{"id":279799,"date":"2018-10-24T13:08:35","date_gmt":"2018-10-24T13:08:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2018\/10\/24\/seperis-deciduqueen-tips-for-writing-an-essay\/"},"modified":"2018-12-06T15:55:49","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T15:55:49","slug":"seperis-deciduqueen-tips-for-writing-an-essay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2018\/10\/24\/seperis-deciduqueen-tips-for-writing-an-essay\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-279799 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-thumbnail'><figure class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<div class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2018\/10\/24\/seperis-deciduqueen-tips-for-writing-an-essay\/attachment\/279800\/'><img width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/tumblr_o7rc0llPaK1r4gsyio1_1280-150x150.png\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/tumblr_o7rc0llPaK1r4gsyio1_1280-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/tumblr_o7rc0llPaK1r4gsyio1_1280-100x100.png 100w\" sizes=\"100vw\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/seperis.tumblr.com\/post\/179307519430\/deciduqueen-tips-for-writing-an-essay-with\" class=\"tumblr_blog\" target=\"_blank\">seperis<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/deciduqueen.tumblr.com\/post\/144929997751\/tips-for-writing-an-essay-with-executive\" class=\"tumblr_blog\" target=\"_blank\">deciduqueen<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Tips for writing an essay with executive dysfunction: <b>do this.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Write out bits and pieces of the essay. When you get to a part you can\u2019t\/\u201ddon\u2019t want to\u201d write, put it in bold brackets. Get as much done as you can and come back in a half an hour or so!<\/p>\n<p>If the executive function is still bothering you, take it one bracket at a time. Don\u2019t delete the bracket until you\u2019re done\u00a0\u201cfilling it in,\u201d so to speak. If you need to take more breaks or hop to the next bracket, you can do that too! Similarly, if you have a thought you want to get down but you aren\u2019t sure how to word it, put it in bold brackets as well!<\/p>\n<p>It may not\u00a0\u201ccure\u201d the executive dysfunction or procrastination problems, but it makes writing the essay more like putting shapes in holes of the same shape. It can be a pain, but the process is a bit more streamlined and user-friendly.<\/p>\n<p>I know this may not work for everyone, but as someone who has really bad executive dysfunction and problems focusing (thank you, ADHD!) this works REALLY well for me! I hope by sharing it it can help other people (with and without executive dysfunction\/adhd) too! o\/<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>As someone with both, this actually works.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I started doing it with fanfic and carried it over to QA\/QC testing at work.\u00a0 It\u2019s biggest use is breaking procrastination which gets you in a shitty infinite loop of do-this-don\u2019t-feel-it-oh-webpage-do-this-don\u2019t-want-to-oh-article repeat like a goddamn break command, which for me is the biggest problem.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It visibly breaks down your task (write this thing) into smaller bite-size tasks (write this part of this thing).\u00a0 Each bracket is now a small part; you can almost pretend the big thing it comes from doesn\u2019t even exist.<\/p>\n<p>Do not underestimate how utterly gullible the brain is; you can trick it fairly easily if not consistently.<\/p>\n<p>Two examples:<br \/>1.) For QA\/QC testing,I write manual tests in spreadsheets where each vertical row is a step and can be fuck-knows how many steps (my record is around ninety-something steps). When my tests start, I have a brain-easy standard; open template with eight visible steps, paste in the standard first step and last two steps, then enter brackets\u2013<\/p>\n<p>Step 2: [SSP &#8211; Submit FS Application]\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Step 3: [STP &#8211; TLM here]\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Step 4: [TIERS &#8211; AppReg]<\/p>\n<p>Step 5: [STP &#8211; Appt]<\/p>\n<p>Step 6: [TIERS &#8211; Approve App]<\/p>\n<p>\u2013in the remaining five steps.\u00a0 Each of those five steps will be expanded to five or ten or fifty, I have no idea, but right now? There are eight.\u00a0 I can deal with eight.\u00a0 I can lowly expand to more [SSP &#8211; Create Account][SSP &#8211; Start Application for Food Stamps][SSP &#8211; One female HOH under thirty and one female child under five].\u00a0 Then I throw in the other TLM step because I just remembered I need that.<\/p>\n<p>Now I have<\/p>\n<p>Step 2: [SSP &#8211; Create Account] <\/p>\n<p>Step 3: [SSP &#8211; Start Application for FS]<\/p>\n<p>Step 4: [SSP &#8211; 2 HH, HOH F &lt;30\/F &lt; 5]<\/p>\n<p>Step 5: [STP &#8211; TLM here] <\/p>\n<p>Step 6: [TIERS &#8211; AppReg]<\/p>\n<p>Step 7 [STP &#8211; Appt]<\/p>\n<p>Step 8: [STP &#8211; TLM here]<\/p>\n<p>Step 9: [TIERS &#8211; Approve App]<\/p>\n<p>Then I go away and do something else sometimes, but sometimes, I can keep this up until I\u2019ve mapped most of the test.\u00a0 Each bracket step is replaced with actual step-out instructions eventually and will get to around fifty with this setup, but I have no idea.