I have decided that I don’t like February. Actually, I’ve known that before. February 2012 was a very bad month; February 2018, also not a good month. Really February 2020 doesn’t at all compare to either of those and so I should be counting my blessings. In fact, I think I’ll do that.

Blessing #1: Christina, who brings me chocolate and cooks amazing meals. Last night was bacon tacos with tomatillo salsa (really pork & pork belly, but fondly called bacon tacos), which reminds me that this morning I can have leftovers, always a nice thought.

Blessing #2: my brother, who sends me puppy pictures when I am feeling sad.

Blessing #3: Zelda, the beloved dog, who has developed the sweetest snore in her old age, always charming me.

Blessing #4: my dad and stepmom & their comfy driveway. I am so incredibly lucky that I get to sit at their breakfast table and talk to my dad about life, the universe & everything. I don’t take that for granted at all.

Blessing #5: Serenity. The van, not the emotion. I love my cozy tiny house and I love the freedom it’s given me.

Blessing #6: Lynda, my writing buddy, always in reach at the end of the text message window to encourage me and inspire me.

Blessing #7: Beautiful Florida weather. Even February could be made so much worse if it wasn’t sunny and clear outside.

Blessing #8: my chicken friends. I love that they now come running when I open the van door, I love that they’ve decided that Zelda is harmless, I love the sounds they make and I love watching them. It is impossible not to smile when you have these crazy birds in your life. Go, chickens!

I just realized that I was trying to think of two more blessings in order to make my list include ten and that annoyed me. Ugh. I am not going to become a person who writes top ten lists, that’s just ridiculous. So I will stop counting my blessings now, at least in pixels, but I will keep counting them as I get dressed in comfy clothes, walk the dog through a beautiful park with lovely spring flowers, eat a delicious breakfast of bacon tacos with eggs from chickens who eat my blueberries and Z’s dog food, and enjoy the first day of a new month. It’s going to be a great day. And a great month, too.

As regular readers know, I took a class in November called Write Better Faster and since then, I’ve been working my way through an ever-growing list of books searching for the magical cure to my writing malaise. I have not found said magical cure, but I have developed a deep and sincere love for the self-help genre, especially the really crazy ones. Unfortunately, I didn’t write down all the crazy stuff, I mostly just laughed at it and moved on.

But I’ve written down plenty of worthwhile things. Literally, I’ve taken something like 37,000 words worth of notes. Yep, it’s a novella of notes. However, since that many words is completely unwieldy for refreshing my memory, what follows are my favorite ideas and tips. Some are word from word, straight from the book referenced, and others are paraphrased, or my summary of what I learned from a given title.

1) Consider scheduling focused work time on a weekly basis and sticking to the schedule. Structure enables focus. (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)

2) Live your life with awareness and engagement. Be awake to what’s going on, commit to actively participating in your life. First principle for becoming the person you want to be: ask yourself, “Am I willing, at this time, to make the investment required to make a positive difference on this topic?” (Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts–Becoming the Person You Want to Be)

3) Focus on one wildly important goal. Track it using lead measures and create a compelling scoreboard that lets you celebrate successes, no matter how small. (The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals)

4) Track your damn self. Practice appreciation and gratitude to reward your past self so you feel motivated to continue. (Well Designed Life: 10 Lessons in Brain Science & Design Thinking for a Mindful, Healthy, & Purposeful Life)

5) Find your tribe, lean on them when you fail, and get back on your path. (Well Designed Life: 10 Lessons in Brain Science & Design Thinking for a Mindful, Healthy, & Purposeful Life)

6) When we trust that we live in an abundant universe and give freely, we raise our frequency, strengthen our faith, and feel awesome, thereby putting ourselves in flow and the position to receive abundant amounts in return. (You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life)

7) Stop judging yourself. Take your aspirations and break them down into tiny behaviors. Embrace mistakes as discoveries and use them to move forward. (Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything)

8) The ability to feel good at any given moment is a superpower that can change your life. Celebration is a specific technique for behavior change and a psychological frame shift. It is something you do to create a positive feeling inside yourself (the positive feeling is called Shine.) This is NOT OPTIONAL. The power of feeling good is the best way to create habits. Start with the Maui Habit: every day, as soon as you wake up and put your feet on the floor, say, “It’s going to be a great day.” If that’s a stretch, say, “It’s going to be a great day — somehow.” (Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything)

9) Fear is excitement without the breath. Feel the fear, breathe into it, and it will turn into excitement. (The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level)

10) Create value and delight, because there is nothing better than delighting people. The best job of all is doing something that doesn’t feel like a job. (The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level)

This isn’t a true top ten, because it’s not organized. Number one is no more important than number ten and vice versa. But I do think #8 is a good thing to work on. I’ve cried every day this past week and every time I find myself getting trapped in ruminating and sadness and anger, I put my feet on the floor and remind myself that today can be a great day if I want it to be. It sounds hokey, but it does help.

