Tag Archives: writing

Struggling, with editing

While yes, it’s true that I’ve been struggling with life in general over the past two years, I’ve also been struggling when it comes to writing. Well, the writing part is usually fine, it’s the editing part that gets me.

An old friend of mine said that most of his blog posts are written and edited in his head before they end up on the page. I don’t think it was intentional as such, but he would just mull over it until soul and fingers screamed to put it all into words and on the page. If you know what you’re writing does that mean you don’t have to edit as much? That’s surely what it seemed like with him. I don’t know how much he edited after he wrote things but mostly he’d be done with it pretty quick.

I never quite understood that I had trouble reading, until I went to see an eye doctor for a stress test and they showed me colored overlays at the end of the test. Because I didn’t respond correctly to the overlays he concluded that I didn’t need any, but if I find they they help me I could of course buy some myself. Since then, this was in November 2021, I’ve had even more trouble reading, because I now know what it’s like to read without the struggles I’ve been having.

I went and bought myself some overlays, and they work great, I did some testing on my own and I was reading the same amount of pages in about 75% of the time. This was truly amazing. I was so happy! So excited to keep reading and such. But there was a few issues, this didn’t translate well to computer work and I’ve spent a lot of time looking for “overlay” solutions to the computer, software wise, but not been able to find anything that would work for me. And holding onto books while using the overlay works poorly with my painful hands, so I have to really take effort and read only for a short while before I get too annoyed.

This led me on to understanding that the best solution would be to have the color in my lenses, in the glasses I’m already using for focused work, but for that I need that prescription (I think, I’m too much of a spoonie to research it too much). So I drafted an email to them, as they had said I could come back if things felt different after I got my glasses in December. I’ve yet to send it though.

What does all of this have to do with editing? Well, part of editing is reading what you’ve already written, and that’s my biggest hurdle right now. It’s so uncomfortable to read it, because I know how much nicer it is without all the interference, that I can rarely get through my own written texts. So I have a lot that’s almost done, just needs some polish and I just can’t finish it because I lost the steam where I was just writing straight from my brain, and reading is uncomfortable so I just avoid the editing part. I publish things where it just pours out of me, or where I’ve used the crafting of each paragraph as a way to ground and stabilize myself.

I think two things will follow from here, I will send off that email tomorrow. And I will try to do writing where I’m focusing on crafting paragraphs about the thing that’s been mulling around my mind for a while. Maybe I’ll be able to write and publish more again because of it.

To Follow your own advice

I know, it sucks. Like a lot. Coaches don’t play, you may want to yell at me, and that’s a very fair point. Yet, recognizing when you give advice you should follow yourself, it could actually help you do it. Let me explain.

Yesterday, a friend was sharing some of their struggles with their workload with their studies, and having to pretty much just put their head down and keep studying as much as possible to get through it. Which reminded me of when I had my worst crunch periods, but I was also very sick, so I had to balance everything I was doing on a knife’s edge to not completely crash. So I gave him advice based on how I took care of myself during such periods.

When I needed to crunch studies, the most important thing to me was to eat regularly and take a walk every day. At least one walk. This would depend on the level of my health, and at one point I had to just opt for much shorter walks, but more frequently both for mental and physical health reasons. I’ve gotten through the worst times, health wise, of my life while studying full time, and it’s been strange, but you pick up some interesting coping mechanisms, and one was take good care of yourself while studying.

So there I was, yesterday, unable to really go out the house and unable to take very well care of myself, and handle my physical and mental anxiety enough to get writing done as I wanted, and get resting done as I wanted. And it hit me, I wasn’t following my own advice. I knew in theory that I would be better off, if I wanted to write, if I took a walk every day. When I took a walk every day for like 14 days, I wrote two good articles in that time.

I have the proof that putting in this effort makes a difference. I got the experience, to give me the knowledge what I can do to create a better better environment for myself. And since my goal for the coming 2 years is to write, if not daily at least a majority of the week’s days, establishing a pattern and habit of treating my self as well as I’d treat my friends would be a stable foundation to start on.

So here I am, again, sharing my advice, but advice that I want to follow myself. I want to write more, and in order to be able to write, I need to take a walk at least every other day. And to not feel icky, I need to shower, and I need to remember to feed myself because my brain is doing a lot of work. I need to remember to take breaks and go up and just do something else. I need to allow myself restful sleep, even on days I haven’t written anything.

I can work on figuring out what habits work better for me. But still keep treating myself with compassion, and care. Even on high anxiety days, I can help myself through because I know that 30min walk is very likely to make me feel better, and even if it doesn’t, that would’ve been 30minutes where I didn’t have to sit and just tense up, it was 30minutes I moved my body, and 30minutes I got to breathe fresh air, and 30minutes I got to listen to a book as I took my walk. It was 30minutes that I was able to meet cute dogs, or just see the colours of the leaves change in the park. It was 30minutes that I took a little bit better care of myself instead of just wallowing in my anxiety.

And even if it doesn’t work, I can always take a nap after my walk, and try again tomorrow.


