Vice Party - The Good, the Bad and the Nearly Useless

I don't get to indulge many vices, more's the pity. When it comes to the buffet of vices, I still sit at the kiddy table. Alcohol, which I used to enjoy (Lemon Drop anyone?) now equals migraine. Chocolate, too. The list of fun things that end badly for me is long and sad. Since I can't consume vices, I spew them instead. And still, they turn in service to writing.

1. Swearing is my vocation. It's a calling, a sacred duty to which I am devoted. Since the public rooms of the bordello strive to appear slightly family friendly, I curb my colorful language. Meet me in a public situation one or two times and you'll have no idea of the vast, simmering cesspool of language underlying my polite facade. Hang around long enough to lull me into a sense of safety, though, and that pool will bubble over. Most of my friends still look surprised when a word or phrase slips out. Many of them giggle, too. Does it help me while I'm writing? Probably. If only to give me the ammunition to complain in grotesque detail about how a story is or isn't coming together.

2. Analyzing. I have a degree in overthinking. It is a hindrance part of the time. The other part of the time, I'm making it work for me. Everything I watch, read or experience gets vivisected - how did the story go together? Did the conflict work? If no, why not? If yes, why? What would make a poor plot work? How could things have been changed. This is all part and parcel of peering beneath the hood to learn how something runs (or doesn't) so I can build my own.

3. Companion to that: I talk too much. No one wants to watch The Walking Dead with me anymore. I usually see within the first several minutes of an episode how it will end, and often, within the first episode or two, I can tell how a season will end. These are the wages of analyzing stories as a mode of living. Sure, sure, I learned long ago to not volunteer the spoilers. I may be slow, but I can be taught. Still, my TWD friends and family keep casting sidelong glances my way during a show. Finally someone will ask if I have it figured out. There's a second of silence when I shrug and nod. One of them will grin and say, "What's your theory?" I blab. Everyone laughs and blows me off. Until the end of the episode/season. How does this help my writing? It's concrete evidence that I've managed to learn valuable lessons about conflict and story arc - not just as an intellectual exercise. They're internalized. Keith likes to talk through movies and TV shows we've watched. Mostly, I think, he likes getting to geek out about a show with me. But tonight, while reading on his Kindle, he turned to me and said, "You know I can't read some of these books now without remembering what you've said about stories. About how there has to be both internal and external conflict that comes from who the characters are before a story really starts to resonate. You turned me into a tea snob over the years and now you're turning me into a story snob. A few scantily clad women and a couple of explosions used to be enough." High praise. I'm going to let this help me stop worrying about whether or not I'm doing it right. I'm just going to write and trust that conflict and plot will take care of itself.

4. The occasional bag of sour cream and onion potato chips because some times, you just need to grind the bones of your demons between your teeth. They taste salty. Like my writer tears. Or the blood of the innocents sacrificed to the gods of word count.

Pain Contingency

Migraines require contingency plans. Usually contingency plans nested inside contingency plans. I suppose any chronic condition does. It's just that this is the one I can talk about as I'm coming down off of a three day ice pick to the brain that did not want to respond to treatment. If this post is less coherent than usual, it's because while the pain is gone, the neurological impact lingers. In brief, here's what a plan looks like:

1. Lifestyle management - food, exercise, sleep patterns
2. Preventative measures - prophylactic meds, prescribed supplements
3. Abortive measures - prescription meds (like Imitrex), heating pads, Tiger Balm
4. Emergency measures - ER visits, big gun prescription meds, hospitalization

Naturally, the goal is to live in stages 1 and 2 so you don't have to step up to numbers 3 or 4. Especially not step 4. The higher up the chain of numbers you go in this plan, the more time you lose. Recovery takes longer. And if you're trying to get a story on a page on deadline, the last thing you want is a brain scrambled first by migraine pain and then by big gun meds. There are two problems with steps 3 and 4.

