I have not done much writing in the past few years, and I have not submitted a story in at least three. But I have been writing, slowly, haphazardly, and sometimes way too cautiously. I didn’t make the 50K wordcount for NaNoWriMo last year, but I did get a first draft of a short story completed during that process.
I purchased Peter Chiykowski’s The Story Engine Deck last year and have been practicing taking the generated prompts and running with them. I took one prompt, ran through the James Van Pelt’s Seven-Sentence Story exercise (one of my all-time favorites) and managed somewhere around 11K in words.
And today I started a new story, also based on one of The Story Engine Deck’s prompts, using some of the available booster packs. I noticed the story had to involve a dreaming incident and the main character will probably go missing for a few days during the dream. The story I wrote during NaNoWriMo also has a dreamer losing days (in a completely different context, of course).
And that made me think about my last small writing group. There were four of us, two who have gone off to publish and two who have not. One of the first things we did as a group was to pass around copies of three stories that we felt represented who we were as writers as a sort of introduction. They all commented on a theme in my writing of someone who feels out of place and needs to come home. It’s there. I can’t deny it. It’s part of who I am, in a way, always thinking that I’m an outsider.
So when I have two stories with the same thing happening: lost time, I take notice. Or at least I noticed it this time. There have been many ways of dealing with the COVID lockdowns. One I saw Boing Boing’s post on COVID Standard Time, which means as I write this is is March 671st 2020, not January 1st 2022. Time has stopped. We’ve lost a year. I’ve had many days where “How the hell did it get to be <insert month name here>?” was the question of the day.
And I do feel like I’ve lost time myself. I am not doing what I should be doing. I have goals and I’m not working towards them. I’m waiting, or something. So I have to get moving. I have to take action. I have to make a concerted effort to do the things that need doing and the things I want to do. Imagine the privilege of having things you want to do and still not doing them?
And this feeling of losing time is nothing new. We can remember our childhoods and the years just melt away. We watched the Harry Potter Reunion Thing today and it was chock full of “where did the time go?”
I’m looking at today and tomorrow with the same warped perspective. Where did my week off go? Am I ready to go back to work on Monday? Am I prepared for the deluge? I got some extra sleep, sure, but all that’s prepared me for is waking up at 10 when I need to be online sometime before 8:30. I tried to enjoy Christmas as an event and as a season (we’ve got until the 6th, you know) but it also seemed like a distraction, but a distraction from what, sitting on my ass?
So as much as I hate New Years Resolutions, I am trying something new. I am going to write one scene a day. If I’m good, I’ll stick to the same story until it’s done. I am also keeping a spreadsheet and will try to track the number of words written. I gave myself an Adafruit PyPortal and I’m learning how to program it to serve as a clock and I’m thinking I’m going to put a “words written this year” gadget on it.
With any luck, I’ll also manage to get some editing time in on the stories I have completed.