Waiting game

Some days, it seems like I spend more time waiting to write than I actually do writing. I feel that tell-tale itchy feeling inside my skull that indicates I am ready to write (I think), even if I don't know exactly what I will write. But there was the kid I promised a round of Heroscape, and there were the kids who needed lunch, and there is the kid watching No Reservations across the room. Soon there will be the kids I promised a trip to Dairy Queen this afternoon, and the dog who expects a walk right about now, and the laundry and supper and other assorted everyday things that constitute my "real" job, the actual reason I stay home during the day instead of trekking to an office somewhere for a paycheck.

Don't get me wrong. I love this job. In spite of the 24/7, every week of the year hours and the lack of tangible rewards. And I am happy and pleased to have my boys home with me, and I enjoy the Heroscape and the Rock Band and the Uno Attack and the trips to DQ. (I mean, come on--who would object to DQ?)

Except there's this itching in my head, and my computer is right here, and the PW document is open on that tab, right over there. Only I know that if I open that tab and start trying to write right now, there will be inevitable interruptions. My best hope is to wait another few minutes, when they settle in for their allotted video gaming time and a lack of interruptions will be almost guaranteed. Because I love my family, and the only thing that makes me crankier than not being able to write when I want to is being interrupted in midthought. I get snappy. I don't like this about me, but there it is.

So, yeah. Waiting to write. Remembering why I'm really home. Taking a deep breath and trying to enjoy the moment, even if it's not the one I think I want right now, because it won't come again, and I might regret missing out on it later.

Refrigerator quotes

As I was standing over the stove and idly stirring the veggies and pondering how my most recent blog entry seemed like it was missing something, I stared blankly at my refrigerator. Now, as some of you may know, my fridge is plastered with kid pictures, kid writings, kid honor certificates, and an assortment of snipped out comic strips and quotes that mean something to me. As often happens, my pondering landed me on a couple of those quotes, which had up until that moment not seemed related in any way at all.

"Any idiot can face a crisis--it's this day-to-day living that wears you out."
~Anton Chekhov

"We can do no great things, only small things with great love."
~Mother Teresa

It's the small things that wear you down. But it's also the small things that can save you. Here's to small things and perspective. And refrigerator quotes.

Why do I do this?

For the last year or so, I've been muddling through what I can only guess is a midlife crisis of some variety--although I tend toward the introspective and soul-searching anyhow, so a fair portion of my life has consisted of mid-something crises of some variety or another. Lately, I've come to believe that these phases of looking within are less crisis and more just part of the normal cycle of things--life is a journey, and all that. The day I stop questioning what I'm doing and why, it's all over, I suppose.

I linked an article by Holly Lisle the other day that comes really close to my own take on what drives me to write and on life in general. For a while, I lost sight of why I wanted to be a writer, and it became more about proving something than about the writing itself. And nothing I wrote was ever big enough in financial terms to be deemed a success as success is defined by a large number of people. I ended up cutting myself off from the joy of a lot of small triumphs and celebratory moments because none of them were ever BIG enough to justify, once and for all, that I deserved to be a writer, that what I was doing was important enough to continuing to do it. And I quit writing altogether for a year or two, because I let myself believe in the conclusion that unless I could make a living from it, it wasn't worth doing at all. I can hear several of you out there hollering, "Bullshit!" Yours are the voices I should've been listening to all along, but you know... It's a funny thing, isn't it, how the negative voices always sound like reason and logic, and the ones who believe in you are so easily drowned out?

I was raised Catholic, I married a Catholic, and my children are being raised as Catholics (with a good dose of Mom's personal opinions about spirituality and religion tossed into the mix). If not for my children attending a Catholic school, I would likely not be practicing any religion. I've delved into a range of spiritual studies, from Native American beliefs to Wiccan studies to Qabbalism. Probably the pivotal point of my personal spiritual beliefs is an article I read several years ago, in which the author states his belief in the mystery of life--that we can know nothing except that we don't know everything, and therefore the best we can do is the best we can do. I also hold a steadfast belief that, while we can and should learn from other people, each person's best teacher in the realm of spirituality is him or herself. There's a lot to be learned from simply sitting still and listening.