First: migraines are an electrical storm in the brain. Synapses are firing in weird, random patterns that have awesomely little to do with anything useful. Like thinking. Or making stuff up for stories that make sense. Apparently, Lewis Carroll was a migraineur and several of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland were, in fact, migraine symptoms written and described in terrible detail.

Second: Once the pain hits, looking at anything with a back light is torture. Hell is not a pit of fire where the wicked will burn for eternity. It's an endless cubicle farm of migraineurs trapped amid flickering fluorescent lights and computer screens with visible refresh rates. And perfume. Just thinking about this version of hell is making me queasy.

Thus if any writing is going to be done regardless, the prepared migraineur/writer has: The migraine writing contingency plan.

1. Glacier Glasses - in the early stages of a migraine, when the words must flow, a pair of polarized glacier glasses will buy a few hours of typing time. When that fails:
2. Pen and paper - old school. Slow. And eventually, even looking at the contrast of white paper and black ink is more than my challenged neurons can handle and we turn to the last defense:
3. The Alphasmart - no backlight. Typing. Very low contrast. If your touch typing is remotely trustworthy, this is a great tool. Someone wise put raised bits on the F and J keys so you always know where home row is. Even in the dark. I won't pretend that there won't be some mighty surreal typos to decrypt when you can see again, but hey. Words, right? The only challenge - one I failed this go around - keeping the Alphasmart battery charged up. Oops.

From Hamlet to Zombies - Sick Days

To write or not to write, that is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to appear more than human in powering through virus or bacteria, or to admit mortality in the face of such tiny invaders and to wilt, thereby defeating them.

Enough with butchering Shakespeare. The wisdom of sick days is in the eyes (and constitution) of the ailing. Some people can work through just about anything. I’m not one of them.

Pain? No problem. I cannot work through having my mental capacity impaired. Most illnesses only kick me in the teeth for a day then linger for a few more. I can usually get at least a partial word count out of that. Some bugs come along, though, and grab hold of my brain. This is a real thing. Pick up a copy of The Great Influenza for evidence. A flu virus at the end of WW I set the stage for WW II, all because the virus didn’t just infect the body of the US president negotiating the truce. It crossed the blood/brain barrier and infected his brain, leading to a treaty being signed that he’d been opposed to signing.

It’s a rare cold or flu that turns my brain to goo, but when one does, I am down for the count. There will be zero word count. There will be bad TV, tea, soup, and likely, an odd-tasting Chinese Herbal medicine to drink. I’ll always drink them, though, because those herbs kick viral backside and I get to work much faster.

My real problem, one I haven’t found a way around, yet, is migraines. They are the single reason I lose the most days per year of work. They are a perfect storm of neurological impairment and blinding pain that manifests as mental impairment. Sometimes, the blind part is 100% true. No writing through what amounts to an electrical storm in the brain. I have yet to find a way to push language and coherent thought through a migraine in order to muscle out word count. My best coping mechanism is to take my meds, go to bed, and get back at it when I wake.

Most of the time, this works out just fine. Now that I’m on deadline (and this is a migraine night – for the forensically minded, you might be able to detect a pattern by comparing my posts over time – I secretly suspect I make less sense and that posts written under the influence of migraine jump around) if I need to fold up shop early because of a migraine, I make up the word count on the weekend. My deadlines are figured without me working weekends. That allows for make ups as needed. It also allows me to remain married and acquainted with my family.

For the record, I’m not in favor of powering through your body's signals to rest. It doesn’t make you tough or virtuous. It makes you deaf to your body's ability to heal itself. Besides, if you’re going out in public while you’re sick, you're not taking your responsibility for preventing the zombie apocalypse at all seriously. Do you really want the CDC to identify you as patient zero? Oh. Wait. I guess if you were patient zero, you won’t care. You’ll be strolling the ruined remains of civilization looking for a tasty snack of brains.

From messing up Hamlet to zombies in one post. Do I win?