NaNoWriMo 2012 – Day 2

After my relatively slow start yesterday, I came to find myself stuck again. For some reason I just couldn’t get into the right mindset to start today and so I spent my day with everything but writing. I swear, at some point I was even cleaning out my kitchen cupboards, just to get away from that blinking cursor! The problem was mainly that I was just in too good a mood to throw myself into the paranoid mood of my main character. With distance these things never turn out that great, so somehow the circumstances were all wrong.

23.30 and I thought, damn, there is just no way I’m going to write a word today. Well, I was wrong. I filled a bath, took my iPod with me and started typing away. Half an hour later I had managed to write 545 words and I was soaked and relaxed with a bit of the heavy feeling you get when your bath is just a tiny bit too hot. Still far away from my target of 1700 words, but it’s a start and more than yesterday.

I am not worried yet by the way. Just because I have some difficulties right now to get into it, that doesn’t mean that it will stay like this. If I feel inspired I can easily write 3000 words in one day. I just need to get into the right working mindset. I am also not bothered about reaching the 50,000 words in a month. If it happens, good, if it takes longer, also good. At the moment I’m mostly dealing with other things anyway, so the writing is just a bonus. I’ll just take it one day at a time.

12554 / 61694 (20.35%)

NaNoWriMo 2012 – Day 1

So, today started NaNoWriMo and I was quite happy to get started. Or so I thought in theory.

What actually happened was this: First I woke up and didn’t really do any work right away, because I wanted to read something first. Then I thought, well, first I need some breakfast anyway and fried myself some egg and bacon and gobbled down some avocado as well, all while listening to a podcast. When I looked at the time it was already 12.30! Now I really had to get started! What did I do though? First I restarted my computer – I do that about once every few months, but a few days ago something crashed and  since then it has been acting up. Once it booted up again I remembered that I hadn’t done any software updates lately, so I fired that up and another 15 minutes went down the drain. Then I saw the state of my computer desktop and decided to de-clutter that a bit. Once I was finished with that I realised that I was hungry again and got myself some yogurt. Oh well, if I eat something, I might as well take a little break, so I watched an episode of X-Files.

By now it was 3.30 pm and I was starting to get annoyed at myself. Stupid procrastination! Finally I sat down and started with the work. However, quickly I realised that I was utterly unprepared. I hadn’t read what I had written before and after all, that had been months ago! While I was reading through that stuff, I was smoothing things out a bit here and there, adding a few words, a couple of sentences. When I reached the end I thought … well, fair enough, I can work with this, but immediately I drew a blank as to where to go from here. No planning, no brainstorming, well, I had done nothing. I pressed about 300 words out, but then I was just at a loss as to where to go from there. It was a couple of hours later and I decided to take a break and have some more food with another episode of X-Files, before continuing with the work. Since that episode was a “to-be-continued” one, I got sucked in and one episode turned into 4. Suddenly it was 9pm and I was tired already!

No, no, no, I thought, this is not how this should be going! So, I finally sat down and did the leg work. I looked at the structure and scenes I had so far and then started to collect ideas. The problem is that the part of the story that I have already, came about pretty much through associative writing, drawing on actual things that happened to me a few months ago. Of course I put an entirely different spin on the events, by completely changing the interpretation and now it’s as far away from the actual events as it could be. Still, it was somewhat born out of a specific situation. Continuing this fictionally was the idea, but really, there needed to be a red line, a story, and not just some ramblings that connect by mere chance. It took quite a bit of staring at the blank page to finally get into it, but in the end I collected quite a number of interesting ideas for scenes.

So, all a bit of a difficult start, but I think tomorrow will turn out quite a bit better, now that I have actual scenes that I can just write down and see where they lead me! I really should have done this stuff yesterday, but oh well, you know how these things work!

 

12009 / 61694 (19.47%)

NaNoWriMo 2012

Well, tomorrow it all starts again. The big NaNoWriMo writing challenge! Last year my dad participated in it and achieved his 50,000 word goal. I myself wrote a novel of 80,000 words at the beginning of this year and one month of it was spent writing 50,000 words in just the same way as during NaNoWriMo. This time round, I will join the actual challenge as well. From experience I know that I can make the word count in one month, if I concentrate a bit. I also really wanted to get back into writing regularly, since I am basically stuck at home at the moment due to a recent flare-up of a chronic illness, which makes me feel entirely uncreative.

