Zentangle Challenge 201 #MSAD15

I had recently started Zentangling and I've been loving it so much. So, when the Diva threw across this challenge in support of Moebius awareness, I decided to give it my all. So, this is my way of telling the Diva and Artoo that I'm so proud of their efforts. And yes, I'm wearing purple today in support of Moebius awareness Day. Are you wearing purple too?  #MSAD15

Mastery by Robert Greene – A Summary (Part V)

Chapter V Awaken the Dimensional Mind: The Creative Active

“…Several things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainities, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…”

-          John Keats

In childhood, our minds were completely open, and we entertained all kinds of surprising, original ideas. Our heads teemed with questions about the world around us. Not yet having commanded language, we thought in ways that were preverbal – in images and sensations. This is the ORIGINAL MIND. We cannot help but feel nostalgia for the intensity with which we used to experience the world.

We no longer look at things as they are, or wonder why they exist. Our minds gradually tighten up. We become defensive about the world we now take for granted, and we become upset if our beliefs or assumptions are attacked. This is our CONVENTIONAL MIND.

Masters and those who display a high level of creative energy are simply people who manage to retain a sizeable portion of their childhood spirit despite the pressures and demands of adulthood.

Masters not only retain the spirit of the Original Mind, but they add to it their years of apprenticeship and an ability to focus deeply on problems or ideas. This leads to high-level creativity. Some people maintain their childlike spirit and spontaneity, but their creative energy is dissipated in a thousand directions, and they never have the patience and discipline to endure an extended apprenticeship.  Others have the discipline to accumulate vast amounts of knowledge and become experts in their field, but they have no flexibility of spirit, so their ideas never stray beyond the conventional and they never become truly creative. Masters manage to blend the two and create the DIMENSIONAL MIND. This mind is active, transforming everything it digests into something new and original, creating instead of consuming.

The Dimensional Mind has two requirements:

1)      High level of knowledge about a field or subject

2)      Openness and flexibility to use this knowledge in new and original ways.

To awaken the Dimensional Mind, we need to follow these steps and avoid the following pitfalls:

Step 1 Choose the right Creative Task

Creative activity involves the entire self – our emotions, our levels of energy, our characters, and our minds. It needs time and effort. It entails years of experimentation, and the need to maintain a high level of focus. We need to have patience and faith that what we are doing will yield something important.

The emotional commitment to what you are doing will be translated directly into your work. To aid in this process, it is often wise to choose somethingthatr appeals to your sense of unconventionality and calls up latent feelings of rebelliousness. Keep two things in mind:

1)      The task you choose must be realistic. To reach your goal, you may have to learn a few new things.

2)      You must let go of your need for comfort and security. If you are worried about what others might think and about how your position in the group might be jeopardized, then you will never really create anything.

Step 2 Creative Strategies

The mind tightens up over time because of two reasons:

a)      We entertain same thoughts and ways of thinking for sake of consistency, familiarity and reduced effort.

b)      Whenever we work hard at a problem or idea, our minds naturally narrow their focus because of the strain and effort involved.

This means that the further we progress on our creative task, the fewer alternative possibilities or viewpoints we tend to consider.

A.      Cultivate Negative Capability

The ability to endure and even embrace mysteries and uncertainties was called by Keats as Negative Capability. We must be capable of negating our ego. Truly creative people in all fields can temporarily suspend their ego and simply experience what they are seeing, without the need to assert a judgment, for as long as possible.

 

In the arts and letters, your thoughts will congeal around political dogma or pre-digested ways of looking at the world, and what you will often end up expressing is an opinion rather than a truthful observation about reality. To Keats, William Shakespeare was the ideal because he did not judge his characters, but instead opened himself up to their worlds and expressed the reality of even those who were considered evil. The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces. And so it is best to keep this in mind and not grow too fond of your ideas or too certain of their truth.

 

B.      Allow for Serendipity

The brain is constantly searching for similarities, differences and relationships between what it processes. Feed this natural inclination by letting go of conscious control and allow chance to enter into the process. When we are in a more relaxed state, our attention naturally broadens and we take in more stimuli. Serendipity are the chance associations and discoveries that we were not expecting. To allow this to happen:

a)      Widen your search. Look at more than necessary in research stage. It may seem tiring and inefficient but you must trust this process.

b)      Maintain an openness and looseness of spirit. In momrents of great tension and searching, you allow yourself moments of release. You take walks, engage in activities outside your work (Einstein played the violin), or think about something else, no matter how trivial. “Chance favours only the prepared mind” – Pasteur.

