Red and Green
11/11/2022 11:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
izmeinaThis time last year I was well and truly riding the Green Wave. It was as if someone had tipped a whole vial of Felix Felicitas potion into my pot of Polonium Tea.
This time it is very very different. Chalk and cheese.
Things had been fine for the start of the month. Nothing like a grand project to make life interesting and to impose a bit of discipline and purpose.
I knew from past experience that I do Nanowrimo differently from most people. From the very first time and ever since then.
Most people who sign up for the crazy caper of writing a 50,000 first draft of a novel in a mere 30 days during November are all guns ho and full of grand plans at the starting stalls.
At the stroke of midnight, they are off and racing. Full of the enthusiasm of a grand brand new venture. But then the initial excitement wears off and they are faced with the less glamorous drudgery of plodding on and clocking up 1,666 words every day in order to stay on track.
It is the second week when they start falling by the wayside. And that is precisely when this serpent gets the wind in her scales.
The first time back in 2009 when I signed up on the spur of the moment thanks to the evil influence of Catness and ever since then.
The first time I made a point of joining at the last minute because I am by nature someone who insists not just on Plan B. I am not happy unless I can go all the way to Plan Z. So by signing up at the last minute it would be my one and only chance to wing it because of course I would revert to the usual mode for the next one especially with a whole year’s notice.
It was such a struggle to get through the first week since I had of course gone totally out of my comfort zone with no prep at all. Nothing but a pack of Dark Grimoire tarot cards as inspiration.
I kept wondering what masochistic madness made me sign up for such craziness but the inner serpent insisted - have all the pity parties you like but get those 1,666 words on the score board first.
It was like squeezing blood out of a stone, nails scratching on a blackboard. But then on the fifth day the muse turned up.
Nanowrimo went from wading in treacle to a frenzied attempt for the forked tongue to type fast enough to keep up with the tsunami of words in the serpent skull.
For some inexplicable reason it has been like that every single year since. It is almost like the muses and monsters want to know that I am serious before they deem me worthy of their visits.
So this time the magic began on Sunday. Still no proper story words but the green zone where the words come faster than the forked tongue can type them.
I was so happy and even hoped that Monday would be the magic day when the actual story would arise from the rubble of random ramblings and rumination.
I started with the usual ritual of typing the date and time so that I can do the same thing at the end of a session. In that way I know how long I have been writing and how many words I have written. My usual word count is something in the ball park of 1,000 words per hour when not in the zone but more double that when in the Green Zone. The highest word count per hour I have ever done came in at 3,000 per hour. Strangely, it is often the higher rate that produces the best stuff. Basically because what I learnt from the first time around is that the easiest way to get the quota done is to disable the brakes. Accelerator only for November.
Or according to the Nanowrimo mantra - editing is for December.
By disabling or ignoring the inner critic, it gives the green light to the subconscious - (what I like to call the Inner Serpent) to run riot. And the subconscious is where the magic is.
So I was not expecting it to take 5 minutes just to type the word Monday.
A whole army of evil spinning beach balls turned up and it became quite clear that the next words 7th November 20.40 were NOT going to happen.
I shut down Scrivener and restarted it several times. Beach balls all the way. Same with Firefox. Same with Safari. Same with Twitter.
So I resorted to the nuclear option of just turning the damned Big Mac off.
When it came back on, I opened Scrivener. But instead of pesky beach balls, there was something infinitely more sinister.
A pop up screen telling me that Scrivener was a trial app available for only another 10 days. I could either buy online or enter my license number if I wanted to continue.
It did not take too long to find the receipt in Gmail. After all, this was not the first time this has happened. I entered the license number only to be told that it was not VALID.
Now that was a new twist. It had always worked before.
So I then tried to log in to recover my licence number. Maybe I was using the wrong one. But of course I had long ago forgotten the password and the Big Mac had not stored it. So then I tried the password recovery option only to be told that Literature and Latte did not have that email on their system.
I tried 6 times entering the license number and got told every single time that it was invalid. At this stage I was not just panicking about this year’s Nanowrimo but about every single other file on Scrivener. Especially November 2021 where I wrote about my adventures in the Green Zone and all the gory details of my grand adventures in the hospital. The last time I was even remotely so long in hospital was when I was born 3 months prematurely. 3 months and 6 days are not quite comparable.
So basically, like some sort of ransomware, I could not edit, add to or even read any of the words I had written in Scrivener. Including some stuff of great sentimental value.
So here I was in the Green Zone with a dozen muses all wanting to get their ideas on the page but no more Scrivener.