These last few days I have been working on blog posts for my numerous blogs and I’ve generally brought myself into a writing mindset, so that I can just jump right in once November starts. I will make an effort to keep you updated about my progress on achieving my 50,000 word goal. The project for this month of writing will be the one that I alluded to in my last post. Here a short description:

The novel will be an exploration of mental driftwood. The main character jumps from association to association in a world coloured by paranoid delusions, dreams and coincidences. It will be accompanied by visual fragments, photographs or graphics that relate to the content in one way or another. The idea is to take normal everyday occurrences and interpret them in a way that is bound to seem threatening to the main character. The reader in this case will have to decide for himself whether he wants to get drawn in by the visual aids and the use of the pronoun you, or pull away into safer waters if that is possible. Main themes will be urban alienation, loneliness and depersonalisation / derealisation.

So far I already have quite a number of words, 11,000, so the goal for the end of November will be 61,000 words. At this I will probably not stop and try to get to 70 or 80,000, because 60,000 is still a bit short for a novel in my opinion.

Imaginary people invading the real world

I have some great news, my friends: I finished the first draft of my novel today! You can probably imagine how happy I am about this after months of work and partly struggling with writer’s block. The draft is almost 85,000 words long and has some in some parts already polish. It turned out vulgar, outright pornographic in parts and the thought of my parents reading it makes me want to crawl into a very dark hole. In some way that’s almost reassuring, but since they know my pen name, I probably can’t prevent them from buying a copy if I ever publish it. Scary!

Where it will go is still written in the stars. First I will have to start editing it. Only after the first, or maybe the second edit I will actually show it to other people. Since I’m in a bit of a grey area with some of the details, I will also have to make sure I don’t piss a certain person off, who happens to feature in the novel. This can either be a very bad thing if this person has a problem with it, since rewriting the lead character kind of defeats the point. However, if this person actually likes it, then this could actually open up some cool possibilities. At this point I can only be very unspecific about this, but I hope that it will all work out for the best.

I will now leave the novel be for a few days, since I will be busy with work stuff, but I expect to start editing in June.

I have also been working a little bit on a different project that is slowly taking shape. However, it’s a somewhat disturbing in some ways, so that I can only work on it over short periods. I tend to have the problem that my characters start invading the real world. The best example is the lead character of my novel. He’s obsessed with records and since I did a lot of research about the topic, I ended up buying some records myself and getting my brother’s old record player out of storage. Since the record player is rather shitty though I’m now planning on buying a good one and have literally spent hours researching the right kind of record player. I imagine, that once I have it, I will end up getting a new system for it as well, which will take more hours of research and so on. All because my lead character happens to be fanatic about records.

japanese spider crab © Lilly Schwartz 2012

Then there is the thing with the Japanese Spider Crab. One day this little monster featured in my other project in some remote thought of the main character. It really was a rather unimportant side remark and I can’t even remember how I even came up with mentioning it. However, days later I still ended up in the Sealife Centre here in Berlin, because they happened to have one of those beasts there. They can have a span of 4m and look really scary. Since this project meanders from one bizarre thing to the next I try to only spend a few days in a row on it, since I don’t want it to invade my life too much. I should probably also never write about really crazy characters, because it would probably mess with my head.

At the same time this very knowledge that fictitious characters can well start to have a real impact on your life as a writer is something that I really cherish about having written this novel. Writing gets you a lot closer to a story than reading it and it somewhat makes me wonder about some of the more disturbing books I’ve read over the years. I wonder what these books have done to their authors.

New ideas and some progress

These last few days have been rather productive when it comes to writing. Although I have been trying to work mainly on the novel, I was inspired to work also on a different project that combines writing with visual imagery. I used to do this already many years ago in quite a different and very minimal fashion. Back then I worked on this by taking pictures and adding a short statement to it, inside the frame. The statement might have been one word or just a half sentence, usually in German. Back then I was still writing poetry. Not particularly good poetry, I might add, but just the usual teenage angst type of stuff.

