Tag life

Week three of camp: Balance

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Total word count this week: 504 words. Grand total after three weeks: 2492 words.

Perhaps I should have made my goal a teeny bit lower.

I’ve made peace with my need to set the bar higher than reasonable. Have I learned my lesson? Maybe. Ask me again in July when the next session of camp comes around and I decide the night before that I’ll be able to write/revise way more than I allow myself time for.

It has been a stressful few weeks at work. I’m not sleeping well. Schedules shift with the season, and change makes me anxious.

But.

Tonight is a gorgeous spring evening. I dropped kiddo off at his last indoor soccer practice, walked down the street to a local coffee shop, and am sitting in the warm late day sun, happy to breathe fresh air and have these precious moments to spend with words and a delicious cup of ginger mint tea.

Life brings me down sometimes. Tries to pull me under with both the mundane and the soul crushing. Writing has always been an escape. For years I journaled, poured my teenage/early twenties angst onto page after page, book after book. Wrote poems that I read now and have to laugh at the shear drama of it all. When life stopped requiring regular mental purging, I turned to fiction and found release in the stories of people who took up residency in my brain. (Apparently they didn’t get the memo that it’s crazy in there.)

Sometimes, writing brings me down too. The pressure I put on myself to write more, write better, find an agent, get published. Create a brand.

You know what I’d like my brand to be?

Balance.

Me, standing in tree pose, roots firmly in the Earth, hands extended to the sky. Strong. Not falling over. Giving love to my family, my friends, myself. Giving my all at work, but then leaving it there. Giving my all on the page, but not worrying about perfection. Getting into nature and being one with the sights, the smells, the sounds. Dancing when the music moves me. Being still.

I sat down once this week to work on my new project. Distractions continue to haunt me, brought on by fatigue, a lack of self-discipline, time. It’s okay. I wrote once, and once is better than nonce. I’m happy with how things are going and feel like I have a decent amount of momentum. There is one final week left in camp, and this week is crazy busy, so I don’t see a miraculous race to the finish happening.

But.

My camp mate is coming in from out of town at the end of the week. The three members of our cabin along with a couple other awesome writing peeps are getting together. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the end of this mini journey.

Sometimes you sit alone in a coffee shop (or outside of one) and type away into the void, and sometimes you hang out with friends and laugh until your sides hurt. I expect to do a bit of both this week.

Balance.

 

Week one of camp: Procrastination and doubt

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Camp NaNoWriMo started last Sunday. I didn’t add any new words to my project until Wednesday, when I managed to eek out a measly 142. Part of the problem is that it was spring break this past week and the boys were off from school. To save money hubs and I alternated days off with the kids. On my days off, instead of my usual writing time, I hung out with the boys and we visited friends and family. It was fun, but draining. I love my boys to pieces, but they have entirely too much energy. A quick trip to the grocery store is like taking monkeys through a tree farm.

I love springtime, but the weather this week has been cold and ugly, and it’s making me feel restless and trapped. I want to take walks, breath fresh air, and warm my face in the sun. It doesn’t help that my WIP takes place in winter. Those 142 words? They were all about how much we look forward to spring.

On Wednesday night I met up with a few of my writer friends for coffee and conversation. It was great to see them and reconnect. But I continued to feel listless and uninspired. Sometimes when I work on a project, it calls to me. I can’t wait to get back in front of the screen and get lost in the world I’ve created. The characters meet me in my dreams, tell me their secrets, beg me to get their stories onto the page. Right now? All I feel is doubt. I’m often crippled by decisions required at the beginning of a new project, and this is definitely one of those times. The creative flow is blocked by my inability to commit to an idea. Remember that outline I talked about in my last post? Yeah, that totally hasn’t happened yet.

Saturday morning I sat in my usual place during soccer practice and decided to do a bit of stream of consciousness writing in the hope that I could dislodge the dam of doubt in my brain. It helped, and I walked away with 695 new words, bringing my total for the week to 837. To reach the goal I’ve set of 10k, I need to average 2.5k a week.

I need to pick up the pace.

Life returns to normal this week. Kinda. My parents are home from their snowbird place down south and my dad likes to bring the boys to soccer, which means less time in the chilly yet muse-filled indoor arena. (Although my days were numbered anyway – the outdoor season will start next month and it’s difficult to type while sitting in a camp chair. In the rain. I have little hope for a decent spring to ever arrive.)

The bottom line? I allowed myself time for family this week, and time to wallow in the murky pool of procrastination and doubt. Now it is time to light the fire of let’s-get-moving-already. My goal for week two is to spend some solid time at my desk, not worrying about what is or is not working; simply writing. If the words are garbage, then the words are garbage. Hopefully they’ll lead me to where I need to be headed with the story. And hopefully it will stop snowing and I can get outside and talk a long walk full of positive brainstorming energy.

Spring intentions

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Tomorrow is the vernal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. We will officially enter into my favorite time of year: SPRING. Around here, spring generally shows up late, or sometimes never — going straight from 30 degrees to 70 and skipping over the lovely mild temperatures in between. Our first week is predicted to hover in the high 30’s with plenty of sun. Cue the cabin fevered Buffalonians emerging from their snow cocoons. In shorts.

