Why Do You Swim in the Cold?

I swim for OCD.

An obsessive, runaway mind says a million fractured things and doesn't let them go. Cold water says FOCUS. I dare you to think about anything other than THIS. 

I swim for Anxiety. 

Anxiety tells you the world is dangerous. Cold water slaps you in the face and shouts I'LL SHOW YOU DANGEROUS. It shocks your nervous system and realigns your brain's idea of "dangerous." When you get out of the freezing water and back into your comfortable, safe, cozy life, your body relaxes. It relaxes and turns off the adrenaline and cortisol. It finally realizes the difference between dangers real and dangers imagined. When I swim in the day, I sleep in the night. When I don't swim, anxiety often keeps me awake.

I swim for Chronic Fatigue.

Chronic fatigue tells you the battle is lost today. Cold water wakes you up: every sense, every nerve, every fibre of your being.

Grief tells you the world is darkness. Cold water tells you the world is full of fire and life. It surprises a laugh or a shriek out of you as you take that plunge. Your body reacts whether you tell it to or not. The cold steals across your submerged skin, running like shots of electricity between your pores, contracting the small muscles of your body, seeping into your organs, shuddering against your lungs. You hoot or hiss or holler or whuff. You might grin or grimace or scream or laugh. You don't know which will happen. You can't plan it. You can't control it. But you WILL feel it. I promise you.

When Depression tells you there's nothing left to feel, cold water will grab you by the diaphragm, spreading the menthol burn that turns to warmth in your chest. It will snake its tendrils of energy across your surface and through your depths, from your toes to your hairline. It will sear the moment through your foggy mind, so you can look around and see the sky. It will remind you that what is wild is both beautiful and terrible. That you are wild, beautiful and terrible.

Cold water will hold you close whispering, "This, my friend. This is what it is to be alive."

 

When Characters Suprise You, but You're the One Writing the Script

 Let me tell you a story. Sometimes the process of writing is simple, not easy, but simple. You plot something out. You develop the characters. You put the two together and you write a scene. Sounds pretty normal. 

Sometimes it doesn't work that way at all.

Earlier this week I was writing and when I finished the scene the character was upstairs trying to work something out. She heard the door downstairs, boots and voices. Someone had arrived at her shop. Her friend was downstairs and had let them in. 

Now here's where it gets weird. I thought I knew who had arrived. There was another character who, in my head, was already on the way. But when I went back to his scene, he changed his mind based on new information and rode off, literally, in a different direction.

So when I went back to the shop... I didn't know who was downstairs. SOMEONE had arrived. Yes, I could edit that bit out and move on with my life, but no. The characters waiting at the shop NEEDED someone new to arrive. It was what happened next.

So I brought my character downstairs to see who was there and the person standing there was someone I DIDN'T EXPECT. I was as surprised as the character I was with. BUT when I thought back through what I had already written, I had foreshadowed that character coming. 

It'll be a better anecdote once you've read the book. But still. It's like the story is real and I'm discovering it sometimes rather than writing it myself. Or at least the part of my brain that is writing the story is just very slightly removed from the main part. It's not all a concious process. It's weird. And glorious. 

On Writing

 I've never shared much of my writing process before, mostly because when the writing is going well, I'm busy, and when it isn't... well, that doesn't make for a good story. Writing fiction is a form of exercise and you have to do it regularly; build up your brain to being ABLE to write more. When I wrote most of 1272 BC, which is the working title of that first draft I finished in February, I was writing a minimum of 500 words per day. And it was TOUGH. I slogged for hours over those 500 words. Now my minimum goal is 1500 words per day, but on a really good day it looks a lot more like 2000. (Which incidentally is how much Stephen King writes per day.) It is my long term goal to make 2000 be my minimum benchmark.

The tricky part (other than the hurdle of sitting down to write at all) comes if you miss a day, or a weekend, and you lose your momentum and then life is busy and a week or two goes by without a proper day of fiction writing. It happens, and it takes a lot to get back into it. You have to cut yourself slack, go back to celebrating small victories like 100 words, and then push yourself to write line by line, conversation by conversation, scene by scene. I will make goals like "I need to get her out of this room and into the next before I stop for the night," which is gruelling and the extremely unglamorous part of being a writer. When you write slowly the story drags horrifically. It's boring. Imagine if you were reading that slowly. One paragraph a day. And the characters had been in the middle of the same conversation for WEEKS. You would never want to pick that book up again. That's what writing is like sometimes.

And then there are the 2800 word days when the characters write their own lines and they pour out of my fingers onto the page like they're alive. I take a break to get a drink, but the characters keep talking and when I come back to the page I have to catch up, my fingers tripping over each other, trying to get the words down before they fade away. Those are the days it's wonderful to be a writer.

Of course, many days are somewhere in between. Nothing in life is all glamour or all torture. Like everyone's work, a lot of it is just... ordinary. But the more days I write, the more productive every one of those ordinary days become. 

 

October 2020 Writing Challenge

 

2020 has been... well, you know. You've been there.

But in some ways it has been a good year for me despite the overarching apocalyptic disaster vibes. My postpartum depression did not go untreated this time around, but still it's taken two years to get back to where I was before baby #2, and also there is no "back". Only onward. Early in 2020, before there was a pandemic, I finished writing the first draft of a novel I had been working on for three years. Yay!

Then I tried to start the rewriting process, but there's truth in the idea that you need to let a manuscript sit for a bit before trying to fix it. And THEN we were in the middle of a pandemic and with two kids in the house I didn't write successfully for months.

In July when the baby went back to daycare, I started writing again and I found a new world with new characters.

In August I started writing a novel about that world. I wrote 25,000 words of it in August. 16,000 words more in September. And now entering October I have the lofty goal of finishing it by the end of the month, which is about another 40,000 words - more than I have ever written on a novel in one month.

But see, there is another goal looming. I always try to participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) which takes place every year in November. The goal for it is 50,000 words in one month on a new project. And I have a new project waiting in the wings for this year. A new story in another new world with new characters. But to be ready for Nanowrimo, I need to finish my current work in progress while it is still October.

My manuscript is currently 40,315 words heading into October. I will keep writing until I hit somewhere north of 70,000 words and the end of the story. 85,000 words is a standard submission novel manuscript to one of the big publishing houses, but the end of the story is the real goal. Word counts can change considerably in editing anyway. 

Onward and upward! To Narnia and the North!