Serendipity strategies can be interesting devices in the arts too. Writer Anthony Burgess, trying to free his mind up from the same stale ideas, decided on several occasions to choose random words in a reference book and use them to guide the plot of a novel, according to the order and associations of words. Once he had completely haphazard starting points, his conscious mind took over and he worked them into extremely well crafted novels with surprising structures.

To help yourself cultivate serendipity, you should keep a notebook with you at all times and note down idea/ observation the moment it comes. Keep notebook by bedside to note ideas that come during fringe awareness. In this notebook, you record any scrap of thought that occurs to you, and include drawings, quotes from other books, anything at all. In general, you must adopt a more analogical way of thinking, taking greater advantage of the associative powers of the mind.

C.      Alternate the mind through “the current”

The Current is an intensification of the most elementary powers of human consciousness. Most often in our culture, on one side, people run rampant with speculations never taking time to entertain possible explanations while on the other side, people, particularly in academia or in the sciences, accumulate mountains of information but never venture to speculate on larger ramifications of this information or connect it all into a theory. They are afraid to speculate because it seems unscientific and subjective, failing to understand that speculation is the way to see the invisible. Scientists must have a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by an artistically creative imagination, says physicist Max Planck.

 

D.      Alter your Perspective

Creative people are those who can look at a phenomenon from several different angles, noticing something we miss because we only look straight on. We should not rush to generalize and label. We should subvert the following patterns:

 

1)      Looking at the ‘what’ instead of the ‘how’

If the book we are creating is not working out, we focus on the uninspired writing or the misguided concept behind it. Although we think we are rational when we think in this way, most often problems are more complicated and holistic; we are simplifying them, based on the law that the mind always looks for shorthands.

 

To look at the ‘how’ instead of the ‘what’ means focusing on the structure – how the parts relate to the whole. With the book, it may not be working out because it is organised poorly, the faulty organisation a reflection of ideas that have not been thought out. Our minds are a jumble, and this is reflected in the work. Thinking in this way, we are forced to go more deeply into the parts and how they relate to the overall concept; improving the structure will improve the writing.

 

Our minds naturally tend to separate things out, to think in terms of nouns instead of verbs. In general you want to pay greater attention to the relationship between things, because that will give you a greater feel for the picture as a whole.

 

2)      Rushing to generalities and ignoring details

Immersing yourself in details will combat the generalizing tendencies of the brain and bring you closer to reality. Make sure, however, that you do not become lost in the details and lose sight of how they reflect the whole and fit into a larger idea.

 

3)      Confirming paradigms and ignoring anomalies

We routinely look for patterns that confirm the paradigms we already believe in. we must turn ourselves into a detective and deliberately uncover and look at the very anomalies that people tend to disregard.

 

4)      Fixating on what is present, ignoring what is absent

The ability to alter our perspective is a function of our imagination. We have to learn how to imagine more possibilities than we generally consider, being as loose and radical with this process as we can. This pertains as much to inventors and businesspeople as it does to artists.

 

As you work to free up your mind and give it the power to alter its perspective, remember the following: the emotions we experience at any time have an inordinate influence on how we perceive the world. So, if you are experiencing a lot of resistance and setbacks in your work, try to see this as in fact something that is quite positive and productive. These difficulties will make you tougher and more aware of the flaws you need to correct. In physical exercise, resistance is a way to make the body stronger, and it is the same with the mind.

 

E) Revert to Primal forms of Intelligence

 

While language is a good thing, it has made us lose our connection to the senses – sight, smell, touch – that once played such a vital role in our intelligence. If there are no words for certain concepts, we tend to not think of them. And so language is a tool that is often too tight and constricting, compared to the multi-layered powers of intelligence we naturally possess.

 

“The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be voluntarily reproduced and combined.” – Albert Einstein.

 

As opposed to words, which can be impersonal and rigid, a visualization is something we create, something that serves our particular needs of the moment and can represent an idea in a way that is more fluid and real than simply words. The use of images, diagrams, and models can help reveal to you patterns in your thinking and new directions you can take that you would find hard to imagine exclusively in words. To Leonardo da Vinci, drawing and thinking were synonymous.

