Process Entry: Dec 3rd, 2020
It’s winter now, or at least it’s nearing Christmas time. It doesn’t really look like winter out there (meaning the lack of snow and warm weather). I am starting this series of journal entries on process now, but I will recap the last couple of months as an update.
So, September I had a bit of a difficult time. Summer, even with the pandemic, seemed relatively normal I suppose. I worked at a coffee shop, but not much. I did, although, go out with lots of people (friends, co-workers, dates) and I feel like part of that was because we had been quarantined for months before since the pandemic started in March. It was really scary at first because, like I said, we were really quarantined (that meant no going to shop, everything was shut down, and school was online). So summer returned basically to normal. With September brought the signs of a resurgence of this virus, and I started to get pretty worried. I was in a pretty bad state in September and October because of course I had planned to finish my graduate degree in Creative Writing in March, but then that got pushed. I had a very hard time completing much of any writing, and so it got pushed again. I had never really recovered from my experience with a toxic series of university relations before, and had never really gotten help.
The problem was that I was creating nothing, writing nothing and most certainly not working on my novel and feeling more and more shame for not graduating “on time”. It got to the point in October where I was so depressed that I would not leave my bed or go to work.
In October I got help and at first it was hard because I am not very good at asking for help or being vulnerable in that way, but the more I talked to the therapist, the more I opened up. Within weeks I was slowly making progress again, slowly restarting my life and coming to accept that yes, Masters is hard work and in many ways unfair and terrible, but I was sucking into playing the victim and depending on hatred, which wasn’t healthy. It wasn’t helping me or anything.
So I started to turn things around and realize that, yes, I was doing this and yes, I was going to graduate eventually and get this done, and no, it will not be as fast as I would have liked and that was okay.
So the past month of November, due to massive surges in the virus, I’ve been staying home most days unless essential. I’ve slowly been chipping away on revisions of my novel that once was so daunting that I could not even open the file. I’ve prioritized sleep, so I get 8-9 hours a day. I don’t wake up super early. I usually wake up and then work in privacy downstairs with coffee for a couple hours and then have a healthy, light lunch. After lunch I have now been getting up to more mobile tasks, whether its looking for stuff to sell, taking content photos for social media, brainstorming, etc. After that, every single day I have been working out. I’ve found it to be the best use of that time in mid-afternoon, which I usually struggled with a lot. I start with learning a kpop dance or doing a dance workout for cardio. I’ve currently upped my learning roster to TXT’s Blue Hour, BTS’s Dynamite, Seventeen’s Left and Right and Jackson Wang’s Pretty Please. Then I do isolated training on a specific body area (arms, legs, chest, etc.)
I’ve gotten today as an extra day off because hours are being cut with my job, which is fine with me because it’s pretty dangerous out there right now and sometimes I feel like places like coffee shops shouldn’t even be open. I did more work on my novel today, which included revising chapters 16-18 or the very end of ACT 3 (I’ve split my novel by four acts). In November I revised my entire outline and restructured the story, and then I went through all of ACT 2 and fixed it to generally match my outline. I haven’t touched ACT 1 yet, but that’s because it’s not that far off from my outline. I’ve also written out different plots (A plot, B plot, C plot and D plot). My A plot follows my protagonist’s hero’s journey, my B plot is the romance plot, my C plot looks at the climate/ wildfire affects on my story and the D plot is an addition of a series of letters written by the Grandpa for the protagonist to read throughout the novel. Next I will begin revisions on ACT 4.
My current plan of action is to go through the entire novel like this once so that the novel matches the outline, even roughly. Then I can go back and expand and make the writing and plot stronger.
Anyways, that’s all for today!