I saw a car with eyelashes this morning and it made me laugh. Then I stopped and took a picture of it, so I would remember that I’d laughed, and so I could have a reminder of laughing. It also let me check Appreciate off on my daily to-do list, because it gave me a nice moment of joy, of pleasure to be alive in a world that can be silly. I put the car on my gratitude list when I wrote my morning words, too. I wonder whether the person who put eyelashes on her car questions whether she’s spreading joy in the world or just knows she is?

This week’s book that I am forcing everyone in my life to listen to me talk about is called Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. When I started it, I was sure I was going to dislike the author, because he names things after himself (Fogg’s Maxim #1, etc.) and capitalizes everything and I felt like his words radiated too much “I have invented sliced bread” enthusiasm. But by the end of the book, I really liked him and I really liked the book.

One of his inventions — sliced-bread style — is a name for an emotion, Shine. I’m capitalizing it because he capitalizes it, although if he wants it to catch on, I really think he needs to lose the capital. Real words don’t need random capital letters in my opinion.

He defines Shine as a feeling of success, something like “authentic pride.” The feeling you get when you ace an exam or make someone laugh (when you’ve been trying to) or delight yourself with your own cooking or writing. The feeling when you look at your work and you’re happy about it or someone gives you a random compliment that pleases you, that feeling. And he believes that the best way to develop good habits, which will in turn lead to living a good life, is to celebrate successes, no matter how small, and give yourself lots of opportunities to feel Shine. His argument for this actually isn’t just feel good — it’s based on brain chemistry, and the fact that we form connections between neurons more easily when they’re tied to pleasure. If you want to form a habit, you need to make it feel good, and the easiest way to do that is to celebrate it.

So today I ate some healthy food, including sliced radishes for a healthy snack. Yay, me! And I wrote some words on a story and while Past Me would say there weren’t enough of them, Present Me is patting myself on my back and saying, Good job, self! And now I’m finishing a blog post that took me forever to write, so congratulations, self, you rock!

And while I can’t exactly say I’m feeling happy, at least I’m smiling. Tiny Habits = totally worth reading. My favorite self-help book of the week.

Shine on!

I haven’t been much of a travel blogger for the last few months: most of my time has been spent in a single lovely driveway, enjoying the company of good friends, excellent food, many board games and the Florida winter weather. And not so much enjoying, but at least dealing with, the necessities of dentist, doctor, lab work, van maintenance, etc. R and I had been talking about going camping, though, and between his schedule and my plans, we seemed to be running out of time, so this week we arranged to meet up in Gainesville and camp in the Ocala National Forest for a couple of days.

I chose our campground mostly for practical reasons – it was only an hour away from where I would pick R up, reasonably close to the highway, and the entry in the All Stays app promised fresh water and a dump station, both of which might come in handy.

As it happened, for $20/night, it was a really nice campground. There was a swimming area with a sandy beach (although plenty of signs warning about alligators), trails into the woods, restrooms with showers, picnic tables, bear lockers, plenty of room between campsites, fresh water right next to the campsite, and a general air of peaceful serenity.

But there were also a great many ticks. And on our second day, some serious humidity that turned into unexpected rain. (The weather report was still claiming that it was overcast but not raining even while the rain did its thing.) We’d planned to stay for two nights, but after lunch on our second day, when it became clear that between the ticks and the rain we were going to be sitting in the sweltering van (80+ degrees outside) all day, we decided to head back to Sanford. Oh, and my propane wasn’t working, so we’d had to run the generator to make dinner, breakfast, and coffee, which doesn’t exactly add to the peaceful serenity of a camping trip.

Despite the abbreviated ending, we’d had a nice time. I’d really like to remember it that way. I feel like I’m lying to my future self to even try, though. We went back to Sanford, had a delicious dinner, played some Ticket to Ride and went to bed with plans to go to the movies to see Birds of Prey the next day. We did wind up going to the movie, but between the morning walk and the movie, we managed to have an argument that really just devastated me. I spent most of the rest of the day crying, couldn’t talk to Christina about it without crying, have a headache today from crying, and am crying even while I try to write about it, so yeah, I want to be honest to my future self about it. My kid broke my heart, rewrote our entire relationship, and left me feeling like our future interactions are all contingent upon me being some inauthentic version of myself that is smaller and nicer and placating and… huh, I guess I’m a little angry, too.

