Stop this crazy ride…

merry go round This week has been insane. It seems like everything that could have gone wrong, has and if it hasn’t yet, it’s waiting to do so until just the right moment.

Dealing with crazy vendor issues with the rental property we own. Trying to get an estimate for some work done there totally ruined my day yesterday. I was going to take off and go to the grocery store around noon since I usually go on Sunday and hadn’t made it there yet (I finally got there around 6pm tonight, actually). But I ended up having to wait for one of the estimators to call me back, only he didn’t. Then I had to run errands and pick up my new prescription sunglasses and it took 45 minutes to convince them I couldn’t see out of my left eye with my new progressive bifocals and for them to figure out that lens was in crooked. MUCH better now.

It was also DD’s 12th birthday. EEEEEEK! One year left. *gulp* So I spent a crazy amount of time running around to pick up some last minute presents for her. We have to return one. Borders was out of the Extended Edition of HSM3. 😛 The grocery store wasn’t, if only I’d gone there on Monday! And for her birthday we always go out for Chinese food. Usually PF Chang’s but just as often a smaller local place that’s really good. We were smart and made reservations last night. We JUST made it in time too.

Today was supposed to be more low-key, and in many ways it was, which was nice. I spent the morning working on changes to Chapter One of the project I’m working on with my mentor. I didn’t get as far as I wanted to though. I kept having to deal with more phone calls about the rental property. The pool guy called to tell me the tenants were moving out — property manager reassured us only 2 of the 4 were, don’t panic. Phew. That mortgage is barely covered by the rent.

So, I was planning on picking up groceries again today, only my friend Romance Diva friends, Dana Belfry, who called at 11 am to ask what I was doing for lunch. She sounded disappointed when I said I’d just popped leftover Chinese into the microwave. Turns out she was down in my neck of the woods (or in SoCal does that translate into “my wing of the mall?” Anyway…) So we went out for lunch at Claim Jumper (I drooled over the bread pudding for you, Mother!) and she brought me a big box of books she’d picked up for free and didn’t want. Out of 13, I’ll probably read over half of them. Someday. My TBR pile is too big as it is.

So what did I pick up in the grocery store? Yep. Another paperback. LOL

So, I’m sitting here, the kids have gone to bed and I’m going to now try to focus on getting more of Chapter One revised. I don’t think I’ll finish, but I need to get further along than I am. Must. Go. Write.

Say Anything

Don’t worry, I’m not going to wax nostalgic about an 80s movie here. But the title was fitting for how I’ve been thinking about this blog lately…

It doesn’t matter what I say in this post, it’s more a matter of a need to “say anything” at all. I just need to post something, and then do it again in a couple of days. Build and sustain momentum, but the longer I leave it, the harder that gets. Thanks to those of you who commented or have pestered me about why I haven’t been posting. I’ve been feeling the same way about my journal entries lately too. The first couple days I started writing stuff down for 20 minutes were painful. Not as painful as the 10 minutes I spent walking on Monday, but mentally painful. My brain didn’t want to focus or work the way I needed it to, but with practice, it gets easier each day. I just remind myself it doesn’t matter what I type, I just have to type something.

In the movie, Lloyd Dobler asks Constance, “Why can’t you be in a good mood? How hard is it to decide to be in a good mood and be in a good mood once in a while?” I wish I knew. November and December seem to be rough months for me. Not just this year, but to the point I wonder if there’s something about the shortening days that wears me down so much. I know it’s not just holiday stress, but it’s very hard for me to just wake up and decide to be in a good mood. Maybe I should have been born as an animal that hibernates — a bear or a squirrel.

In order to get back into routines that work for me instead of against me, I’m participating in the Accountability Corner with Bria and some other Divas on a separate blog. We’ve set up goals for the coming year and are cheering each other on and holding each other accountable. Like routines, the goals have to work for you too. I think I have better goals than last year’s, but I’m still worried about how measurable and specific they are and if they’ll get me moving in the direction I want.