If you want to meet this old incarnation of me (and maybe understand a little German, although that’s not entirely necessary for the most part), head over to http://www.klickerklacker.info. I have to say that the UX is slightly off, since it was supposed to illustrate that the world is not intuitive by itself. If you want to get to know people you sometimes have to keep prodding at some issues, even if you think you’ve already reached the end of the line. So, after the pop up opens you can find more than one picture, just keep clicking on the pictures until the window closes. Nowadays I would probably use a different approach to typesetting on the pictures themselves as well, but a few of the pictures I still find quite interesting.

strange apparitions © Lilly Schwartz 2012

The project I’m working on now is again a combination of text and pictures, but this time with a focus on the text. The pictures I use are mostly public domain, old illustrations from long out of print books, historical photographs, or pictures taken from scientific sources. The idea is to create a study of how different lines of thinking flow together with the perception of the external world. By taking aspects of our visual culture out of context, we can easily create a view that is largely unrelated to what reality really looks like. All of this is based on the assumption that our perception of the world mainly depends on how we interpret what is happening around us from our individual viewpoint.

It is in fact also a quite personal project and might not even say much to other people, since within the project I take little things that happen to me and interpret them differently in a what-if kind of mode. Instead of the relatively down-to-earth type of person that I have become over the last few years, I take on a very paranoid, maybe even misanthropic viewpoint. Of course this can only make sense for anyone else, if I really go overboard with this and create an interpretation that is so absurd that everyone immediately sees how strange all of this really is. The weird thing is that this different interpretation might be closer to what my view of things would have been like during the chaos of my teenage years, of course without reviving the more naive aspects of teenage angst. It plays with melancholy, anxiety and a sense of doom that befalls us for no apparent reason, while working mostly with strange coincidences and focussing on disturbing aspects of the world around us.

So far I have no real clue, where this will lead me, whether it will be long or short and whether it will even reach a conclusion, since it meanders through every day thoughts, obsessions and nightmares. As I say, I’m actually concerned that it might not make much sense to anyone else at this point, but I think if done right this can also be quite interesting to other people. I will tinker around with this for a while and see whether it works or not.

On the novel front I have finally cracked the 70,000 words mark and added a scene after being a bit blocked for a while. I’m not sure how long it will still take me to finish, considering that I’m somewhat distracted as well, but it feels like I’m close to finally wrapping up the first draft. There are still at least 4 scenes missing, but I already know most of their details since I’ve been going over them a lot in my head during the last couple of months.

Hiding from empty pages

When writers are blocked they sit at their desk gloomily and stare at a blank page, right? That’s what the movies show. It’s how writers are depicted. However, I think it’s nothing more than a myth. Do people really do something as silly as that? Do people really sit and stare at their empty pages without writing anything for hours? No, I don’t think so. It’s certainly not what I do. When I’m blocked, I can’t even sit down and look at a blank page. Instead I read one book after another or watch movie after movie. Or I might even do both. When I was still at uni I started to clean the bathroom to escape all that daunting stuff.

Can I make it? Can I really finish this manuscript? I only wanted to take a few days off. Now it’s a month later and I’m full of doubts. Is it good enough? Do I even have a chance? Do I even want to finish it? It’s strange how a bit of doubt can ruin all of our momentum and throw us back into pitying ourselves. Self-pity also seems to be one of these stereotypical emotions of writers.

The other day I finally got a bit of a break, sat down and wrote something. It wasn’t for my novel, but something that I dreamed up spontaneously. I left Scrivener open and added a few lines every now and then. A bit of a story was coming together after all, but nothing too elaborate. Just what poured out of me in some of these moments when I looked at the chestnut tree in the yard. There it was again, that need to write, but somehow I still didn’t dare to touch the novel. How do I find my way back into that story? How do I manage to get these dialogues to work? That third part of the novel turned out to be like some sort of gloomy grey vampire. It’s sucking all the energy out of me. And that I say without even having given it a try for a month.

Then earlier my computer crashed. Did I save what I wrote these last few days? I was almost a little afraid to open Scrivener again. If I had to write it all again, I would just abandon it and my momentum wouldn’t return. When I finally conjured up the courage to click on the icon, it was all still there.

This morning I came up with another little scene for that new story. It’s actually something I dreamed about last night, a particularly powerful image that stuck in my mind this morning. Difficult to describe the flavour of this new story. I doubt it’s going to be very long. I also doubt that it’s going to be very profound. At least I’m writing though. At least I’m not just hiding from my empty pages. Or is writing something new also just procrastination? I can’t decide.