I know that this too shall pass. I know that someday it will just be something in the rear view mirror, some moment of pain that maybe still makes me wince but that maybe can make me laugh, too. I know all that, I really do. I even know that he didn’t mean to hurt me the way he did and that he regrets having done so. But none of those thoughts change the reality of this moment. I feel like a failure at a thing I worked incredibly hard at being good at and — yeah, my heart is broken. It hurts. And Fore Lake Campground feels like a Before with an After that just makes me cry.

This too shall pass.

On Valentine’s Day, I went grocery shopping with Christina & Greg. On the way into the store, I said, “Oh, yay, Valentine’s Day. I shall buy myself some chocolate.”

Thus ensued a brief conversation about Hallmark holidays, which Christina scorns. Years ago, I too hated Valentine’s Day — it’s such a loaded holiday for anyone not happily partnered. These days, though, I like all holidays that can be labeled chocolate holidays, because they’re an excuse to eat chocolate, and I like reasons to eat chocolate. Christina pointed out that I can have chocolate whenever I want, and I said, sure, but if I ate chocolate every day it wouldn’t be special anymore. I like it to be special.

I view chocolate holidays as a reason to check in with myself and see if I need taking care of. I’m the person who takes care of me, mostly, so I’m the one who gets to say, “Hmm, would flowers make me happy today?” And if they would, I buy myself some flowers. And yes, I could potentially do this every day, but I can’t afford flowers every day, or chocolate every day. Even if I could, it would then just become routine, it would stop being a treat. I like Hallmark holidays — or chocolate holidays, which is the name I prefer — as an opportunity to be nice to myself. (It’s never even occurred to me to buy myself a card, though — I don’t go that far!)

Anyway, back to our shopping excursion: I went into the grocery store with every intention of buying myself some chocolate. Sadly, the grocery store had no chocolate without the allergen warning label that it had been processed in a place that also processes wheat. None! I am pretty sure I read the label on every single brand of chocolate bar they had. Before I was done, Christina was also reading labels.

Alas, there was no safe chocolate. But so it goes. I bought myself some gluten-free bagels, smoked salmon and cream cheese, which is also a rare treat, because hey, Hallmark holiday = reason to have a treat, and just because I couldn’t have chocolate didn’t mean I couldn’t have a treat. I toasted my bagel in Christina’s toaster and it was delicious. Treat success.

The next day Christina and Greg went out to lunch, and came back with gluten-free Thin Mint-style cookies (that tasted exactly like Thin Mints) and a gluten-safe chocolate bar for me. And you know, treats you buy yourself are lovely, but treats from thoughtful friends are even better. I finished the last of my chocolate bar last night right before I went to sleep and I fell asleep feeling loved. It’s amazing what a little chocolate can do.

Today I am off to Gainesville for a quick camping trip with R and M. It’s going to be hot — in the 80s — and it will probably rain, but I’m looking forward to it anyway. R texted me this morning and said if I didn’t want to drive all the way to Gainesville, they could meet me after M finishes her classes at 5. We texted back and forth for a few minutes before I finally called him, and established that I would rather drive an extra couple of hours to spend four more hours with him, that in the weight of my preferences, more time with him outweighs time spent driving. So I’m going to be getting on the road very, very soon now and today is probably not going to include any of the worthwhile things I have been doing (aka writing, teaching myself Affinity Photo, reading self-help books and taking notes) but it will include some joy. As my morning’s meditation guide said, “It’s going to be a magical day.” At the time, that made me laugh — it sounded so Disney to me — but I like the thought. I hope your day is magical, too!

I woke up this morning and thought, “Something good happens today, what is it?” It took me a minute and then I remembered — it’s Friday! Apple Music updates my New Music playlist on Friday. New New Music, yay!

Also Happy Valentine’s Day, but that just means I might bake the gluten-free chocolate cookies that have been sitting in my freezer ever since Publix had a Buy One, Get One sale.

Back to Apple Music: I switched my phone service to Verizon back in November and Apple Music was included with the plan I chose. It was sort of funny, I was — almost without looking — going to get the Unlimited productivity plan, aka Do More Unlimited, because I use my cell service as my internet access while I travel, and of course I wanted to Do More. And then I looked at the options and realized, nope, no, definitely not. I am a Play More Unlimited kind of person. I’d much rather play than do.