After recent experiences with recalcitrant websites, instead of endlessly attempting to re enter the licence number in the hope that the 666th attempt would be lucky, I sent off an email to the support staff.
But while in limbo waiting for a reply, it meant that I had to use Gmail as a substitute.
During Nanowrimo I have a golden rule, no online lurking until I get to the daily word count quota. Having to use Gmail would of course make this impossible aside from not having an inbuilt word count or goal progress bar that turns a gorgeous shade of green the closer you get to the goal.
So I was forced back into snail mode. Then there was dramas with the bank, little shits on scooters scaring the living daylights out of me and a whole bunch of things sending me into sensory overload Constant Vigilance mode.
The Scrivener support staff were excellent. It turned out that the problem was the company they outsourced the management of licenses to had gone bankrupt.
I knew they had changed providers but had not realized that was the reason.
So turning off the computer and opening Scrivener from scratch had triggered the inner ‘check that this user has a valid licence’ mode.
But when I entered the license number it was looking for it on a server that no longer exists. That is why all my attempts kept getting rejected.
So the support staff gave me a link to a page where I could download a legacy version which does not require constant licence verification.
I did all that yesterday. The download and instalment went much faster than I expected. No dramas at all. I think within less than 10 minutes I was back in business again.
All my old projects were still there but I exported the most recent ones just in case and added a few more today - both PDF and plain text versions.
But all these dramas and distractions mean that once again the actual story I had planned has been put on hold.
At this rate I will be happy if I can start my planned story about evil weeds and bad seeds some time on Monday or Tuesday.
I am also in the middle of a diagnosis for autism from my regular shrink. She told me last year that I had a lot of typical autistic traits. She and my GP gave me names of shrinks who are authorised to do diagnosis for NDIS purposes but both of them have waiting lists of longer than 9 months and out of pocket expenses of over $2,400.
I told her that is completely out of the question. Since I am not interested in trying to claim disability benefits, I do not need the outrageously expensive nuclear option but simply a letter from a shrink to get the job mobsters off my back.
She said she could do a quick and dirty version (the inner cynic says that she wants me to use up the remaining sessions that my local GP has authorised) and has given me a list of questions about my life from childhood to the age of 18. My mission if I choose to accept it is to answer them in less than 50,000 words.
(It is also possible that she is just being nice or feels a bit guilty for the awful mess up she made with my Medicare rebate from my appointment back in January. Because she ticked the wrong boxes, instead of getting an EFT rebate within a day or two of the appointment, I ended up having to wait for a cheque in the post which these days is like something out of the middle ages.)
This is where the nano strategy comes into its own.
I will write every single thing that comes to mind that could be relevant and then worry about editing and condensing it all later. After all, you cannot edit a blank page.
Last year my little sister outed me. The hospital goblins wanted to send me home after only 2 days in spite of my protests that I was not capable of managing getting up and down the stairs and in and out of bed on my own especially while on heavy duty pain killers.
When the surgeon turned up on Thursday 28th October (2 days after surgery) to ask how I was doing, I was on the phone to my sister at the time. She asked to speak to him and told him that I was autistic and not very good at advocating for myself. She made a big thing of not letting some one in my state go home alone because I have no one to keep any eye out if anything went wrong.
She insisted that it was totally irresponsible for the hospital to send me home in my circumstances. He agreed. Apparently the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing. I think he had planned to see me at 10am but assorted emergencies meant that he did not get around to my case until 3pm and by then the hospital goblins were already ticking boxes to discharge me in spite of my objections.
So he got that nonsense put in its box and got me not one or two extra days but four of them.
It was a fabulous four days. Because I was not in pain or not bed bound, it was like being in a holiday resort with so many interesting things to amuse the inner geek.
Watching the trains coming and going from the station visible from my window, working out the patient nurse ratios, discovering the mystery behind Patient XXX along the meanings of assorted abbreviations on the message boards and pottering around finding the best location to watch the sunset were just some of the attractions on offer. No need to worry about sunrise. That was a feature of my room. All I had to do was get out of bed and sit in the big blue chair near the east facing window.
So I think it’s long over due for me to start flying my FREAK flag instead of trying and failing miserably for the last 50 years to pass as even half normal.
This time it is very very different. Chalk and cheese.
Things had been fine for the start of the month. Nothing like a grand project to make life interesting and to impose a bit of discipline and purpose.
I knew from past experience that I do Nanowrimo differently from most people. From the very first time and ever since then.
Most people who sign up for the crazy caper of writing a 50,000 first draft of a novel in a mere 30 days during November are all guns ho and full of grand plans at the starting stalls.
