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 see where I could add more words to change the picture into a different, recognizable item. Then I’d fill in all the empty units so no one could tell I’d used the words to create pictures.
For some reason part of the fun was keeping my pattern-making a 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!