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halojedhaIt's 2019! I'm really enjoying reading everyone's end-of-year round ups, but I've been too sick to write one so far. Came down with a cold while visiting my parents for Christmas, and am currently on the fifth day of ills. Leo has succumbed too. We were planning to go to a queer warehouse party for NYE, although I was a little unsure about whether my energy levels would be up to it, and then in the end the decision was made for us. We had my first adult Quiet NYE In, and divided it between reading on the sofa and talking and cuddling in bed, listening to the fireworks go off in the street behind the house. It was wonderful.
Since then we've both felt a lot more ill. After three days of lying in bed reading and napping I've started to feel super restless and fidgety, but every time I try to get up, I feel dizzy and have to stop. We've been chipping away at the housework, with variable success: today it was only because Leo caught me at it that I realised I've been refilling our E-cover washing up liquid from the laundry liquid refill. I'd been complaining for the last month that the washing up liquid wasn't really doing the job, and now we know why. Now that it actually contains washing up liquid, the washing up is going much easier. Who'd have thunk!
I tried to do some Qi Gong yesterday - thanks to fatigue, going away to visit family, and the centre being closed for the holidays, I've missed three weeks of Tai Chi classes - but had to stop and have a sit down. Got my disused yoga mat out and did some floor work instead, starting with just rolling around to try and loosen up my achy bits, and ending up doing 20 mins of stretching, including various bits and pieces borrowed from pilates and yoga. My body was so thirsty for the movement, it was like YES, YES, MORE OF THIS. I felt tired afterwards, but a lot less stiff today.
The New Forest visit was a great success. D and G were in fine form and made a great fuss of us, and Leo worked really hard sorting out their stuff from the storage locker and lofts.
I had a good time too: G took us to the garden centre and bought me Pots and Things as a Christmas present, including a fabulous planter shaped like a giant teapot. I haven't decided which of the indoor plants to repot in which pots yet, but I'm looking forward to it. We also bought an extension pole for our pothos, which has reached the summit of the climbing pole it came with, and is currently waving around at the top looking for things to latch onto with its little caterpillar feet. We are not going to let it destroy the plaster, but we are going to give it some extra height to climb. (There's a metaphor here: something something needing structures in place before one can unfurl and reach one's full potential?)
Before the solstice party one of our friends did a bang-up job dressing Pothos as our Christmas tree, so he currently looks very jolly decked out in tinsel and baubles.
The highlight of the New Forest trip, for me, was writing. After spending the weekend gently socialising in the kitchen, helping out with cooking and cleaning a bit, but mostly tangling with Leo on the sofa and reading, I felt thoroughly recharged. I'm binge-reading (re-reading, in some cases) Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books at the moment, which are addictive and page-turny, but also atrociously written (or perhaps edited) in places. I can't turn off the part of my brain that notices redundant words / sentences / paragraphs / whole pages that are just repetitive and unnecessary, nor the part that spots all the little typos and inconsistencies and plot holes and daft worldbuilding. I say all this with love; I enjoy the books tremendously, I've just read eleven of them in a row and am about to start on the twelfth.
Anyway, something about reading a novel with mental red pen in hand tickled my little competitive "I could do better than this" impulse. There's a novel I conceived nearly three years ago, while on a weekend minibreak with friends in Lisbon, which I haven't given myself any opportunity to work on yet, mostly because of self-pressure to work on the non-fiction book I'm in the middle of writing, if I'm going to write anything. While I've been off work sick the last couple of months, the novel has been bubbling up - particularly during those pre-dawn insomnia hours when I wake up around 4am and can't get back to sleep. I've been spending time in the places and with the characters, fairly passively sitting back and letting it all flesh itself out.
So on Sunday evening in the New Forest, after an entirely indolent weekend, we settled down to sleep and it all started blooming again, new details, new character interactions. I lay with it for half an hour, then decided to get up and start writing down some notes so I wouldn't forget it. I took my laptop downstairs and curled up on the sofa in the quiet and the dark. Three hours later I'd written three thousand words.
I got five hours sleep, got up again, and after breakfast I wrote over another two thousand. That's all so far - life and Christmas and ills have got in the way since then. But I know the next bit, and there was more brewing while I was showering today, so I'm looking forward to getting back to it.
This is my first long-form attempt at fiction since I was a nipper. It feels exciting and completely self-indulgent to spend time on something so selfishly pleasurable, without any anticipation of it being finished or published or useful any time soon. There's a part of my brain telling me that if I'm well enough to write the novel, I'm well enough to do all the other things I should be doing. But sod it. Inspiration is precious, and doesn't come every day.
There's a small secret part of me that has wanted to be an author my whole life, and it's never going to happen unless I write. Maybe the novel can sit on the back burner and be the thing I work on when I'm too bummed out to do anything else, and I can twiddle with it while procrastinating on the non-fiction book. Or maybe I'll get totally obsessed with the novel and it'll take over my life, and then when that's started to feel like work and I find myself inclined to procrastinate that, I'll go back to the non-fiction. The main impediment to the non-fiction book being finished is that I'm not in the habit of writing: I think just letting myself writing whatever I feel like is the key to unblocking that, and things will get written in the order they do.