Keeping it together

Sometimes it’s necessary to take a break and evaluate where you’re going with your writing. That’s what I did over the last few days. I haven’t even looked at my text. I read books that could count as research and had conversations with my brother about the story. I have been having some problems with the third part and I think a bit of time off helped me to get some new leads for it. Generally I think that I will need quite a bit of editing, before I’ll be happy with it. It also seems to me that I have to live up to quite a personality with all of it. The protagonist is quite strongly connected with a real person, even someone I admire, so it’s all very precarious and I want to get it right. To make things worse, there is a 50 / 50 chance that the whole effort will be for nothing. This real person could easily block the novel from ever being published if he doesn’t like the idea. This little problem was easy to ignore while I was nowhere near finishing the first draft, but now I’m actually rather close and it’s becoming more of a real problem. The more I advance on my draft, the closer I get to the problem of approaching this person and asking about his opinion on my work.

And then there was also the problem with the idea for the sequel. The idea actually blocked me somewhat and I couldn’t quite concentrate on getting this current story developed properly. It’s difficult enough to keep the first part coherent, considering that the third part seems so different from the rest. Having another new and different idea in my head makes it even harder to keep it all in order. I will maybe read for a couple more days, but then I should really start to write again.

All in all it’s not exactly smooth sailing these days, but I’m still working on it, even if it’s only progressing in my head.

Defeating Progress Bars

You know, once upon a time I used to work in IT support. I’m not saying this so you can ask me silly questions about computers. I haven’t worked there in years and by now I know nothing of such things. This little detail might explain my obsession with progress bars though. If you grow up with computers and end up spending a lot of time installing software, like you tend to do in IT support, you come to hate these little bastards. They get stuck at 99% and, although it says 1 minute to go, they don’t move forward at all. Somehow they still give you the impression they’re moving, because they want to torture you and drive you mad. Progress bars are crazy little things. You come to stare at them for hours, especially if you install whole operating systems. Looking at progress bars is just silly though. Just as silly as looking at every new recombination and mutation step in an evolutionary algorithm, something I’ve done too many times as well. It tells you absolutely nothing and instead you should go and have a cup of coffee, somewhere without the screen in sight.

I hate them little progress bar bastards, I really do.

So, why am I putting progress bars on my blog and why am I happy about the progress bars in Scrivener? Simple: I’m in control there! You are free to imagine a maniacal laugh at this point. In Scrivener the progress bar is a direct result of my actions. I write and it changes. It doesn’t just sit there while I wait for magic to happen. No, I’m in control! It’s really quite a power trip!! Same goes for my little progress bars in the side bar of my blog. I can make them say whatever I want!!! Look here:

91372 / 80000 (114.22%)

 

Of course I’m not that far in my struggle with all these words, but I’m still in control of the progress bar. What a joy!

Now, if you want to add one of those little progress bars to your wordpress.com blog as well, I suggest you run over to this little site, which I’ve come to cherish: honorless.net

There you can create the progress bar and it gives you the HTML code once you click ‘Refresh Code’. The code it gives me for the progress bar I created up there is this one:

<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; width: 30%;" title="114.22%">
<div style="text-align: left; margin: 2px auto; font-size: 0px; line-height: 0px; 
border: solid 1px #FF0000; background: #DDDDDD; "><div style="font-size: 0px; 
line-height: 0px; height: 3px; min-width: 114.22%; max-width: 114.22%; width: 100%; 
background: #0000FF; "></div></div><div style="font-size: 8pt; 
font-family: monospace; ">91372 / 80000 (114.22%)</div></div>

You can then insert this code into a text widget in your sidebar or into a post. Up to this step it’s easy and doesn’t need any knowledge of HTML or CSS. Here comes the trick though:

Right now, and this might change back to normal one of these days, wordpress started stripping the div style width from the code. So instead of the correct first line it will save the code without the width: 30%;" part. This will make you lose control over the width of the progress bar in relation to your sidebar or to your space for postings.

To resolve this little problem, just change width to max-width before saving and all is fine again. You can play with the percentage to make the progress bar longer or shorter now. The last step is to also start laughing maniacally about having defeated those nasty little bastard progress bars! MUAHUAHUA!!!!1!!001!2

Have fun!