But enough about the weather. What I love about spring is the opportunity to start new. Forget new year’s resolutions; they never stick. Our bodies are deep in hibernation on January 1, immersed in a time when we take things slowly, draw inward, and fight to stay warm. Now is the time to resolve to live life fuller; the days are getting longer, the sun has escaped its cloud prison, and the Earth sends an invitation to change in the form of robins and daffodils.

This morning I did a yoga practice specific to the spring equinox, meant to wake up the body. The instructor asked her virtual class to set intentions and I thought, what better way to set my intentions than to post them here on my blog where I can refer back and perhaps even be held accountable by my friends and followers.

My spring intentions:

  • Keep my body healthy and strong (and hopefully pain-free!)
  • Make time every week to write
  • Be present in the moment

I need to focus on my health and change what I can control because there are days when the pain from endometriosis is more than I can bear. So I’m trying a new approach and hopefully it will be one I can stick with and see some results. As for writing, that is always part of my goal list because it is something I seek to continually improve. Right now I am querying my second novel and the steady flow of rejection has been a bit heart breaking. But I’m not ready to give up on the idea of my stories being out in the world and know that I have to keep writing and make it part of my weekly routine. Lastly, I vow to be more present, especially when I’m with family and friends. To savor all moments, from the blissful to the mundane. Life is too short to exist solely for our to-do lists.

Bloom away little flowers. Embrace the longer days, the warm sunshine. Decide what needs to change in your life and change it. Now is the time. Happy spring, everyone.

Waiting for the muse

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Words to describe me: mom, wife, friend, counselor, household manager, volunteer, health nut, writer. Notice where writer falls on the list. As something that brings me joy but also a fair amount of heartache, it easily slips to the bottom of who I decide to be each day. And when I do carve out time for writing, it’s often in small, interrupted patches, and the muse doesn’t always show up. (Translation: one hour dedicated to writing = 45 minutes on the web/social media/my phone/not writing + 15 minutes staring at a blinking cursor/not writing.)

I know what they say. Get your butt in the chair and put the time in if you want to make something of yourself as a creative person. So I convinced the family to turn our guest room into a writing office. Bought a new desk. Surrounded myself with inspirational things and books and lots of sticky notes. My job is only three days a week, which means I have two whole days to write while the kids are at school. All of the ingredients needed to crank out some amazing stuff.

Reality: See that list above? I volunteer at my son’s school several times a month and serve as committee chair for our local scout pack. I use one of the free days to grocery shop/meal prep/clean. I procrastinate under the guise of keeping up my social media presence. (Translation: waste time worrying whether or not people I’ll never meet will like my mildly witty tweet.)

When I do get my butt in the chair at my beautiful desk that is often covered with all things not related to writing, I worry. Worry about my stories and whether or not they will ever sell. Worry about the words coming out of my brain, especially when they seem stuck somewhere between there and my fingertips. Worry about all of the other things I should be doing, like cleaning out the basement or snuggling with the cat.

I recently read that you should carve out the same place/time each day and your muse will show up because he/she/they will know where to find you. Makes sense. John Cleese has a great video about how we need to allow ourselves time to get into the creative space in our mind, which for the modern writer may mean browse social media, search for the perfect playlist, make/purchase a comforting mug of your favorite warm beverage. The thing is, life doesn’t always allow for the same place/time for writing, and we use distractions as an excuse of settling in instead of truly settling in.

Take last Wednesday for example: It is my day off from work. Writing day. YAY! But the previous Friday was a snow day, so I had to go into work to make up the missing hours. It’s also usually the night I meet up with my writing group, but my older son has started indoor soccer practice at an elementary school on Wednesday nights with no place to sit and work. I decide to bring my laptop and find someplace nearby to write.

6:55 Drop son off at practice. Drive to nearby store with café.
7:00 Scope out the space and wait for barista to finish previous person’s order.
7:05: Order a cup of tea, decide on a small dessert, chat with barista.
7:10 Fire up computer, log into wifi, check twitter, tweet about how warm it is.
7:20 Log into library site, look for music to stream.
7:25 Open document, read last few pages, stare into space trying to decide what to write next.
7:35 Start writing.
7:50 Realize we need milk at home and if I want to buy some and get back to pick up son by 8:00 I need to wrap things up.

Fifteen minutes of writing. I wrote about 300 words. That’s the problem. Sometimes it takes so long to get all the other crap out of the way that when I actually start to feel the muse show up, it’s time to stop. At home, this may mean someone/thing requires my attention, or I wasted five and a half hours doing other things and now it’s almost time to get my son from school. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve managed to make it work at other times, like when the boys practice at the athletic center that not only has no wifi, but there’s a dead zone so even data on my phone doesn’t work. Just one hour of no distractions—buckle down and get some words on the page already—writing time.

Every writer I know has a list of other things that require their attention and responsibility. And often making the choice to write means you are sacrificing something else. Made worse by the fact that you may sit there, missing whatever it is you’ve chosen not to do, and stare at the screen. Waiting.

Don’t give up on your muse. Do what you need to do to get into the zone, even if that leaves only a handful of minutes for writing. I beat myself up the other night about only getting 300 words down, but hey, that’s 300 more than I had when the night started. And now I know the routine of that particular place and can change my approach next time.

I daydream about the possibility of giant chunks of uninterrupted writing time, just me and my muse, hanging out, telling stories. But reality can be cruel, and it forces me to figure out how to make it work when I can if I want to bump writer up the list. I do. Because, heartaches aside, it feels good to be in the zone. There’s really nothing else quite like it.