It's a wrap

Today is the last day of November and as I look back over the past 30 days, I'm SO glad I skipped NaNoWriMo in favor of NaBalWriMo (national balanced writers month).

I had a number of goals for myself and accomplished a few of them, as well as a few things that should have been on the list. Highlights for me include:

More exercise.
Committing to regularly walking the dog also got me pumped to bike more often. Hobbit girl and I have found some great places to ride and we've had a blast.

Cast your bread upon the waters and it will return to you.
I've been decluttering the house like crazy and donating stuff whenever possible. During one drop off, hobbit girl wanted to pop into the thrift shop to look at books and videos. She found some Harry Potter stationery and I got a freaking miracle. There was a Maytag portable dishwasher (the kind you hook up to your kitchen sink for an hour) for $50, or 10% of what the machines cost new. At last I could be free from my 10 years of sink slavery without having to spend a fortune to redo the entire kitchen. We removed one cabinet and voila, I now have an extra hour a day of not doing chores!!! Woo hoo!

Reaching out.
I participated in Harry Potter week with some old and new blog friends and had so much fun! After nearly a year and a half of running this blog, it was great to rekindle my enthusiasm for it. I also finally got an author page for myself up and running on Facebook. It's been great connecting with people there and that's helped tremendously with query jitters.

Refreshing.
Letting myself off the hook to produce has been a mixed blessing. While not writing has loosed the grip of perfectionism that had been so immobilizing, I also began to feel lonely not hanging out with my characters. I missed them and yesterday dove back in to work on plot knots.

Movies, I found, were wonderful for restoring my courage and sense of play, perhaps because it's a different medium. The documentary American Teen is one I'd recommend to my YA writing friends if you ever need to remind yourself why reaching out to kids this age is your passion. Disney's Tangled will instill you with hope that old things can be refreshed and made stronger. If you're bogged down in revisions, this is the flick for you. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows instilled in me once again that evil wins when good people do nothing and that pursuing a calling can be hard and thankless at times, but support is near and abundant.

How was your November? What things have refreshed you during dry times? Have you ever taken a break from writing? What brought you back to the desk?

Read More

Use it or lose it

One of my goals this month (that I've dubbed NaBalWriMo) is to seek freedom from the things that are bogging me down--burnout, creative low-ebb, disorganization and mess.

Spend a day with me and you'd see these things are all tied. My environment could be worse, mind you, but it isn't yet the haven I and my family need. What I need it to live with less. Lots less. But then the excuses start piling up, and I let the clutter problem remain unaddressed.

Stephanie Culp's Streamlining Your Life to the rescue. Here are some of the best excuse busters I've yet come across:

Know your goals and remove obstacles to achieving them
Clutter keeps me from having the energy and time to write. It also keeps my husband and daughter from being their creative, productive best, too.

Clutter steals time
Moving stuff from here to there and there to here is a huge time suck. So is scrambling to find essentials. And we all want more time, especially to write!

Decluttering blesses others
The toys your kids aren't playing with could be blessing another family. Ditto with the toasty coat that's too snug, the magazines you've read already and the CDs you've loaded on to your MP3 player. St. Thomas Aquinas argues that not sharing from our over-abundance is a form of stealing.

If I lost this in a house fire or flood or tornado, would I really miss it?
I've been through a major house fire with my parents, and let me tell you, it wakes you up quickly to what's "just stuff" and what truly brings you joy. I find this question especially helpful for culling things that no longer fit this phase of my life.

Your clutter won't go away on its own
Ignoring accumulations won't solve the problem. You brought the stuff into the house, you have to carry it out. There is no magical solution to making clutter disappear--though such a device or power would make great fodder for spec fic. Even house fires have to be cleaned up. You can, however, hire someone to help you declutter--but you have to take the step of contacting them.

Good enough is good enough
You don't have to perfectly balance the "correct" number of possessions. This is not an algebra test with one right answer. You might accidentally get rid of something you wish you hadn't. Or you might put in the trash what might have been recycled or donated. You might not be ready to part with a boxed up collection you inherited from Grandma. It might take weeks of a half hour here, a half hour there. That's OK. Take a deep breath and remember your bigger goals--like having a streamlined life that allows time to write--and keep purging the best you can.

Which of these excuse-busters speaks to you? What dreams would you chase with a less cluttered life?

Read More

Balancing the blech

I can't be the only one whose weekends are often full of chores, chores, a tiny bit of fun, and more chores. There ought to be a way to get out from under the weekly press of it so I have more balanced weekends. I'm realizing my family members' attention deficit issues mean most of the organizing falls to me, because I'm the only one with the skill set. Let me tell you, it gets discouraging pretty quickly.

Years ago I picked up a couple of household organizing books and NaBalWriMo just might be the time to revisit them and blog about tips I learn. One's called Streamlining Your Life by Stephanie Culp and the other is Bonnie's Household Organizer by Bonnie Runyan McCullough.

The number one rule of organizing is only organize what deserves your attention. And a lot of things don't.

Tip of the week:
Don't have too much stuff.

Simple, right? We hang on to stuff we don't need or haven't used for years for one of the following reasons:

I might need this someday
It's still perfectly good
Every ____ is precious (scribble, stuffed animal)
But it's an antique!
This might come back in style
A special person gave it to me
It's a piece of my history
Someday I'll take up this hobby again

All these excuses seem on their face logical, but they're actually emotionally-based decisions. Getting rid of "perfectly good" things we "might need" scares us. But hoarding to stave off a fear of deprivation actually CAUSES deprivation. Your life becomes captive to mess. You lose time and energy when you hoard. Later this week, I'll share some of Culp's no-nonsense talk to help counteract with solid thinking the emotions that make us captive to stuff.

