Jul 07, 2009 13:41
I’m off to do a Vedic Astrology course tomorrow. This is not something I’m massively fascinated by, I’m more of an I-Ching and the Tarot woman myself, (and angel cards, of course,) but when a friend mentioned it, the writerly part of me went, hmmm, might be useful for a story sometime. So, I signed up.
However, apparently as part of the course, we get a reading so the time of our birth is required. Pretty seriously required. My mother has never been able to remember my time of birth with any degree of certainty, although there was a time there, a few years ago, when I thought she had told me eleven a.m. Then she contradicted this and said she didn’t know. So, I was left wondering where eleven in the morning came out of. Anyway, I decided I would get straight down home and persuade my mother she really did remember. Thankfully, she was in the mood for it. After asking her a million questions to get her back in the correct time frame, as in, who brought you to the hospital, who minded my older brother and sister, who else had a baby at the same time etc. etc. etc., things started happening. I left her with strict instructions to think and think and think, and brought the dog for a walk on the beach to allow memories to percolate.
(An an aside, my eight year old niece wanted to know why we just didn’t consult my baby book. Sweet! Babies just didn’t have baby books in those days, which aren’t ALL that long ago. We were lucky if we photographed occasionally, well I was, being a third and middle child. J )
When I came back she had got this far. She had suffered from blood pressure with me and therefore had to be hospitalised and induced. She still couldn’t remember the time, but given that I was induced it had to be during the day. Also, she has a memory of very efficient nursing staff and felt pretty certain it would have been early in the day. For some reason, the time eleven o clock was in her head. I would have thought, Da Daaaaah, except, I may have been the one to put the eleven o clock in her head. Anyway, I have settled on eleven for a birth time.
The other thing of interest is the fact that I was an induced birth. I remember meeting an old friend of mine once who just had a baby in that manner. You could still see the memory of the pain in her face. She told me they had to hold her down in the bed because the pain was so extreme she wanted to throw herself out the window. It sounds like an exaggeration but you could see the truth in her eyes. That birth hurt. Anyway, I have heard that being induced can be traumatic for the mother but I wonder what it’s like for the baby. Perhaps it explains my hatred of being pressured or rushed in any way. J
In WIP news, shorts have been abandoned, put aside, half written and weeping. J There was obviously never going to be an end to,” just two more shorts,” unless I unceremoniously abandoned them. In getting this novel back on the road, I’ve been sorting through all the work I’ve done on it previously, you know, world building stuff, snippets of ideas, descriptions of cities, scenes, attempts at outlines, false starts, etc. Apparently I’ve written over 50,000 words on this novel already. None of them usable in their present form as part of the novel, but pretty fabulous at providing me with a foundation to work off. Now, I will say no more about the novel, as I’m an induced child and you know how we hate pressure. J
I have discovered also that it is imperative to have a good system for filing on your computer. Mine has been a little crazy; stories filed under different names in different locations, no easy way to see which is the newest version, a million version of the same stories saved forcing me to check why I have so many versions, only to realise, there was no reason, just me haphazardly saving things everywhere to be certain I didn’t lose them and not realising that I was creating a giant mess for myself to sort out in the future.
No more. I will be a Queen of filing from now on. I swear it. Why isn’t an efficient filing system for your work ever mentioned under writerly advice? J