Manning the Workshop

Most of you who read me have probably already read this post on punching our fears in the face. In a more literal mental sense than perhaps most people think of. So, alright, I'm one of those people for whom running subroutines with names and faces and particular skillsets of their own also helps. As if you couldn't have guessed.

The other thing I (we) do, which is a lot more foundational for me, is having a mindscape. Some people call it a memory palace, other people call it your power focus or your center or what-the-fuck-ever. I like mindscape, because I grew up on a steady diet of mythology and folklore, and what it is, essentially, is me playing Fisher Queen. I have a manor house, because I imprinted on Narnia and L'Engle and Weyrs and other such sprawling complexes which may or may not bear any resemblance to architectural feasibility. (Kitty has a Tower, a White Tower against a certain someone else's Dark Tower, because she imprinted on King.) Then there's the lands around, because when I was a little girl I wanted a lot of land, both from the horse-crazy phase (which I grew out of) and the sheer pleasure of being in the relative middle of nowhere (which I did not). Also I gave myself fire lizards, because fuck you MY mindscape, that's why.

(It probably says several things about me that I went for the empathic carnivores that are more intimidating than they look. I leave parsing the subject as an exercise for the reader.)

So, then, let's play with the land of metaphor! The lands are mostly there to amuse me, though there's a set of burial mounds (look, I grew up within spitting distance of a set of Late Woodland mounds, I imprinted on those heavily) which serve as the mental place I keep bad memories. Not quite like having a nightmare realm, more of a place where I can shut things away unless I'm needing to bring them out for some reason or another. Then we get into the manor house itself for interesting bits of metaphor - there is, as you would expect, a massive fucking library. Because I need my reference material, and you didn't think I kept all those pop culture allusions sorted without some kind of help, did you? Especially around Yuletide, when I have to haul out my reference material and edit however many stories Kitty ends up pinch-hitting this year.

Up on the top floor, though, is my Workshop, which gets a capital letter because tradition. (Also known as its origins have been lost to the dim dark haze of memory.) It has turret guns with which I and whichever subroutines are running can shoot down brainweasels and other distractions. Like the urge I'm having right now to tab over to Twitter and find out who said what this time. (Bang!) The Workshop's also sectioned off into smaller chunks; I keep the editing workshop separate from the music workshop because they require very, very different forms of attention for me. The editing workshop, as you might expect, has all my grammar and narrative tools laid out; there's the mallet of Wrong POV and the chisel of Clarify Your Action and the brush of Let Me Just Polish Up That Typo For You. Among other things, of course, but that does for a sampling of recently used tools. I grew up with family members who did woodworking, imprinted on archaeology early and often, and only came to fiber crafts later on. Besides which, in a lot of respects editing is like an archaeological expedition, to find the bones of a writer's story and help to fix up the rest of the structure so that it looks like a story ought. Sometimes that means you learn that the story's bones look like a whole different animal once you get it excavated, but usually it's putting the vertebrae in their proper order and fixing the reversed phalanges. I did mention the archaeological imprinting, right?

You may have noticed I think a lot in metaphor, or at least I'm less shy about saying so than a lot of people. (I may be less shy about a lot than a lot of people. This continues to boggle me. If you guessed I was the shy kid at school, you are 100% right.) At any rate, the music workshop is even more metaphorical and, I would say, close to synaesthetic in nature, at least as compared to the editing workshop. Moreover, parts of it are relatively new in conception. I've always played music, but I've never approached it in as structured a manner as I am now. The muscle memory section is old, and is hard to put into words even metaphorically - you know how you know your way around your home, right up until you (or somebody else) moves a chair? Like that, applied to technique. Those of you who play an instrument, dance, do martial arts, or anything else that requires a specific form of body awareness know how hard this can be to describe to laypeople. Then there's the repertoire section, aka that part where I learn other people's music. This also has some archeological tools in place; getting to the bones of a tune is a crucial part of learning a primarily aural (and oral) tradition. The sight-reading module looks like nothing so much as a microscope, whereas the ear training module is a pair of giant noise-canceling headphones - I hate wearing them IRL but I appreciate the increased focus the metaphor demands. And the newest part, the songwriting part, is one part writing toolkit to one part raw emotional core to one part music theory. Theory falls under the same very general kind of pattern recognition that narrative and grammar patterns do, which I find alternately helpful and frustrating. Most of this takes the form of blobs of color, often but not always yarn-based; sometimes when I have a particular image in mind it's worked more in cross stitch where every piece is slow and laborious to come together, but it makes a glorious final image. As I do more songwriting, no doubt this part of the workshop will firm up its metaphors and imagery.

I do a lot of work in my head, due to my various preferred forms of expression. It's only fair to me that I keep a tidy - if not logical - workplace. This isn't the only tool in my kit; I'm as likely to use fiddle practice as a form of meditation and to-do lists as a form of structure as anything more internal, but it's a damn powerful one. And now that I have straightened out my headspace for the afternoon by writing this post, I get to go make dinner! This is actually a fairly common thing for me, the internal sorting intentionally combined with external action, so that I'm neither too stuck in my head nor too prone to acting without thinking. While I cook dinner, no doubt my subroutines will be working on sorting out the lyrics I finished drafting two days ago, assimilating the version of this week's tune I solidified earlier today, and arranging my weekend schedule. And whether it's this evening or a few days from now, I will inevitably be astonished at how much I get done by sheer virtue of having a well-tended mindscape.