Since then we've both felt a lot more ill. After three days of lying in bed reading and napping I've started to feel super restless and fidgety, but every time I try to get up, I feel dizzy and have to stop. We've been chipping away at the housework, with variable success: today it was only because Leo caught me at it that I realised I've been refilling our E-cover washing up liquid from the laundry liquid refill. I'd been complaining for the last month that the washing up liquid wasn't really doing the job, and now we know why. Now that it actually contains washing up liquid, the washing up is going much easier. Who'd have thunk!
I tried to do some Qi Gong yesterday - thanks to fatigue, going away to visit family, and the centre being closed for the holidays, I've missed three weeks of Tai Chi classes - but had to stop and have a sit down. Got my disused yoga mat out and did some floor work instead, starting with just rolling around to try and loosen up my achy bits, and ending up doing 20 mins of stretching, including various bits and pieces borrowed from pilates and yoga. My body was so thirsty for the movement, it was like YES, YES, MORE OF THIS. I felt tired afterwards, but a lot less stiff today.
The New Forest visit was a great success. D and G were in fine form and made a great fuss of us, and Leo worked really hard sorting out their stuff from the storage locker and lofts.
I had a good time too: G took us to the garden centre and bought me Pots and Things as a Christmas present, including a fabulous planter shaped like a giant teapot. I haven't decided which of the indoor plants to repot in which pots yet, but I'm looking forward to it. We also bought an extension pole for our pothos, which has reached the summit of the climbing pole it came with, and is currently waving around at the top looking for things to latch onto with its little caterpillar feet. We are not going to let it destroy the plaster, but we are going to give it some extra height to climb. (There's a metaphor here: something something needing structures in place before one can unfurl and reach one's full potential?)
Before the solstice party one of our friends did a bang-up job dressing Pothos as our Christmas tree, so he currently looks very jolly decked out in tinsel and baubles.
The highlight of the New Forest trip, for me, was writing. After spending the weekend gently socialising in the kitchen, helping out with cooking and cleaning a bit, but mostly tangling with Leo on the sofa and reading, I felt thoroughly recharged. I'm binge-reading (re-reading, in some cases) Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books at the moment, which are addictive and page-turny, but also atrociously written (or perhaps edited) in places. I can't turn off the part of my brain that notices redundant words / sentences / paragraphs / whole pages that are just repetitive and unnecessary, nor the part that spots all the little typos and inconsistencies and plot holes and daft worldbuilding. I say all this with love; I enjoy the books tremendously, I've just read eleven of them in a row and am about to start on the twelfth.
Anyway, something about reading a novel with mental red pen in hand tickled my little competitive "I could do better than this" impulse. There's a novel I conceived nearly three years ago, while on a weekend minibreak with friends in Lisbon, which I haven't given myself any opportunity to work on yet, mostly because of self-pressure to work on the non-fiction book I'm in the middle of writing, if I'm going to write anything. While I've been off work sick the last couple of months, the novel has been bubbling up - particularly during those pre-dawn insomnia hours when I wake up around 4am and can't get back to sleep. I've been spending time in the places and with the characters, fairly passively sitting back and letting it all flesh itself out.
So on Sunday evening in the New Forest, after an entirely indolent weekend, we settled down to sleep and it all started blooming again, new details, new character interactions. I lay with it for half an hour, then decided to get up and start writing down some notes so I wouldn't forget it. I took my laptop downstairs and curled up on the sofa in the quiet and the dark. Three hours later I'd written three thousand words.
I got five hours sleep, got up again, and after breakfast I wrote over another two thousand. That's all so far - life and Christmas and ills have got in the way since then. But I know the next bit, and there was more brewing while I was showering today, so I'm looking forward to getting back to it.
This is my first long-form attempt at fiction since I was a nipper. It feels exciting and completely self-indulgent to spend time on something so selfishly pleasurable, without any anticipation of it being finished or published or useful any time soon. There's a part of my brain telling me that if I'm well enough to write the novel, I'm well enough to do all the other things I should be doing. But sod it. Inspiration is precious, and doesn't come every day.
There's a small secret part of me that has wanted to be an author my whole life, and it's never going to happen unless I write. Maybe the novel can sit on the back burner and be the thing I work on when I'm too bummed out to do anything else, and I can twiddle with it while procrastinating on the non-fiction book. Or maybe I'll get totally obsessed with the novel and it'll take over my life, and then when that's started to feel like work and I find myself inclined to procrastinate that, I'll go back to the non-fiction. The main impediment to the non-fiction book being finished is that I'm not in the habit of writing: I think just letting myself writing whatever I feel like is the key to unblocking that, and things will get written in the order they do.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-03 08:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-03 11:31 am (UTC)I had a conversation along these lines with my supervisor recently, who was advocating doing colouring or some such on my fatigue days just to get myself out of passive consumer brain and into active brain. I was like, "if I'm well enough to do Art I'm well enough to work!" She said, "I think you misunderstand me; I'm not talking about something you'd show anyone, just activity to get you out of the mindless watching Netflix all day rut." I was all, do a thing that I wouldn't show anyone?! Error: does not compute.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-03 11:45 am (UTC)