Goodbye 2021

Dec 31, 2021

Two nights ago I had this dream…

I was in a car, sitting in the front seat. We were on a very narrow road, both sides of which was water. The road and the water stretched endlessly. The driver was sitting tensed at the wheel. One wobble, one wheel going off, and we would be in the water. I worried that we wouldn’t be able to push the car back up. My spouse in the back was sleeping peacefully.

 

I have been living this dream over the last two or three weeks. Finishing up the revision of Boiling Frogs. I had said in a post some weeks ago that I’d allow myself till CNY to finish but I decided to chase a finish in 2021. I’ve kept my head in my laptop, afraid that any looking up, any indulgence in anything else would miss the goal. I’d fall in, or out, or off, and never finish. 

 

It’s been tense, tiring, and I’ve stretched myself and then stretched again. I’ve startled awake in the middle of the night thinking of the chapter I’ve been working on, wondering what the characters are feeling or doing. I’ve had to breathe, tell myself that I needed to sleep, and I could go back to them in the morning. I’ve had to follow the in breath and out breath, again and again, till I fell asleep.

 

And my spouse, who has been forced to take days off due to company policy, has  provided the calm, and the nutrition, I needed to keep going. He’s cleaned, cooked, and laundered, (and slept too) so I could keep looking at the road.

 

On this last day of 2021 (which so many of us are happy to kick in the butt) I have finished the revision. 

 

I don’t know when the stretched me will unwind, relax, and be able to feel normal. The next week is one to faff, and get that haircut, do the blood test, check in with the eye doc, read a book a day, laze in cafes, and reflect. Also look up and take in the news from India. I have peeked at it, but I couldn’t really look away from the road ahead and risk falling into the water, vaster than any ocean I know. 

 

And finally my waking and sleeping dreams have revealed the images or energies of the last two years. 

 

2020 began with me having a ton of plans, blueprints. I put in foundations and even built a bit overground, in the first months, but then covid halted the construction. I waited — alert, ready to re-start, sure that I would be able to — blueprints and tools in hand. 

 

I don’t know when I dropped them. And began that descent into lethargy, apathy, hopelessness. Not seeing family added to it.

 

Then in 2021, vegetation grew over what I had built. The construction decayed and became an overgrown ruin. 

 

Until sometime in June or July when something snapped. The 27-day blog challenge was a few steps, maybe even a floor, upwards from the deepest, darkest dungeons I had sunk into. That construction I had begun in 2020 still couldn’t be restarted but I couldn’t stop creating either. Then challenging August was filled with ill health.

 

Nevertheless, in the last four months of the year the shift towards rigour, strength, and perseverance, towards reclaiming those lost bits of me, continued. Almost near the goal yesterday I panicked because I couldn't get one chapter, the second in the book, right. I reached out to writer friends for feedback. 

Oh and I had a training goal too, which I completed. But too tired to elaborate now.

It has been a self-absorbed time and I hope to emerge now. 

 

Goodbye 2021. 2022 is uncertain — for all of us. But in this transition between the two there is a reset. 

 

Happy New Year to everyone. May all your dreams manifest in 2022. May all beings find peace.

 

Revision Blues and Other Miscellanea

December 15, 2021

My eyes and head are heavy after four hours of revising, especially since I feel dissatisfied with the work. Yesterday I did more in just three hours and felt accomplished and hopeful after. Today I came upon some rough chapters that need more re-structuring and the work slackened. I feel despondent. 

 

But that is not the worst of it. The worst is that the book sounds worst and worst every time I read it. I have no objectivity about it. I am sitting here on the black futon in my writing room and trying to think of the nice things people who read the book said about it. But all that comes up in my mind is—what makes you think you know how to write a novel, revise a novel, or even know if a novel, any novel, is any good?

 

Hmm...

