Monday Moanings - November 3, 2014

NaNoWriMo Writes Again!



Yes folks, it's that time of year again when writers of all stripes and flavours set pens to paper and/or fingers to keyboards to crank out some 50,000 words by month's end. This annual writer's marathon which began on Saturday, November 1, is billed as a

"fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to creative writing. Valuing enthusiasm, determination, and a deadline, NaNoWriMo is for anyone who has ever thought fleetingly about writing a novel."

Check out the NaNoWriMo website for all the details.





As was the case last year, I'm not a registered participant because firstly I'm not writing a novel and secondly, I'm not that driven, and so I'm doing a 'Lite' version. My approach is a little more relaxed because I've learned, finally, that it's okay to give myself permission to have fun, to accept the better offer when it comes along without obligingly picking up a side order of guilt, and it's okay to attend to my own well being.

My efforts last year got hijacked by the sudden appearance of a visual aberration that caused words to appear smeared down the centre field of view. The problem (epiretinal membrane in both eyes) persists and is even a little worse this time round, though apparently still not bad enough for corrective surgery.

I am undeterred! Over the past months I have learned to tinker with lighting, font size and type (yes - serifs make a big difference!), and line spacing so as to limit the impact of the aberration. I've learned to manage my time at the keyboard, limiting it to 30 minutes at a time so as to ward off eye strain, fatigue and headaches. I find it rather intriguing that I have less difficulty with my handwritten work. I do my best writing, my most creative and evocative writing, with my favourite fountain pen flowing across smooth white paper. When transcribing my longhand writing to the laptop, I don't have much difficulty deciphering the blue ink script. I suspect because my brain has already had a hand in the writing; it knows then what the words are on the page.

So what does NaNoWriMo Lite look like this year? Ah well I have a plan, a very organized plan to get my manuscript back on track, in just 3 hours a day x 30 days.

Week 1: Days 1 &2 - reacquaint myself with Scrivener®
               Days 3 - 7 - outline, outline, outline; get all those pieces already written and yet to be written, organized! 

Weeks 2 - 4: WRITE!

And how's it going so far?

Saturday: 4 hours (impressive eh?) updating the software, tinkering with the fonts - thank goodness for technology and good software architects who allow for format modifications, however tedious it may be to find the right menu and tab to do so - and working through some of the tutorial. My muse, reawakened from a long snooze at a writer's retreat two weeks ago, spent the entire time twitching in my write hand.

Sunday: 3 hours struggling to get through a few more tutorial lessons before giving up and moving on to reviewing what was already on my Scrivener® outline. My muse fought me every step of the way, her protests getting louder every minute, "I want to write. Forget the bloody outline. I want to write! Please let me write."

Today: All right, already! I hear ya. Come on babe, let's go write.

©2014 April Hoeller

Thursday, or Thereabouts - January 30, 2014

Write On!

I wanted a diagnosis. I wanted to know what was distoring my central vision. I've wanted to know this since October 31/13 when the greasy smear first appeared down the centre of my visual field. I wanted it to go away. Yesterday I got my answer. Yesterday my love and I made the trek down to the city, to St. Michael's Hospital to see a neuro-opthalmologist.

The information sheet warned, in caps no less, that "Due to the complexity of care for our patients, the waiting time will be 3 to 4 hours."  So it was with books and writing tools, tablets and smartphones that we settled into the waiting room. No matter how I planned for this, no matter how much stuff I brought to while away the time, to distract me from the tension and the tedium, waiting in a big city hospital to be seen by a big gun specialist was still nerve-racking, a delicate balance between fight and flight accompanied by the constant chatter of the optimist and the pessimist in my head bantering on about the best outcome and worst case scenario. I studied my surroundings - hospital green walls, salmon marbled vinyl flooring, bad artwork on the walls, umpteen notices about infection control, two identical poems about miraculous hands which I couldn't see well enough to read, and a big poster about patient's expectations of a great hospital. I wrote a little (you're reading it now) and the first hour passed.




Just after 10am, my name was called. The doc spent the next 40 minutes asking questions and doing tests. No fault found. Then the eye drops went in and I was shuttled back out into the waiting room. Of course due to the drops, my eyesight became even worse over the next 40 minutes. Those green walls became a sea of blurriness and the wall art some nondescript flotsam and jetsam. Again I was summoned back to see the doc. One look with an opthalmascope into those huge dark pools that my eyes had become, and she announced the diagnosis: an epiretinal membrane in the macular area of both eyes. You can read all about it on the Canadian Opthalmological Society website.





I have half of what I wanted and it's neither as good as my optimist nor as bad as the pessimist. But it's not going to go away. I am stuck with this distortion and though it may get worse over time, I won't lose my sight entirely. When it does get really bad there is a surgical procedure that can remove the membrane, with some risks; all surgery has risks. While I wait to see a retinal specialist who will monitor my eyes for some time to come, life goes on. There is a Chinese New Year dinner to prepare. I've got most of the ingredients and the rest I'll pick up today. Tomorrow after a luxurious massage and a haircut, I'll get cooking.

Write on, I say, Write On!

© creativenature.nl - Fotolia.com

©2014 April Hoeller

Thursday, or Thereabouts - November 7, 2013

Return of the Aura

Canterbury Cathedral (deliberate blur)

I re-discovered her late last Thursday afternoon, Halloween of all days, hanging out in an article about the tracking of infectious diseases. I cast my eyes upon a page in the U of T Magazine, and there she was; a vague patch of blurriness resembling a smear of Vaseline across the text, a bit wavy, like a heat shimmer. I looked away from the page and she seemed to vanish. I looked back to the page and she waved back at me, taunting me, annoying me and yes, scaring me just a little. Okay, maybe it was a bit more than a little. I checked my blood pressure (118/75) and my blood sugar (4.9). I checked one eye and then the other - her smear campaign was clearly an equal opportunity employer who enjoyed being smack dab in the centre of my view. I smiled in a mirror and stuck my tongue out. I checked that my health card was in my wallet. 

I turned around to my desktop to have a wee chat with Dr. Google. Migraine aura without the headache you say? I haven't had a visual display of wavy lines and shimmers preceding a migraine since my early twenties and now I had one but no blinding headache? Well it's never a good thing to leave diagnosis entirely to the Internet school of medicine, so by Tuesday, with no clearing in sight and a hypersensitivity to light and sound, I headed off to my eye doc. No fault found. A thorough exam including retinal scan came up with a diagnosis of ocular migraine. 

So I'm left with my aura. I've tried to make friends with her, but really I'd just like her to leave, NOW. She's playing havoc with my NaNoWriMo project, but on the upside my inner critic can't be bothered reading over blurry writing and so is unemployed. Bonus! And I'm pretending to be on a cruise where Internet is prohibitively expensive and often very slow. Three fifteen minute sessions a day limits my time in front of a flickering screen. It's a quiet softly lit space with a pen and stacks of paper. What's not to like?

(NaNoWriMo Update: I have fallen a tad behind. 3947/6000)

©2013 April Hoeller