 

The German writer, Friedrich Schiller, had a drawer full of rotten apples in the desk from which he worked. He found the stench delightful and he found that he did his most creative work while inhaling the fumes. When doing his deepest thinking about the theory of relativity, Albert Einstein liked to hold on to a rubber ball that he would periodically squeeze in tandem with the straining of his mind. Writer Samuel Johnson had a cat and a slice of orange on his desk whenever he worked. These sensual cues stimulated him for his work.

 

These aids to the creative process are related to the phenomenon of synaesthesia – stimulation of one sense provokes another. What this means is that this smell/ touch gets them ready to alternate ways of thinking, creating and sensing the world. They allow themselves a broader range of sense experience.

 

Step 3. The Creative Breakthrough – Tension and Insight

 

The feeling that we have endless time to complete our work has an insidious and debilitating effect on our minds. Our attention and thoughts become diffused. Faced with the slenderest amount of time to reach the end, the mind rises to the level you require. If you don’t have such deadlines, manufacture them for yourself.

 

Emotional Pitfalls

 

The 6 common pitfalls when we arrive at the Creative-Active phase in our career are:

 

1)      Complacency (constantly remind yourself of how little you know)

2)      Conservatism (make creativity rather than comfort your goal)

3)      Dependency (don’t look for approval – develop internal standards and a high degree of independence)

4)      Impatience (don’t hurry to the end or warm up old ideas – enjoy rigorous practice, push past your limits and resist the easy way out)

5)      Grandiosity (work must motivate you not praise – don’t allow ego to inflate)

6)      Inflexibility (be naïve and optimistic of your capability while you keep doubting your achievements and subject it to self-criticism)

How to make Resolutions that you can keep

The book you resolved to complete or the 10 kgs you promised to lose in 2014 didn't happen. So, you just shifted them on to 2015. Did you take a moment to understand why the well-made plans went astray? Simple. Your brain considered this a huge challenge, you get overwhelmed and gradually, you lost hope, focus and track. There is a simple way out of this.

1) Make resolutions you can achieve quickly. Rather than resolving to lose 10 kgs in one year, make a resolution to exercise for at least 30 minutes everyday.

2) Focus on one thing at a time till it becomes a habit. Instead of deciding to remove all junk food from your diet, resolve to remove fizzy sugary drinks in January, then add potato wafers in February and build it up.

3) Focus on things within your circle of influence. Do not aim to get your book published this year. Instead, resolve to write/edit 1000 words everyday to complete the book or to pitch the book to 20 different publishers by the end of the year.

4) Break up tasks to know what to do when. Continuing the above examples, the resolution would now be to write 1000 words in the WIP every day and not a blanket resolution that just states complete the book.

Just before the new year dawned, I decided to do something different and decided to sketch out my resolutions for 2015.

The illustration did get me super-motivated but I realised it didn't have any crystal clear actions to follow. After this, I jumped into the January Jumpstart Challenge at www.sparkpeople,com for health and fitness, joined up My 500 Words #my500words to get me to write a fresh batch of 500 words every day and resolved to edit at least 3000 words of my first draft every week.

Suddenly, things cleared up and it was super easy to follow up. I was making progress and it made me feel that I have achieved something every single day. Believe me, there cannot be a better motivator than that. So, what are your resolutions for 2015? What are your plans on achieving them?

Regimenting Life Again

Results = Regimentation + Repetition + Ritualization

- Amir Siddiqui (Check him out on FB https://www.facebook.com/amirofthebody/posts/816216408438322?fref=nf&pnref=story )

While he was talking about training in the gym, isn't the same true for training in writing too? To see any results in writing, we need to have to regiment our day, repeat it everyday and have a ritual that spurs us on to write. Read http://www.copyblogger.com/writing-rituals/ to know more about some popular writing rituals.

