In Which We Consider the Meanings of Words

I'd say there's been a lot of talk about a certain issue in a certain town (or couple of towns) lately, but the truth is there's always been a lot of talk about some issue or another. Some hot-button issue where people on both sides see things very differently, and my own particular views or where I fall and on whose side, if anyone's side, are irrelevant to this post, except in that this particular issue was the cause of my pondering the power of words.

I'm not talking about the power of words to convey us to lands of imagination; as writers of fiction, we're all aware of that. And a little bit afraid of it, I think, mostly of harnessing that power imperfectly. This power of words that I'm talking about is also the power of labels, names, the things we call our actions and ourselves and the terms we use for one thing or another.

Here's an important word, "but." It's a word that comes after you've tossed out an idea, and maybe that idea's a good one. Maybe it's stark and brilliant in its simplicity. And maybe it's an important idea, you want to get it out there so that others will know it exists and some will agree with it. Maybe you hope this idea changes something you think needs changing. And then when you say it you realize, wait. I don't want all this color and brilliance. I don't want to put myself out there that far, and I don't want to stand out, I want to be quiet and not be recognized. And so you attach a "but" and chop off some of your first statement, put a qualifier on it. What comes after 'but' limits and de-powers what comes before, and a lot of times it's not even on purpose. Taking a stand or making a bold statement is scary. Using "but" takes away some of that fear, because then you have an exit door you can duck out of if things turn out less well than you want.

"If" is another good one. "If" means that what you're about to say or what you just finished saying is true only in a specific set of circumstances, and the more specific you get, the less likely it is that that "if" will come true. It's not quite as much of a backpedal or a mute button as "but" but it's close. Depends, as with all words, on how you use it. When volatile issues come up a lot of people bring out the "if," for this reason and also because "if" implies control. It implies that there is something that didn't happen, that might have happened, that meant you could control the situation. That may not always be true, and clearly wasn't true because that situation clearly got out of control. If X had/hadn't happened... you see? That makes "if" a very tempting word indeed.

There was a movement recently in fanfiction writing circles. Well, not relatively recently, but recently enough that I remember seeing it. Previously, people would "warn for" certain contents of their stories, or put warnings in the headers of their fic. And this led to a number of other writers pointing out that warning for something implies that there's danger or distaste in the contents of the story, leading to potential denigration of certain subject matters. Nowadays a lot of authors are using the terms "contains" and "content notes", which achieves the same result of telling a person what's in the story that they might be interested in reading or avoiding, and removes the value judgment.

I'm a writer. Apart from the medium by which I choose to write, my only other tools are words. Syntax and grammar, synonyms and descriptors and different languages in one sentence, they're all different tools in the same overall category. And by and large when I'm writing fiction, on the first draft I don't pay as much attention to the fine details of word choice so much as I do to the plot, the pacing, trying to get as much of what's in my head out onto the page as possible. It's when I go back for the rewrite that things get dicey. Then I have to look at every line, look at my editor's notes, look at all of the places where what came out doesn't convey what I had in my head or isn't clear or something else, and I have to change it. And out comes the tool box, and I have to find different words, put them in a different syntax, sometimes even go to a different language for a different set of words describing a concept so I can bring that non-English point of view back to the original story. That's a whole other essay, by the way, the theory that different languages influence a person's mind to different ways of thinking and behaving. It's called the soft Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic relativity if you want to look it up.

I'm a writer. I have been for a very long time now. At first I only needed to concern myself with childish things, as the saying goes, but then as I grew up I found myself tackling more and more adult subjects. And alongside my growing up, the internet grew up as well. I found myself communicating in a medium I was supremely comfortable with. For what feels like the longest time (proportional to my expected lifespan it probably isn't) I was pretty careless with my words. Then, as time progressed and the internet became more of a regular thing, so much a part of so many people's life that it became invisible and taken for granted, I started to become more aware of how I was communicating. Part of it was the overwhelming tendency of my corners of the internet to focus on social justice, but part of it was also living through several kerfluffles at least exacerbated by if not caused by poor communication. And, dammit, I'm a writer. I should be better at communicating via text than that.

So, I started watching, and paying more attention, and trying to do better. And explaining what I was doing as best I could when called upon to do so, or when I felt moved to ask someone to change their words. This whole post started out by my feeling moved to ask someone to consider that they had appended a "but" to a statement that I felt the first part of it was the most important. I felt that adding "but" was placing conditions on a thing I felt was unconditional. We had a brief discussion, and I think we both came away happy. Because, again, words have power. They are important, they matter. And I'd much rather use mine to help and teach and heal than to excoriate or chastise.

