#but also for the sake of this draft i am prioritizing function over form

[ichorblossoms]

makes little jazz hands wip wednesday yaaaaaayyyyy

the current beginning of p2 i have written is already outdated so i'm not gonna share it but this little snippet is canon. for now shglkfd

mind any first draft jank like always, getting into grimm's head is something i especially want to rewrite after i have a solid draft down when i have a better idea of how to convey their thought processes and contrast that with the narration but! gotta start somewhere

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[P2- Grimm POV, it/its for Grimm, he/him for Yarrow]

Out in the desert, away from Rappock and people and Yarrow, Grimm only had itself to lie to. It spent the past few days scoping out the few hiding places in and around the town; old, abandoned houses, makeshift shelters people had hidden out in once upon a time, ancient concrete drains with rotting bedrolls in them—any place a person could feasibly hole up. Yesterday it was the ones to the southwest, today was the west, tomorrow would be the northwest, it wasted its time travelling clockwise. I’m being thorough.

Grimm didn’t expect to find anything important in them, part of it knew Bella Perez was not in Rappock, wherever she was, but maybe it could find another lead, some better information to go by than a vague sense she went southeast before it left for good. 

A week and a half. That’s how long it had been staying in Yarrow’s house. It needed to leave that cloying place for its own good, yet all the same, it knew it would turn Storm around in a few hours and ride right on back. It had to pick up dinner on the way home too—Yarrow had cooked or shared his leftovers with it nearly every night the past week and Grimm couldn’t allow that again. It overstayed its welcome and then some.

Grimm knew a good thing when it had one, the question was how long it would take things to go wrong. I won't stay to find out.

On Tuesday, a man had showed up at the clinic’s door with a hearty plate of home-cooked food for him as thanks for his appointment earlier and Yarrow, damn him, insisted that Grimm eat it while he made himself dinner. Grimm turned him down and the stalemate ended with them splitting the food and Yarrow cooking up an extra side.

Of course Yarrow of all people would find a way to live like that, so close to other people and embedded in their lives. How did giving come so easily to him? Why couldn’t he see it was wasted on something like it, who would only leave? Or was he trying to keep it there, lure it into false comfort so it’s stay?

No. No, Yarrow wouldn’t think like that. He wore his heart on his sleeve and meant it.

If anything, Grimm was grateful he wouldn’t be hurt when it left; it didn’t quite know if Yarrow would survive out here when it left all those years ago. Being proven wrong was a relief.

And so it rode, another hour of thinking of nothing in particular but the desert before it. Animal tracks and smells dotted the landscape. A coyote passed through a few hours ago. Javelinas lived nearby. Vultures picked apart a day-old horse carcass.

Fifteen minutes later, it spotted a cow. Definitely someone’s, there weren’t any wild ones out here. It rode over.

[grimm coaxes it to follow, this might even take up a ~page or so of panels depending on things..? the point is more to show grimm working]

“C’mon, let’s get you back.” The cow was absolutely not Grimm’s to worry about, but the two of them were heading back to Rappock regardless. Maybe it’d get some cash in thanks for its deed, not like it hadn't done this for work before.

She wasn't much of a hassle, but every so often she'd begin to drift off and Grimm would have to steer her back on course. She wanted to wander. Grimm couldn’t exactly blame her, “Sorry, just takin’ y’home.”

[bigskydreaming]

How do you tackle this set of ADD/ ADHD problems? You start writing, you veer off path, rambling now, oh no it's becoming a book have to make conscious effort to end this train of written thoughts! Vs. Revising! Editing! Going over the entire thing you wrote! I have the added bonus of skipping phrases, from one word per paragraph To Whole Sentences! And I somehow skip again during revisions. I hate it here!!

Ooof. Its not easy and takes a lot of trial and error to figure out, at least for me. Its also a big part of why my posting style is the way it is....it is really easy for me to draft and write a lot quickly, but the editing and revising process takes me SO much longer because I have to keep.....resetting my eyes back to the top as I realize halfway through editing a paragraph that I’ve gotten distracted and allowed my mind to wander even while I kept moving my eyes down the page as though that actually accomplishes any editing....lol. So I like....have to prioritize. I pretty much have to stockpile my editing/revising projects for when I can afford to devote a full day of medication to the process because like.....its one of the things that I absolutely just CAN NOT pull off when not on my medication, I just.....keep going through the motions and never quite pay enough attention to actually be worth it. 