\u00a0 Each time I open it, it\u2019s still short, and I can visibly see my own progress; just as importantly, my brain thinks it\u2019s done, that I\u2019m just cleaning it up (I have no idea what my brain assumes but it works).\u00a0 It\u2019s not overwhelming; my brain doesn\u2019t lock up at the sheer scope; <i>I know this shit<\/i>.\u00a0 (I\u2019m actually a relative expert on this shit.)<\/p>\n<p>2.) This is how my journey to non-procrastination actually started.\u00a0 Bear with me, this require some explanations and set-up.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0For those reading <i>Down to Agincourt, <\/i>you\u2019ve probably read my comments about how the storyline went from around 18,000\/22,000 to current full count &gt;1.7 million words (&gt;5000 pages) and eight to nine books, not including the one that is all short stories.\u00a0 All of it, except the short stories, is in a single massive Master document I reguarly (and paranoidly now) back up.<\/p>\n<p>Until roughly mid-2015, it never occurred to me there was anything to break up, despite the honestly uncomfortable load time. This despite the fact at this point it had automated word count and automated scene count and a timeline created in a massive Excel spreadsheet that also houses a full character list and vital statistics.\u00a0 It\u2019s not like I didn\u2019t see the word count and number of characters and massive timeline with scene breakdown every day, right?\u00a0 I\u2019d talk about it to people.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>So how is it that until roughly half-way through posting <i>Map of the World<\/i>, I really wasn\u2019t entirely aware of how fucking huge this was?\u00a0 How do you go from 18K to around a million words in three and a half years and not really realize it?\u00a0 That\u2019s around 700-800 words a day if I wrote every day. And yet.<\/p>\n<p>Here we go; this is the setup.<\/p>\n<p>You may have noticed the \u2013 Day X \u2013 that appear in chapters and sometimes cross chapters.\u00a0 Those weren\u2019t actually some kind of style decision originally; they were just timestamps for scenes I wanted to write for my totally this is a writing exercise while coming out of severe depression and later, my dad\u2019s death.\u00a0 That was literally it; I wasn\u2019t writing linearly, I was being chased by depression and using words between it and me, and to do that, I wrote whatever came into my head, which was a shitload of my Id in action.<\/p>\n<p>(Like many people with clinical depression, the worst possible thing is the apathy; the only way for me personally to avoid that is to do something, anything that can lock my mind to the here-and-now, and apparently, this goddamn story was what worked.)<\/p>\n<p>While trying to track down porn scenes\u2013unsurprisingly, I really liked re-reading and working on those\u2013I started using bookmarks to jump around, but Word\u2019s interface for them sucked.\u00a0 I needed something better, and this segued beautifully into my second favorite self-soothing method: scripting.\u00a0 Back in the day, I\u2019d learned HTML and CSS so I could post my fic on a webpage and not just usenet; this led to buying a domain and running an archive or two. My best method of learning something new is a clear and reachable goal, and my best defense against depression is work: it was the perfect storm.<\/p>\n<p>So I learned VBA, how to write an add-in, and created a new Word bookmarker with an easy pop-up interface I could open from the ribbon or quick access toolbar.\u00a0 Then I\u00a0mapped the entire story by my pre-existing Day X timestamp, quite literally to find my favorite scenes, and noted bookmark + description in a very simple spreadsheet timeline that\u2019s turned into two very large spreadsheets because that happened.<\/p>\n<p>Unintended consequence:\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In my head, the story was not\u2013what it is\u2013but a series of days. When each day period got too long and I had to scroll a lot through it, I\u2019d bookmark right before a favorite scene \u2013Day X_A \u2013 \u2013Day X_B\u2013 so I could find it.\u00a0 When I opened the doc, I never really looked at it; I opened my bookmark interface and went to what I wanted to write.\u00a0 Eventually, I had a function to bookmark my last position temporary so it would jump there immediately on open so half the time, even the sheer number of bookmarks didn\u2019t penetrate; in other words, my sense of scope was roughly four paragraphs to thirty pages aka the min\/max space between two bookmarks.\u00a0 Even when I started tracking word count\u2013again, I\u2019d learned VBA so why not add that to the spreadsheet?\u2013it wasn\u2019t real. That was <i>scripting,<\/i>\u00a0how I self-soothed, and in a completely different medium, not <i>writing<\/i>.\u00a0 They were\u2013to my brain\u2013entirely unrelated things.<\/p>\n<p>To my brain, one document meant it was one story and a story doesn\u2019t sound long, does it?\u00a0 The bookmarking meant this one document is one story that is never more than roughly thirty pages long at any given time, or the min\/max between two bookmarks.<\/p>\n<p>According to my brain, Agincourt overall is one story of about thirty pages written.\u00a0 Even now.<\/p>\n<p>When I do final edits, I copy the chapter into another document with bookmarks and save.\u00a0 The longest chapter I posted was forty thousand words.