Day 4 Still haven`t figured out how to change my É to a question mark! I looked it up in `help` and also online. Other people said it helped them – not me. I`m going to have a lot of editing to do when I`m finished! I took a lovely walk outside when I had my break today. I was in a t-shirt on November 4th – bliss. We have huge fish swimming upstream! Not an easy task. We have sections where the river is about six feet deep and has a fast current. Other parts are shallow with rapids. The poor fish. I`m not sure what they are. We used to think they were trout, but these guys are huge. I took videos of them to send out a query, but uploading them to Facebook was taking too much time away from my novel. Hey, do I get a badge for procrastinating by fish (insert your own question mark here, please). Still need to catch up a bit with word count, but I got my 5,000 word badge today – wahoo! Have a good sleep everyone 🙂
Day 3 Ok, here comes the first challenge! I was working away nicely this evening – trying to catch up on my word count and telling my inner-editor where to go – when my cat sat on my laptop. She has a place on top of a set of drawers beside me, with a comfy blanket because she likes to be near me when I write. J She`ll walk across the keyboard once in a while vying for attention, which I gladly give. Occasionally, she`ll try to lie over my shoulder with her butt on the keyboard because I`m not giving her my undivided attention. She did this tonight and now my keyboard is switching my question marks to a French É – see, I just typed a question mark! My son told me it`s an alternate function of that special key, but he doesn`t know how to fix it. So I had to continue typing away without question marks until I can ask my IT son-in-law in the morning! Silly kitty. Anyway, now I`m beat, so I`ll pass my 5,000 mark tomorrow (only 746 words to go). Take away from my experience todayÉ (argh!), pet the kitty before I start work then move my laptop to the sun room! See you tomorrow!
PS – When I transferred my blog from Word to WordPress I tried my ? key and – as you can see – it worked! Crazy things computers.
NaNoWriMo Daily Notes on Progress – or lack thereof!
NaNoWriMo Day 1
So this is my first attempt at NaNoWriMo. I decided to blog about the experience so you can make an educated decision if you’re thinking about doing it next year. And no – I don’t use a typewriter, but I liked the image and it was free. Here goes:
Day 1 It had to start on a Sunday, didn’t it?! I had decided to take Sundays off so I could go to church and visit family who I wouldn’t see otherwise because they work full-time. So here I was gearing up for the big event – my first NaNoWriMo – and I wasn’t even going to write on day 1! Fortunately, it was Daylight Savings Time and we turned the clocks back an hour, but not till 2am. So – aspiring to be a fringe fiction novelist – I figured out that the time between midnight on the Saturday and 2am on the Sunday, when the time officially changed, was no-woman’s land and up for grabs. I grabbed it and wrote furiously for two hours. I had to tell my inner-editor to pipe down several times, but I did manage 633 words – Wahoo!!! I need to catch up a bit tomorrow, on writing and sleeping, but writing a little more for six days should keep me on track. Fiction is a lot harder than Faction. (Oh dear, I seem to be losing the ability to find the right words. Bedtime).
Day 2 I started late because my son had a craving for French toast with cheese – a delicacy he came up with while at a restaurant yesterday. The chef wouldn’t cook one for him so he’d been wanting one ever since. Two French toasts with cheese later I set to writing. I already had 633 written from the Twilight Zone time of Saturday night, so I was feeling confident. “Just write away – don’t edit!” is what we’re told. Just get the 50,000 words written in abandon. Edit January and February. Ok by me, but sooooo difficult to do once you’re a writer. I also had to take time out to do my gardening responsibilities which I had procrastinated. So, with 15mins to spare before dinner had to go in the oven, I finished my word count for the day! Sweet bliss. Of course, I have no idea what I’m writing next, just a rough outline of start-middle-end. So I took some time tonight to research names for my antagonist. Yes, I’m learning all the big writing words so I know what people in the forums are talking about. See you tomorrow!
An autistic child’s neurodiverse perspective on a daily walk to school with his mother. First distributed as a short story by the child’s counselling centre.
The mother’s neurotypical perspective of the same event follows. We hope we’ve given you a glance into the way an autistic mind differs from a neurotypical mind.
Written by myself and my son, Benjamin Collier.
THE CROSSING-Part 1, written by Benjamin
The Child’s Perspective
Along they walked, side by side. He’d been told enough times now to remember the rule. They always walked side by side when they walked to school. He didn’t have to hold her hand. She said that was ok as long as they stayed together. So he walked by her side and talked in his head to his imaginary friends.
Most of the time, he was oblivious to his surroundings and the other mothers and children who walked the same path. But he noticed that some other children held hands with their mothers, swinging their arms back and forth. Their mothers had obviously told them that they had to hold hands. He wondered why they had different rules from his mother.
He’d come to accept it, but he still constantly questioned why rules applied to some people and not to others. The rules were different for the bigger people, the parents and other adults, and sometimes his big sisters, too.
His mother greeted the crossing guard and the other mothers as they came to the crosswalk.
Then suddenly, her young son darted from beside her and started off across the road. Approaching cars skidded to a screeching halt. Faces were red with panic and anger. The drivers scowled, and the crossing guard blew her whistle with ferocity. The boy’s mother lunged forward and ran to grab her son from in front of the cars.
As she did, she could hear the other mothers shouting heatedly at her son. “Unruly child!”
