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.

Work Is Love Made Visible

And I say that life is indeed darkness save when there is urge;
and all urge is blind save when there is knowledge;
and all knowledge is vain save when there is work;
and all work is empty save when there is love;

--Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

I didn't want to write this post. It's been a long, raw week, and I'm not sure how much I want to go walking naked down the virtual street this weekend on top of it. Plus, frankly, this feels like some combination of bragging, showing my privilege, and no-shit-Sherlock moments. Which is how I know I needed to write it anyway, because those are the brainweasels talking. The ones that want me to say oh, this is nothing, you should see what Kitty does with more demands on her time, you should see what I think I could do if I were living up to my full potential, you should see what people with more limitations get done and how much more amazing they are than I am. What you've been building on for the past four years is nothing. And I know at least half of that is bullshit, especially the last one.

In other words: fuck you, brainweasels, I ate you and turned you into an introduction. Because that's one of the insidious things about doing this work; I end up with a mantra of "this is just what I do" so that I avoid caterpillaring myself. (We're all familiar with this, yes? The one where someone asks how do you move all those legs at once, and then you go OH FUCK and topple over.) But the dark side of avoiding that problem is the one where I forget that this is something that took a lot of work to get to, and I shouldn't minimize it.

So, we've established that I haven't had a 9-5 job in four years and change. The financial specifics of how I managed that are on the one hand hugely important (savings, luck, a partner who chooses to support me) and on the other hand not really the point. The point is this:

That's a random day from last week, and it's one of the easier days, frankly. Nor is it quite as regimented as it looks; that section of time for German also includes running vocab exercises on Memrise, acquiring breakfast, and writing up a quick post to go along with the public accountability post for German.
The half hour break is so I can actually shower sometime ever, and the second one is because lunch is important and I'll forget to eat until 1 or so if I don't put the free time in. Okay, sometimes I forget to eat until 1 or so anyway, but if I'm having a good day and sticking pretty close to the schedule, that break is where it should be. The slots you see as Haven 1x01 are the variable ones (which reminds me that after I finish this up I need to go toss some scheduling in for the week ahead), which may be blog work for Unspooling Fiction, website content, paid work, or blog posts here. Basically, those are my sitting down and writing times, though in the future they may become my sitting down and songwriting times, since I'm slowly beginning to believe that not only is that a thing I want to do, it's a thing I'm capable of doing.

And that looks pretty full, right? Scary-organized. But the secret for me is to have a lot of tasks I can cycle through that use my brain in different ways, and each of them helps me cycle up to the next task on the list. You may have noticed I can be a little over-analytical; the music gives me a chance to put that aside and the Unspooling Fiction work gives me an outlet for the analysis that doesn't result in never-ending cycles of self-doubt and inaction.

It wasn't easy to get here. I've been at these routines in some form or fashion for the better part of eighteen months now, and this is still the ideal, not what happens nine days out of ten. The chances of work slopping into the evenings are pretty high. Sometimes the practicing feels perfunctory and unproductive, the writing feels obvious and cliched, there's this fog over my brain and nothing works. I hate like hell that I'm not bringing reliable income into the household and have to convince myself each week that I am contributing. Sometimes each day. There is, always, the specter of "get a real job!" to fight off; if you've watched Amanda Fucking Palmer's TED talk this week you know exactly the one I mean. And I came to it late, late enough that I wonder if it's not too late on the bad days.

But what terrifies me more is the notion of never playing another note again. So I do my PT and I write lyrics and blog posts and, soon, I'll tell you all about a project I have to demonstrate that there is no such thing as too late. There's only getting up every day and doing the work I was meant for, and letting everyone else decide if that's something they want to be a part of.

And when you work with love, you bind yourself to yourself, and to each other...

The Four Important Questions

Possibly not the ones you're thinking of. Kitty and I took it into our heads to translate a certain set of questions, and I give you the results of the languages I speak! In order from most to least fluent; you can find the rest of the languages over here.

Qui êtes vous? Qu'est-ce que vous voulez? Où allez vous? Pourquoi êtes vous ici?
¿Quién es Ud.? ¿Qué quiere Ud.? ¿Dónde va Ud? ¿Por qué está Ud. aquí?
Wer sind Sie? Wie wollen Sie? Wo gehen Sie? Warum sind Sie hier?

It's possible you've correctly identified them by now (and yes, normally in Spanish I'd cut out the Ud. but the sequence it comes from is highly formal), but just in case: Who are you? What do you want? Where are you going? Why are you here?

We may be B5 nerds around here, but I take those questions about as seriously as I do anything. Because they're important. Singing Meatloaf at the top of my lungs and bopping around the living aside, you could argue they're the only important questions. It helps that I imprinted on B5, not when it first came out, but instead at a vulnerable transition stage of my life. (Namely, college.) Babylon 5 was made for watching when you're hanging out, being liminal, as many transitions and changes are contained within its story arc.

I don't talk about it much, because frankly I have asked and answered these questions more times than I care to count, and it gets more personal and less intended for public consumption each time. But I go through it as a process somewhere between every week and every year. You should be able to look at my actions and see the answer, between this and Twitter and personal journal, but I and a few friends started up a group to support each other just over four years ago. (We called it Courtesan School, because we're like that.) I don't think any of us realized it at the time, but what it's done at least for me is give me a weekly to monthly point at which I check back with a small group that knows me well, and see if I'm staying true to those answers. 

Oh, it's more structured and less wibbly-wobbly New Age talk than it sounds. Am I remembering to exercise? Am I doing my languages? Am I making progress, however miniscule on my various stated goals and projects? Have I developed new ones? Have I run into roadblocks? Having a group to sit down and hash these things out in front of is really useful, even if people are busy and stressed and not up for much input. The simple act of public accountability works. Pretty soon I'm going to be taking that to a wider scale, which is, I think, part of what scares me shitless about it, wondering what if I fail in front of a bunch of people who don't know me nearly as well as my girls. (This is silly. I know the answer: pick up and do it again. Try again, fail better.) More to the point, the act of setting aside some time to reflect lets me match actions to self-image and see where I'm doing well and where I'm falling down.

That's one of the sneaky things about the questions. They don't just demand words, they demand that you act on those words, or you're doing nothing but lying to yourself. And it doesn't much matter if it turns out that you have high standards, your brain chemistry is fucked, or both: this is hard fucking work. Unending, as it turns out. But I didn't sign up for easy. I signed up for worthwhile. I just hope someone out there's going to agree with my definition of worthwhile.

Sometimes, though, it's just good to dork out and remember certain truths.

"The universe speaks in many languages, but only one voice." -G'Kar