I also joined GoodReads last year, and I managed to track about 75 books I read last year with it. I’m already tagging books I read this year as well. The next step is to get comments on them written down so I can go back and remember what I liked or disliked about certain books. Of course, getting our entire library up there would be a cool thing, too.

Now that I’ve started this, I’m getting ideas for things to write about, but I think I’ll save them for Saturday.

Wishing everyone the best in 2009!

Where’s my Calgon?

I now have less than a week to finish and submit this short story. EEEEEEK! Where the heck did September go?

I’ve been up against multiple deadlines this month and I’d hoped to have this story finished well before now. However, that’s definitely not the way it has worked. The characters have been not cagey, but playing their cards close to their chests, we’ll say. Every paragraph has been a struggle to write. I think it’s the added pressure of knowing it was intended to be submitted for real and that I’d promised myself that when it was done I’d send it to Jodi. Yeah, no pressure or anything.

“Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”
— C. Northcote Parkinson

So, where does the story stand? Pretty much where I left it over a week ago. I have five basic scenes/plot points to hit and I know there are a bunch of things that I need to bring back to wrap it up nicely.

So, what’s the problem? A distinct lack of focus and motivation. I feel like I have a perpetual headache. Most of my other obligations have wound down for a bit but there’s still the daily grind to accomplish as well. However, I still feel like that Greenday song, “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” Oh, not anything from the lyrics or the video, just the title. After two essentially sleepless nights last week, I could use the extra Zzzz’s. Maybe that’s part of the headache?

So, why am I whining (am I? I tried not to. Honest.) about this here? DH and I drove an hour or so north of here for a friend’s birthday party on Saturday night (*waves hi to TinyFroglet!*) and to mourn the passing of her youth. She turned 40 this year as well. Anyway, she said she really enjoyed reading the blog because I wasn’t afraid to be honest about my struggles with this process. So thank you for pushing me out of the rut and making me realize that explaining it and thinking out loud about it does actually help more than just ignoring it and hoping it’ll go away again.

So, what am I going to do about it? First, I’m going to go check and make sure the premier of Heroes is taping tonight, then I’m gonna sit down with my timer and jump into one of those chat challenges at Romance Divas. Ready? Here I go….

Thursday Thirteen: Habit Forming

13 Things to Avoid When Changing Habits

As you can tell from Monday’s post, habits and routines have been on my mind alot.

Leo Babauta from Guam has a great blog titled: Zen Habits where you can go see his comments on these pitfalls. He gives permission to reprint his posts, but in what follows below are his pitfalls, followed by my own thoughts them. You should go explore the real thing if you have any interest in the topic.

I also love the quote he has on this post: “Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.” by Jim Ryun.

1. Taking on two or more habits at once.: Yep. Guilty. Baby steps, one at a time.
2. Not committing a plan to paper.: The Accountability Corner thread at Romance Divas is especially helpful with this one. It’s semi-public accountability and forces me to look at least a week in the future.
3. Being half-committed.: Very Guilty. Repeatedly. Just wanting to establish a good habit or break a bad one isn’t enough. You have to actively work on it. Whoddathunkit?
4. Not having support.: This requires admitting you want to change to someone else too. Ewwww.
5. Not thinking through your motivation.: Because it’d be good for me isn’t enough. Goes back to that commitment thing.
6. Not realizing the obstacles.: Plan ahead.
7. Not logging your progress.: Again, I can look back at my Accountability Corner thread on Divas and see just when I stumbled, but I can also see the long runs of success as well.
8. Having no accountability.: Sick of hearing about the Accountability Corner yet? Too bad it’s just writing, although Bria and I talked about adding another category besides Writing Time and Writing Life to it next round.
9. Not knowing your triggers.: Logging your progress can help identify these and will help you plan ahead.
10. Not doing your reading.: Hmmm… my highly theoretical self is skeptical of this one. I guess it could be reinforcing motivations, but honestly I’ve never found it much help before.
11. Changing focus too soon.: Focus? Whazzat? I swear I’m related to gnats somedays.
12. Not being consistent.: Ooh. This one and the next sound familiar.
13. Quitting after failure.: This one is often too tempting and I can see where I’ve beaten it with some habits, but not others. Guess we better check that motivation thing again. Sigh.