Ideas hunt in packs, like wolves

My father told me for the first time about the story he wanted to write when we were on a holiday in Sweden. If I remember correctly, I was 14 or 15 at that time and I was in love. Our cottage was somewhere in the middle of the woods 20 km from the next village. It was right at a lake and we bought fishing rods with which we would sit down at the jetty with our feet in the water. We were useless at catching the big ones, so those ones we caught were mostly bones. In the end we fed them to the neighbour’s cat.

The landscape was beautiful and the woods were like nothing we have in Germany. Here all natural forests have been cleared to make space for different forests full of fast growing wood. This is the case in almost all of Europe, since it is much more densely populated than most parts of America for example. In Germany only a small patch of natural wood is left somewhere near the Baltic Sea, which I even visited once. It looked nothing like the woods I knew from my childhood. The same was true for this forest in Sweden, since the Scandinavian countries still have vast stretches of land that almost nobody cares to visit. It’s too cold for the most part, too dark in the winter. The region where we had our cottage was one of the more populated areas, but still you could walk in the woods for hours without meeting anyone. The trees were tall and there were moss covered rocks all around. Since this wasn’t mountain woodland, these rocks looked seriously out of place. As if a giant had just dropped them in there.

The air was crisp and clear, very unlike the city air I was used to, and once you stepped into these woods you felt as if you were in the middle of a fairy tale or a Tolkien story. You could find the occasional wild berries, and after the rain mushrooms seemed to just pop out of the ground and onto our plates for dinner. After the rain the forest smelled particularly great, all musky and earthy mixed with the distinct smell of summer that is so terribly hard to pinpoint. Even the cities smell of summer, but much less so than this wonderful stretch of land. We would borrow canoes from the neighbour and visit all the small little islands that lay there in the middle of the lake, uninhabited, but with occasional signs of campfires.

I was torn that summer. On the one hand I was having a great time, I loved the nature around us, the warm evenings, watching the sun go down behind the trees and the cat meowing on our back porch with the lake view. On the other hand I was in love and I sent longing letters home. I would write them down on the jetty or at night when everyone else had gone to bed. The next post box was at a small snack shop that was really quite far away. It was a walk of 45 min one direction. Every second day I would walk there together with my father to send these letters. It gave us 1 ½ hours to talk. And in this time he was telling me everything about his story.

It took him many more years to finally sit down and write it. He wrote the sequel to this story first and even after that he took a long break where he wasn’t writing much. Only in November he sat down to write it during the National Novel Writing Month. He finished his 50000 words, writing every spare minute. On the weekends he met with other people participating in the NaNoWriMo challenge.

A lot of people talk about writing or about the ideas they have for a great novel. What makes people writers though, is when they actually sit down and write. It’s the secret of writing: You actually have to write.

It doesn’t help to stare at blank pages without an idea and hope that it will come to you. It also doesn’t help to write something with no idea behind it at all. You will get stuck very soon if you just think of a good beginning and don’t know where it’s supposed to go next. And even if you have that great idea in your head, that’s also not enough. You actually have to sit down and write it. Annoying, eh?

I think what stopped me most of the time was the lack of a great idea. I could write about myself of course, since I have a reasonably interesting life to tell about, but that’s not really creative. And at times it can even get really difficult if you’re writing about the most difficult times. I have the ideas now and it seems as if I can’t even stop them coming to me. Just today I had a cool idea for a sequel to the novel I’m writing. It would be quite different, but about a topic I always found haunting. I jotted the bare bones down on the back of the white sheet of paper I’m using for short notes. And there I thought this idea would let me go at some point. No, it carries on and on and on.

Sunday afternoon mood

As I am sitting here writing these lines, I’m looking over to the front door of the house across. A guy with a leather jacket and a hood on his head is pacing while smoking a cigarette and talking on his mobile. The mirror of a scooter is throwing the sky back at me while a young girl wearing a head cover and a blue coat walks past. The twigs and branches of the tree in the backyard are bouncing up and down in the wind. It’s the typical view from my desk. Nick Cave is howling out of the speakers left and right from my desk and it’s totally understandable how I can’t keep the words flowing. His voice drags me off the sentences and I feel inclined to listen to his lyrics. An old gnarly Turkish woman in a brown coat is trying to keep her skirt from falling down while searching for her keys. A woman around 30 with a boy of 5 or 6 step out of the house. She holds the door for the old lady. Now a couple of men walk towards the door, one of them with an orange plastic bag from the vegetable stall on the parking lot of the DIY shop two backyards from here. He has grey hair with black sprinkles and walks with no inclination to rush whatsoever. It’s 3 pm and none of these people seem to have 9 to 5 jobs. That’s my neighbourhood; it’s always in a Sunday afternoon mood. The sun is breaking through the clouds again. I can’t wait for the summer to be here.

