A keyboard. How quaint.

One of the side benefits of the job as I have it is the whole day's spent offline. I've got wifi access so I can technically use my phone to browse the internet, but there's no point in trying to browse on an iPhone for any length of time. As such, the internet happens without me. A couple of times, I've scheduled large numbers of posts to my Tumblr so when I get back, they'll be waiting for me, but otherwise, I leave the internet alone.

It's pretty wonderful.

It's not even the hours offline so much as it's good to get reminded that the internet belongs on my computer and not on any device that fits in my hand by living in such a reality, and I should do my best to leave the internet in my apartment and not carry it with me.

Challenge #12

Make an appreciation post to those who enhance your fandom life. Appreciate them in bullet points, prose, poetry, a moodboard, a song... whatever moves you!

The first person I lost in fandom - really lost, not moving blogging platforms and falling out of touch, not drifting apart, not a falling-out so extreme there's no talking anymore - wasn't someone I knew well. I knew people who knew her well and we'd spoken in person at BASCon a couple times, and because we had nametags, we could greet each other easily. But between one year and another, something went wrong - complications with surgery, as I recall - and she wasn't there anymore.

I've since lost a lot more people. Some I'd spoken with frequently, some who were friends of friends. Some I knew by wallet name, some where I couldn't tell you any more than what fandoms we shared. Sometimes it was a surprise and sometimes it wasn't unexpected. A few times people told me, a few times I wondered about them and went to check and learned that way, a couple times it so happened I'd see something they'd made or stumble over their account and then learn they'd passed on years ago.

Late last month, someone I knew pretty well - we'd chat a few times a week, pass links onto each other - disappeared off Tumblr. Deactivating their blog, deleting their Archive of Our Own account. They'd been undergoing some fairly drastic health issues and had occasionally stepped away from the internet for weeks at a time, and after a few days of worry, it was seeing the deleted AO3 account that actually made me feel a bit better. Tumblr's a place where deactivation can happen willy-nilly, but AO3 requires deliberate effort. It let me tell myself they made the choice to step away as far as they could, rather than them leaving without providing a forwarding address. Tonight I found someone else I knew pretty well - we shared dinner in London once - who'd stopped posting over two years ago had their Tumblr account deactivated, also. Maybe they stepped far away. So I tell myself.

I knew I'd lose people someday. It's part and parcel of knowing people - knowing that they'll leave. When I got into fandom, I mostly made friends with people older than me; I've lately looked around and realized I'm mostly making friends with people my own age or younger. I don't know how long any of them are going to stay in my life. I know it's not going to last forever, or even as long as I'd wish it would. But I know they're here right now. And I know they've made my fandom life better, no matter how much time we had together.

Challenge #11

In your own space, grant someone's wish from Challenge #5. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it and include a link to your own post with the wishes you granted if you feel comfortable doing so.

That was a fun way to spend a good hour or so. A very good hour, even.

What's getting to me about forgetting my headphones and MP3 player at my client's place more than having forgotten them is that my client sent me a text message about it. The forgetfulness is its own issue; that I didn't get a phone call about it has me absolutely baffled. She's a good few decades older than I am, and the messages she sent are iMessages that require internet access, not what I'd call "plain texts" that don't. So there's a good chance I wouldn't have seen it after I left the apartment's wifi range and got back to my place.

A direct phone call would've been much easier. I'll head over tomorrow and get it then, so it's less of a problem and more of an inconvenience, and it's still got me baffled she didn't simply call.

It's been well below freezing all day, and the only time I've spent outdoors was the pair of bike rides to and from the gig location, which itself is barely a 20 block ride. It was more than enough for my fingers and ears to get uncomfortably chilled, though I take it as a point of pride that continuing to mask up means my nose and mouth are just fine. I'm still thinking often on how safe I am for this cold snap - a safe place to sleep, hot water, layers to bundle up. Mostly, the tiredness comes from having rearranged a fairly sizable home library's substantial fiction section, up and down a stepladder, picking up armfuls of books over and over, and it's not digging a ditch, but between hours of that and the cold, I'm feeling pretty wiped.

