Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Yes, I Have a Process

     Every day I sit down and have a mini-freak out: oh god, I don't have anything to write about.  I search my brain and recount the events of the morning to try to pull from something, anything, that I can turn into a few paragraphs.  It's my process.  It's a pretty shitty process, actually.  It causes a lot of undue stress.
     Every Tuesday between 8 and about 10 I realize it's Tuesday and I think fuck, it's only Tuesday.  I used to really like Tuesdays.  In fact, I think I've mentioned it before, in my letter to Tuesday.   However, since then, it has left me cold.  Somehow, Monday has lasted so long that Tuesday is inconceivable to me.  How can only 24 hours have passed since I last sat at this very spot thinking about my case of the Mondays?  And why will I have to wait another full 24 hours until the juvenile-named hump day.
     Combining my every day process of a mini-freak out and the every Tuesday process of lamenting the day can make 8 - 10 on Tuesdays a particularly trying time.  I get stress induced nose acne and my ulcers kick up a full level of failure-fear mucus.  Failure-fear mucus is the particular brand of stomach mucus that sits in the pit of my stomach making me feel hungry and full at the same time.  It's caused when I start listing all of the ways I could potentially fail if I don't come up with something right now, at this very second.  The nose acne is just an added bonus. 
     Yes, this is part of my process.  I have grown to rely on this failure-fear mucus as an indicator to whether or not I'm doing this right.  Too much of it probably means I actually do need to eat something or maybe make the next pot of coffee decaf.  But not enough of it is also a sign that maybe I'm heading down the slippery slope of the passive observer.  The blank page might be intimidating, but a dead soul would be worse.  It's a harder position from which to recover.
     I do think everybody has their own process, and it can be kind of silly to drone on about mine when it won't help anyone else one bit.  But there is something about it that worries me.  I write a lot of notes.  Before I even put down the slug line at the top of a sketch I write out paragraphs and paragraphs or lists and lists of notes.  Some of them read like stream of conscious writing where I go from my commentary to character description to dialogue to alternate jokes with nothing more than periods between them.  I worry that if I get hit by a bus before the final product makes it to the world, people will find these notes and think "well, clearly she was nuts, so maybe this bus accident was a blessing." 

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