Writing life: A drive to the coast, trees, little cats and big cats

I took a break from writing fiction over the last weekend. 

Even two days off changes the thinking and writing patterns. It’s probably because the mind gets filled with lots of other thoughts and interactions with other people’s vibes. It’s like visiting vastly different head spaces.

We went for a drive to visit family in a small town on the coast called Machilipatnam or MTM as we call it because it’s such a big name to pronounce. And I was thrilled to see pink trumpet (tabebuia rosea) trees along the highway besides the usual yellow poinciana which have been around for years. 

They’re so pretty! 😍

I’m thankful to whoever had the thought to plant them. It’s a nice change from the minimal palmyra trees.

 

I guess the pink trees are part of the beautification drive for the areas surrounding the new capital city and quantum valley tech park that’s coming up. 

 

Yellow poinciana in bloom🌳🌳🌳 

The mango trees are beginning to bloom. It’s mango season but the mango harvest only lasts about 2 months. Took some pictures under the mango trees at the house. And a Java plum tree and an orange tree that I started from seed and planted about 2 years ago. 

The Java plum has grown taller. It makes me happy to remember the little sapling which has now turned into a big tree. I hope it will grow there for many years and bring a happy vibe to everyone who sees it.

 

In my experience, it’s true that being surrounded by green spaces helps the mind get into a creative state easily. The Japanese have this concept of Shinrin yoku or “forest bathing” which is all about immersing one’s senses with the visuals, sounds and fragrance of a tree-filled atmosphere. It feels like a healing reset button for the psyche. 🌳🌴

It was late night by the time we got back to the city and Biscuitus had missed us so much but cheered up after some treats and petting. I feel really bad to leave him alone at home for longer than absolutely necessary. 

He made lots of biscuits to show how happy he was. Sweet little love!

 

😻 Biscuit maker paws 💖🐾 

 

I haven’t had time to focus on my Biscuitus stories because the historical fiction writing flow is going well. I’ve written about 40K words on the story I restarted over Lent. And I really want to finish it by the end of April.

I’ve been reading a lot of stories from other genres but set in the same time period and location to get a better feel for the setting. The funny thing is that the historical research gets a little too real when one dives in too much. I even dreamed about it. A kind of drone view dream of flying over that place during that time, a couple of centuries ago. It felt so real.

Maybe its a good thing because this level of immersion helps make the stories more realistic.

 

Little cat stories 

As for the Biscuitus stories, I’ve been thinking about a leopard character and a cheetah as his friends or supporting characters.  

I made this AI image of Biscuitus, the mighty Roman warrior for a vision board. It's the way I see him because he's got that cattitude 😹

 

Cheetahs and leopards are absolutely gorgeous. There’s something so thrilling about watching a Cheetah run. I feel sad for the prey but at least it was a quick end. I don’t want to outrun that cheetah LOL I wanna give him head scratches and chin rubs and call him my baby puddykins and cuddle him 😻💕

More cheetah cuteness but I don’t agree with the idea of keeping them as house pets where they can’t run free and live free unless it's to breed them till they can be on their own and release them into a safe habitat. Sadly, they're almost going extinct.

 

Leopard stories from the old days 

My grandparents used to tell me big cat stories from the early days when they bought a few acres of land and built a house that was somewhat remote. Apparently, my great grandfather, who was a quiet school headmaster, owned a rifle and kept it in his house for self-defense from predators back in the early 1900s. 

 

Cute, majestic and probably murderous puddykin who's likely making lunch plans! 

 

There was a story about a leopard that entered a house. The woman of the house got so scared when she saw it that she climbed into an iron trunk while the leopard tried to get her out.

After a while, it gave up and climbed up on a loft (houses were built with high ceilings back then because it was hot and there was no air conditioning). Her husband and my great grandfather realized what was going on and went in with rifles to chase it out.

They didn’t know that the big cat was sitting up on the loft until it jumped down right on the man’s back and mauled him a bit. They tried to shoot it but it escaped.

My grandmother did say that they had a leopard skin wall hanging in their house when she was a kid. Back then, I guess wildlife preservation wasn’t a big focus (no human encroachment into their habitat meant a thriving wildlife) and it was about controlling a large predator population.

There were stories about leopards walking into human habitations to prey on small animals for food. They belong to the genus Panthera pardus fusca and are quite similar to the American Jaguar which is more widely known.

There was another time when my grandmother and her sister were coming home from their British-run boarding school (early 1900s in the present-day TN/AP border hilly region called the ghats) for the holidays on their horse-drawn carriage or Jatka, when a leopard jumped over the horse. 

Maybe the leopard wanted to try horse or humans for dinner but he was scared away by the driver.

There were lots of stories like these.

I’d like to build on some of these original stories for my Biscuitus series.

It’s important to get the balance right for the story. A friendship or alliance between a small house cat and two big cats? Maybe they’re different in size but their personalities are on the same page? Or they share the same quest? Or the house cat has a big attitude to match his larger cousins?

