This morning, I woke up with a murderous headache and attitude problem, and decided to skip yoga and walking. Just a foul mood, lots of “who do you think you are, you can’t write, you’ll die a failure, alone and afraid” stuff.
I went over what I’ve been doing recently, and I think the mood has nothing to do with the writing (which went slowly yesterday but well). I wrote a scene between Mr. Assassin and a psycho character that made me go, “Yes, well, the whole Batman/Joker thing makes sense now.” Like, Mr. Assassin is genuinely, pants-shittingly scared of this woman, not because he can’t hurt her, but because of the double bind of a) it would wreck her mom if anything happened to her, and b) it would wreck him if she happened to anyone else. Which means he has to cooperate with her at the moment, and which will eventually mean her hurting someone. Just not *right* now, and there’s someone unconscious in the back seat while he’s driving down Gold Camp Road at midnight.
VERY satisfying to write.
I think I’m more mad at myself for not having the business side of things in order (fair). I’m gonna talk to Jamie about the tentative plan and see if she can find any major holes or places where I need to think things through better. It’s time.
Also, I think that the thing I was doing with my head and neck yesterday, as gentle as it seemed at the time, stirred up some shit. The thoughts that were going wrong this morning were very “head” thoughts, monkey-mind if you know what that is.
It seems to be a pattern that as soon as I do something good for my body, there comes a test to see whether I really want to commit to it or not.
“Less tension in your neck? Fine. The reason you have more tension in your neck is to help control anxiety. Let’s see if you can face the unfiltered anxiety, shall we?”
If I let myself relax while sitting in my chair in front of the keyboard, what I feel is a bone-deep ache in my sinuses, a temperature spike, and a tension in my solar plexus, but a pleasant comforting feeling in the back of my neck. Traps are tense around the shoulders, but more so on the opposite side than usual. Relaxing doesn’t directly stir up thoughts, but I do feel particularly head-oriented today (vs. heart or guts).
Midjourney stuff: I found a switch for –chaos, which has a range of 1-100 (e.g., –chaos 10, –chaos 90, etc.). It feels like –style tends to control the “how” of the image generation, and –chaos tends to control the “what” of the image generation. So if you’re working on it and are getting a bunch of nonsense, you may want to try something like –chaos 19 to help tame a bit of the nonsense, or trying a range of –chaos <value> to see whether the images respond to having more or less chaos. It’s weird. I’ve been seeing times where more chaos produces a more intelligible image (but more times where less chaos produces a more intelligible image).
Continued playing will ensue.