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!

1 SandyCarlson	2 Tamy ~ 3 Sides of Crazy	3 Candy Minx
4 SJ Reidhead	5 Juliadamus	6 Jennifer McKenzie
7 Ava Rose Johnson	8	9

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The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

Back On Track…

Well, I gave in and wiped the harddrive on the laptop after trying just about every method known to man to try to get any files off it. The file system was completely hosed.

Reinstalling the OS and upgrading to Leopard and then reinstalling Office and Adobe’s Creative Suite took way too long. I’m still missing some stuff, but luckily I had registration codes written down for everything except one and I think I lost the email for that one in the wipe.

Fortunately, I only lost about 5 days worth of edits and journal entries that weren’t backed up on my desktop machine. I’m giving what used to be called .mac or iDisk and is now known as MobileMe a trial. For $99 a year, they’ll back up all the preferences and data from my Apple-centric software. Sadly, I don’t like Mail, Safari, iCal, or Address Book and prefer Entourage. So, if I want that stuff backed up, I have to do a bunch of picky hand-setting of what I want archived. Add to this, if I don’t want to give up my two free month trial, I can pay my money now and upload more than 100mb at a time.

Do you know how small 100mb is?! Sheesh.

So on the whole, I’m not TOO depressed about having to wipe it, but I am feeling a distinct sting where all my contacts, emails and stuff that wasn’t backed up have been ripped from me. Yes, for a digital packrat, this sucks. Oh well, life goes on and more will be accumulated over time.

So the plans this week are to jump back in at the deep end and keep going. At least the writing stuff lost wasn’t new pages, just some edits. It could have been so much worse than having to resummarize the scenes in Revealed, but I’m looking at them closely in terms of subplots and what I can do to expand on Barrington’s story line. I also printed out the whole beast so I can work on the edits from that and know which pages have been revised for sure. Yup, list of pages revised went poof too.

So that’s how my week wrapped up. Dr. Horrible was definitely a bright spot. Joss Whedon is pure EVIL!

Thursday Thirteen: Grrrr!

13 Things That Irritated Me Today

Sorry, no pretty pictures today. I’m stuck on my old, slow desktop and I now get why my kids complain when I tell them they can use it to look up something instead of commandeering my laptop when I’m trying to use it. *grumble*

1. My laptop refuses to boot.
2. This meant I couldn’t do my morning rounds of checking email, sites, forums to wake up.
3. I also couldn’t jump straight into my journal entry for the day and save it in the usual spot.
4. Getting to camp and realizing DD forgot a towel for their water games today and that I’ve already put 230 miles on my van since Monday. Good thing I got those new tires, huh?
5. When I tried to make a restoration CD, the DVD drive on my desktop went AWOL.
6. After several hours of not doing anything different (yes, I tried reseating the cables earlier too) it worked fine.
7. Realizing that the restoration CD that finally burned was the wrong one.
8. Realizing that MAX speed isn’t most reliable speed. Anyone need coasters? AOL doesn’t send any these days.
9. Getting screwed by the guy at Staples (Yeah… that was EASY!) because he doesn’t know what specials they’re running in their weekly flier. He gave me $3 back for 2 recycled ink cartridges that I was replacing, but when I argued it was supposed to be $15 each he got confused and left the original $6 credit and gave me one more for $15 and realizing I won’t see that $21 anyway, because it was on DH’s company rewards card.
10. Getting whined at that I didn’t rip the desired Pokémon songs all day because of the stupid DVD drive.
11. Apple’s crappy support forums and troubleshooting guides are just sad. And unhelpful.
12. Wasting several hours on all this and having to pick up my office and do dishes instead.
13. My laptop still refuses to boot.