In Which We Do Not Fight Alone

I had a revelation the other day. And why is it that so many of the, or at least my, revelations about mental state things and emotional things are accompanied by "... if only you had realized that ages ago. You idiot." Or words to that effect and to greater or lesser degree. But that's another blog post.

This one has to do with Natasha Romanova punching her fears in the face, and something about that that I missed the first several go-rounds with that idea. An intrinsic part, and the part without which the badassing would not be possible. It starts with the very simple fact that she was afraid. Sitting on the ground in the corner in the shadows, huddling and tear-stained and probably wishing someone else would come rescue her for a change. If she hadn't been afraid, we wouldn't have noticed her badassing her way through the rest of the scene. She would have simply been Natasha Romanova, doing what she does, and it wouldn't have been  as resonating because superheroes badass their way through life. People like us sit in the corner and cry like babies.

So it starts with that, realizing that maybe it's okay to have bad days. And it's okay to sit in the corner and curl up with your hands over your head and want someone else to rescue you for a change. But then I got to thinking, because we'd been addressing my Superwoman complex the other night. I'm sure a lot of you know that one. It's the one that says if I fuck up in any little way I'm obviously a failure because I'm supposed to be strong and powerful and do things correctly. It's the one that says you're privileged, you're lucky, therefore you can't complain. The one that says other people have it worse, so stop whining. The one that says no one wants to hear about your problems, if you go and bug someone for help you're just imposing, so shut up and keep moving. We have to be Superwoman, Superman, Superperson all the time or we're nothing. We get this for various reasons due to gender roles in society, class roles, occupation, or squirrels. (I may be lying about the squirrels.) It's all bullshit whichever way it comes.

So I was thinking about that, and following the scene along in my head because the Barton-Nat fight scene is among my favorite parts of the movie, which reminded me of something else. In the Avengers, Nat comes into the job at all because Coulson asks her to, and she goes and storms off to beat the Loki out of Barton because her friend needs her help. And of all the times I've thought over this scene, it finally sank in that if it's all right for Coulson to ask Nat for help, or Nick Fury to ask Cap, or Nat to ask Cap, or Barton to need Natasha's help even if he's not at that time capable of asking for it, why is it not okay to ask me for help?

It's one of those revelations that's simple, seems small, and yet triggers an avalanche of comprehension right down into your forebrain.

Let's look at some other folks. Delenn is one of my heroes, we already know I'm a big Babylon 5 geek. And if she needs something from Sheridan or Lennier or even Londo, she asks for it. Audrey Parker isn't shy about calling on Duke or Nathan if she needs backup. If Sherlock Holmes can admit to Molly Bloody Hooper that he needs her help, you'd think I could. And going back even further, the movie that influenced my thinking possibly out of proportion, even Sarah had no qualms about admitting to her friends, "Every now and again in my life, for no reason at all, I need you. All of you." Why is this right for all of them but wrong for me?

Sometimes there is no help available, no backup, no friendly neighborhood assassin, no wee little brave pomeranian-fox knight. And that sucks. It just plain does. But sometimes, if you kick the notion that you shouldn't need help to the curb and look around, there is help there strolling along, waiting for you to ask. Sometimes there's friends there watching you struggle and thinking about dragging you out of the muck whether you ask or not. And you just have to remember, it's okay to need help, and to ask for it. It doesn't make you a bad person, it doesn't make you crap at what you do, it doesn't mean anything except that, for whatever reason, you need some help. If Phil Coulson can ask for help when he needs it, so can you.

In Which We Fight

It was a fucking awful day yesterday. It's been a fucking awful week already. I've been pulling whatever I can to help myself get through The Next Thing, because there are way too many Next Things for someone quietly sinking under a miasma of bad feelings. Today I pulled Sucker Punch and Natasha Romanova. Lots of women I adore!

There's a thing that keeps circling around on tumblr, a phrase that I found and loved. "Natasha Romanoff [sic] punches her fears in the face." I like that image. It's a good image. I like to imagine that I do that with my fears and little voices that tell me no one wants to hear it, my problems aren't that bad, I should be able to fix them myself so stop bugging everyone. I like to imagine I walk up to those fears and insecurities and self-aggrandizations, rationalizations, all meek and submissive. Hi, how you doin. Walk up to my fears, shake their hand. Then punch them in the face.

