I’ve long threatened to write something that was nothing but dialgue, and today’s OneWord prompt gave me the perfect excuse.
“Idiot!”
“What? What did I do?”
“Just…give me that. Well, you broke it.”
“How? I just pushed the button!”
“I don’t know how. I just know it was working before you picked it up, and now it’s broken.”
This month, I’ve really struggled with my Create365 project. Sometimes, I just fell asleep before I did anything. Sometimes, I couldn’t find an inspiration.
Over the weekend, though, I ran into a new problem. I was thinking through some edits for a manuscript, lost track of time, and failed to get anything created. And I berated myself for it. I actually lectured myself for several minutes because I keep not being creative.
Then, I took a deep breath and realized how silly I sounded, not so much because I was talking to myself but because of what I was saying. The creative process has various phases to it. You stumble on an idea. You incubate the idea. You bring the idea to some sort of tangible medium. You then edit the tangible form of the idea until it’s “ready”. And then you share the ready, tangible form of the idea.
Yeah…editing is in there. It’s a part of the process. It’s extremely rare that your first attempt of an idea is going to be so perfect that you’re going to be willing to share it as is. You have to spend some time mending the holes, shining the surface, adding that final flourish.
So, while it’s very hard to share something that’s in the editing process for the project, I need to remember that not being able to share something because it’s being edited is no reason to be hard on myself.
This post was inspired by my brother threatening to document my “accomplishment”.
When the weekend began, I had eight books on my to-read shelf and a killer sore throat. Today, I have four books on my to-read shelf and am just starting to get my voice back. In the interim, I got sick, lost my voice, and read a few books. I figured it was a good way to keep myself occupied while I couldn’t do much else except watch the Olympics and pick on a friend.
I did start a book tonight, but for the record (and for my brother’s book of his sister’s more odd accomplishments) this is how my shelf now looks:
There are two things of note in this picture. The more obvious one is that the books all now fit in the tiny space between the speaker and the wall of the bookshelf. The less obvious one is that it took me several attempts to get a clean shot because I was experimenting with various light settings. It turns out I’m not adept enough to freehand the setting needed for the light in my room, but the flash setting worked well in this case. (Usually, it’s the other way around for me.)
I may need to consider finding a tripod.
Tonight, I spent an hour reflecting on some editing notes I recently received, and on my own notes, and tried to come up with a plan to fix parts of the manuscript I’m working on. And then I berated myself for not getting anything done this evening. I have no idea what I was thinking. Editing is hard work.
But Alex is on my mind now, and so she helped me respond to OneWord:
Alex spun the globe, watching continents and oceans blur together. When it stopped, she closed her eyes and pointed to a spot.
It had been a favorite game when her father was still alive, his own weird way of telling Alex where he was headed next. She would try to predict it by spinning the globe, and he’d tell her where to go to find where he was really going.
She opened her eyes. “The Pacific Ocean, again?” Every time she’d played the game on her own lately, she found herself pointing at the same area of ocean. “What’s there?”
This has nothing to do with the manuscript…but it could develop into something of its own. Something that relates to another goal of mine.
I love a piece with so much potential!
You may have noticed I’m tracking two things this year: the number of words I’ve written and the number of books I’ve read.
That second is woefully low for this far into the year. I know it. I’m without transportation right now, so I had to freeze my Holds at the local library. I have been wanting to get into listening to audiobooks, but I haven’t found many in a format I can play. It’s been something of a struggle trying to figure out how to resolve the two.
But every few months, I allow myself to buy some things (used) off my Amazon wish list, so I ordered a book I’ve been wanting for years because I enjoy the movie (currently on my wish list), a book I really enjoyed the first time I read it, and some science activity books. They took a while to arrive, though, so I raided a pile of books my roommate has had in the living room for well over a year and came out with two more.
Naturally, that afternoon over half the books I ordered arrived. And shortly after that, the other books arrived. So now my book pile looks something like this:
I certainly should be racking up the books read soon!
Prompt: You venture into the world of online dating. Browsing through profiles, you drop your coffee mug and it shatters on the ground – it can’t be.
My friends had been on my case to sign up for one of those dating sites. I couldn’t bring myself to cave in. I do have my standards, after all. But I’ll admit a certain curiosity, so I found a site that looked less smarmy and browsed for a bit. Seas of faces stared out at me, some so revolting I couldn’t fathom reading their profile.
And then I saw it. I was so revolted that I lost my grip on my mug. It can’t be. Warm liquid soaked my socks, but I couldn’t be bothered. Who would do such a thing? My face was staring back at me.
When I could finally move, I started picking up the shards of my favorite mug. My friends are so dead.
Thankfully, this isn’t autobiographical…but it could insert nicely into one of my projects.
I have something else I was working on tonight, but I got distracted from finishing it. Like so many people, I”m an Olympics junkie. In grad school, I worked on a thesis analyzing the relationship between a host country and its indigenous cultures. The Calgary Games were part of that study, so you can imagine how much the Vancouver Games interest me.
But that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is to distract you with something else while I look for some non-Olympics-filled time to finish the other prompt I was working on. And once again, oneword comes to the rescue.
Ara gripped the dagger in her hand nervously. The blade was nearly as long as her forearm.
Bauble held his smaller dagger out in front of him like it was a long sword – two hands on the hilt. “Are you ready, Lady Ara?”
“Not really,” she said, “I never thought I’d ever really have to use one of these things.”
I’d love to pretend otherwise, but I’m really getting into using the oneword prompts to see how they can help me think about my writing projects.
This time around, Ara is waiting with Bauble at Princess Rose’s castle. She’s still trying to make sense of her surroundings.
Ara reached out to touch the browning blooms on the mantle. A petal fell from just the breeze caused by the movement of her hand.
“Lady Ara, those are stalag roses. They’re very delicate. You mustn’t touch them.” Bauble shoved her away from the fireplace.
“Stalag roses?”
“Yes. They grow up from the ground like stalagmites.”
“Got it,” she replied. “But how does anything grow down here?”
He sighed. “By magic, of course.”
No humor this time.
It’s been raining all week (in Seattle? Go figure!), but today’s rain just had a beauty to it that distracted me from my work for part of the afternoon. I decided to try to capture it, but I walked out right as the rain started falling harder. My skills being what they are already, it wasn’t the best combination to really get a good shot, but I like how this one turned out:
So, we give everyone a basic common knowledge, laced with critical reasoning skills, and then we dump them into another kind of learning. In ye olden dayes, this would have come in the form of apprenticeship. In these more progressive times, it comes in the form of college or vocational school.
Why put school-weary kids through yet another level of schooling? Because not only do we need a basic common knowledge with each other, we also need a basic common knowledge with those in our field. We need a groundwork to build from, to discuss, to argue over, to challenge. We need to understand where the industry came from, what it’s gone through.
When we understand where we’ve been, then history informs our decisions to create something reliable and to create something innovative. When we share a basic knowledge with others in our field, we can propose, clarify, and defend those decisions in a manner that will allow others to understand what we’re doing.
Education is about transferring knowledge and skills at its very basic core. But it’s really about enabling communication – common knowledge can encourage and support discussion and discovery among those who share the knowledge, be it among the general populace or those within a field.
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