At the stroke of midnight, they are off and racing. Full of the enthusiasm of a grand brand new venture. But then the initial excitement wears off and they are faced with the less glamorous drudgery of plodding on and clocking up 1,666 words every day in order to stay on track.
It is the second week when they start falling by the wayside. And that is precisely when this serpent gets the wind in her scales.
The first time back in 2009 when I signed up on the spur of the moment thanks to the evil influence of Catness and ever since then.
The first time I made a point of joining at the last minute because I am by nature someone who insists not just on Plan B. I am not happy unless I can go all the way to Plan Z. So by signing up at the last minute it would be my one and only chance to wing it because of course I would revert to the usual mode for the next one especially with a whole year’s notice.
It was such a struggle to get through the first week since I had of course gone totally out of my comfort zone with no prep at all. Nothing but a pack of Dark Grimoire tarot cards as inspiration.
I kept wondering what masochistic madness made me sign up for such craziness but the inner serpent insisted - have all the pity parties you like but get those 1,666 words on the score board first.
It was like squeezing blood out of a stone, nails scratching on a blackboard. But then on the fifth day the muse turned up.
Nanowrimo went from wading in treacle to a frenzied attempt for the forked tongue to type fast enough to keep up with the tsunami of words in the serpent skull.
For some inexplicable reason it has been like that every single year since. It is almost like the muses and monsters want to know that I am serious before they deem me worthy of their visits.
So this time the magic began on Sunday. Still no proper story words but the green zone where the words come faster than the forked tongue can type them.
I was so happy and even hoped that Monday would be the magic day when the actual story would arise from the rubble of random ramblings and rumination.
I started with the usual ritual of typing the date and time so that I can do the same thing at the end of a session. In that way I know how long I have been writing and how many words I have written. My usual word count is something in the ball park of 1,000 words per hour when not in the zone but more double that when in the Green Zone. The highest word count per hour I have ever done came in at 3,000 per hour. Strangely, it is often the higher rate that produces the best stuff. Basically because what I learnt from the first time around is that the easiest way to get the quota done is to disable the brakes. Accelerator only for November.
Or according to the Nanowrimo mantra - editing is for December.
By disabling or ignoring the inner critic, it gives the green light to the subconscious - (what I like to call the Inner Serpent) to run riot. And the subconscious is where the magic is.
So I was not expecting it to take 5 minutes just to type the word Monday.
A whole army of evil spinning beach balls turned up and it became quite clear that the next words 7th November 20.40 were NOT going to happen.
I shut down Scrivener and restarted it several times. Beach balls all the way. Same with Firefox. Same with Safari. Same with Twitter.
So I resorted to the nuclear option of just turning the damned Big Mac off.
When it came back on, I opened Scrivener. But instead of pesky beach balls, there was something infinitely more sinister.
A pop up screen telling me that Scrivener was a trial app available for only another 10 days. I could either buy online or enter my license number if I wanted to continue.
It did not take too long to find the receipt in Gmail. After all, this was not the first time this has happened. I entered the license number only to be told that it was not VALID.
Now that was a new twist. It had always worked before.
So I then tried to log in to recover my licence number. Maybe I was using the wrong one. But of course I had long ago forgotten the password and the Big Mac had not stored it. So then I tried the password recovery option only to be told that Literature and Latte did not have that email on their system.
I tried 6 times entering the license number and got told every single time that it was invalid. At this stage I was not just panicking about this year’s Nanowrimo but about every single other file on Scrivener. Especially November 2021 where I wrote about my adventures in the Green Zone and all the gory details of my grand adventures in the hospital. The last time I was even remotely so long in hospital was when I was born 3 months prematurely. 3 months and 6 days are not quite comparable.
So basically, like some sort of ransomware, I could not edit, add to or even read any of the words I had written in Scrivener. Including some stuff of great sentimental value.
So here I was in the Green Zone with a dozen muses all wanting to get their ideas on the page but no more Scrivener.
After recent experiences with recalcitrant websites, instead of endlessly attempting to re enter the licence number in the hope that the 666th attempt would be lucky, I sent off an email to the support staff.
But while in limbo waiting for a reply, it meant that I had to use Gmail as a substitute.
During Nanowrimo I have a golden rule, no online lurking until I get to the daily word count quota. Having to use Gmail would of course make this impossible aside from not having an inbuilt word count or goal progress bar that turns a gorgeous shade of green the closer you get to the goal.
So I was forced back into snail mode. Then there was dramas with the bank, little shits on scooters scaring the living daylights out of me and a whole bunch of things sending me into sensory overload Constant Vigilance mode.
