let's stumble towards success and pack some snacks for little breaks

Woman on packed bus, loudly into phone: "Yeah, so thanks for listening. I just needed to confide in someone."

Child: "It's the magic guy, Mommy! Hi! Hi, magic guy! Will you do magic?"
Off-duty street magician: *attempts to ignore the child for a while, then exasperatedly performs a coin-disappearing trick*

Child: "La la la laaaaa..."
Parent (much more loudly than the child): "DANTE! Use your INDOOR VOICE! That is an OUTDOOR VOICE! We can turn around right here, you know, we don't have to go to Wal-Mart!"

I've been writing a lot more recently than I have in years, probably because I now actually have the time to get ideas down when they pop into my head. I mentioned in my end-of-year meme that I wrote over 60,000 words in 2010--probably about half of that was written during the last three months of the year. (Most of it was fanfic, although NaNoWriMo, while it didn't work out for me, did yield several original ideas I've been poking at.)

I was thinking today about the writing process, or rather my writing process, and how mentality and environment affect my ability to write. For me, there are two main aspects of writing: idea generation and first drafts. I prefer to write from the beginning to the end of a piece rather than jumping around between scenes, and I do a lot of restructuring and editing in between chunks of new words, so my first drafts tend to be pretty close to the final product. I know you're not Supposed to do that, and the whole point of NaNoWriMo is to get out of that habit, but I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that it's how I work best. Especially when I look at my '07 NaNoWriMo novel, which I have tried to revise several times without much success. So instead of fighting my urge to rewrite while writing, I'm trying to embrace it and work with it, and it's resulted in several pieces I'm pretty happy with.

Idea generation, unsurprisingly, seems to happen mostly when I'm letting my mind wander. I'm not sure why, but my best fiction ideas usually come to me while I'm falling asleep and my best academic ideas usually come to me when I'm doing boring, repetitive tasks. Several times, I've tried to generate fiction ideas while stocking merchandise at Williams-Sonoma by thinking about fanfic, and accidentally ended up writing treatises in my head on things like the neurological motivation for RPS and the connection between accuracy in social judgment and psychological health in celebrity-fan relationships.

Getting down the actual words requires different circumstances, and I'm still figuring out exactly what the right circumstances for me are. If I'm at home, I need silence for any kind of writing, and I usually need to be alone for fiction writing, although having people around can actually make academic writing easier as long as they're quiet. Considering this, it's weird that the most productive place for me to write right now is the bus. I discovered this a few months ago, when I needed to go to work right in the middle of a thought. I pulled up a notepad application on my phone, just to finish the paragraph before the right phrasing went out of my head, and wrote several hundred words during the twenty-minute ride downtown. I picked it back up on the way home, and ended up riding all the way to the end of the line and then catching another bus back to my stop because my writing was flowing so well that I didn't want to get off. I think I wrote 1300 words that day in just a couple of hours. The majority of the 10,300-word fic I spent the end of December on was written on the bus, using my Sidekick's thumb keyboard. (Which, let me tell you, ow. I tried using my laptop, but it's hard to see the screen and I get paranoid that people are looking, and I'm also wary about leaving it in the break room.)

I'm not sure why the bus is so inspirational for me. I think it's partially that the internet is available but not easy to use--cutting myself off from the web entirely doesn't work well for me because I'm the sort of person who stubbornly resists authority even when it's in my own head, but I'll happily choose not to dick around on the internet because it takes forever to load and scrolling is a pain in the ass. It also may have something to do with thalamic response to the white noise and vibrations on a bus. Maybe I should buy a massage chair.

In the end, I think writing, for me, can be broken down into creativity and focus. Idea generation requires creativity without focus, whereas pounding out the actual words requires creativity and focus. Sometimes I get focus without creativity, which usually means a lot of rereading, minor editing, and staring at my outlines. It doesn't feel productive while I'm doing it, but I actually think those periods are a helpful and even necessary part of the process, letting the work I've done sink in and looking at it like a reader would.

After getting off the bus this morning, standing at the corner of Linwood and Main, I felt a slight tickling on my neck. Thinking it was my headphone cord, I reached up to brush it off, and suddenly found this maybe one-and-a-half-inch cockroach bug thing squirming around on my hand.

I wonder if it crawled on me on the bus, or if it was in my trench coat when I put it on. The buses are usually pretty clean, which means that bug was probably on my person for about half an hour before I noticed it. It could have been in a pocket, but I rooted around in there for my bus pass, so it's more likely that it hid in the fold that covers the zipper of the coat.

*tingles*

My "indescribable" mood theme pic is perfect for this post.

EDIT: Dude! I just remembered last night's dream. I dreamed that you could set the text linking to the "read comment" page to be different for every day of the week. O.o

Today, after work, I walked from PVCC to the Taco Bell by Cosco, bought myself lunch, walked back to the MAX stop on Linwood and Main, waited for about forty minutes, rode to 59th, and walked home from there.

This is not an unusual afternoon ritual for me (although I don't go to Taco Bell often). However, as I approached my house, it began to snow, and I wondered if perhaps today mightn't have been the best day to wear shorts and a T-shirt.

Quick question:
We will never know of what he might have been capable.
We will never know what he might have been capable of.

Which is right? The first one seems more grammatically correct, but the second seems like it flows better.