I spend a lot of time inside my own head. Okay, I spend all my time inside my own head, because until they develop telepathy treatments we can't exactly by in other people's heads, but I do. Possibly because I'm a writer, or a creative person, or any number of bullshit reasons but I do spend a lot of time thinking and daydreaming. It's a thing. It helps. Especially when things are shit and my head is full of thoughts like the above, like whatever I'm doing isn't any good or isn't even good enough, which is one of those depressive oxymorons because if you don't matter, how can it matter that what you're doing isn't any good or isn't good enough? Hell with that, your depression says, the point is that you are a bad person and you should feel bad. And fuck that, I say, and picture myself in Hollywood commando black with a good set of kevlar and some badass boots, maybe a set of brass knuckles, and punch depression in the face.

You can't always fight. Sometimes you have to recharge. That's where the whole routine of taking care of yourself, enlisting other people to help remind you to walk around, drink some water, eat something healthy and tasty (please both your physical body and your senses), get a good amount but not too much sleep, and do something quiet that helps you, where that comes into play. Sticky notes and alarms and things. There's a mental recharging, too. We can't always be Sweet Pea with a machine gun and a broadsword hacking down orcs, robots, and Axis zombies. Sometimes we have to turn to ourselves and go "Look, honey. Things are bad right now, okay? I know it hurts. But I love you, and I'm right here with you, and we'll get through this." And sometimes when I do that I'm an older woman (well, a woman older than I am now) and sometimes I'm, um, Thorin Oakenshield, and, you know, whatever works, right? Being kind to myself. Hugs and comfort and it'll all be okay.

(I mentioned living inside my own head a lot, right?)

I have mental subroutines. I have had for a long time, I don't know when it started. Subroutines is the programming term because among the many things I grew up with, computer programming was one of them. You can call it brain hacking. You can call it dissociation even though that's a misleading term, it's not as harmful as that implies and it's not nearly as drastic. I call it headvoices, to distinguish from brainweasels, or sometimes patterns or paradigms. When I'm writing I call them characters. When I'm working, which is to say all the time, I pull out the ones I think will best help. And I turn to Eve, my profiler/assassin/mercenary operative, and I tell her "Okay, you work logistics. Figure out how I can get all the shit I need to do done in this amount of time. Here's the essential list, here's the optimal list. Go." And I turn to Sam, my oldest character, and I shove him into my mental Workshop and go "Okay, here's the list of worlds I'm going to be playing in when Eve finds me some writing time, here's the sections I need to get done, here's the parts where the stories are weakest. Go fix." And I turn to Alan, my half-Sluagh nigh on immortal really old bastard, and I go "Okay, here's the list of insecurities and brainweasels. Here's the battle axe of empirical confidence, here's the broadsword of skillsets. Go kill. Go punch something in the face." Alan likes punching things in the face.

And then I come out of my head and get dressed for work, brush my teeth, put on my earrings and my rings and my shoes and grab my lunch and head to work. And in the back of my head, Alan and Sam and Eve are hard at work, busy little subroutines or dissociative whatevers, but mostly, the back of my mind is working on the things I set it to work on so that when I have time to sit down and look at it again, it's more solid. Morebetter. Usually. Call it guided meditation, if you like. Or patterning, or spellcraft, or selective thought process, or whatever. It helps. It helps me, it helps some people I know, too.

This week is not going to get better any time soon. I am not expecting this. I'd like it to! But somehow, I don't think it will. But that's okay. I have a vivid imagination, and right now as I get ready for work, I'm balling up all the shitty stuff that's been happening, putting a physical semblance on it in my head, and punching it in the face.

Like Natasha fucking Romanova.

In Which We Are Courtesans

So, last time I blogged about Courtesan School, and how it started. A couple of days later I was faffing about on Twitter and somehow this led to a discussion of exercise, which led to a comparison of what exercises we variously do, which led to what I'm coming to think of by now as the inevitable "how do you courtesan?"