The Scrivener support staff were excellent. It turned out that the problem was the company they outsourced the management of licenses to had gone bankrupt.
I knew they had changed providers but had not realized that was the reason.
So turning off the computer and opening Scrivener from scratch had triggered the inner ‘check that this user has a valid licence’ mode.
But when I entered the license number it was looking for it on a server that no longer exists. That is why all my attempts kept getting rejected.
So the support staff gave me a link to a page where I could download a legacy version which does not require constant licence verification.
I did all that yesterday. The download and instalment went much faster than I expected. No dramas at all. I think within less than 10 minutes I was back in business again.
All my old projects were still there but I exported the most recent ones just in case and added a few more today - both PDF and plain text versions.
But all these dramas and distractions mean that once again the actual story I had planned has been put on hold.
At this rate I will be happy if I can start my planned story about evil weeds and bad seeds some time on Monday or Tuesday.
I am also in the middle of a diagnosis for autism from my regular shrink. She told me last year that I had a lot of typical autistic traits. She and my GP gave me names of shrinks who are authorised to do diagnosis for NDIS purposes but both of them have waiting lists of longer than 9 months and out of pocket expenses of over $2,400.
I told her that is completely out of the question. Since I am not interested in trying to claim disability benefits, I do not need the outrageously expensive nuclear option but simply a letter from a shrink to get the job mobsters off my back.
She said she could do a quick and dirty version (the inner cynic says that she wants me to use up the remaining sessions that my local GP has authorised) and has given me a list of questions about my life from childhood to the age of 18. My mission if I choose to accept it is to answer them in less than 50,000 words.
(It is also possible that she is just being nice or feels a bit guilty for the awful mess up she made with my Medicare rebate from my appointment back in January. Because she ticked the wrong boxes, instead of getting an EFT rebate within a day or two of the appointment, I ended up having to wait for a cheque in the post which these days is like something out of the middle ages.)
This is where the nano strategy comes into its own.
I will write every single thing that comes to mind that could be relevant and then worry about editing and condensing it all later. After all, you cannot edit a blank page.
Last year my little sister outed me. The hospital goblins wanted to send me home after only 2 days in spite of my protests that I was not capable of managing getting up and down the stairs and in and out of bed on my own especially while on heavy duty pain killers.
When the surgeon turned up on Thursday 28th October (2 days after surgery) to ask how I was doing, I was on the phone to my sister at the time. She asked to speak to him and told him that I was autistic and not very good at advocating for myself. She made a big thing of not letting some one in my state go home alone because I have no one to keep any eye out if anything went wrong.
She insisted that it was totally irresponsible for the hospital to send me home in my circumstances. He agreed. Apparently the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing. I think he had planned to see me at 10am but assorted emergencies meant that he did not get around to my case until 3pm and by then the hospital goblins were already ticking boxes to discharge me in spite of my objections.
So he got that nonsense put in its box and got me not one or two extra days but four of them.
It was a fabulous four days. Because I was not in pain or not bed bound, it was like being in a holiday resort with so many interesting things to amuse the inner geek.
Watching the trains coming and going from the station visible from my window, working out the patient nurse ratios, discovering the mystery behind Patient XXX along the meanings of assorted abbreviations on the message boards and pottering around finding the best location to watch the sunset were just some of the attractions on offer. No need to worry about sunrise. That was a feature of my room. All I had to do was get out of bed and sit in the big blue chair near the east facing window.
So I think it’s long over due for me to start flying my FREAK flag instead of trying and failing miserably for the last 50 years to pass as even half normal.
no subject
Date: 2022-11-14 01:58 pm (UTC)That's funny how much you enjoyed your prolonged stay in the hospital. Do the patients get separate rooms in Oz? Here, it's 3-5 patients per room, beds separated by curtains, so only one lucky person gets a place near the window. And someone always has visitors, so there's constant noise and mess.
Anyway, that's a good idea to turn a weakness into strength! I think I can start feeling similarly about my age, instead of being embarrassed by immaturity and being a perpetual novice, learning new things when one's supposed to have made all the important decisions and reach mastery and a peak of one's RL career... maybe it's time to be proud that I'm still learning and doing something new.
The Mad Mac
Date: 2022-11-15 02:11 am (UTC)At this stage it is now officially Vintage!
Not only can I not download any version at all of Scrivener 3, I can no longer update my Big Mac operating system version 10.11.6 to anything newer.
I found that out last December when I got my 50% discount coupon for Scrivener in after my 2021 win.
The license thing appears to be random. The pop up has occasionally appeared in the past but only after I have turned off the computer and starting again from scratch (that is why I avoid doing it during November)
Whenever it happened in the past, I would just enter the licence number and it was then business as usual.