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!

1 Talk About My Favorite Authors	2 SJ Reidhead	3 Tempest Knight
4 Paige Tyler	5 Jennifer McKenzie	6 Alice Audrey

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Tick, Tock…

I joined Bria‘s writing goals accountability thread on Romance Divas‘s forum and have been thinking about time management a lot lately. The other night, Andi and I were talking about how this past year has flown by so quickly. There’s lots of theories out there and I’m not going to dig into any of them here.

I’ve always been bad at time management strategies. Stuff either happens or it doesn’t. For me, this usually means it doesn’t. I’m a major procrastinator: Why do today what can be put off ’til tomorrow? This accountability thread has been keeping my on my toes. I did great the first week and the next three days, but then with the holiday looming and the realization that other obligations also need to be met… well I earned my first unhappy face. I don’t know how the rest of this weekend is going to go. I’m nearly done with two of my goals (journal entry and blogging), so that just leaves 2 hours of writing on my WIP for today. Sounds easy you say? If I didn’t need to live in the real world, sure, piece of cake.

Most of the time I find myself hyperfocusing on something that allows me to escape from things I don’t want to do or think about. I shouldn’t be surprised when DD and DS whine that they don’t want to do boring but necessary jobs around the house. No one likes to (do they?). They certainly don’t have the best role models.

I’ve always been amazed and a little awed by people who manage to fit so much into their lives: scouts, sports, work, hobbies, entertaining, as well as all the little daily maintenance things that make their lives run smoothly. I like the idea of “found minutes”, but I think I’ve lost so many minutes I think they’re all curled up with the dust bunnies. I know they add up, but I find it takes time for me to get into tasks and then once there, I tend to hyper focus and my perfectionist tendencies override any permission I’ve given myself to do the task for “just fifteen minutes.” Because you can do ANYTHING for just 15 minutes, right?

I also find I lie to myself all the time by pretending I work well under pressure with tight deadlines. Papers in college were always started the night before they were due and that worked out ok. However, as I get older, I find I want to enjoy more quality time, but the guilt of other things left undone ruins that. I don’t want to put everything off to the last minute any more.

I think the best quote I ever read was “We all have routines, but is the one you have working for you?” I’m learning to juggle my commitments, but finding that sweet spot of balance is difficult. I just need to keep at it and establish better routines that actually work for all the areas I need to balance instead of just going with the flow and ending up caught in the eddies.

Wordle & FQD

I’m late in posting this, but I didn’t want to ignore it either. Wordle.net is an awesome way to lose a few hours messing around.

Call me crazy but this is my favorite new lens. I rushed pasted in my three WIPs. Bria and MJ and several other Divas did theirs.

You can fiddle with the color palette, orientation settings for the words and I think I set the maximum words to use at 150 (the default). Lots to play around with and procrastinate.

As you can see if you go look at the larger version of this one, the largest names are the heroine, the hero and a couple of secondaries (Lord and Lady Rylestone) — it’s slightly skewed to the secondaries because of title usage for their names and their home and no, I can’t cut one of the characters. Next you see two of my favorite echo words, “back” and “into” and some other theme related words “foal”, “mare”, and “stables”.

Bria’s set up an accountability group at RD and I’ve been setting my goals as 2 hours of writing on FQD for 6 days a week, journaling for 30 minutes a day and going through a craft lecture or blogging every other day. Yesterday was a bonus post for Andi.

Progress this week has been slow at best only about 2000 words in 12 hours of actual writing time. My mind has been craving more inputs and I’ve been reading one of Margie Lawson’s lectures every other day and trying to keep up with the exercises in it. I don’t expect progress to pick up much in this coming week either, especially since we should be hosting a bbq on Friday.

Andi pointed me to a new editor blog by Alicia Rasley and her friend Teresa Stevens: edittorrent and I keep going back to read and reread posts. Their redlines series is a must read. Installment #11 has some great tips on pitching and making sure your summary is in the right ballpark and can be converted into a query letter as well. Definitely worth a look.