"Rituals that bring us together and that help us map out the patterns of our days are far more vital than you’d think. Without mundane time-milestones like breakfast, lunch, dinner, weekends, a yearly vacation, and a periodic raise, we can go crazy. Those who suffer from structure deprivation fill the emptiness of chaotic hours with alcohol, gambling, compulsive shopping, compulsive eating, and even with compulsive picking at every micro-hillock of skin their restless fingers can find and try to pry loose." --- Howard Bloom

I hated being regimented during my childhood. My mother had these strict hours she followed (and made us follow) everyday for meals and sleep. Our study time and TV time were fixed and unchangeable. This bled into the weekends too. While we fought and argued about it with her many times, it did bring in big results in my life and my brother's too. For starters, we were toppers in school and college all through our life. We were healthy and happy. We had various family rituals of togetherness, festival rituals and vacation rituals which are a part of our most cherished memories now. As the years sped by, these rituals became habits and they remained so till we got married.

Suddenly, we were no longer in the military rule. We were completely free. We could sleep in the entire day, have a bath at any odd hour, no one will ask us to switch off the television, we can order in any day, any time we like and we could eat anywhere (even on our bed) at anytime we please. Since my brother and I are self employed, this also means we can goof off as no one monitors the hours we work. This seemed like the ultimate bliss. I did live by this laissez-faire approach for a few years till I realised babies thrive on routine. Either you create a routine for them or else they would create one that might not be so pleasant for you. Rituals and routines came back into my life but were never regimented like before. If they had been, then my writing would have been on another plane now.

I sorely miss the order and routine my mother had got into my life. My brother and I had such perfect habits as children. We woke up at the same time every day, we watched half an hour of television at the same time every day, we studied for the same number of hours at the same time every day irrespective of whether we had exams the next day or not and we went to bed at the same time too. (We got an extra hour on weekends!)

I think it is time I regimented my life again. The last experiment I had tried was to write every day, at least a 100 words, in the current fiction project on hand and I have been successfully pulling it off for the last few months. The mental peace and emotional satisfaction from this achievement have been awesome. Now, the next challenge is to take it further. I'm planning to have a daily routine and structure, that will be followed with strict discipline, for all those mundane every day activities like sleep, meals, etc. so that my time can give way for those life-changing dreams like writing, a fit body and knowledge. I'll keep you all updated on how it goes.

Meanwhile, do you have daily routines, writing rituals, etc.? Share them here to inspire me.

Lessons learnt from Nanowrimo - Wordcount Obsession

 

‘What is this obsession with wordcount? Does wordcount count?’ I have wondered many times. Did Shakespeare think of it? Did Doris Lessing count her words every day? Does Jhumpa Lahiri do it? Is NaNoWriMo actually making a big difference in the lives of innumerable writers? Are we sacrificing quality for quantity? With all these questions haunting my mind, I picked up ‘Ernest Hemingway on Writing’ yesterday. It has a place right in the front of my bookshelf because I pick it up often, open any page randomly for a dose of inspiration. You can compare this to taking a cowboy taking a swig out of the whisky flask just before he kicks off on his horse. This time, I got this…

“I loved to write very much and was never happier than doing it. Charlie’s (Scribner’s) ridiculing of my daily word count was because he did not understand me or writing especially well nor could know how happy one felt to have put down properly 422 words as you wanted them to be. And days of 1200 or 2700 were something that made you happier than you could believe. Since I found that 400 to 600 well done was a pace I could hold much better was always happy with that number. But if I only had 320 I felt good.”

-          Ernest Hemingway

Then the prolific Stephen King says in his book ‘Stephen King on Writing’,

“I like to get 10 pages a day – amounts to 2000 words – only under dire circumstances do I allow myself to shut down before I get my 2000 words.”

Suddenly it struck me that R.K.Narayan also says in his book ‘My Days’ that he sticks to 1000 words a day every day. Nanowrimo asks for just 1667 words a day. It’s just that we have days when we skip it, laze it and then end up doing 5000 – 10000 words to catch up. When we skip these goals in our everyday life, there is no Nanowrimo to hold us accountable. We should have a Nanowrimo every month.

Writing is a lonely profession with no fixed salaries, recognition or instant credit. It is easy for one to lose focus on the way and go astray. It is easy to grow lazy and hard to overcome the tedium. Every November, a jolt hits us, shakes us up, gets us writing and reaffirms our faith in ourselves. Even today, I had to force myself to say ‘no’ to an outing with friends. Writing needs to shift from my back seat to my front seat. In fact, I think I should allow it into the driver’s seat and take my life in the direction that it should actually be going.