So now I have Apple Music and unlimited streaming music in my life and I love it so, so, so much. I’m listening to all kinds of music and I love searching for random fun new things. I can’t even say what my big favorites are, because I mix it up all the time. But I like the playlists that Apple creates — Today at Apple, Breaking Singer/Songwriter, Piano Chill, and so on. Three times a week, though, the software updates playlists specifically for me: my Chill Mix, my New Music Mix, and my Favorites Mix. The Favorites Mix is entertaining because it is so often very wrong. I don’t know why Apple decides this batch of random songs that I’ve never heard before would be my favorites but they are often not. I love the New Music Mix, though.

I like making playlists, too. Not serious playlists, mostly, but random playlists, like the one I’m working on that includes every song I stumble across that uses the word “Hallelujah” in the lyrics. It’s got 11 songs in it right now: only three of them are versions of the Leonard Cohen song.

I’ve made a playlist for my current writing project, too, although I sort of screwed that one up: I started with individual playlists for the two main characters and then I merged them into one. Unfortunately, it worked better as separate playlists. “Worked better” equals “got me into the writing zone more effectively.” But when I started writing this story, I thought it would includes sections from Niall’s POV and so far that hasn’t happened. His songs in the playlist just shake me out of the mood. I might have to separate them again, but it’s 41 songs long, so it’s not a small project.

In other projects, I finished reading another three books from my ever-growing Write Better Faster list. The list is ever-growing, because one book seems to lead inevitably to another book and some of the books have resource sections which I then wind up adding to my list. According to my list, I’ve read 16 books since I started the class in November: I now have another 36 to go. I seem to be adding them at the rate of two new ones for every one I finished. But I’ve also rejected 9 as being not what I’m looking for, so if I can just keep that up, maybe I’ll finish someday. Maybe even by next November.

My favorite of the books so far, at least out of those that should be described as self-help, is Well Designed Life: 10 Lessons in Brain Science & Design Thinking for a Mindful, Healthy, & Purposeful Life, by Kyra Bobinet. This book! If you’ve ever wondered why you don’t X, even though you know you should, she knows the answer. The most profound chapter for me (right now, anyway) is #4, about Me, Not Me, where she says basically that we develop our identities as children and as adults, we reject behaviors that don’t fit who we believe we are, without conscious awareness of the rejection. She mostly uses food and exercise in her examples, but it’s applicable to so much more.

When I first read the chapter and did the exercises, I immediately spotted one of my writing problems: I identify as an editor before I identify as a writer. That’s not good. If I could let go of being an editor first, maybe I actually could Write Better Faster. But the connections kept coming for me. Why do I identify as “Not a graphic designer,” anyway? Why do I think visual art is Not Me? Why do I look at all the self-taught cover designers and artists and think, “But I can’t do that.” Why can’t I? What makes that Not Me? Answer: probably some experience in early childhood that doesn’t relate to who I am now.

So I spent $50 on Affinity Photo, downloaded two books on it, and spent another $30 on a cheap graphics tablet. I don’t need to become the kind of artist whose work makes it into art galleries, but there is no reason why I can’t learn what I need to know to make lovely book covers. I also splurged on a whole bunch of fonts, because fonts are fun.

Things I have learned this week:

#1: It does no good to wear headphones at the dentist if he’s drilling inside your mouth, because the drill is basically inside your ear, closer than the headphones are. The dentist already knows this, which may be why he recommends listening to whale sounds, the idea being that the whale sounds and the drill sounds will mix together.

#2: Graphics apps for the Mac are expensive. But you can do cool things on your phone for literal pennies. The long version of that story is — well, actually, too long and too boring. But the short version is that I’d like to be able to make simple covers for short stories so have been experimenting with apps. In my imagination, I take a photo, use a graphic filter to turn it into something that looks like art, add text and make it a book cover. In reality… yeah, I probably need to pay for covers. But I’ve had fun with some phone apps, including one called Popsicolor. For 99 cents, it turns photographs into pop art.

#3: Self-help books that say you can manifest your success by believing in it (with the implication that if you’re not successful, it’s because you don’t believe in yourself enough) make me grumpy. Also, I believe that I choose my emotional responses and so I know I am choosing to be grumpy about such books, not being “made” grumpy, and that words are important. However, that said, I still feel grumpy.

#4: It’s a good idea to pay estimated taxes. Sigh. I was really sure that the combination of lousy book sales in 2019, plus various expenditures on advertising, marketing, covers, and production, was going to make taxes a moot point for 2019. I’m trying to convince myself that the good news is that I actually did earn a little money in 2019. That’s good news, right? Right. I wish I’d paid my taxes as they were due, though.

