No, no, don’t panic! MGC isn’t doing something New and (contra-)Improved!

I was dealing with reading myself back into a work-Not-In-Progress. Now, it’s been a about a month, and most of that month, well, reasonable people would look at and think “Your husband underwent major surgery that came out with one less organ than he had going in; why are you even worried about writing?”

I never claimed to be fully reasonable when dealing with myself, only to try to be when dealing with myself and others. (Yes, I know, there’s Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for that. Jordan Peterson pithily put it “Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.” It does help.) So in addition to giving myself grace, taking myself off to the clinic when the inevitable result of stressing so hard my immune system flatlined while in a giant building complex full of sick people, and then following doctor’s orders, I am trying not to beat myself up over lack of words. It won’t help, anyway; I can’t yell my backbrain into obedience. (Can anybody? Would that even be a good thing?)

But when I start feeling better, and the story has slipped out of my brain? Time to try to read myself back in. The thing is, I kept finding myself shying away from reading the words on the screen.

That’s fine; that may not be the words themselves, but the screen. Just as pulling up the ebook on the e-ink kindle and reading makes all the typos that escaped 17 rounds of editing pop out, so any sort of format change helps separate the story as written from the “I should be writing if I’m staring at this and I’m failing” wall of awful that is so hard to surmount, or the invisible mental filter that makes typos blend in like lions in the long grass.

In fact, when I am getting words, I’ll send them to my alpha readers on a chat set to night mode, so they transform to a different font, and sepia text on a black screen. Awkward phrases and typos leap out sufficiently that sometimes it takes a few minutes to put up the next few paragraphs, as I had to stop and do a hasty re-write.

So, I took this stack of paper, a hole punch, and a three-ring binder to the back porch, and sat in the sunshine while I hole-punched papers and organized them in the binder. The poor hole punch can only do a few pages at a time, so this was like an odd scattered montage of story, with a few paragraphs here, a few there… All while with no distractions (except the monarchs, as the migration is ongoing.)

At the end, I had three extra sheets of paper that I hole-punched and stuck at the back. I had intended to plot in reverse, because I had an idea that we’d focused on some characters too closely recently, and the background ones needed to pick up their subplot and run with it, but I wanted to see the outline of the whole thing to see if I was following the general trajectory of story, and how close it looked like I was to the climax and the end.

I never got there, because my brain took some random things mentioned earlier in the story I’d seen as I unjammed the printer, others I saw as I sorted papers, hole-punched them, and stuck them in the binder… and went “that wasn’t worldbuilding fluff! That was foreshadowing!” Here’s how it’ll play out in the start of the next chapter, and the middle of the chapter after that! Oh, and you need to research this to finish out the chapter.”

All right, here we go…