One of the things I hear when I listen is that call to writing. I have examined that call from all sides. I should write because it has the capacity to touch people. I should write because something I write may be the ripple in a larger pond that helps someone, somewhere become who they are supposed to be. I should write because it sets the example for my children that you're allowed to follow your dreams, even if it's hard. I should write because I can, and it would be wasteful not to. But really, if I strip away all the shoulds, it all boils down to the one crystal-clear reason I write, the one that never dissolves even if I lose sight of it for a while.

Someone, something--whatever mystery we come from and return to--insists that it's what I'm made to do--not the only thing, but one of the big ones. I write because it's what I'm called to do. Where that ends up taking me, I don't know. It's the doing that's important.

Greek dancing

We drove to Chicago yesterday to see one of my cousins get married. He's a good deal younger than I am, so we've never been particularly close, but it was a lovely wedding and reception, and all the usual family was there. And as usual, the family gathering has left me in something of an introspective funk. There's nothing like a good dose of rarely-seen family to spin you around and make you look back at where you've come from.

I had a good childhood, and I like my family. But I'm something of a loner, so often through the years I've felt like an outsider, as if I'm watching the "real" family core but not actually a part of it. And then one of them will startle me with how genuinely happy they are to see me, or by asking me a question that indicates they're as up-to-date on and interested in what's going on in my life as I am of theirs. (Mothers are excellent passers-on of such information.) And I snap out of my neat little self-contained life to recognize that no matter the years and the distance, my life and those of these aunts and uncles and cousins (including the great's and the once-removed's) are intricately and irrevocably linked. We're a part of each others' histories. This is a very cool thing.

My cousin's bride belongs to the Greek Orthodox Church, which is similar enough to our family's Catholic heritage that we weren't entirely lost during the ceremony. At the reception, of course, there was the mandatory Greek dancing. (I heard someone in my family dub it the "Greek conga line.")

At one point I looked out and saw my mother and her two sisters in the line. I suddenly saw them, and I was struck by what beautiful women these three are. No, they're no longer as young as they once were. They are a teacher, a nurse, and a secretary, the three professions that were respectable for young ladies in the time they grew up in, although each of them put motherhood above all else. They've buried both their parents. They've dealt with serious illnesses, their own and others.' They've raised their children and set them free (a thing which, at this point in the lives of my own children, terrifies me). Two of them have grandchildren, and the third had just married off her first son. But there they were, laughing while they danced a dance they didn't know the steps to, unafraid to be just who and where they were. I didn't join them; I guess I'm not that brave yet. They give me courage, though. They've been doing that for years, and so steadily and without fanfare that I'd never noticed.

In honor of them, I will remember to continue dancing even though I don't know the steps. And I'll smile while I'm doing so.

Organizer-Woman takes on The Muse

I am an extraordinarily organized person. I have to be--be it ADHD or some other "disability" or simply who I am, if I am not organized then I tend to simply jitter around the house aimlessly and accomplish nothing. Give me a list of goals and a calendar, and I transform into Organizer-Woman, complete with cape and panic-reflecting wristbands. No matter how tiny the detail, if it requires doing at some time other than right this very second, it goes into my Day Runner. And if it is in my Day Runner, then it GETS DONE, PERIOD. My family knows this about me. They roll their eyes when I command them to WRITE IT ON THE GROCERY LIST when they try to get by with a quick, "Hey, buy me some cheese next time you shop, hon?" But if they really want that cheese, you better believe it gets on the list. (Joey, being the clever young man he is, attempted to trick me once by writing "Rock Band" on the bottom of my shopping list. He discovered, to his chagrin, that the rule is "It must be on the list or it will not be bought," but that there is no corollary which states "If it is on the list, it will be bought." Poor guy.)

I've applied that uber-organization to learning new things that I want to learn, including the mechanics of fiction writing. I've spent what probably equates to months worth of hours poring through how-to articles and books, dissecting suggested techniques and assembling them into a process that works for me. When I took a couple of days last week to assess Crowmaker and determine exactly what about it wasn't working for me, I suspected that it may have been that my Organizer-Woman alter ego was strong-arming the story a little too much.

