Patterns

Boredom and I don’t get along very well, so years ago I found a way to turn routine tasks into games. It’s all about patterns. Either recognizing them, or creating them.

I remember how I handled homework in elementary school. My teachers loved repetition, and would assign writing 10 vocabulary words 20 times each.

Boring!

So, I’d draw vertical lines to create 5 columns, then count down 20 lines. I’d do this on 2 pieces of paper. This created 2 canvases of 100 units each.

Each column was assigned a word. Then I’d fill in a unit with the appropriate word to create whatever pattern I’d chosen – usually something simple like a tree, house, or flower. I’d complete both pictures and admire them, then fill in all the empty units so no one could tell I’d used the words to create a picture.

For some reason part of the fun was keeping my pattern-making secret.

I had a similar thing I’d do with math facts. All I needed was a grid.

Fast forward to now. Washington has been locked down for 8 months. Eight frustrating, over-crowded, claustrophobic-inducing months.

Boredom is big.

But since I’ve dealt with boredom many times before, I know all I have to do is make a game out of one of my routine tasks. Like writing.

For some unfathomable reason, I decided it would be fun to work on 6 novels at the same time until I had them all at the first draft stage. At the same time.

I reached that goal last month.

Obviously I didn’t think it through all the way, because now I have 6 novels, sitting on my computer, waiting for rewrites.

Did I mention that rewrites are my least favorite part of the writing process?

Fun times!