Luckily, over the years of kinda....developing my own inadvertent coping mechanisms for my ADHD while growing up, since I didn’t get my diagnosis until much later in life, like....I somewhere along the line got pretty good at drafting things in such a way that I don’t tend to NEED a ton of edits. Like my drafts are always fairly clean and legible and say what I want them to say....they just say a lot more than I need to say too, lol. Essentially, my drafts ARE my posting style, that’s what they look like, and in my editing process, I just....take a weedwhacker and hack and slash my way through the unnecessary stuff and trim things down until I get an actual polished product.

But because like, that editing process is so, so crucial to my process and like, I HAVE to be on my meds during it and whatnot....that’s why I don’t really bother editing my posts or trying to keep them short and just....word vomit on the page whatever I’m trying to spit out as quickly as it comes and then just move on to the next thing. I could make each of my posts as polished as any fic I write, lol, its just.....in order to do that I’d end up writing 75% less than I do as is, because its not the writing that takes up my time and focus, its the editing and trimming. 

So basically I mean, for me, personally, it ultimately came down to figuring out what my personal priorities were and aligning this with my medication schedule/how fast I metabolize and building an actual writing and editing schedule and process around this, specifically in regards to Official Projects I’ve dedicated myself too.....

And then the tradeoff, the ‘sacrifice’ so to speak, in order to allow me to maximize the amount of time-while-medicated I can devote to the stuff where that’s most crucial, like editing, is that like....I give myself permission to just NOT regulate the stuff I do where ‘good enough’ will suffice. I mean, I’m perfectionist as hell, so it wasn’t easy to train myself into accepting it as a necessity, lol, but at the end of the day, like I’ve always said - my blog is just my personal thing, everything I post is stuff I just need to get out of my head and onto a page somewhere as much as it is stuff I want or need to put in front of other peoples’ eyes.....so, y’know, at the end of the day, it doesn’t HAVE to be anything other than what it is, the way I do it. I can post whatever whenever and I don’t need to be like, on my meds or on a specific schedule or routine to do stuff like this, and it occasionally grates because sometimes like when I AM on my meds and wrap up a work session early and pop on tumblr while still medicated, I look at some of my posts and I’m just like oh for fuck’s sake, why. LOL. But. Whatever. Y’know?

So that’s my advice I guess. I know the Trials of Rambling Exponential Explosion of Growth from one totally manageable idea into like, a whole fucking book when it really didn’t have to be like that, brain, and its annoying and can definitely end up cutting into your productivity despite being ironically ‘more’ productive......and for me, the answer ended up just being....to stop seeing it as a problem. Giving myself a break and not trying to tell myself it was an Issue that I needed to find a solution to, that this was me doing writing wrong and I was never gonna get anything done this way. 

And instead I just kinda....let it be what it is and found a way to repurpose my rambling kind of writing and the time/energy I’d felt was being ‘wasted’ by that, like.....instead of finding a way to stop it from happening, instead I just focused on figuring out a way to get something useful out of it when and where it does happen....when ultimately, it was going to happen no matter what. 

And that eventually ended up being like....this blog. My posting style and habits and my just...using it to burn off the more frenetic of my writing energy so that when I actually want to write in a ‘productive’ sense as in something that will be polished, that I concentrate on editing, that’s meant to not just be read but ENJOYED as a reading experience....I HAVE the time and mental space and focus and spot carved out in my medication schedule that I can devote to that, because I’m not wasting all of THAT stuff trying to just.....rework the things I crank out in my more manic-writing-sessions, like my posts, which are ‘good enough’ as is and don’t ACTUALLY need the benefit of me being on my meds or spending time editing and revising them into a more polished form....not when I don’t actually need them to be that in order to serve the function I’m intending them to be.

Basically......instead of trying to make everything I write perfect and necessitating I cut my content production in half and settle for only getting a much more finite amount of the stuff in my head that’s labeled To Be Written, like, from there and onto the page....I let the stuff that doesn’t actually need to be peffect have permission to exist just as it is the way it comes out initially, even when its all rambling and spat out in a rush...and save my polish and the physical and mental resources I need to devote to something to MAKE it polished for like.....just the stuff I really need or want to be that way in the end.

And that way, I don’t waste my time essentially just doing the same stuff twice and get to keep my production levels up to something I’m happy with instead of down where I’d constantly be kicking myself about how little content I actually manage to get out into the world and instead is just stuck up in my head driving me nuts and annoying me.