When I write, I generally start by simply writing down anything that I already know about a story--details of a character, a scene that's vivid in my head, maybe even just a general idea of theme. Then I work through a series of questions and exercises to help me flesh out what I don't know and start filling in blanks, which includes a template of 6-10 primary plot points to help stake out the territory I'll be covering. Because my natural tendency is to focus on characters and relationships, I sometimes struggle to find the action focus necessary to make things jump instead of letting the characters just sit around and talk or think. I know this about myself, so I try to head myself off by focusing first on the action-oriented plot when I frame a story. What I found last week was that Crowmaker was driven so hard by a deadline-oriented plot (OMG, we have to keep moving!) that the landscape of possibilities had grown narrow and confining instead of just creating suspense.

In desperation, because I love this story and I don't want to lose it, I sat down at the kitchen table with none of Organizer-Woman's notes. Zero. None. But that's OK, I assured her. She was going to get to flex her organizing muscles, still. I took out a stack of blank index cards and a pen, and I made three piles of cards. Stack one had cards with an action-oriented event on them, either related to the big plot or... Gasp! Not related to the story at all! At least not as far as I'd known up until that point. I just picked them out of thin air, or from a dream I happened to recall at that moment, or from a tidbit of a recent news story that had piqued my interest. Then I made a stack with a character name (or two) on them, representing the people and the relationships I suspected would turn out to be interesting if I gave them some room to talk. The third stack was focused on the story's viewpoint character, either her relationship with other people or her internal growth or things she had to face about herself.

Then I shuffled each stack and matched them up randomly with each other, one from each stack, and paper-clipped them together. My current assignment to myself is to write at least one chapter from each bundle of three cards, incorporating the three mostly-unrelated cards as best I can. The main plot is still there; the main characters and relationships I wanted to explore are still there. But there's a fresh angle to it now, too, and the challenge to make things that started out unrelated link somehow to the pieces of the bigger picture. Organizer-Woman is skeptically satisfied with patting the paper-clipped stack of cards now and then and assuring herself it's all written down and it'll be OK; the Muse is happily dancing around in the confines of the current chapter (since I haven't peeked at any other than the one I'm currently working on), with lots to do but no temptation to go crazy and rampage through the rest of the story.

It's a new approach for me, but it might work. It's fun, if nothing else, and it hasn't hurt my word count--almost 4,500 so far this week, and my goal is 6,000 or so a week.

Fuzzy day, a few links

I am having what I've come to call a fuzzy day--over the years I've learned to recognize that, much as with my emotional moods, my mental moods follow a cycle. In the past I've tried to analyze them and determine if they follow a predictable pattern--a certain number of days, phases of the moon, the weather. I finally gave up and settled for learning to recognize the moods themselves and determine the best way to deal with them. On the days when my intellectual faculties are high and sharp, I focus on keeping things on an even keel and directing that energy to accomplish as much as I can without overdoing it (and thus risking a burnout and crash). When the energy inevitably fizzles, I am left with a day or week or so of fuzzy days. I am not lacking in creativity on these days--that would be too simple. Sometimes the right brain actually increases output, spamming me mercilessly with ZOMG awesome ideas. But there is a force field between the two halves of my brain which prevents me from taking the ideas and breaking them down into anything useful. Sometimes just finding the right words for even the simplest things seems nigh impossible, let alone stringing together entire sentences or formulating complicated things like plot structures. Or grocery lists. Or even blog entries. (I am not actually writing this, in case you wondered. Robot-me is.)

Anyhow, my plan for fuzzy days has long been to just lie low on the creative front, jot down whatever ideas I can manage to grasp, and muddle through what really must be done as best I can. The fuzzy passes, eventually, at which point I'm able to kick back into high gear and do productive things with the mish-mash of stuff that fell out of my brain in the interim. I do not fight the current; I swim along the shoreline and keep my head above water until the current shifts and I can make it back to the beach, whereupon I build a fire and dry off and set about figuring out where I washed up and what direction I need to head from there in order to get back on my planned course.

I did manage to force myself through morning writing time, focusing mainly on writing some of the actual journal entries Ein's father made about Important Stuff so that I can better judge how she'd react to them. In the course of doing so, I uncovered two, possibly three, new characters. They brought a couple of boxes with them which were labeled "MISSING PLOT PIECES AND LINKS" and inquired if I'd been looking for those. I tried to be nonchalant and had them stack the boxes over in the corner until I'm prepared to check out the contents. So far, the muse has not attempted to hide them from me.