“That was a stupid thing to do!”
“You know you never cross without the crossing guard!”
And she heard some mutter under their breath.
“Terrible mother” and “Ashamed of herself.”
She carried on across the road, holding tightly to his hand now, trying to ignore the comments and keep calm. After all, they didn’t understand. Her son looked like any other child. Why wouldn’t they expect him to follow all the rules?
The boy heard the words they shouted at him, but he took none of it to heart. They were just repeating the rules, feeding him the information he already had. The rules were just stupid. That’s all there was to it. And there were too many of them.
He preferred his world. There, he could do whatever he wanted without rules, and he could play all day, and no one got annoyed with him. His world was safer and happier. He wondered why other people didn’t live in their own worlds too. Why did they insist on living in a world that didn’t make any sense?
Why did he have to live there?
When they reached the other side of the road his mother kept a tight hold of his hand and told him to look at her eyes. He knew that was the signal she wanted to talk to him. He knew he had done something wrong again. His puzzled little face lifted, and he gazed into her eyes, trying his best to concentrate on her words.
“Why did you try crossing the road without the crossing guard?” she asked in a soft voice.
A question? He wasn’t expecting that. Didn’t she already know?
“It was safe to cross,” he answered, “The cars were all far away. I knew they would stop in time, and they did. I was right. Why am I not allowed to make the cars stop instead of the crossing guard? Why do I have to wait for her to say it’s safe? Why do the cars listen to her and not me?”
His mother frowned a little at first, then something lit up in her eye and her lips curled. He believed that was what people called a smile.
“Because she has the STOP sign,” his mother said, “And you don’t.”
He thought for a moment, a frown on his tiny forehead. Then he looked up at her and gave her his own smile. He knew she liked that, and it’d make her happy.
“Okay,” he said in his matter-of-fact voice.
Maybe someday, when he was old enough, he could buy his own STOP sign.
Satisfied with that dream of the future, he ran to the playing field. Free for a little while till the bell rang and the confusing rules would start again.
She knew their walk to school was always an adventure for him. They would set off from home and stroll along the sidewalk to the road.
It was just the two of them and his four friends; Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Donatello. He never went anywhere without them. They kept him company in a world where she couldn’t go–not yet, anyway. They were his companions when no one else wanted to play with him.
At first, he would take them to Kindergarten with him, but his teacher had become annoyed several times at his lack of attention in class. So now, they stopped at the playground on the way to school, where he had to say “Goodbye” to his imaginary friends.
Sometimes he would look so sad. He asked his mother if they would be alright until he got them after school. They were as real to him as if they were his classmates–maybe more so. They didn’t call him names.
He ran free for a while. She had come to realize that he needed a lot of freedom from the world he didn’t understand. He needed extra time to just ‘be.’
She watched him as he mumbled words she couldn’t comprehend. His arms flailed, and his voice got louder with shouts and screams for no apparent reason. He was so happy just to run and not be confined to rooms and paths and the never-ending rules she had to constantly teach him. Her baby was happy. She loved to watch him play in his world.
He had learned, finally, to stop at the end of the path and wait for her. They had made an agreement that if he stopped all by himself he wouldn’t have to hold her hand anymore. He rarely wanted any physical contact.
She missed the sweet baby boy she could hold tight and hug all day. He didn’t seem to want hugs at all, but he would let her kiss him goodnight, and he held her hand if there were cars close by; only if there were cars.
They were nearing the crossing guard when he suddenly darted across the road! She screamed his name as approaching cars barely managed to stop in time. One car came to a screeching halt and she saw the look of horror on the driver’s face.
Everyone, the drivers, the crossing guard, the other parents, even the other children, all scowled and shouted at her son. They told him he was a bad boy and he needed to behave better. She ran to the middle of the road and grabbed his hand.
As they finished walking across the road, the crossing guard blew her whistle and held up her sign. The other parents started to cross too. Their whispers were intentionally loud enough for her to hear.
“Terrible mother!”,
“Should be ashamed of herself!”,
“Not enough discipline, obviously!”
They all rang in her ears as she held tight to his tiny hand and got him safely across the road and away from the other parents and children.
She felt like shouting at them all, “He has autism! That’s why he sometimes behaves like he does! What’s your excuse?!”
But she had tried her best not to let her son see her get angry with other people. She didn’t want him to think that’s the way people should deal with disagreements. So she asked him quietly why he had run across the road instead of waiting for the crossing guard to tell them it was safe.
He explained, in his simple, broken words, that he had looked to make sure the cars were far away, and he knew they could stop before they got to the crossing.
He asked her why the cars wouldn’t stop for him if he wanted to cross the road. Why couldn’t he make the cars stop if he was right? Why did they only stop for the crossing guard?
His mother frowned a little at first, then her eyes lit up, and she smiled at him.
“Because she has the STOP sign,” she said, “and you don’t.”
He looked at her, puzzled. She was used to that look all too well. Then, a faint grin came across his little face, a rarity for him. She loved to see him smile.
Off he ran into the playing field, alone, or maybe not. Maybe he had some other imaginary friends who he left at school until the next day. Either way, he was free again, happy in his own world for a few minutes, until he had to join the other children in this world again and deal with another rule that made no sense to him at all.
Lynne Collier 