 

Last week I had crept away one afternoon and sat two hours in the library café. It was raining outside, and the light was grey and soft. There was a bunch of men chatting loudly at one end of the café but the tables in the cafe are spread over a large area and I found one at the other end of the high-ceilinged room. It was quiet and slow, and my mind began self-loosening some of the shackles that I keep it in, so it doesn’t wander helter-skelter all day. One of the things I began thinking of was how the pandemic had diluted the intensity or even taken away my passions, but amplified my obsessions. Passions release happy energy; obsessions just make me miserable. I cannot remember ever feeling before 2020 the listlessness I had felt for most of the year. Later in the week a friend I had brunch with asked me how I survived the depression I had sunk into in 2020. Luckily one passion survived through and kept me afloat. I mean karate ofcourse.

 

I have been trying to explore the energies of this year. In many ways it was worse than 2021 as since the beginning of the year, until at least September, my health issues and stress levels were astronomical. The year began with plodding, sinking, awareness-blinding energies. But that 27-day blog challenge I set myself in the middle of the year changed my relationship to them. I see today that when I lose my words, I also lose my ability to hope. I don’t know how I can remember this in the future during times I feel lonely and despairing.  

 

I had wanted down time during the last two weeks of the year. Chatting with or emailing friends, sitting in the library café and journaling about the year, training but slowing down a bit there too, and most of all organizing my bits and books. It all feels a huge clutter right now, a clutter that keeps me awake at nights as I haven’t yet resolved the tension between my inner minimalist and my materialist. The minimalist energy is rising strongly — perhaps an effect of the pandemic where so many of us realized how little we need to live well. 

 

I remember that in August too I had wished for a month with a lot of time to slow down. It hadn’t been so. It was filled with doctor visits, tests and exhaustion The end of the year is similarly chaotic and the exhaustion is colossal, but something has shifted. I can’t fully identity the subtle change in energy. Not light and hopeful yet. Still a lot of swirling fear and uncertainty. But pockets, occasional small pockets, where the mind finds rest. 

 

It began raining as I wrote. The wind blows, the doors bang. Time to switch to my other passion, the one that carried me through the pandemic.

 

 

Not Procrastination

December 6, 2021

 

Do you ever feel like you need to study all the materials available on something and only then sit down and do it? Like at times, I’d love a manual on life to read, and then after I finish it I could live my life. 

No, that’s silly. Any manual on life would be so complex with ifs, and buts, and ands, that it would take all the moments from birth to death to read it, leaving no time at all to live it. But sometimes I have felt, and have heard other writers ask, do you ever feel like you need to read all the craft books on writing for a while, and only then start the writing? I guess we ask this because it is often hard to make that mind transition from reading about new skills to writing new raw material. And writers have to create their own raw material, their zero-eth draft. Perhaps not all writers feel it, but some of us do.

 

I haven’t begun reading my draft yet. I felt frustrated all weekend because I was blocked about reading it. This morning I remembered something I had written a few months ago when I was stuck while trying to start my re-write. I had said that maybe I can’t do it because there are things I need to learn yet. 

 

That was an Archimedes in the bathtub moment for me. I had the glimmering of  this on Saturday morning post karate. Often, I take a bus to the library after training. I return books, browse through the stacks, and sit at the back and read poetry or bits of memoir. On Saturday I pulled two craft books, that someone had recommended, off the shelves and sunk into one of the soft black armchairs. I looked at the sections on revision. They both had tips which felt useful so, despite already having an overwhelm of books to read, I borrowed them.

 

One I placed on my bedside table and this morning I opened it to the chapter on revision. Of course, like all revision advise this one too talked about character. This one too had the familiar questions—

What does this character want and to what lengths will she go to get it?
What obstacles stand in the way and what is at stake if the protagonist fails?

How will the protagonist change in the pursuit of this desire?

 

And no matter how many times I revisit these questions for my three MC’s, I discover new things about them. Today I decided to ask myself these questions.

 

There are many things I want but if this was a novel and not life, I would only focus on one or two of them while developing the plot. Getting my book ready to send out to agents and supporting my karate students for their dan gradings, are the top two things I want. Interesting things emerged when I answered the second part of the question—what lengths would I go? I recognized that both require such differing inner energies that I might not be able to pursue both and complete them in the time I want. And though what I most badly want is the first, I would slow down on it to finish the second. 