I woke up at 5:30 this morning, intending to meditate before I did anything else. It’s good to meditate first thing in the morning. It helps me start my day feeling healthy and responsible, like I’m taking care of myself and trying to become a more balanced and spiritually centered human being. I just had to check the caucus results first, though, and thus ended all hope of ever getting into a place of quiet calm. Seriously, Iowa, WTF?

I’ve had lots of election conversations recently. All the people that I’m close to are reasonably invested in watching the Democratic primaries, although every conversation basically ends with “anyone but Trump.” I’ve done my best not to get invested in any one candidate, because that way lies… well, not heartbreak, but maybe apathy? I realize that I myself am not the single person who sways elections, but I am the long-term Democratic woman voter who donates & volunteers, but only some of the time.

I couldn’t bring myself to watch the election results in 2016 because for the first time in years, I had done nothing for a candidate: no money, no phone calls, no walking door-to-door. I felt like if Hillary lost Florida and then the nation, it was going to be all on my shoulders, my own apathy dictating the outcome. Actually, it was the apathy of hundreds of thousands of people just like me. None of whom are feeling apathetic this year, I hope, but I’ve been trying very hard not to pick a primary candidate, because I don’t want to wind up disappointed and having to vote for someone I don’t care about. Worse, dislike. All that said, I do have a “Nevertheless, she persisted,” t-shirt and I might have to wear it today, to console myself. Nevertheless, she persisted. It is what we do.

Meanwhile, I am persisting in writing. I’ve had to give up on Cici for the time being. I don’t know why the story disappeared on me and the words weren’t there, but it did and they weren’t. Much to my relief, however, once I stopped trying to force Cici, my imagination decided to wake up again. Currently, it’s telling me the story of Laurel, who is running away from home, and — probably — finding a new home in Tassamara. At the moment, though, she’s on her way to Disney World. A snippet? Sure, let’s have a snippet…

“Siri, where the hell are we?” Laurel’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, a white-knuckled grip of pure frustration. 

Her phone didn’t answer her.  

Laurel resisted the urge to yell at it. What good would it do? But she glanced at the screen again — the map app still showing nothing but a white expanse with light grid lines — and then quickly back to the road before her.  

It was not what she’d expected. Florida was supposed to be palm trees, white sand, and sunshine. This forest that she’d found herself driving through was all wrong. It was pine trees, tall and skinny, with rough bark and tangled undergrowth.

To add insult to injury, it was raining. 

What was the point of running away to Florida if she was running straight into lousy weather? 

Maybe, just maybe, she should have checked the weather report before stuffing the summer clothes she hadn’t worn in months into a suitcase and heading south. Unfortunately, it hadn’t even occurred to her. 

Maybe she should have gotten her car a tune-up before deciding to go for a drive of a thousand miles or so, too. Somewhere around the Florida-Georgia border, after the last time she’d gotten gas, a mysterious orange icon had appeared on the dash. She didn’t know what it meant, so she was trying to pretend she didn’t see it. But the longer it sat there, the more it felt like it was glaring at her. 

She took a hand off the steering wheel and patted the car’s dashboard. “Hang in there, Sadie. We’ll get there. Somewhere. Someday.” 

An hour ago, getting off the highway seemed like a sensible decision. Florida drivers obviously didn’t give a damn about the then torrential downpour — they’d been zipping by at 75 or 80 miles per hour. Breaking down would have been terrifying. 

On the other hand, there were worse places to break down. Like right here for example.

She was in the middle of nowhere. 

She knew it was the middle of nowhere, because there was no cell service. Not a single bar. She might as well be on the moon. 

No cell service meant no calling a tow truck if her car died. Also no using her GPS to figure out how her little local street detour had turned into this expedition into the wilderness. Worst of all, no cell service meant no more music. 

She’d been streaming road trip playlists since leaving Kentucky, everything from the classics — Johnny Cash singing “Wide Open Road”, Springsteen with “Born to Run”, the Eagles, Steve Miller, America — to cheerful modern pop and country — the Lumineers, Sam Hunt, Katy Perry.  But only fun, lively, happy music. The kind of music she needed to distract her. 

Without it, the silence left much too much room for her own thoughts to cycle through the same dreary material. She should be happy. She should be ecstatic. But her brain kept getting in the way. 

All the usual caveats apply, of course. First draft, not edited, might not even make it to the final story. But yesterday was a 2K word day, the first in weeks, and I’m hoping today will be equally productive. And it will be, as long as I can stop refreshing the news results to find out what the hell is happening in Iowa.

Iowa. Seriously, Iowa? *shakes head*