I'm coming to think of this as inevitable because at this point, any discussion of my daily routine ever seems to end up coming around to "how do you do all that??" Me and my fellows in Courtesan School. The short, one-sentence (but possibly not 140 characters) answer is that we are incredibly organized and four years plus practiced at rearranging our schedules in a game of activity tetris to figure out what it is we can do in a day, and what we can drop and pick up the easiest if we don't have time or energy to do it all. Because sickness happens, sleepless nights happen, and with everything we do or try to do in a day we do need all of our energy. For me, I can most easily drop languages or music practice, and pick it up again. Dropping a day of a language won't hurt me, even dropping a week or two when I have a deadline breathing down my neck, or every Yuletide as archive open day draws near. For Adsartha, it's one out of her several music practices. (I do multiple languages at once, she does multiple music practices. That's also a part of Courtesan School, learning what your specialty is, your particular talent, how to be who you are, and then being yourself as brilliantly and as much as you possibly can.) So, over the past four years, we have learned by trial and error, lots of error, how we can pack all of the things we want to do in a day, and do it without hurting ourselves.

Several sub-lessons of this were hard. Learning that downtime, rest time, is something we need to schedule in because we can't always do everything at once. Learning how to take downtime at all. I scheduled a rest day the other day and then it took me about two hours to actually rest because I kept thinking of things I could be working on. Learning which activities are fulfilling enough to spend time on, and which aren't. Learning which can be dropped without hurting our overall process. Learning that life is a marathon, not a sprint. That it's okay to drop or change something that isn't working for you, that failure isn't a dirty word. For the first two years we had two quotes we kept coming back to: Samuel Beckett, "Try again, fail again. Fail better." and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. "If you can't run, walk, if you can't walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving."

We made mistakes. A lot of mistakes. Let us never again discuss the great Lead ALL the Baby Courtesans incident of 2008? 2009? whatever it was. We were too new at it to lead anyone else by anything other than maybe our good example, or possibly as an object lesson. We didn't even know where we were going ourselves, at the time. (See those Four Important Questions.) We discussed our goals and our methods, figured out the best way to check in; at first we checked in two and three times a week, now we're down to about once a week, and that seems good for both accountability and us taking stock of where we are. We swapped recipes, some of which were a definite "never make this again" and some of which worked so well we're still doing it. Let us never again discuss the Great Lemon Bars Experiment of 2012. Right now, we've probably been in our daily routines for maybe a year, couple of years. I've been in mine for at least a couple of years, so I'll lay that one out for you right now.

I get up, and then I shower. I have no idea why showering works better to wake me up than almost anything, but it does. In the winters I get up and stagger into the shower, in the summers I can get up and stagger to pull my sweats and shoes on, and then go walking or running. Usually it's walking, because my asthmatic weakass lung capacity rarely permits running and often I lose half the progress I've made from summer to summer. Slowly but surely; part of CS is learning where your limitations are and how to get to or modify the ultimate goals to fit. So, I get up, shower or run, and do fifteen to thirty minutes of vocabulary exercises for my various languages to wake my mind up. Since it's just vocabulary, it's less strain on my sleepy mind than full on reading or grammar study would be, but switching back and forth between languages is still work. For this, I use Memrise, which is a nice easy-to-use online tool for learning vocabulary in other languages -- a set of flash cards, basically. Then I go out into the living room and do my exercises, which for me consist of ballet exercises and other forms of dance, and some yoga. I started taking ballet when I was maybe six years old, and continued till I was eighteen. Exercises on machines and with weights quickly become more of a chore for me than anything else, and if you're miserable at your exercises, it makes it that much harder to do them. So why bother? I go through dance exercises, finish with a stretch and a reverence as much for the mental as the physical, and then go grab breakfast and sit down with my computer and my Irish book. Depending on how long it takes me to do my lesson for the day, sometimes I tidy up the house after. And I post my lessons online for public accountability. I also do a statement of intent for the day for writing work and blog work; I call it a statement of intent because it's easier for me to intend to do something than it is to not meet a goal. Again, the little things that make it easier or more enjoyable? They help. A lot. In little ways that add up to big ways.

So by now I've finished my morning language (it used to be Russian, which is why it's 'my morning lanugage' in the overall) and tidied up where I can, so as not to have to do a great big tidying later on in the week. Little things into bigger things. And I've gotten ready for work, and then my aunt picks me up because we carpool in to work and she's only a little further out of downtown than I am, on the same route. At work, depending on how busy it is, either I spend the day dealing with my day jobligations or I spend the day keeping ready for some day jobligations and working on blog writing or personal to-be-published writing. I'm very lucky at this point in that I have a job that allows me to do this. I suppose if I didn't I'd have to find some other way to manage, and probably have to cut back my writing schedule and blogging by a lot. Still, since I can, I do. At lunch I do some more language practice; until recently this involved studying German, but since I've completed my German textbook right now it involves translating things from English to Russian and German in order to keep myself in practice. I finish out the day at work, get home, and either do Japanese or guitar practice depending on the day. It used to be both, but then I discovered that this took up the same amount of time while not advancing either skill in the slightest, so, greater blocks of time for each and more spread out over the week. Then I cook dinner, because I do love to cook, and because now that I have a large kitchen it's much more enjoyable and sometimes I can keep my Japanese book and notebook in one corner while I keep an eye on something simmering, so I can start dinner sooner. After dinner it's finishing up whatever bits of blogwork for Unspooling Fiction are left, line edits, web coding, miscellaneous other things until a last round of tidying and checking doors and windows and brushing teeth and taking my tired ass to bed.

