Transition Girl

Why transition girl?... Best answered by a quote from the Iliad....."The soul was not made to dwell in a thing; and when forced to it, there is no part of that soul but suffers violence."

Saturday, November 24, 2018

Prcrastination days with Pudeldame

My drafting work on the sequel for the Peithosian Gift (working title Peithosian Curse) started with a bang a couple of months ago. Then I hit a wall - about 25,000 words into the drafting. That was three weeks ago. Got stuck on a scene where I was not sure what I wanted the POV character to do. It took several sittings to land something on the page but not before I spent a day side-tracked with rethinking the timeline for the whole novel, reworking that timeline and then plotting out the scene by scene storyboard to match the new time line. Eight years become thirty-six months. I came back to the storyboard early scenes three more times to cross-check particular characters and their emotional progressions to ensure consistency with the revised timeline.

I usually describe this sort of reworking effort as procrastination. The source of my unwillingness to write is sometimes related to my overly analytical mind discovering plot holes (rarely the size of canyons but big enough that I just know a reader of the story would grumble at stumbling into it). It can also be because I am just not feeling creative on my chosen day of writing and no amount of staring at the computer screen is going to inspire me. I once spent a day counting the number of ways I could procrastinate and reached a number well into the 60s suggesting, like many writers, I can always find an interesting way of filling the time in the surrounding silence of the solitary pursuit to avoid answering the question - what to write next?

More often than not, the faffing around does lead to some spark of an idea and the writing eventually flows. But when it doesn't, it is better to let go and do something else. Today I'm writing this blog. After almost a week of driving, walking, staring at the screen, watching tv, listening to philosophy podcasts, admiring random art painted on giant silos out in the country, scowling at the dampening wintery rain that cut my road-trip shorter than originally planned, rearranging my bookshelves (to give me more room to buy more books), making rocky-road slice, seeing a movie and having ice cream for the first time in almost two years (and feeling sick afterwards), walking some more, loosening up with a therapeutic massage, trying my best to dampen the urge to impulse buy more books online shopping (and failing miserably). Probably didn't help that I watched the movie "Hector and the Search for Happiness" on iTunes only to discover that it was based on a book by a French psychiatrist traveller so, yes, I simply had to get the book...Some of my favourite philosophy 'fiction' books have been written by French writers (see The Elegance of the Hedgehog as an example).

The list goes on. On the plus-side, I now have a better understanding of the great debate post WWII between Satre and Camus. Another plus, discovered a curious German band - called Pudeldame - who's YouTube video clips reminded me of the music videos made in the 90s that were entertaining stories in themselves. The music was good, too - though I will confess German is not the easiest language on the ear. Lead singer is also an actor with lovely puppy-dog eyes who I have been watching on a sublime series on Stan called Deutschland 83 (and 86). There is some serious procrastination going on here. Check out one of the music videos here: https://youtu.be/8fXsUamZrxY

I can feel the 17-year-old punk girl, Grace, bubbling up inside of me. She is one of the POV characters in the sequel. I am supposed to be writing one of her scenes today. It's early. I still have six hours of procrastination ahead of me.