What are your organization battle zones? What kinds of stuff are crowding your life? What excuses and emotions are keeping you fettered to belongings you don't need?

Read More

Experiments and surprises

Getting out from under a work deadline has been incredibly freeing. And so has committing myself to NaBalWriMo, my experiment in "filling up" in a period of burnout.

I got in a bike ride with hobbit girl yesterday and she was quite impressed, since I haven't ridden in over a decade. That old adage about never forgetting how to ride is totally true. My muscles were remembering all my best bike memories. The summer between eighth and ninth grade, for example, I biked 10 miles nearly every day going to visit my BF Becky and her new horse, Chess. I liked to imagine my silver 10-speed was a dapple grey gelding named Strider. Unlike Chess, he never tried to throw me. Chess was green-broke, and I don't know what Becky's parents were thinking buying such an animal for a 14-y0.

But I digress. And I have to say it's an exceptionally good sign I'm able to do so. A week ago I was so fried, I could not have called up a memory from that era.

I did some quality writing yesterday on a scene I've been stuck on for ages. As Anne Lamott said, sometimes you just have to try things. Four hundred words later, I feel like energy is coming back in this project I'd begun to despair about.

Film time with hubby was the most surprising part of the day. We'd had this Argentinian Netflix pick "The Secret in Their Eyes" sitting around for two weeks unwatched. The fact it was about a writer researching and writing a novel appealed to me. The description on the sleeve was rather offputting, though:

"A startling discovery comes to light for retired Argentine criminal investigator Benjamín Espósito (Ricardo Darín) as he pens a biographical novel about the unsolved case of a young newlywed's brutal r*pe and murder years ago. Past and present intertwine for Espósito and colleague Irene Menéndez Hastings (Soledad Villamil) in director Juan José Campanella's Oscar-winning character study in which justice, pain and love collide."

I generally avoid movies with the word "brutal" anywhere in the description. I have to say, however, that this film approached a heinous crime with such sensitivity and emotional beauty. What matters is how deeply concerned the protagonist is with seeing justice served for the victim and the husband she left behind.

As a writer, I was especially interested in the protagonist's grappling with the aesthetic and ethical implications of fictionally "doing justice" to this case that has haunted and shaped his life.

The cinematography draws you in right away. Arty scenes suddenly cut to Benjamín crossing out lines and crumpling pages. He tries opening after opening--something I could totally relate to, even if my genre isn't crime fiction.

The film switches back and forth in time. In the present, a retired Benjamín writes and researches his novel and tries to make sense of his past. In flashbacks, younger Benjamín the legal counselor gets drawn into a case that is bungled by his superiors. He and a colleague (to whom he's obviously attracted) work to solve the crime and bring the killer to justice.

Justice, and how it is intertwined with love and fear (and love with fear) becomes the thematic thread linking the case, Benjamín's novel and Benjamín's search for meaning as he enters old age. Several very clever literary leitmotifs echo among the story lines. In the end, Benjamín must learn to reinterpret and re-narrate his own life. It's a powerful picture of how writing shapes the writer.

Have you tried something new lately? What pleasant surprises have resulted?

Read More

NaNo alternative: NaBalWriMo, more creativity, less guilt

For some of us, November isn't the month to become drafting warriors. Perhaps you're in the midst of querying and have a draft underway, or have been revising a while and need to maintain momentum. Or maybe you're just a bit tired, period, and haven't been able to write much of anything for a while.

I'm in categories A and C. And it's the latter area that concerns me. It's not block, it's burnout. What I need is time to fill up and recharge.

I propose a month of creativity-building and moving forward on existing work as new energy comes. I'm calling it

NaBalWriMo

National Balanced Writers Month

more creativity, less guilt

If you're interested in joining the fun this month, let me know. Then post your own goals and the small step you plan to take. You can read mine HERE.

What are you up to this November? Want to be my NaBalWriMo buddy?

Read More

It's on! NaBalWriMo

Many of you are on board with a NaNoWriMo alternative in which we DON'T push ourselves to the brink of insanity drafting 50K words in a month (kudos to those who do--there's a great site with support and accountability all ready for you).

Rather than call it something negative, like NaNo-No, which I did jokingly in a previous post, I'd love this to be a positive, fun, relaxed, 30-day creativity-enriching experience, so I'm dubbing it:

NaBalWriMo
National Balanced Writers Month
More creativity, less guilt!

If you're up for it, please take a moment to think about places in your life that feel out of balance, and share your list of a few simple things you'd like to try to regain sanity and creative joy this month. We can cheer each other on! I'll go first.

My November goals:

-To be more emotionally present, especially to family
-To have more energy
-To recharge spiritually and emotionally
-To explore deeply some themes that I care about
-To rediscover the joy of creating
-To offer encouragement to other writers
-To maintain momentum with querying

And my "action items"
(to steal from boring corporate training I've sat through):

-Write one page a day of memories or notes or wordplay
-Watch lots of movies
-Read widely and with relish
-Have coffee with a friend
-Do a messy craft with hobbit girl weekly
-Walk the dog 4x week on the hiking trails nearby
-Blog some journal explorations and fun stuff
-Cheer on my NaNoWriMo, NaNoWraMo and NaNoRevMo pals
-Query 10 more agents

Anyone up for designing a badge? Let me know that you did and I'll send folks over to copy it and display with pride.

What do you think of the concept? Let me know if you're planning to join in NaBalWriMo!

Read More