Hey folks! I’ve got just a quick post for you now, because I need to go heads down on Jeremiah Willstone #2, CITADEL OF GLASS, for Camp Nanowrimo. Prepping to be Guest of Honor at Clockwork Alchemy next week – and creating the Kickstarter campaign for The Neurodiversiverse, which we want to go live before CA – has put me behind on my word count for the month … so I need to make a few changes.
In “normal” circumstances, I have a pretty simple day: take care of food, cats and laundry, work for several hours on the project of the day, and then break – on Mondays and Wednesdays, a late break for dinner where I catch up on reading, on Tuesdays and and some Thursdays, an early dinner break before writing group and the church board meeting, and on Fridays and Saturdays, an early break for coffee and drawing / writing before a late dinner and more reading (with date nites with my wife thrown in). This structure makes sure I’m both making progress on life and work projects during the day, and creative projects at night.
But you can’t do that during Camp Nanowrimo or regular National Novel Writing Month – at least, not if you get behind, because if you do, you will fall farther and farther behind. Writing in Nanowrimo actually makes it easier to write more in Nanowrimo – generally, you can raise more questions for yourself than you can answer in a writing session, creating the fuel for future sessions. But once behind, that can jam up – stuck in “writer’s block” where you haven’t raised enough interesting questions for creative mind to answer, or not thought through the answers enough when you get to the point of writing the outcome of a confrontation.
When I’m behind on Nano, I have to drop my normal “read and eat” strategy in favor of “crack open the laptop at every available opportunity”. And I won’t limit myself to “write and eat” during meals and “laptop in the coffeehouse” sessions: at the very end of the day I’ll set up the laptop in the kitchen , sitting down to bang out the day’s wordcount before I let myself crash for the night, where both I and the laptop recharge.
“Autistic inertia” is the way many autistic people describe their inability to start or stop tasks, and some feel it is one of the most disabling aspects of autism. I don’t have a formal diagnosis of autism, but informal tests put me on the spectrum – and being aware of your own neurodivergence and the experiences that other people have with the same neurodivergence can help you find strategies that work for you to cope.
For me, I can work on tasks for hours and hours on end – but if I don’t have a long enough block to do a task, I tend not to start a task. Now that I understand that I may be struggling with autistic inertia, that helps me understand what may be going on. The feeling that I won’t be able to get anything done if I don’t have time to get everything done is just that, a feeling. In reality, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step towards it … and the journey towards 50,000 words in a month begins with one word on the page.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Normally, there should be an open book or sketchbook next to those delicious fish tacos.
DON’T FORGET: Please sign up for our Kickstarter at neurodiversiverse.com – my understanding is that the more people who sign up to be notified when it goes live, the better the campaign will go on launch day! And if you’re in the Bay Area, please come see me at Clockwork Alchemy where I’m the Author GOH!