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Neurodivergent Writing for Neurodivergent Readers

Seeing a conversation about traditional publishing, and the issues with it and how books that seems like a treat don’t make it through because traditional publishers just don’t know how to market it my mind went on a tangent.

What if we allow ourselves to write for a non-traditional audience? If you’re neurodivergent, like me, you may know that you have trouble to sit down and write some of the thoughts and stories you’d like to write because you have this idea of what traditional writing should be like.

For a while, after having a long period of severe aphasia, and memory loss, and my mind just wasn’t putting words together, I was able to write smaller sentences again, and kind of string them together into something someone could read. I could tell it wasn’t an article, it wasn’t a poem, nor musings. But in a way it could be all of those things. I was letting myself write to the little capacity I could, and it brought my joy and I could tell others saw themselves in some of it.

We tend to get hung up on what we think writing should be. Because we’ve been taught all the rules. It’s common to say that knowing the rules are needed in order to break them. And it may be true in some cases. But what if we just let go?

What if we just let ourselves write that sprawling messy story, where we don’t go from point A to B in a straight line, but we jump to D and C, maybe X and J, on our journey to tell whatever we’re telling.

Let yourself write in the way you think. And let that be it. You can always come back to it, and create something else out of it.

Don’t restrict yourself with writing the perfect lines. Just write for the joy of it.

Sometimes, when I give myself time and space to think, connect the dots and so forth, I also am able to write something down in a coherent matter, like this post i wrote just now while having breakfast, because a conversation between friends hit the right notes.

Happy writing. 😻

Google voice typing

I’m going to try to write a blog post with voice. Basically I missed a step on the stairs today which meant that I pulled my arm and it’s now really really hurting and it’s my writing arm which means that I can’t write cuz it hurts.

I know that Google has the feature to write for me when I’m talking, so I’m trying that out today. I’ve been considering dictating blog posts in the past but it has just never come around to try it out so I guess today is a prime time to do so.

Even writing the full stops and the new lines is really helping me think about how I’m writing these sentences. I am however not comfortable knowing when to use a comma. I mean I know how to use a comma when I’m writing but remembering to say it the right way at the right time it’s not really the same thing as taking a deep breath to add that in your text. It is quite different.

I tried to ice my arm but it feels like it made it worse or it got worse because I iced my arm while reading so I was still holding the book which put a bit more strain on it. It’s very typical of me to try and rest but do things I shouldn’t do when I need to rest, oh well.

I think this turned out pretty well maybe I can do it again in the future sometime maybe sitting outside and watching The Birds getting some sun on my face while writing an interesting blog post. who knows, you will if you stay tuned. thank you for reading and see you next time, wait read next time.


Photo by Marie Axelsson (me), cc-by-sa.


Patreon

Writing and stuff in the New Year

Stuff, such a good word.

This year I have a few things I want to do, one of them is write more. So here I am, on Jan 1st, writing.

I asked the community on #amWriting if they wanted to help support each other, and so many people chimed in. With both big and small writing projects. Some want to write whole novels, some just a few lines every day.

As most of you know I’m baby stepping through a lot of things in my life, so my writing will be both on here and for uni, because I can’t max out in writing everywhere. But that’s fine. I’m learning my limits and working to live within them in a healthy way, and sometimes stretching them, but that’s a post for another day.

The way this blog has worked in the past year is to mostly contain my musings, which haven’t been written down too often. I’m looking at a new routine to squeeze in writing. Basically a small session after breakfast, while having had breakfast with reading. The good thing about this combo is that reading can trigger thoughts, and I can write them down.

There are other things that I want to write this year, one is my Creative Writing Project for university (basically a BA in creative writing). I’ve decided on what I want to write and it’s going to be poetry, about my grandmother. I’ve shared my project statement draft on patreon, for patrons only, as I don’t want to get in trouble with class if I share too early.

Me and Loa are also looking into doing more with our gaming blog / channels. While he is focusing on video, I want to keep writing and probably do small reviews of games I play this year. That blog has been stagnant since I moved it to a new host, a year ago. We’ve not even updated the theme to something other than default.

What are you writing this year?

Disorganized publishing – publishing on the go

While writing at the keyboard at the computer is quite nice, swiping away at the phone is a whole other beast.

I’ve learnt that I can touch swipe better if I’m looking at the word in writing rather than looking at keyboard. Which is interesting. I think it’s easier to remember the approximate motion of the swipe by just not looking at the keyboard, when I do it always feels like I’m missing

Example of wiring with the apple store function while looking at the keyboard

Example of looking at the text instead.

I did change what I wrote, because I started editing. Maybe I should make a video some day to show you all how smooth this is.

I have two words that always get written wrong when I look at the keyboard :

Thank has been plaguing me for the past few months always turning into Thanh and Thang…

Remember I had to rewrite three times just now.

That said, I guess this is my endorsement for SwiftKey!

Yes, I know they basically track everything I type, but it’s so valuable to be able to just swipe away.


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