The real Biscuitus has spread out on the day bed beside my desk, all four paws up in the air to cool down his furry belly. He’s dreaming about something because his whiskers and paws are twitching :D

He’s likely getting visions of the pigeons dancing and performing aerodynamic feats outside the balcony. And it's a full-on predator mode dream about grabbing them based on the way his paws are moving :D

He’s a dreamer too and deserves his own stories!

Guess he’s feeling the heat with that paws up pose. Summer’s set in and we’re already getting what we refer to as the outdoor sauna treatment.

 

My bougainvillea's leaves wilting in the heat 🔥 

 

It’s mid-April and the heat waves have begun on the South East coast. Day temperatures have already crossed 40 C and the nights’ lowest temp is about 25 so not enough to cool down. I’ve put a watermelon, musk melon and pomegranates in the fridge for dessert.

The only way through summer is to stay in an air conditioned environment. Inside a building or in a car. This is why no one here enjoys summer and we wait for the Southwest monsoon to kick in around late June and cool things down a bit with some rainy weather.

 

A rare rainy day in April with a view of trees from my balcony and gorgeous white egrets flying over them 💗 

 

If anyone ever reads this, please forgive the typos and punctuation. These blog posts are meant to be a stream of consciousness, free flow writing exercise to unlock the flow when I feel creatively stuck. It’s just an exercise in writing whatever to get the fictional flow going again.

It’s not meant to be a professional piece of writing and it’s a creative exercise to get the mental brakes off, get out of the box and play around with words and expression. A kind of warm up before the actual workout.

I guess that’s a writing tip for writers and other creatives. Just get in and write whatever and the tap turns on. 

If anyone ever reads this, thank you for your patience with my ramblings and please drop me a comment or email or DM my biscuitus_catus Instagram, if anything resonated.

#writinglife #freeflowwriting #creativewritingexercise

Writing life: My Lent writing experiment and reflections

 

Hmmm… the day after Easter has arrived and I’m looking back on my Lent discipline to stay offline and be more productive, spiritual and creative.

It was not easy.

Cutting out hours of online time to refocus that time on my creative and spiritual goals by staying offline was somewhat effective but probably not as dramatic life changing as I optimistically hoped it would be.

But it was a learning experience. I gained more understanding of my mental focus, writing limits and daily variations, and how to nudge the creative sessions a bit further with better self-talk, mental rehearsal and a “just draft it without perfecting it right now” that allowed the skeletal framework of the scene to come into being without a fully fleshed out production.

I’ve been tracking my daily word counts on an excel sheet for several months. And learned that while this creates an understanding of the ebb and flow of the process, it should not be treated as a benchmark that creates pressure.

There were days when 2500+ words flowed easily with an easy mental movie to finger typing, story writing flow. And then the struggling days when 600 words felt like pushing a rock up a hill.

So, I’ve had to learn not to expect the high days every day. And spend my evenings trying to figure out how to make it easier.

One important learning was that it’s more difficult to ease off the pressure and let it flow than to push harder to meet the day’s goals.

Sometimes, I need to stop and change focus to something else. Maybe just retire a struggling scene for the day and pick up a more interesting part to flesh out from one of the other chapter outlines.

This disrupts the expectations of a linear flow and some days feel less like a clear river flowing and more like a giant tree fell across the river blocking the flow and making a muddy pool.

But switching to a different scene allows the blocked space to clear naturally. 

 

On those days when it feels difficult, I remind myself of my years as a marketing copywriter for an IT company. That type of writing demanded a machine-like logic without much room for creativity. It was like forcing the part of my brain that wanted to create a magical world to build a boxy structure instead.

I was grateful to have a seat in front of a glass wall with a view of the trees outside which was better than an open office plan or cubicles with no view. But there was a feeling of being chained to that laptop and dreaming of escaping that daily mental marathon of churning out IT marketing copy on a hamster wheel.

I could literally feel the creative juice in my brain drying up writing things like “improve after sales customer satisfaction levels by delivering… proactively predict redundancies… leverage resources…”

The morning to evening hours felt like a progressively wilting plant in a cubicle. Every evening, I’d spend the commute home eagerly drenching my dried up brain looking at the sunset and green trees to bring back some of that life again and restore the balance.

Today, I wrote about a world that existed almost two centuries ago and my readers love it. I’m thankful to be able to create my own worlds, write my stories in my own space, with my cat on my desk, trees outside my window and no more icky IT writing.

What I accomplished during the days of Lent this year… 

• Finished a historical fiction story of 25k words.
• Restarted a shelved historical fiction story that I’ve been stuck on for months. Made new chapter outlines and wrote a few more chapters. I’m on track to finish it this month if I stay and progressively improve on the offline discipline I built over my Lent days. I really want to publish it this month and give this the main focus. These are written under a pen name.
• Created more dialog snippets, scene ideas, character prototypes and lyrics for my cat Biscuitus’ fantasy series under my real name. This is a passion project and I’ve decided to give this only an hour a day.

Each year’s Lent discipline teaches me new things. I’m going to continue practicing this year’s daily disciplines and apply the lessons to my daily creative practice. Focus on taking care of the process so the results flow from it.

The dreams of one finished story every month are calling out to me like the dryads and tree spirits in Narnia :D

#writinglife #creativeprocess