\u00a0 It was bookmarked into ten page increments at my favorite scenes to edit.<\/p>\n<p>According to my brain, Agincourt is overall one story of about ten pages to edit.<\/p>\n<p><b><i>This is what I mean about tricking your brain.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<p>This wasn\u2019t deliberate or something I thought about until I started posting <i>Map of the World<\/i>, at which time I briefly and horrifically realized actual fucking\u00a0<i>scope.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Then I thought about what happened, shifted this to my work life, and got a raise, a promotion, and a reputation for being really organized, detail oriented, with an incredibly strong work ethic, and incredibly smart, and I am really fucking not.<\/p>\n<p>(I\u2019d learned VBA, and work is spreadsheet oriented.\u00a0 I used this method to literally map out every screen of an entire program with all options in a multisheet spreadsheet over two months\u2013talk about insane fucking scope\u2013and wrote in functions to navigate it in bite-sized pieces; the whole is unreal and as it turns out, had a side effect of being both incredibly useful to a startling number of people but also tricked them into thinking I know shit.\u00a0 This kind of changed my work life forever.\u00a0 Recently when I went up to defend a bug report someone actually said:\u00a0\u201cI\u2019d trust her over my own eyes.\u00a0 It\u2019s definitely valid; check it again.\u201d I mean sure, I was right, but <i>holy fuck that happened?\u00a0 <\/i>Do they know my laundry hills qualify as mountains and I\u2019m down to one fork because I haven\u2019t done dishes\u2013uh, in a while?\u00a0 I can and have lost my own shoes under my own table for days.)<\/p>\n<p>Specific examples I remember of how this worked.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>a.) For <i>It\u2019s the Stars That Lie<\/i>, fully a third of the entire length didn\u2019t exist except in brackets for scenes between other scenes.\u00a0 I called all of them [More here].\u00a0 \u00a0I still have a lot of those throughout later books.<\/p>\n<p>b.) For those who read <i>A Thousand Lights in Space<\/i>, the entire beginning in Ichabod\u2013ALL OF IT\u2013looked something like this:<\/p>\n<p>[Day X &#8211; Ichabod &#8211; Main street like Bartlett?]<\/p>\n<p>[Alison and Dean talk]<\/p>\n<p>[More here]<\/p>\n<p>So I could indulge myself with something like thirty pages or something of Dean and Cas in the cabin eating and being passive aggressive about the laptop and wandering around the camp digging holes.<\/p>\n<p>c.) For <i>The Game of God<\/i>, the <i>entire action Croat sequence <\/i>outside the walls with Dean and co was this<\/p>\n<p>[ Run, fight Croats, northwestern door, make out in snow]<\/p>\n<p>Followed by Dean and Cas making out in the snow scene.\u00a0 At one point, early on, this led to sex nearby but as you are aware, that part was necessarily cut for death scenes and gods being born and Roman women being dramatic.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Brain?\u00a0 Tricked.\u00a0 Due to reasons which I\u2019ve discussed, I had to stop final edits of the end of Game of God and moved to edit later books that don\u2019t have those specific triggers.\u00a0 It still works brilliantly for those, and I\u2019ve been using it to tentatively edit Game of God in single page increments and making progress, though it probably helps that I\u2019ve been on medication that\u2019s slowly but surely working.<\/p>\n<p>The specific actions taken<i>\u00a0<\/i>here aren\u2019t necessarily applicable to most people, but the <i>method<\/i>\u00a0is.\u00a0 Break down your task into discrete <i>tasks<\/i>\u00a0and if needed, each discrete task into more, smaller tasks. Find the ones you want to do, skip the ones you don\u2019t now.\u00a0 Come back and look at the ones you don\u2019t want to do.\u00a0 Break those down until you find parts you do.\u00a0 Repeat.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>When your brain rebels and starts the cycle, <i>do something else to break out of it<\/i>. It can be a related task that exists or, like me learning VBA because that shit\u2019s fun, it\u2019s a task that didn\u2019t exist but I created because I really wanted to do it and then <i>made it related<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>(Note: If you want the Work bookmarker, it\u2019s an add-in you are welcome to email me for and works in all office versions. I wrote it from scratch by hand so it\u2019s safe. It is really really cool.) <\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>seperis: deciduqueen: Tips for writing an essay with executive dysfunction: do this. Write out bits and pieces of the essay. When you get to a part you can\u2019t\/\u201ddon\u2019t want to\u201d write, put it in bold brackets. Get as much done as you can and come back in a half an hour or so! If the &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2018\/10\/24\/seperis-deciduqueen-tips-for-writing-an-essay\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[67,466,4,45],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279799"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279799"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":279801,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279799\/revisions\/279801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}