When I started all the jumping through hoops to get back access to my own stuff, I came across a support page that had separate fields for lost licence recovery depending on whether you bought the software before or after 26th June 2019. I had bought mine way back in 2013.
https://www.literatureandlatte.com/legacy-download?os=macOS
Meanwhile, the support geek told me the assorted ways to access my projects outside of Scrivener.
I had been using the short cuts in Scrivener all along thinking that it was the only way to get to my stuff.
So I learn something new every day.
"How do I access my projects?
While Scrivener has convenience features for tracking the last few projects you've edited (e.g., the File > Recent Projects menu and the Open Recent button in the Project Templates window), these features should not be relied upon to manage your projects. Think of these commands as shortcuts to where your work is located on your computer, just like a shortcut on your Desktop/Dock is linking to a program saved in your Program Files/Applications folder. You should therefore familiarize yourself with where your projects are stored, should you ever have to do a full reinstall of your program (in which case the "recent" lists would be wiped). You will then have confidence in knowing precisely where everything is."
Most of the time when I am using Scrivener, I am offline because it is the number one productivity porn trick during November. That is why I simply hated the idea of using Gmail as Plan Z.
About the hospital - the one I stayed at is the flagship hospital. Most of the rooms on the upstairs wards are large double rooms with giant en suites and I always managed to get the window.
The older hospitals had a lot more 4 bed wards. Single rooms were mainly for private patients or for those with contagious diseases.
At one point when the goblins were trying to get rid of me, I was moved down to the 'transit lounge' which is sort of a holding bay on the first floor where patients go when thy are a day or two from discharge. There are no separate rooms in that section just curtains dividing the beds. They can squeeze a lot more people in that way. I spent 2 nights in that noisy joint before being sent back up to the seventh floor where I got an even better room with a bigger window.
One fascinating but slightly disturbing aspect of the "transit lounge" was the giant whiteboard at the nurses' station. All the bed numbers were listed along with the names of the occupants, the date of arrival and expected departure along with the specialty. Most were in there for back issues. a couple of plastic surgeries and only one Gyno which was me.
I was surprised that such fairly sensitive information was so publicly available
One of the patients was listed as XXX - maxillofacial. I was intrigued since everyone else had a name. That evening near midnight I was sitting in the lounge doing a Duolingo Blitz when a woman who looked like Frankenstein's monster waddled in with an IV drip in tow. She couldn't sleep and I couldn't either so we got to chatting.
She had come from emergency. Had been attacked by her ex at her flat and was lucky to be alive. He had smashed her face, nose and jaw. She was the mystery XXX and her name was kept hidden because her X who did it was still at large. He was arrested while i was still there so then the board changed back to her original name.
We were talking for ages. He had assaulted her in front of their 8 year old son. Her mum then took him (the kid) in. I did a lot of listening and not much talking. I guess she must have found it unusual and definitely refreshing not to be once again subjected to the usual "You will be fine" "everything happens for a reason" and of course the worst one of all "Why didn't you leave him?" (she actually had. He had been stalking her)
The jerk had made such a mess of her place that the cops had to send in the trauma cleaners. most of the mess was her blood!
I kept thinking to myself that I am so lucky the Grinch is 80 something. So while he is emotionally and mentally toxic, at least he no longer presents a physical threat to me. My mother was not so lucky.
Because of my years working in a nursing home, I was particularly interested in all the mundane day to day running of the place. I paid special attention to staffing ratios, hoists and other equipment used to move patients, the bathrooms, the wierd biodegradable bed pans and urinal bottles, the very strange wound dressings with strings attached leading to a little white box that would look more at home in an Apple Store. What looked like a wifi hot spot gadget was actually a mechanism for sucking air from a dressing to keep it dry.
And yes, about learning new stuff. You are either green and growing or brown and rotting.
It was curiosity and being in Martian mode that made everything so interesting and also a lot less stressful. I learnt fascinating tidbits like the pain medication gadgets patients are given immediately after an operation where you get to press a button if you feel pain but is set so you cannot OD (and of course the gadget keeps records of how often and when you use it) - the main ingredient is fentanyl! It apparently has the best balance of fast acting vs side effects.
I really must go back and read some of the stuff I wrote last year. Apart from the goal of clocking up the Nano word count, the other aim was as a sort of scientific experiment. a Green pensieve. I was paying attention to the things that made being in the Green Zone different than my usual neurotic jittery crazy state. The biggest difference of all was a sense of wonder and an ability to remain in the current moment instead of constantly being somewhere else in my head.