Speaking of Nick Cave … the other day I posted about my rather sarcastic message to a seller of second hand books (read it here). They had sent me a really ridiculous book instead of the Nick Cave biography I ordered. To my surprise they actually answered. They told me that they didn’t have the book in stock after all, oh surprise, and offered to refund me. This is actually quite interesting, since I didn’t even ask for a refund. Maybe my sarcastic message had a certain impact.

Since I actually needed the book as research for my own novel, I ordered it new instead. This way I could only order a paperback edition though, since the hardcover seems to be out of print. However, now I feel generally really disgusted by the entire experience, since the new book arrived in a worse condition than I expect from a second hand book. The cover has dents, because of a sloppy binding and the paper is wavy as if it was lying in water for a while. The picture pages can hardly be peeled apart, because the book is such a shitty production altogether. I feel sorry for Ian Johnston, the author of the book, since Clays Ltd, St Ives have done such a despicable job of producing it. I sincerely hope that my own novel won’t suffer the same ill fate.

Speaking of the book. The delivery man caught me off guard yesterday, after a writing bout until 3 am. It’s a long way from the bed to the door. Yesterday evening I got the book from a neighbour, middle-aged with a friendly face, who came down to my door to give me my package. Apparently he also doesn’t have a 9 to 5 job. The neighbours here are friendly and sometimes you see them stop on the stairs to talk to each other. There is no rush.

The other day one of the neighbours’ boys waited for his friend outside the door of their flat, the one across from mine. He saw me coming up the stairs and got inside as quickly as he could. He was so quick that I couldn’t guess his age, but definitely young. The door was still open, but I couldn’t see him. He was hiding. I unlocked my own door and as I was closing it from the inside I saw the boy peeking at me from behind his door just as I was peeking at him from behind mine. One of the older neighbours’ boys, I can only guess as to how many there are, also once brought me a package over. A friendly guy, definitely working age, but younger than me. We had a quick chat and he was somewhat surprised, since he apparently didn’t know that I had moved in. Understandable, since Nick Cave howls far from the stairwell. A third neighbours’ boy leans out the window to smoke right now.

I once lived in a bedsit in a concrete block in Kaarst, a small town near Düsseldorf. The neighbour next door was a junkie just out of rehab. His girlfriend was trashing all of his furniture on the day after he moved in, at 6 in the morning. She was out of her mind on drugs. A few months later, just when I was going out, the father from down the corridor struck the junkie in the face, because that fucked up guy had hit his girl on the corridor during a row. He tried to justify himself. “She’s out of her fucking mind, taking heroin while carrying my child. She deserves it”! The father from down the corridor said “Don’t blame her. You’re the madman hitting a pregnant woman! You pick a woman, you live with your choice. Try hitting her again and I call the police”. Then he went back to his 2 room flat at the end of the corridor. They always had the door open, because there were at least 5 people living there, including a gnarly old grandpa with a cane. Of course it was a Turkish family. Generational family homes are otherwise uncommon in Germany.

My neighbourhood here in Berlin has a bad reputation. It’s supposed to be a place full of youths up to no good. However, I know what a bad neighbourhood is and this isn’t one of them. What I see is kids playing ball on the street, people who talk to their neighbours, families who take care of their elderly and builders coming home from work. I see a laundry delivery guy bringing a suit for someone in the house next door. I see a couple walking their two dogs while holding hands. I see the waitress of the café in front of the retirement home chatting to her girlfriends across the bar. Youths are always up to no good, but at least this is a neighbourhood in the real sense of the word, where neighbours talk, take packages for each other and, better still, where it’s always Sunday afternoon. Or was it Saturday? Ah, never mind, what day is today anyhow?

Homer Simpson: [lounging on the couch in his pajamas, drinking beer] Ah. I love these lazy Saturdays.
Marge Simpson: It’s Wednesday, Homer.