“If you have the opportunity to live an extraordinary life, you have no right to keep it to yourself”

-          Jacques Cousteau

December has now dawned on us – the month of revisions and editing. I wonder what the new year is to bring and I pray and hope that it is writing, writing and more writing with a bit of publishing (*fingers crossed) thrown in.

 

Mastery by Robert Greene – A Summary (Part IV)

Chapter IV See People as they are: Social Intelligence

The greatest obstacle to the pursuit of mastery comes from the emotional drain we experience in dealing with the resistance and manipulations of the people around us. Social Intelligence is the ability to see people in the most realistic light possible. Navigating smoothly the social environment, we have more time and energy to focus on learning and acquiring skills. Success attained without this intelligence is not true mastery, and will not last.

When interacting with people, view them from a detached position and do not get emotional. Focus completely on the people and cut off your own insecurities and desires from the equation. Have complete and radical acceptance of human nature just as how one accepts the thorns on a rose. To get upset or try to alter them is futile – it will only make them bitter and resentful.

“You must allow everyone the right to exist in accordance with the character he has, whatever it turns out to be: and all you should strive to do is to make use of this character in such a way as its kind of nature permits, rather than to hope for any alteration in it, or to condemn it offhand for what it is. This is the truest sense of the maxim – Live and let live… To become indignant at (people’s) conduct is as foolish as to be angry with a stone because it rolls into your path. And with many people the wisest thing you can do, is to resolve to make use of those whom you cannot alter.”

-          Arthur Schopenhauer

Benjamin Franklin was hopelessly naïve and completely misread the intentions of people around him. After facing many problems, he took efforts to gain social intelligence and that became the turning point of his career. With tranquil and productive social relations, he could focus more of his time and attention to writing, to questions of science, ti his endless inventions – to mastery.

Your view of people is dominated by the Naïve Perspective. Following Franklin’s example, you can reach this awareness by reviewing your past, paying particular attention to any battles, mistakes, tensions, or disappointments on the social front. If you look at these events from the Naïve Perspective, you will focus only on what other people have done to you – the mistreatments you endured fr5om them, the slights or injuries you felt. Instead you must turn this around and begin with yourself – how you saw in others qualities they did not possess, or how you ignored signs of a dark side to their nature. In doing this, you will be able to see the discrepancy between your illusions about who they are and the reality, and the role you played in creating this discrepancy. If you look closely enough, you can often perceive in your relationships with bosses or superiors re-enactments of the childhood family dynamic – the idealizing or demonizing that has become habitual.

Adjust your attitude but do not become cynical. The best attitude is one of supreme acceptance. Observe the human comedy and be as tolerant as possible. Social intelligence contains two components – general knowledge of human nature and specific knowledge of human nature. The deep analysis of these two components need to be read in full and practised as they are too valuable to be summarised.

Strategies for acquiring Social Intelligence

1.       Speak through your work

Understand that your work is the single greatest means at your disposal for expressing your social intelligence. By being efficient and detail oriented in what you do, you demonstrate that you are thinking of the group at large and advancing its cause. By making what you write or present clear and easy to follow, you show your care for the audience or public at large. By involving other people in your projects and gracefully accepting their feedback, you reveal your comfort with the group dynamic. Work that is solid also protects you from the political conniving and malevolence of others – it is hard to argue with the results you produce. If you are experiencing the pressures of political manoeuvring within the group, do not lose your head and become consumed with all of the pettiness. By remaining focused and speaking socially through your work, you will both continue to raise your skill level and stand out among all others who make a lot of noise but produce nothing.

 

2.       Craft the appropriate persona

Understand that people will tend to judge you based on your outward appearance. If you are not careful and simply assume that it is best to be yourself, they will begin to ascribe to you all kinds of qualities that have little to do with who you are but correspond to what they want to see. All of this can confuse you, make you feel insecure, and consume your attention. Internalizing their judgements, you will find it hard to focus on your work. Your only protection is to turn this around by consciously moulding these appearances, creating the image that suits you, and controlling people’s judgments. At times you will find it appropriate to stand back and create some mystery around you, heightening your presence. At other times you will want to be more direct and impose a more specific appearance. In general, you never settle on one image or give people the power to completely figure you out. You are always one step ahead of the public.

