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Because I usually am in Vino ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** In 2009, I gave up my studies as a medievalist and musician, left my home, my family, my life and moved to Provence in southern France for a guy. In 2012, I moved away from him to study wine. Today, I'm a vagabond sommelier working in Paris at one of the oldest and most famous restaurants in the world, struggling to find some purpose to what I deem the rest of my life. I'm still married and after 8 10 years, I'm still trying to fit-in with French life and culture and to understand why the French are the way they are. Because they're weird in a different way that I think Americans are weird. Perhaps it's me who's weird. |
| We have another month to go under confinement. At least. But if we are let out mid-May, it's been announced that restaurants and hotels probably won't be allowed to open until mid-July. Mid-July. Mid-July. That's 5 months without business. I'm not sure if many restaurants will survive. At least not as they are. My restaurant is on the 6th floor of a building with some very expensive apartments inside it. My only hope is that those apartments generate enough income to help the owner re-open the restaurant. Otherwise we're probably going to resort to selling off part of the wine cellar. THAT would be tragic. And probably put at least a few of my team out of a job. I'm also beginning to get nervous about my apartment in Paris. I kind of want to ask a friend of mine to go over there and check on it, but he doesn't have a key so all he could do is stand outside the door. Plus it's a good 10 kilometers from his apartment and if he got stopped by the police, checking on my apartment is not a good enough reason to be out and he'd probably get fined. My landlords live in the same building as me, and while they are elderly, I just have to hope that if anything happens they'll find out about it and let me know. I think that even if I don't have to go back to work in May, if we are released from confinement, I'll run up to Paris for a few days to check on the apartment. I'm pretty sure I didn't turn off the bathroom fan and I know I didn't turn off the fridge. In fact in the rush to leave I'm pretty sure I forgot to do a number of things. I can't even remember if I took out the trash. And all my summer clothes are there. Most of my clothes are there. I only had one duffel bag when I left Paris. But this is a perfect time to start new writing projects. Now my internal voice can't say to me "what's the point? you're just going to forget about it when you go back to work in X weeks!" because X weeks is far enough away to accomplish quite a bit. My novel for Camp NaNo is a laugh, but it's also a very good exercise to practice writing. I have also remembered a story idea that I had many years ago but didn't know how to approach. I started doing a bit of reading on the subject and came up with an idea for the narrator, the arch of the story, and am pretty excited about it. I could have jumped right into this novel, but I've decided to keep writing my NaNo novel until the end of the month as an exercise. I do my allotted word count for the day (a bit more actually) as a writing exercise and then spend some time planning out the new novel. It's taking on a nice shape and I think that by May I should be ready to start writing. I'm trying to balance planning with leaving enough space to move about and change things when I begin writing. The last time I planned out a novel, I over planned - for me anyway - and ended up writing myself into so many corners that the novel is stilted, forced, and inorganic. It's about 200,000 words of very forced character development and story. I forced the MC and narrator to be a painter when she should have been a musician. I forced her to remain the narrator, when a third person POV or many different POV's would have been better. I cut her off from all her relatives when some contact with her brother was begging to get written. I could go back and rewrite the novel. And maybe one day I will, but it will be a massive undertaking because I'd have to reread the beast, which would be like forcing yourself to read a 500 page novel you hate, and then rewrite it from scratch. Nothing of the original save the plot can be salvaged. And the whole end is wrong. So we're not doing that this time. I'm using a few different outline methods for this novel and picking and choosing what I need to help me develop the story until I feel like I'm ready to write it. Writing a back cover blurb, letter to the editor, or a character synopsis so detailed it describes what my MC had for breakfast is not helpful to me. Neither are spreadsheets. So I'm not going to do them. It's my novel. About two years after I moved to France I met a fairly well-known British author who was doing a signing at the bookstore across the street from where I worked. I went with my boss who introduced me as a fledgling author and this novelist and I started chatting a bit. I told her that I had had some success with short stories but was looking to start writing a full-length novel but had no idea to go about it. She said the only advice she could give me was to plan it out, but that I'd have to find the plan that worked for me. I hate planning short stories. I think it's ridiculous. But more and more I do see the merit in planning out a novel. But I also see the merit in finding the planning that works for me. The snowflake method gets a bit repetitive and weird for me towards step 6 or 7. The 30-day NaNo -Prep challenge here on WDC, while it was tons of fun when I did it - was way too much. Spreadsheets seem like a good idea to help keep things in order, but I don't want to work myself into restrictions. Anyway, where am I going with this? After some 25 odd years of being a writer, I'm finally beginning to understand my process. And I'm enjoying the learning experience. Something a bit more positive than the past few negative entries I've had. I don't know what day of confinement I'm on. 31 I think. |
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I think it's awesome that you're using that negative experience to get creative. It's hard not to just wallow when those things happen. I use a paper journal for most of my actual coping process too, but I do share bits and pieces on WDC as well.
Might try a short story a day instead. Stay safe. 