Random links to cool stuff I've been meaning to tell you about:

Shadow Unit is kinda X-Files, kinda Law & Order, kinda cool. I was up too late last night finishing the first episode.

Emily Short writes interactive fiction. I tried out Floatpoint and Galatea, after seeing them mentioned in a Strange Horizons article. Galatea I was kind of "eh" about, but Floatpoint had more meat to it and I found it pretty interesting--it was puzzly but not overly so, and it was as much about moral choices as about figuring stuff out. I recommend saving it toward the end so that you can play through different final choices and see the differences in the ending. You can play Galatea online; Floatpoint will require you to download both an interpreter to play it on and the game file itself. (Note: The link on Short's page to an intepreter is broken; I downloaded it here.) When you run the executable for the interpreter, it will ask you what game file you want to use.

There was talk of a table

(Blog entry title lifted from a Grizz blog entry. Hey, if he's not going to use it, I will.)

So, we have a dining room. And we have kids. So except for the random visit from family which includes too many people to squeeze around our kitchen table/island, the dining room is used for pretty much anything BUT dining. Luckily, it's fair-sized, as dining rooms go, and it has a BIG closet with lots of shelves. (Which I love. You have no idea how much I love closets, especially big ones where there normally are none.) So you have your basic table and chairs and china hutch. You also have two smaller china cabinets, inherited from hubby's Lladro-collecting mother, filled to busting with said collection. You also have a globe on a stand and a pair of bookshelves tucked into the corner near the closet. And a teeny bit of leftover floor space to move between all these things.

Much as the dining room is rarely used for dining, so is the table rarely used in the intended manner. When we home schooled, it was Joey's desk on one end and Michael's Tinkertoy/Legos/Knex play area on the other. This year, with the boys in traditional school, it became the repository for all returned homework papers and projects, none of which could be discarded until we were absolutely SURE we wouldn't need them anymore. The table got so full that things overflowed to the bookshelves, which were already crammed with paper and pencil cups and assorted school supplies, books, and science kits. So our first summer project this year was to determine if an actual table still existed in the dining room. Michael was easy--if it was homework, it went into the recycle pile, period. He kept a handful of things we found in the stack, mostly paper airplanes he and his buddies made and a couple of art projects. Joey is more like me--we develop sentimental attachments to random pieces of paper like nobody's business. It took him a while and he saved a great deal more (which I promised to put into storage for him), but he finally managed to wade through all his papers. I undertook the task of sorting through leftover notebooks and supplies to see what might be salvageable for next year and got the shelves (mostly) organized again. In the end, our task was a resounding success. Yes, there IS a table!

At least until Michael's erector set project gets shifted from the kitchen island to the dining room at supper time. And Joey's Heroscape landscape wanders up to the dining room so that the model airplane can take over the folding table in the basement.

In other news, we have four boxes and counting of outgrown kids' books to donate to their school and/or the local library and/or Goodwill. Lest you think this means our shelves are now empty, fear not--the basket in the living room and the random piles here and there simply have a real bookshelf home now. Or will, as soon as I get around to going through the piles and basket. Then maybe I can start on the closets full of board games...

Too. Much. STUFF.

Contagious

I ended up with 1,500 new words yesterday, and over 1,000 more already today. I anticipate a slowdown in the accumulating word count soon, since I'm almost done blocking in huge chunks of new material all at once. Future additions will entail more digging through what I've written and thinking, "Oh yeah, I meant to say something more about this here and there and over there."

My guys are all at their fishing cabin in Wisconsin, leaving me with nothing for company but the dog and oodles of free time in which to write. The manic sprite visited me this morning, but I recognized her arrival and stared her down. The creative energy is all well and good, building like an almost physical pressure. But I'm in charge here, not her. I use the energy; it doesn't use me. Taking a joy ride is all well and good while it lasts, but unharnessed it accomplishes nothing except bringing on a big, fat crash and burn. But I think we've reached an understanding.

So, I started this blog primarily because... Well, because it sounded more entertaining than the other things I was working on at the time. But beyond that, it is turning out to be a good way to track my moods and productivity--a snapshot of my day to day that I can look back on when I need some objectivity, maybe.

