Distracted, but Writing Anyway

Writing is the way I process things.  It's how I learn and how I figure out what I really know.

Writing is nourishment.  It feeds my soul.  It clears my head.  It energizes me.

Writing is spiritual practice.  It makes me focus on what is really important, on what I need to do and understand to continue on my spiritual journey.

But lately, I've been distracted.  I've still been writing.  I write every morning.  But it's been more brain dump that exploration.  More to-do list than insight.

The kind of writing I really need to do, what I crave right now, is hard to do when time is limited, or I'm feeling anxious and stressed, or when there are other big emotional issues (good and bad) to deal with.

My 10 days of tai chi workshop and travel, immediately followed by a day of MMTA convention presentation and performance kept me super focused on the present.  Those activities used all my brain power and energy, and all the other stuff in my life took a back seat.  Once I got home, reality hit me hard.  There was no escape from the massive to do list and the anxiety and stress related to money and my work situations.  I wanted to write.  I needed to write.  But my brain just couldn't get there.

Last week I couldn't even find words to express how I felt about what had happened in Charleston. Once again, music came through to give me some outlet.  (If you like the song, the link to the PDF of the sheet music is in the YouTube comments.)



But all I could do was listen, and read, and mourn.  I couldn't write.

Today is my day off.  I have a huge list of writing projects I wanted to tackle.  But I slept in and then checked Facebook before jumping into my writing.  And once again, I'm distracted, but this time by love, joy, and celebration.  I doubt I'll get as much writing done today as I had hoped, but starting with this post, I am doing something.  And that's good.

This weekend, I process, feed my soul, and do some deep spiritual work. Some of it may be shared. Some might end up filed away under the bed. Distracted or not, the time for writing is now.

Another adventure over, at least for now

Today is the first weekend after NaNoWriMo and to be honest I'm not quite sure what to do with myself. I woke up this morning and wanted to go right to the computer to start writing as I did every non-work day in November. There are lots of things I should be doing, but I find myself wanting to write. The story is done, but there are places that I could go back and fill in a little more, especially near the end where I was just trying to get to the end of the story. But part of me also needs to be away from this story for awhile.

So, that was all a bunch of rambling nonsense about moving on after NaNo. NaNo teaches you to write, to just get the words out and not worry about editing. Obviously, I'm still stuck in that mode.

Here is some information about what I accomplished during November.

This shows my writing progress for the month of November. Yellow is a little higher than the daily goal, and orange is a little lower. Reds are exceptionally bad days and greens are exceptionally good days. As you can tell, I write best(or most prolifically) when I have big chunks of time. Although they encourage you to shoot for 1667 words a day and do develop a habit of writing daily, it just doesn't work for me. I achieved my goal, but did it in a way that works with my ADD brain. You can fight it, or you can embrace it.

To see a graph of my daily word count totals, you can go here.

I got off to a rough start this year, and there is a lot of crap that needs to be cut, but I'm very proud of what I was able to accomplish this year. I actually finished the story and I wrote 26,600 more words than I needed for an official win.

Now, I'm going to work on catching up on all the things I put off because writing was important or fun, or both.

Workshops

I'm really excited because finally our district autism specialists are doing a workshop at a time I can attend. Plus it's free. Yeah!

I'm also looking at going to a lecture on the 25th about the role of nutrition in treating ADD, ADHD, and autism. I've already learned a lot about nutrition and ADD from reading Daniel G. Amen's books and it has made a major difference in my life, when I eat when and what I know I should. When I get a little stressed out and then eat way too much junk, like I did this week, life is not as good. I've got to get back on track.

Even if these workshops just tell me stuff I already know, I'm excited for the opportunity to review and think about how to apply it all again.