And yes, it seems like a lot when you read it like that. But after two years it seems less like "a lot" and more like "my normal day" to me. It did seem like a lot when I started. I ended every day wondering how the hell I had juggled all of that and how the hell I could find the energy to do it all again tomorrow. My failures knocked everything out of whack, not just the area they were specific to. But the check-ins helped. Doing it with other people helped, they talked me down from my tree when I needed it, offered suggestions, other perspectives. We all did that for each other. And, again, it took me a couple of years to figure out what even the broad strokes of my routines could be, that were best for me. And now it's mostly fine-tuning. Changing as things in my life change, like buying this house. Adapting. Learning, growing. The best thing I think CS did for me was get me into the habit of finding the goal, finding what shape best fits the goal to make it likeliest to happen, and picking a likely looking path to get there. And not giving up if that path turns out to have boojums instead of snarks.

In Which We Ask Questions

So, a couple of days ago I was doing Irish, and I took a wild hair. (At least, A says it was Irish, because it was morning sessions; Irish is in the morning, German is in the afternoon. Japanese in the evenings. Anyway.) I made some comment on Twitter as a note to self that I did not need to translate the Four Important Questions from Babylon 5 into whichever language it was. Because I am a giant geek and my first instinct when learning a new phrase in a new language is to go "Oh, I could use that for this geeky purpose!" But I try not to give into all my impulses because then I would spend the rest of the month trying to translate the Dark is Rising poems and never make it to the next chapter.

But of course I made the mistake of saying this on Twitter, which led to the immediate response of "of course you do!" Oops.

A took the ones she knows, as our languages overlap quite a bit. I took the rest of them.

Кто вы? Что хотите? Почему вы здесь? Где вы идти?
あなたはだれですか。どうしてここですか。どこにいくですか。
Cé he tusa? Cad a teastaíonn uait? Cen fáth atá tú anseo? Cá bhfuil tú ag dul?

The questions, as those familiar with Babylon 5 may well have guessed by now, are "Who are you?" "What do you want?" "Why are you here?" and "Where are you going?" It's anyone's guess how good a translation I did on most of them, particularly the Japanese; there are cultural nuances that don't translate well between, really, any language, and I found it especially difficult to get the semantics across. But they're important questions, both within the show and without.

Raised by hippies jokes aside, I had a somewhat different childhood. Due to some less than ideal causes, I wound up with a number of mental and emotional tools I'd picked up from various places (co-counseling, summer camp, Montessori school, bilingual elementary school, there was a lot of learning going on). I didn't realize what I had done or what I'd learned until the last ten years or so. And I definitely didn't figure out how to put it into words until about four years ago, when two friends and I decided we were fed up with stressing over what our lives had become. i.e. Not what we wanted at all.

So we sat down and we formed a plan. Actually we formed a little support group. We called it Courtesan School, because that was the sort of thing we liked (and for those who like that sort of thing, well, that is the sort of thing they like) and we figured, okay, there are a bunch of things about our lives that we're unhappy about. So how do we fix them?

It came back to these questions. In one way or another. In order to figure out who and what we wanted to be, we had to figure out who we were to begin with. Who we were when we were at our best, and who we were the rest of the time. We had to figure out what we wanted and, as we know from Babylon 5 (and other places, of course) that getting what you want can get you ass-deep in trouble, we had to figure out what we were willing to do to get what we wanted, or even if it was what we wanted to begin with. Then we had to reverse engineer and figure out why we were there. How we'd gotten to that point. Why were we at this point in this particular time in our lives, where was 'here', even. And of course, where were we going.