But I also recall a conversation not too long ago in which a friend and I noted how it's often true that creativity begets creativity. Specifically, I had noted a trend on various RP forums--if the storytelling has run dry, all it takes is ONE person to post a story. And more often than not, someone else will soon post a story. And maybe someone else after that will, too, and there is story frenzy, even if it doesn't last forever or get anyone published. I get story ideas from music, very often. I know of songwriters who've been inspired by books or movies to write a particular song. Creativity is like a web, apparently, and the little tremors of other people doing creative things can set off our own creative urges.

It's contagious. If you catch the creative sniffles from me, that would be so great. I'll even send you some tissues and hot soup. And thanks to those out there who shared their germs with me.

Mowing makes me sleepy

No, I am not mowing. Once upon a couple of years ago when we moved into this house, I offered to hire a neighborhood kid to mow our yard. My husband insisted he enjoyed taking care of the yard himself. A few weeks later when he asked me to mow for him, I gently reminded him of his words regarding his enjoyment of yard work. We have had no further discussions on the issue (for the most part). He goes out once every week or so to enjoy his yard work, and I do not.

The retirees in the community behind our house also do not mow, but once a week an entire fleet of hired mowers, trimmers, and sprayers descend upon their yards and the common area that lies between our back yard and the first row of duplexes. Today is sunny, 60-some degrees, and the drone of mowers and scent of cut grass is drifting through the screen door. The dog, attached to my hip as usual while I sit in my super-big chair and use my laptop, caved to the whole nap thing almost immediately and is now a cozy bundle of fur sprawled the length of my thigh. The whole setup makes me want to nose dive into my laptop as I struggle to string words together into coherent sentences.

I wound up finishing draft two of "Wings" yesterday afternoon and evening, so this morning, in between grocery shopping and letting the window guy in to replace the glass in a couple of windows, I took a printout of the story and a bundle of colored pencils and marked up all the sensory descriptions. (I can't for the life of me remember where I got that trick. One of Jack Bickham's how-to books, maybe? God knows I've read enough how-to-write books and articles in my lifetime that I can't keep them all straight.) I made lots of legible-only-to-me monkey scribblings in the margins and the blank space left over at the very end of the printout to brainstorm as many additional sensory descriptions as I could. I'm about halfway through taking my notes and applying them to the ms itself, which is about a half a step ahead of where I thought I'd be today. I am pleased with my progress.

If I can resist the nap urge a little longer, maybe I can even finish up before going to fetch the boys from school.

Worlds Between

As noted previously, I sometimes get really hung up on details. When creating this blog, I was all fine until I hit the registration screen that asked for the name of my blog. Ah! Panic! Dealbreaker--I'll have to take a few days to think about it and get back to you on that, OK?

In a show of rebellion against my easily-spooked muse, I forced myself to leave the registration screen open while I wracked my brain for ideas. Since I figured this would be largely about my writing (since it is a large part of my life), I wound up on my bibliography page as I looked for ideas. It won't take a genius to figure out that I ended up taking my blog's name from the title of my one and only semi-published novel, The World Between Earth and Sky.

I've always been fascinated by Native American culture and stories. Before/while writing The World Between, I read a lot on those topics in the name of research. Many of the Native American tribes subscribed to the belief in different worlds--a world beneath the earth, where the first people first lived before climbing into this one; a world above the sky; a world beneath the waters. This world, the one we live in now, they called "the world between earth and sky."

But even this world is broken down into different layers of life. Don't we live in different worlds just in the course of a single day? I am in a world of nothing but sun and sky and quiet when the dog and I take a walk or sit outside to read. (I read; the dog tries to oust the book from my lap.) I live in sensibility and practicality as I urge the boys through the daily routines of school and homework and bedtime. I delve into the whirling realm of my own imagination as I write, and visit the worlds created by others when I read their stories. I lived the world of my childhood, of my young adulthood, of my motherhood, of all the other -hoods crammed in there.

Our lives are bounded between our earthy births and our passing into the sky-like unknown. We can't know where we came from or where we go, but we have our worlds between.

In other words, "Worlds Between" is a poetic way to say "this blog is about my life." Genius, huh?