Author: Ashlee Scheuerman

Artist, writer, dreamer.

Work through the sickness

Posted on by Ashlee Scheuerman in Writing

My life these past few days: care for sick relatives. Wake up every four hours to help administer medication. Cook soups, retrieve water, collect extra boxes of tissues. Condense an eight hour shift at work into some kind of ungodly three and a half hour race.

And all that leaves me tired out and catching a cold. It’s to be expected, and I’m already getting over it (there’s something to be said for eating heaps of Vitamin C supplements at the onset of an illness, let me tell you!). Nevertheless, I’ve had no energy to do anything besides these important duties. Anyone with a family will tell you that sick time is “drop everything else” time. But I’ve persisted at my writing work (usually when everyone’s taking a nap), and I’ve noticed something interesting.

When I’m exhausted and spaced out, I can be very capable of monotonous tasks like replacing pesky words. Something about the frame of mind I have been in has allowed me to see every instance of repeated words, bland adverbs, and importantly, spotting “it”, “was”, and “that” in my writing (some of the most frequently used words through this manuscript – eek). The fact that I was spacey enough to actually need a bright red sticky note on my monitor with those words written on it makes no difference; I just couldn’t remember if THOSE were the words I was on the lookout for unless I had a quick reference.

This has something to do with lacking the brain power to concentrate on multiple things. Yes, I’m guilty of multi-tasking, which is just code for doing everything slightly less efficiently all at once. If I can think about researching, and emailing, and maybe just quickly checking one of my online hangouts, I’ll probably do it every now and then. But if I’m too tired to even remember those things exist, I have no problem just mumbling my story out loud and finding all the things that need fixing.

Don’t get me wrong, I will be delighted when I’m over this cold. It’s the first one I’ve had in ages, and I resent it. But maybe it will teach me something valuable, if I can just figure out where to find a “quiet mode” in my brain. Because it’s not the distractions themselves that are so problematic to being productive, it’s my ability to think about them while I’m doing something else.

It doesn’t matter what it is. If I can think about it, it’s a distraction.

So I will continue to make the most of this illness and work through it, glancing to my red sticky note every now and then (noting “just” isn’t on the list for the umpteenth time), seeking out those redundancies, and finding all the times where I’ve told, not shown (he’s happy to see them? What ever made me think I could just say he’s happy to see them?).

~A

Writing for a song

Posted on by Ashlee Scheuerman in Writing

The title of this entry may be misleading if you recall an old saying, which would refer to performing a task or acquiring goods for little money as “for a song”. However, I’m thinking more along the lines of listening to music while you write.

This is something I do with a fair degree of frequency. And it got me thinking about how I choose the songs which accompany my work. Do I choose them for the feelings they invoke, and how well they match the scene, or is my writing more directly affected by the tone of my music?

If I kept a record of the songs I’ve listened to, you might see a soundtrack to my stories. When I find the right song, I play it on repeat, anything up to several hours at a time. The melody fades into the background, the vocals become something I might hum along with, and the emotions expressed in those sounds become a state I can fall into. There have been a couple of really important tunes which helped shape some of my favourite scenes, but funny enough, listening to those songs now will not transport me into the story. Only the words on the page can really do that.

With this is mind, I think the answer is that I utilise specific music to keep me in the right mindset. Yes, this sometimes means I seek out very depressing music (sometimes I have to write incredibly depressing scenes!), and wallow until I’ve either finished the scene, or grown so sick of the song I have to find something else.

For the curious among you, my most recent listening habits have actually been slightly different from usual, maybe because I have been doing more editing and less creating. I’ve been streaming a radio station that plays music from the 1920s and 1930s. Although it’s a slightly earlier era than in the game, it makes me feel like I’m still playing Fallout 3. And that is good!

Signing off with an update! I re-discovered why I loved the yWriter software (http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter5.html), created by Simon Haynes, author of the sci-fi comedy series Hal Spacejock. It’s organised and packed with useful tabs and features. I do tend to get distracted easily (hence I forgot how much I appreciated this gem), but I should be able to get back into the habit of using this awesome program for all my writing. I imported my current project into yWriter, and got a lot of work done. Nothing like seeing your progress clearly laid out.

~A

The First Step

Posted on by Ashlee Scheuerman in Thoughts

Looks like I have a blog now!

I will do my best not to ramble too incoherently. This cannot be guaranteed,  because I am known for fits of excitement, impassioned spiels, and I really do like talking about important things (not to be confused with Important Things, which I also sometimes talk about).

Heading off in search of delicious coffee. Come back soon! (that means me, too)

~A