Thursday Thirteen: Procrastination!

Besides perfectionism, procrastination is my next biggest issue. Way back in college, it used to be a running joke that for me a study break was when I took a break and studied. I’m finding similar issues these days as I find myself reluctant to face certain truths or balk at actually writing them down. I don’t recommend any of these methods, but maybe it’ll help you recognize your own self-sabotage tactics.

13 Signs You May Be Procrastinating

1. You catch yourself humming as you go to gather laundry and you HATE doing laundry.

2. You noticed a speck of dust and rush to grab the feather duster and proceed to run it over every surface in the house.

3. You obsessively check your email. Discounts on Viagra and the possibility of your non-existent eBay account being compromised are beginning to look interesting.

4. You find yourself jumping up in the middle of a sentence to go check some minute detail because you were just reading about it and want to get the quote exactly right.

5. Balancing your checkbook becomes your highest priority even though you just did it yesterday. It MIGHT have changed.

6. You need to go check if there are any new posts on your favorite forum, RD always delivers when you need a distraction.

7. You find yourself drinking more water, not because you’re necessarily thirsty, but it means more trips to the bathroom to “think”. Oh, and the plants are probably thirsty too.

8. You play with the fonts. See! It looks better that way… courier is too icky. Times New Roman is boring! What you need is a fresh look at your writing… how about something to put it in context? Regency Script, Copperplate or even FUTURA?

9. Hmmm? Was that your stomach that just growled? Snack time is always good for a few extra minutes.

10. That song playing is driving you nuts! The shuffle isn’t shuffling randomly. You swear it’s picking out favorite songs just to annoy you.

11. You catch yourself staring at the phone, willing it to ring. Maybe the kids forgot something at school. That’ll burn a half hour or so to find it and then drive over and back.

12. You must have some bills floating around on your desk that haven’t been paid. What starts out as a hunt for one unpaid bill, turns into a marathon desk-organizing mission.

13. It’s only Friday, but you’re already pondering what to put in next week’s TT. Hey, if you do one a day for a week, you won’t have to worry about them for a while!

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!

1 Gina Ardito	2 Heather	3 Susan Helene Gottfried	4 Carrie Lofty
5 Unusual Historicals	6 Debbie Mumford	7 Deb Logan	8 Rene Lyons

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It’s Bad When…

…your own son tells you that you need a vacation just as soon as Daddy gets home.

Turbulent wave with foam

<– How I Feel

September has been a stressful month on several fronts. DH has been traveling a lot this month for work. The kids are amazing! They’re able able to tune in and immediately amplify any stress I’m feeling. Mondays seem to be the worst night, especially when Dad’s gone. After two days of no routine, the kids are reluctant to settle back into doing their homework in a reasonable time.

They’re natural procrastinators. What I can I say? They come by it honestly. There’s also this impossible chemistry that goes on between them when you put them within 6 feet of each other. Somehow, even though they’re both under 5 feet still, one will end up touching, pushing, kicking or hitting the other the second your back is turned. An, of course, you can’t separate them. “*I* want you!” and “I was here FIRST!”

I can hear you now, “Why haven’t you been writing during the day, then?” I’ve tried. In fact, that’s when I planned on writing. After dropping off the kids at school , I have a nice chunk of time that’s relatively open until 2 pm. I was doing better when I was getting up early and doing my journal before getting the kids up. Maybe I can get back to that next week. I need some sleep.

I am still cranking out around 1,000 words a day in my journal and I’ve been fairly regular about posting here. What I haven’t Calm, small wavelets been able to do is make any progress on either of my current stories. The Food Critic has my inner editor screaming about no oomph, no real crisis, no real plot and every time I sit down to look at it, I find it impossible to move beyond where I stopped two weeks ago. The novel is likewise sitting dead in the water. I don’t know if I’d label it writer’s block exactly, but I’m in need of decompression time.