 

I found that the main obstacle was wanting both equally and juggling constantly to fit them both in. In the process I dropped too many other things and was constantly anxious and unhappy. What is at stake is the sense of self-doubt, identity, and so many other questions about life path that are bound to emerge if I failed the tasks. In a novel I might experience several mini failures but would most likely accomplish the final task(s), but in real life that is uncertain. Yet fail or not I have to go on. And failing in the second is not an option.

 

The change that will happen in the pursuit of these is something I don’t want to think about. I would if I was writing about my characters, but when it is me, my life, I can only stay open to what changes come and try to flow with them rather than imagine them in advance. 

 

Knowing this helps. I have a plan, sort of, with priority one and priority two now. And reading those chapters on revision is not procrastination but having something to focus on while reading my manuscript. And writing this blog is not procrastination either but a step towards sorting the clutter. 

But an extra day every week or two, to sleep and to finish the tasks that never get ticked off my lists would be great right now. 

Extending my Year

December 2, 2021

I’m doing some committed procrastination today. There are things, maybe just one or two, that I need to do today, but since last month I’ve been wanting to ‘review’ the year. It’s something I often do at the end of each year and sometimes blog about it. Reading through those year-end posts is useful. 

 

I mean, I don’t know how many of you remember your ‘years’? Or even the earlier months of the current year? I don’t—and those posts have been a snapshot capturing the major energies of that year. 

 

This year I felt an urgency to review the year, and find something ‘useful’ in it, since November. I feel like l’ve drifted 2021 away and I needed to find solid markers that would  allow me to map it.

 

One of the things I need to do today is self-training and prep for my karate class tomorrow. The self-training often provides a blue-print for the lesson. I also need to start reading my re-drafted novel so I can start the revision. Will it be the last one? Maybe, as I have versions of it all over my laptop, and in clipped piles of paper on the bookshelf in my writing room. I want to expunge them all. 

 

Instead, I am doing other things. Like looking at my journals from the beginning of this year to see where I was at then. The days before I began that 27-day blog challenge in June seem erased. I also am looking for my journals from end 2013, when Sensei Pete left Singapore. I want to remember those first days in this journey of teaching. I want to drink tea, stare, reflect, assimilate. 

 

I took a quiz earlier. Are you a plotter or a panster? A plotter plots out the entire book before writing. A panster wings it daily, often having to delete large sections of work. I already know I am a panster. I would bore myself if I plotted things tightly. The quiz had questions about how organized one is on holiday or when going to a new place. I’ve changed. I used to have a solid itinerary for each holiday but in the last trips I’ve taken I’ve planned the next day only at dinner on the previous one. I discovered I am at the extreme end on the panster side of the scale. I used to love ‘pansting’ my karate but the pandemic rules forced more planning. Which am I then?

 

This made me want to organize some notebooks and I was shocked to find that since the pandemic began my notebooks have moved into chaos. I used to have a journal and two other notebooks, one for the novel(s) I was writing and the other for classes I took or craft books I read. They were organized chronologically, as in I finished one and started the next. Also, by color, size and type. Now there is no order. Several notebooks with similar content and overlapping time periods exist. Also, the black ones are now sometimes journals, and beige ones contain notes for other things, and I have them in different sizes than I used to. The urge is to ‘stop’ my world till I finish making sense of the notebooks, or alternately shred them all. I am that frustrated for that clueless about dealing with the disorder. 

 

I am desperately frightened to start reading this draft of my novel. What if it is crap? I had a goal of finishing the revision before the end of this year, but each time I pick up the papers to read I get a temple crushing headache that makes my sinuses ache. I need to explore this resistance, so I’ve decided to extend my finish date to CNY instead of the Gregorian new year. Gives me an extra month.

 

Meanwhile the spouse was home today, and we spontaneously began remembering scenes from my fantasy novel. I also remembered the first weeks of karate after Sensei left Singapore.

 

I might be wrong, but it feels like these two journeys may converge in some way over the next months, particularly if I pay attention to signals. I feel like I am discovering some lessons in both, that might help me reach another space, level, understanding with them. 

 

May it be true.