inventory processing and display changeouts, but also due to working as a trainer, so I was away from home working 12-14 hour days at “sorts,” which is what Borders Books called putting together new stores & training the staff for it.
Sorts were fabulous. Full of unforgettable, intense, wondrous experiences I wouldn’t trade for anything. I met so many incredible humans, doing sorts. (HI SORT FRIENDS WHO ARE READING THIS. HIGH FIVES AND FIST BUMPS)
But they were not the kind of business trips that offered free time & a calm environment to tackle intense daily creative endeavors (Yay, overtime! Yay, trying new foods risk free at fine restaurants on the company’s dime! Boo, zero brain juice left before & after work, thanks to long days, lots of human interaction, and plain physical exhaustion.)
Fun fact. I say all that, but I did work on novels while on sorts. Writing on trips was the reason I bought my first laptop, back in the halcyon days when TSA made you turn on your computer in the security line, because they were Strange New Devices and thus a source of much suspicion.
Legacy of Ashes was finished on a sort, and Downrigger was written over the course of a couple of years. The critical point, however, is that I never attempted, nor evered want to attempt writing a novel draft from start to finish in one month.
Could I? Probably? I can put lots of words down on a page at a time, one bird after another, writing ideas into sentences, sentences into conceptual paragraphs, and so on.
But. hammering out words so I can say I’ve written a certain amount has always repelled me. Something deep in my psyche rejects the premise of quantity as any measure of quality. That never has been true, never will be.
Then there’s the ugh-too-tiring-to-contemplate aspect of writing purely to “get something down on a page.” It has a faint stench of “anything is better than nothing,” which is another of those patently untrue truisms people love to trot out as Good Advice.
Thanks to the recently-completed Fancify Floor 2 house project, I have once again learned the lesson that renovating an existing structure is ALWAYS more expensive, more time consuming, and more difficult than building one from scratch.
The effort of renovating the results of a “garbage draft” (not a lovely label, eh?) into a final manuscript would be far more effortful and far less rewarding than building a solid structure from foundation to roof, finishing from walls inward and ceilings down, until the Whole Thing is Finished.
That feels like a good place to wrap up this thing, although I never did get around to discussing all the things I would’ve done if I hadn’t been writing this. So I’ll end with a list:
Daily brain games (10-30 min) Connections, Wordle, Keyword & Metazooa.
Anti-social media displacement activities, AKA idle games: Cats & Soup, Cats and Soup:Fluffy Town, and Wordscapes.
Various Life Chores. Common wisdom is, I should let those go until later, but that just isn’t how my brain works. I have to clear away the clamor of environmental distraction before the small, quiet, tender creative thoughts feel safe to emerge. Basically, I have turned Brownian motion-style tidying up and little time&motion cleaning chores into stims.
Anyway, once I have puttered though all my little routines a few times, my brain quiets enough that I can settle down and just enjoy thinking.
Unless, of course, something else distracts me.
But by putting the writing first in my mind, I can hopefully get to it faster.
We’ll see.
Until later!
What’s on your bookshelf?
This is the part where I talk about my books.
Relics From A Traveling Show
This tidy collection of all my short fictions in one handy volume releases November 12, 2024 in paperback and ebook. Preorders are available now, check your favorite booksite or local shop.
Or! OR! if you like your local library, you could request a purchase. Free for you, sale for me, everyone wins.
Most libraries need the following info for ordering print books:
Title: Relics From A Traveling Show
Author: K. M. Herkes
ISBN: 9781945745201 (paperback)
Every library system does things a little differently, but most want their collections to serve their communities, so most of them are very responsive to patron requests.
If you like novels more than short stories, I recommend my series The Rollover Files for hopepunk tales of about an alternate world where moms with midlife crisis superpowers have been saving the world and making the military nervous since 1943.
I also have a completed, quirky slow-burn science fiction thriller duology with a romance chaser: The Stories Of The Restoration.
All my titles are available from Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Hoopla, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Overdrive and many other fine booksellers.
Support your favorite independent bookseller! Find a local shop via Indiebound