I think next time I go, I'll bring a canned coffee with me. See about heading this off ahead of time.

Save for an incredibly brief break this afternoon, it's been snowing all day. Not hard, but steadily and gently. It's collecting on the trees and in the parks, and while there's not much total accumulation, the rate has me hopeful it'll stay around for a few days. I went out to the movies this evening, and standing and waiting for the bus, I watched the streetlight hit it as it came down - the speed of it, and how even with all the force behind it, none of it hit hard enough to make any noise.

It snowed through a lot of yesterday, too. I took a brief walk for a small errand and stood out in it for a while, enjoying the smell and the chill. I liked the idea my footprints would be gone soon, and with what came down today, I know the steps I took aren't there anymore. There's something compelling about that to me. Not that there's a resilience so much as anything done will be covered over and erased, no matter how heavy or light your footsteps.

Challenge #8

Talk about your creative process.

I can sum it up: "Fuck the muse." I don't write when inspiration strikes, I don't wait to get seized with a passion and fury to create and communicate, I don't try to alter my mental state by getting drunk, high, wasted, plastered, or otherwise out of it. I sit down, and I get the words out.

Assuming I'm at home and not traveling, assuming I've gotten my head clear enough, assuming I haven't devoted the evening to something that's going to get me some income, assuming I'm not out of it because of something like a cold or food poisoning - trust me, it was memorably bad tofu - then I'll get my ass in the chair and work. The AIC Method isn't elegant, and it's less about elegance and more about results. The results are 1,000 words when I'm composing. I may write a few more than that one night, meaning that the next night might see me writing a few less to get to the next thousand according to the raw wordcount. The raw wordcount is key at this stage. I don't write out of order as a matter of course; I can't tell myself the story that way. I write it from beginning to end as best I'm able so I can figure out what the story is, so when I go back and edit everything, I can work at getting it to what it needs to be.

I write quietly, without music or background noise. I write at varying speeds, sometimes getting 1,000 words an hour and sometimes averaging out closer to 250. I'll let inspiration arrive at its own pace, and I usually seek out inspiration and passion and ideas when I'm not writing, so I can save up the energy for the work. I write at night, sometimes in the dark and sometimes before sundown depending on the season. I find a lot of pleasure to turning off the overhead light, turning on the desk lap, and sitting in a little bubble of words - I stumbled over it some decades ago, and the only time I've shifted from that was because of one telecommuting job with a set of on-call hours that had me working in the afternoons, which I still look back on as a fairly bizarre time. But it worked for that time frame. Because it was when I got my ass in the chair and wrote the words.

Walks help. Bike rides help. Going to the movies helps. Going to art museums works, too. Reading nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and going to live performances all help feed the creative spirit. But not the muse. I don't want to think about it in those terms. Nights when I don't write always feel a little bereft. I could be at the movies, I could be out with friends, I could be visiting Paris, and as good a time as I'll be having - and trust me, while I haven't done all three at the same time, I've done each of them alone and in varying combinations, so I can say that even doing that, I'll be thinking about what scenes I want to work out and the story I want to tell. I'll sometimes take longhand notes to help get words together so I can figure out if they're the right way to approach an idea, and that helps a bit, but it's not the same as sitting down and writing 1,000 new words, or cleaning up a chapter, or filling in something I set aside to research later to avoid breaking the creative flow, or line-editing according to someone else's patient notes.

I've joked there's only one proper writing method, and that's whatever works for the individual author to get their words out. I've also joked there's only one kind of writer, and that's someone who gets the writing done. I can advocate for what works for me. I can't say it'll work for everyone, but I'm willing to go on record about its success rate at finishing what I start.

Ass In Chair. Learn it. Love it. Live it. Because it always happens one word at a time.