Courtesan School is a process. There isn't really a graduation that we set out for ourselves, just a point at which we realized we'd integrated its tactics and techniques (cheerfully thieved from, you know, every-damn-where) into our daily lives and were using them to achieve goals and hurdle obstacles. It's a simple process. What are we aiming for, what's stopped us if we've tried it in the past, how do we fix it. Repeat as needed till goals achieved. And other important things to remind each other of along the way, like, it's okay to have setbacks. It's okay to have a bad day. It's okay to feel angry, to feel sad, to feel like nothing is going anywhere and you're going to be fat/dumb/lazy/bitchy/whatever the rest of your life. It's okay. They're just your feelings. And your fellow baby/apprentice/Courtesans are there to help. A bad day doesn't mean you're a failure. Feeling lazy or tired or angry doesn't mean you're that all the time. Every week, we check in with each other to make sure we're on the right track, where 'right' is defined as 'the one we want to be on.' So, every week, we ask ourselves the questions again. Who are you, what do you want, why are you here, where are you going.

In Which We Meditate on Meditating

Today seems like the perfect kind of day to tell you all about how I keep my mind in perfect (hah!) working (ahahah!) order. Stop laughing, I'm serious.

Semi-serious. I've had more experience than was probably wise at attempting to work through a turbo-charged, somewhat manic state -- somewhat manic both in the clinical sense of manic and in the colloquial, and more the latter than the former. And the fact that I have a coping mechanism for working through or coming down from a manic state of project-tackling is at least half-due to general practice at meditative techniques. I was raised by hippies, what can I say? They teach you this when you're young and raised by hippies.

So, my mental landscape is pretty well defined. It started when I was around twelve, thirteen or so, sprung out of recurring dreams and conversations with friends and far too many fantasy novels. It solidified into something resembling consistent form when I became involved in online text-based roleplay, which, since it was freeform, meant I had to consistently describe things like what my headspace was and who lived in it. The basement muse is a subject for another time entirely, but I did manage to get some sort of concrete idea of what it looked like inside the place where I went to plan things.

My headspace is vast and contains multitudes. The center of it is a tower, because little girls who dream of being fantasy heroes love towers, and Very Important People have them (just ask Neil Gaiman). At the ground level there are gardens and fields and hot springs and a big stone wall, but at the top of it is my private little headspace bedroom, and beneath that is the Workshop.

For those of you who haven't read Meredith Ann Pierce's Darkangel Trilogy, it's a young adult series in which a girl is given a spindle which spins, not wool, but thoughts and feelings. And when she's upset it spins an itchy, coarse thread, and when she's content it spins like fine silk. This also comes out, albeit less blatantly magical, when the protagonist of Wise Child (by Monica Furlong) is learning to spin and weave. And in addition to the hippies I grew up spending summers in the Appalachian mountains with my aunts and uncles, and they taught me all kinds of things like how to weave and knit, how to throw clay, how to sew, about feeding chickens and cows and riding horses, how to make baskets, how to spin and make yarn, how to take plain white or off-white things and put color onto them, and the idea that physically creating something tied into one's emotions flew into the blender with all of this and spattered all over my consciousness.  The upshot of all this, I was surrounded by crafty people and books about how being crafty could be magical if you thought about it right, so of course my headspace would be full of magical spindles and spinning wheels and pottery wheels and looms and things. Physical crafts as a metaphor for mental crafts, right?

It turns out, this is exactly what I needed. Years and years later, after one manic bout of Yuletide writing I was finding it hard to sleep. All the stories were theoretically in (that's a complaint for another time and place) and I'd wrapped up a last 72-or-so-hour marathon frenzy of writing, but I couldn't sleep, I couldn't settle down, I couldn't think. My headspace was in whatever the stage beyond disarray. So I made use of all this imagery and meditation training, and I put it the hell back in order. If I created stories and worlds and things out of cones of imaginary yarn and blocks of make-believe clay, after a few straight days of mad frenzied creating my Workshop was probably in a state of tremendous chaos and mess, like a meatspace Workshop would be if I'd done the same thing in the physical world. And if  had done that, then it needed to be cleaned up, right? I could wipe down the tables and put things back on shelves and sweep the dust from off the floor, too. And by the time I was done with that, I was a lot calmer and ready to sleep again.

Figuring that out was one of those big revelations that makes your life so much easier, you can't imagine how you did it the hard way all these years before. And yeah, I still have days when the deadlines are creeping up on me, or when I have five different things in my head all screaming to get out, or when I've been up too late and early and can't focus anyway. But having one more tool in my kit to put my mind in order doesn't hurt, and does help quite a bit.