Effects of the previous day, goals, disappointments...

Effects of the previous day, goals, disappointments...
9:42am
She was having another late start though it was better than her previous day's start. At least this day she had been able to return to the new routine of getting dressed and with bed made before breakfast. She had also managed to do her daily goal of making 1000 steps in the apartment.

9:45a phone call will let machine pick up
This had been a practice she had started 6 months before and had managed to stick quite well to. She guessed she was managing to fulfill that goal about five times a week. That was something she felt very good about. There were strength building exercises she had been trying to do as well. She did not have these set as a daily target. The strength training routine had been set aside with this daily writing routine. The daily writing seemed to take up most of her attention now.

The evening before she wondered if she had reached her wall. With that day's writing she'd discovered that she had gotten her word count within about 500 words of where she would have been if she had started writing on November 1. As soon as she realized that, she felt so tempted to get that small deficit of words written so that the next day she would be able to start the writing knowing she did not have to make up the word debt. But she also realized that if she sat down to write again there was the real possibility she would be too oversaturated the next day and would reject working altogether.

She was already still so oversaturated with the massive effort of the previous day's work that she was rebelling and refusing to attend to her art obligations. At the moment no matter how she tried to look at those projects she felt too resentful at having to face working on them. When would she understand how to handle this? When would she take a stand about this? Was this writing project a procrastination ploy in disguise? No, she did not believe that.

She felt depressed that she had not been able to get herself to work on the art projects. The whole afternoon had blown apart because she had been unable to decide how to proceed with running some errands. The previous day, when she'd gone out to run these errands, she'd found that the car had seemed as if the brake peddle was depressing to far. She had been unwilling to take the car out when she discovered this. It was always a disappointing feeling to get all ready to go out and about and then have to turn immediately around and give up the plan of going out and about. To be inside again when one had expected to be out doing one's errands and running into people.

Here it was the next day and she still needed to buy those groceries. She did not want to return to the garage that had repaired her tire. They were not her usual garage. She suspected that this possible brake problem could have been a result of the tire repair. She wanted to speak with her regular mechanic to at least find out if she could run errands and might this be caused by the tire repair. It was always very difficult to reach this mechanic though. Now the phone was busy every time she tried calling. She assumed the phone line was still broken. There had been an ongoing conflict over that phone connection. It seemed this was not yet resolved.

Her impetus to go out and about had been thwarted again. It was like having a large boulder thrown in one's path that one had to regain balance from having just almost sailed head first over the top. A boulder one can go around. This was not a good analogy/metaphor. Here she stood wanting to go out and about while it was still day light, wanting to get her grocery shopping done, but also knowing about her art projects waiting. She had such hard times deciding what to do in these situations. That indecision depressed her every time.

She did not know just what she would do about going out for groceries. That was not as much a problem as having to get through to her mechanic about the car.
There were surely friends she could turn to for help with the grocery shopping. She was completely out of certain staples that she always used. Her favorite cheddar cheese which she had on toast every morning, on vegetables, in most of her supper dishes. She was out of certain frozen vegetables that she liked very much. She was out of her usual toasting bread. She was almost out of ground coffee. All these usual meals could be substituted with other ingredients in her larder.

She could make a bean spread from canned beans. She could make bread. She had grated parmesan cheese which would go nicely on the vegetables. The food shopping did not have to be done right then. There were also all the canned goods she'd stocked up in advance of that big hurricane they had expected that summer. And, she remembered there was a jar of instant coffee still. Food shopping could be delayed.

She would have to accept that she was not going out. She invented a new dish for dinner, or at least, one she had not been used to having. This was a simple wholewheat rotini pasta, with string beans, broccoli, corn, tuna fish, parmesan, vinegar, and lite mayonaise - a salad. It was so tasty that she wanted to eat the whole bowl. That was too much for a single meal. It had to be put away out of temptation. Immediately she set to making a similar dish without the tuna. This was a slightly different mix of vegetables - just broccoli and corn - and with curry powder. It seemed to taste good. Later that evening before bed and the dish being cooled by then, she had another taste of it. This was excellent with the curry powder in it. The broccoli was tart from the vinegar and chewy as if it were meat. The corn gave bursts of sweetness. She ate too much of it.