 

Creating such a persona is not evil or demonic. We all wear masks in the social arena, playing different roles in different environments. You are simply becoming more conscious of the process. Play to the public. Give them something compelling and pleasurable to witness.

 

3.       See yourself as others see you

We all have social flaws like that we talk too much or are too honest in our criticisms of people offense too easily when others do not respond positively to our ideas. If we repeat instances of such behaviour often enough, we tend to offend people without ever really knowing why.

 

We need to learn to see ourselves objectively. To do this, we should look at negative events in the past unemotionally. Dissect these occurrences and see what you did that either triggered or worsened the dynamic. In looking at several such incidents, we might begin to see a pattern that indicates a particular flaw in our character. We can also elicit opinions from those we trust about our behaviour, making certain to first reassure them that we want their criticisms.

 

4.       Suffer fools gladly

Fools have a different scale of values. They place importance on short term matters – grabbing immediate money, getting attention from the public or media, and looking good. They are ruled by their ego and insecurities. They tend to enjoy drama and political intrigue for their own sake. When they criticize, they always emphasize matters that are irrelevant to the overall picture or argument. They are more interested in career or position than in the truth. You can distinguish them by how little they get done, or by how hard they make it for others to get results. They lack a certain common sense, getting worked up about things that are not really important while ignoring problems that will spell doom in the long term.

 

The natural tendency with fools is to lower yourself to their level. They annoy you, get under your skin, and draw you into a battle. In the process, you feel petty and confused. You simply waste valuable time and emotional energy.

 

In dealing with fools you must adopt the following philosophy: they are simply a part of life, like rocks or furniture. Smile at their antics and tolerate their presence as you would a foolish child. Avoid the madness of trying to change them. It is all part of human comedy, and it is nothing to get upset about or lose sleep over. If they are causing you trouble, you must neutralize the harm they do by keeping a steady eye on your goals and what is important, and ignoring them if you can.

Reversal

“It is a great folly to hope that other men will harmonize with us; I have never hoped this. I have always regarded each man as an independent individual, whom I endeavoured to understand with all his peculiarities, but from whom I desired no further sympathy. In this way have I been enabled to converse with every man, and thus alone is produced the knowledge of various characters and the dexterity necessary for the conduct of life."

- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

 

Mysteries behind the Writing Process

“You learn writing by writing.” I have so often heard this phrase and as the days go by, I understand the truths underlying behind it. When I wrote a first draft and completed it last year, it was futile to try and edit it. I didn’t know where to start and how to proceed further. It was because I can never write a book linearly, chronologically. I might be writing about how they had broken up yesterday and then write about how they fell in love today. So, at the end of the first draft, I had these massive bunch of pages that talk about the various scenes in people’s lives. The point of view and voices might change a lot between the scenes too. That’s why, short stories and poetry pretty much fitted me easily. I could hardly wander much there. Even if I did tend to, like the loyal sheep dog herding sheep, my pen would be herded by my stoic left brain to get back into the fence.

Something changed this time around. I started thinking about plotting and structure. My good bunch of NaNoWriMo friends told me plotting was not so bad for a pantser like me. So, after writing about nearly half of the first draft, I took a break to think. NaNoWriMo is just writing – just word count – thinking is not permitted. For 2-3 days, as my WC backlogged, I mulled over my story and then made some index cards. I wrote down a few lines about each scene I had written. Then, I placed them into the three act structure and marked the scenes pivotal to the hero’s journey. Quickly, I realised the scenes that were missing. Along the way, a perfectly thrilling climax showed itself up in my brain. I jotted it all down in more cards and placed them in their right slots. Hey presto, I was holding a cohesive draft in my hand.

I am still a pantser. It was after writing some 25000 words that I found out how the story ended. By the way, I have another early draft done some years ago for which I could never find an ending. So, at times, I shudder when I think what if I hadn’t found an end to this too. Then I remember Stephen King’s advice to keep writing as the characters do have to come out somewhere. Now, for the first time, I have an interconnected organised consistent draft. It still needs tons of editing but that is another story altogether.

Once this story is done, I am going back to those two drafts. They were wonderful tales, close to my heart and I’m going to give it my all to help them see the light of the day. Wish me luck!