Trying to sort a few things out

[kiya]

Life update: Overwhelmed, but no longer perpetually seethingly furious. Completely burned out on the babe, who apparently sees me and wants to nurse (but is more or less fine most of the time if I'm not visible), and who spent four hours today screaming about not wanting to go down for her nap, which was a bit much to handle.

Somewhere along the line I feel like I've lost a couple of threads on things I was supposedly working on. I went through a period in my Craft training where a particular subset of techniques was easy as anything, something that I was managing to pull off doing nearly constantly, and now it's actively difficult when I actively try. I'm trying not to feel too discouraged by this, because I suspect it has to do with the stress levels around here. I'm hoping to get the pieces back together soon enough, but it still feels like backsliding.

I'm feeling stressed about writing. The onion-hoeing project is ... hard. I've whinged about this before. At the moment I've got scraps and pieces and I want to put them into a file, and in the ideal world I could put them into a file that's basically hyperlinked to an outline and shuffle things around in the outline and see where the shapes on the thing are, but I don't really have a program that can do that (and the one that's closest to being able to do that cannot handle footnotes, which is even more untenable). The program I'm using has an auto-table of contents thing, but if I set it up so it will work with the document it starts fucking with the formatting in ways that drive me spare. I may do what I did with the Traveller's Guide and do a table of contents by hand so I can see what I've written and - perhaps more importantly - where in the document I've put it. I've also got things in fifty zillion separate files. It's driving me nuts.

I can't get any clear sense of flow if I can't spread things out and see where they are, and I can't do that easily at all. I'm now suspecting that by the end of this project I'm going to need to set up an office space with a whiteboard that I can scribble structural stuff all over so I can figure out where it all goes. Because right now what I've got is completely kibbled, it's bits and pieces chopped up and scattered.

I need to find some focus, and get space to do some work, but - again - the Attack Beeker spends most of her time in my company waving her arms and crying "Meem meem meem!" unless I nurse her right then, even if I just nursed her ten minutes ago. I can't get her to eat substantial amounts of solid food - as I was commenting the other day, she'll eat one food at a time and we generally don't know what it is.

(Though currently 'rice' seems to work, and she'll eat fried rice, garlic-flavored rice, etc. So the breakfast plate at the moment has the usual selection of fruit (flung on floor), cheese (ignored), toast (carried about and discarded somewhere random), and fried rice (eaten grain by grain). She did eat a small piece of turkey and a quarter of a roll at Thanksgiving at frozencapybara's, though.)

Comments

[kaifu.livejournal.com]

On the organization of writing front, have you tried Scrivener? I haven't actually tried it myself, but it does look pretty awesome and says it has footnote support. (I don't think it has Endnote handshake support, which is why I haven't gotten the trial copy to play with.)

[ardaniel]

I was gonna say. Do you have Scrivener? Do you need it?

[kiya]

I am not familiar with it. I will look into it when I scrape together a handful of cognitive capacity.

[zeborah]

What happens if you put things into the fried rice (like peas, chopped ham, or suchlike)? (I'm now recalling my youngest brother who, faced with a plate of this kind of thing, would have painstakingly separated the rice, peas, carrot, meat, and what else ever each into its own separate pile before ever starting eating any of it. Even if he intended to eat it all. Fortunately he grew out of this.)

[kiya]

With the chicken fried rice we were testing the fried rice theory with, she picked at the rice, threw the chicken at the cat, and tried to feed a bean sprout to teinedreugan.

[zeborah]

Oh well, sounds like at least the cat profited from the deal. :-)

[queenofhalves]

in the writing situation you describe, i think i would print out the sections and spread them out on the floor, possibly after putting big colorful labels on the first page of each section. then you can move them around visually without a problem, and pick a part up and read it in detail easily at the same time.

[hawlla.livejournal.com]

Being a mom is one of the most difficult jobs you will ever have. This is both a blessing and a nightmare. It is entirely a balancing act. You have to balance being a mom and a career as well as your hobbies or personal projects. I find my balancing act is entirely tipped in favor of the child in the hopes of one day being able to work on my personal projects... and that has yet to happen.

I hate to say it, but I'm fairly glad Rowan wasn't interested in nursing as a babe. I don't know what I would do if I was considered the walking-talking bottle all of the time.

It took a while to get R onto solid foods. It mostly went with "you will sit down and you will eat these minced baby foods because I say so." After he ate whatever I decided, he then was given a bottle. Is this a feasible project with the babe?

[hawlla.livejournal.com]

And in regards to the writing, I can only say to bounce back to your roots.

When I started my on-going project, I bought a notebook and a binder. The binder houses random tidbits of interesting information that I had photocopied or printed from the Internet. The notebook is full of my random scribbling notes.

This is pretty typical behavior at some ages

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

If you look at it from a behavioral standpoint, the Beeker's behavior is perfectly rational: when she waves her arms and screams she gets something she likes. If it worked for me, I might do it too.

When she was a newborn, crying was instinctive and the only way she could get her needs met. Now the situation is less desperate, but crying still works -- but now it's a learned behavior, something that works. It may be time to start teaching her that it doesn't actually work so well any more -- that you are a person, not a walking milk bar. Which you can do by politely and calmly refusing to nurse when you feel she's had enough and is just being greedy. She'll throw a fit, but she'll live through it, and eventually you'll have a better-natured human being.

A good trick is to catch her being sweet and reward her then. hawlla's advice is good too: give her what she wants after she does what you want.

They're darling and innocent, but completely unscrupulous. I remember a child learning a way of asking for things before she learned to talk. She already had a way -- she'd point and vocalize -- but she observed one of her baby friends doing the same thing in a more desperate tone of voice, and she quickly learned that it got results a lot faster, so she adopted it. It was annoying to us grownups, but that wasn't her problem.

[donperros.livejournal.com]

At risk of totally derailing your writing while you learn to use it, do you know TeX/LaTeX? Weird formatting of the name aside, it's fantastic. Auto table of contents, footnotes, you name it.

You have to learn to let go of some kinds of MS Word formatting control, and to accept that Donald Knuth knows more about typesetting that you do, but in return you get a very powerful document processing system.

You ought to avoid the dark side, a program called LyX (supposedly a WYSIWY Mean editor, but what really ends up as a bad tool for Word users), since it tries to reformat your document for you, in ways that are not as awesome as letting TeX do whatever it wants. Instead, you need a good plaintext editor, one that is significantly more flavorful than TextEdit/Notepad.

You'll either use it for everything or decide you hate it with a burning passion, in direct proportion to whether or not you can allow it to handle most of the formatting.