Despite the wonderful cooking experiments, she was disappointed in how the day had ended up. She was disappointed that she had not been able to go out, though she was not looking at how this had caused her having to invent two new delicious dishes. She was disappointed that she had not done that last deficit of writing to bring her word count to where she wanted it. She was disappointed that she had taken no action towards those dreaded art obligations. And, she had refused to even do the little daily figure inventions practice she'd been trying to keep up with.

She also feared that the writing project was taking up too much of her time and attention when she had these other projects due. She feared her father had been right in his judgment that that writing goal was too ambitious for a beginner and would end up overwhelming a beginner to the point of causing them to give up entirely. He felt the daily practice had to be something one could manage.

She had been so swept up in the immediate visible effects this writing had had on her that she had been sure by the seventh day that she would be able to accomplish this. Here she was finding herself in a double bind (if that was what it was called). She had been so amazed by the effects this work had been having on her. She had to continue with it. But it did not fit into the rest of the picture. The more she read and thought about the creation of fiction, of novels, the more she believed that was not for her, that there was too much about it that did not interest her.

She listened to the interview with an author of young adult fantasy fiction series. To hear the spin of those storylines, told her this was not something she wanted to do. She could possibly come up with an outline but to write all the detail necessary to flesh out the detail did not interest her.

She wished there was a practice or exercise for art that was the same as this writing practice. Something she could set for herself on a daily basis that had to be continuously engaged in that was not just executing known steps. She loved practicing a skill, working to improve it.

She got the idea that she could devote a certain amount of time daily to spontaneous image making, whether as separate images, images as a narrative series, or themed series. One of her favorite art instruction books, The Natural Way to Draw, by Simone Nicolaides, gave the advice that one should do a daily exercise of drawing a scene from memory of something in one's recent experience. Nicolaides felt this was one of the most important things one could do to advance ones artistic development.

phone call.....

She used to do a similar thing those cold winter days during the holiday shopping season in New York City when she sat out on the sidewalk with other vendors selling their wares. She had been selling the Christmas cards she'd had made up. To occupy herself during the business lulls she scribbled fantasy animal scenes. If she were to do it now she wanted a smooth flowing pen with black ink and preferably a pen that had nuance to it - a variable line width - and that flowed easily. She had long ago abandoned those 'technical' pens. Once she had experienced the variable line width of a dip pen she was unwilling to use anything else if it were to be ink. Technical pens were also too frustrating. The ink clogged too often. One spent too much time fighting with the pen. It seemed that no matter how much one tried to clean the tool, it refused to work. She was always unwilling to believe that possibly new ink needed to be used.

Dip pens clogged also, but there one could add water. Nowadays she used them with watercolor anyway. So much for free flowing strokes if one had to paint watercolor onto the dip pen with a brush rather than dipping the pen into an ink bottle. This was not a convenient method but it was predictable. One could at least get into a flow with it. One could keep moving.
11:24 am

She had also had the worry the evening before whether she would be able to find anymore she wanted to say in her daily writing the next day. Then she had comforted herself that she could always use the writing time to practice inventing quick little stories. There had been that idea of making up stories for the 4-5 subjects for the month's art class plan. She still wanted to practice making up stories just to see if it was a skill that could be learned through practice.

It was with heavy heart that she'd finished her previous day. She did not want to give up this writing project. She had to find a way to fit it in properly. It had been the tenth day. That was one third through. She felt so guilty about her unanswered obligations. The writing project was not the only thing she needed to honor for herself. She needed to get that tiny bit of personal art done before everything else, just as she'd been doing with the writing. Otherwise it was too easy to let it fall aside. She did finish the day with renewed determination.

This morning she had been able to get on track. She had not expected to have anything to write about. It had been a surprise that she'd written so much without referring to any of her notes. Neither had she stopped to keep an account of summary lines for the topics she'd written about. This time it had been such a narrative of what she'd been through the previous day that there was not much to ponder about.

She neared the point of having said all she needed to say, and hoped that the word count was as at the overall point she had wanted to reach. It was time to check.

11:39 am 2090 words c. 2 hours - 121 minutes = 17.27 wph
11:51 am word count and spread sheet accounting work