Category Archives: Writing

Future Self

23 Monday May 2016

Posted by in Grace, Personal, Therapy

≈ 5 Comments

I read a truly brilliant comment on reddit on Saturday.

I consider reddit a vice, unhealthy on a regular basis, best avoided, but with a lure that makes it ever so appealing on a slow Saturday evening. It’s not the worst vice in the world, pretty far from it, really, but I do try to stay away. 99% of the time on reddit, I leave feeling the same kind of vague nausea that eating too much junk food creates. Like I should rethink my life choices if I’m wasting my time that way. But 1% of the time, I read something truly inspiring. On Saturday, it was this comment on Non-Zero Days.

You should go read it, really. I cannot do justice to its splendor. Partially because I couldn’t bring myself to use capital letters like he did or swear like he did, but also because the flavor of the comment is perfect for the advice within the comment.

My favorite part of the advice, though, is Rule 2: Be grateful to the 3 yous. Ever since I read it, I’ve been thinking about Future Me and how to be nice to her and it’s such a lovely way of providing perspective in my days. Some of it is obvious: that cookie that looks so appealing? Future Me would be so grateful to Past Me for not eating any gluten today. Some of it is a little less obvious: Future Me will definitely appreciate it if Present Me unloads the dishwasher before I start piling dishes in the sink, instead of only after I have a pile of them. And then there’s the big picture stuff: how grateful to Present Me will Future Me be if I actually get better about flossing my teeth? Huh, probably pretty grateful, especially given what a minimal effort flossing really is.

But I’m also trying to take care of Present Me. I got reminded of the second half of the serenity prayer recently, which begins, “Living one day at a time; enjoying one moment at a time;”. It’s so easy for me to get lost in worry about the future, so natural for me to spend my time wandering in mental circles of anxiety. But stopping, taking a breath, sitting on the lanai and admiring the bamboo… it feels so much better. And worrying about the future doesn’t actually help Future Me. Yes, I need to take care of her, but I don’t need to try to live her life. I’ll get there when I get there.

My backyard neighbor has lined the entire back of the fence with bamboo. It’s really tall, at least fifteen feet, maybe even taller and so beautiful. One stalk has managed to spring up on my side of the fence and it’s leaning precariously. But it sways in the wind and light filters through the leaves, and the colors are so perfect, yellows and deep greens. I think Future Me will probably have to chop down the stalk at some point, but Present Me thinks it’s lovely. bamboo picture This picture doesn’t do it justice, because I don’t know how to take a picture of light with my phone, but I’m posting it anyway to remind myself.

So this is what I’m trying to do this week: Be grateful to Past Me for her good choices, forgive her for her less good choices; take care of Present Me and live in her time; and do nice things for Future Me. Fortunately, Future Me would really, really, really like it if I could finish this book and move on to writing A Precarious Balance, so I’m hoping for lots of good writing. Happy Monday!

Selling my house (or not, as the case may be)

19 Thursday May 2016

Posted by in Grace, House

≈ 4 Comments

The second people to look at my house made an offer.

I said no.

This house-selling business is an interesting process. I had imagined it as straightforward: standard contracts, typical mortgages, generally accepted terms. Not so much, apparently. Or at any rate, my two offers were very different. The first seemed straightforward. The second, not so much. The number of things without prices that the seller (i.e., me) was going to pay for was… well, almost laughable. No, I’m not going to pay for all these pigs-in-a-poke. WDO inspection and underwriting and tax services and closing costs and on and on. I do expect that I’ll be paying some of a buyer’s closing costs, but I’m not going to sign a contract that doesn’t come with clear prices attached. Apparently people do, however.

This offer was, in every possible way, worse than the first, so eh. Nope, not going to do that yet. Oh, well. Maybe I’m not selling my house. Or maybe the third people to look at the house or the eighth or the tenth or some other number will be the offer to work out. Meanwhile, I will enjoy living in it.

In other news… I’ve got nothing. I’ve been spending a lot of time looking up random words and thinking about definitions. Well, not exactly random. One link leads to another which leads to another, but the starting word was “grace.” What does her name really mean? A Gift of Grace started with the idea that on the surface, he rescues her (back in my original plot) but really she rescues him. In the new plot, as it has evolved, there is no rescuing. So what’s the gift? Before I could answer that question, I got wound up with words and the way we use them. Salvation, surrender, blessings, alleluia — it’s made for some fascinating reading. None of it useful for writing Grace, ha, but still interesting.

I do think that maybe I got a glimmer of an idea last night from a writing group that I go to. I brought up my struggle and what I currently think my issue is and one of the guys said (about Noah), “so his perspective needs to change.” I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with that idea, but it might help. I hope so anyway! Meanwhile, I continue meandering around in the same chapters, but I think they’re evolving in good ways.

And back to it!

Mother’s Day

09 Monday May 2016

Posted by in Grace, Mom, Movies, Personal, R, Randomness, WIP, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

On Saturday, I was bracing myself for the Mother’s Day blues.

Five years ago, I didn’t see my mom on Mother’s Day. I called her, I expect, but I didn’t do flowers or a card or a gift — I was in grad school, quitting my job, life was busy. I didn’t know, because we so rarely do, that it would be our last holiday. I don’t feel guilty about that — she would scoff at me if I did. But I do think of her and miss her more on the holiday. At the best of times, it’s still a teary holiday for me. And this year, R was busy with finals, so I expected a solitary day. As I said, bracing myself.

Instead, there was an after-dark knock on the door on Saturday evening. I went to answer it with trepidation, that sense of ‘uh-oh, who could that be?’ But yay! It was R, home to surprise me, and a delightful surprise it was.

Instead of my solitary day, I made us a big breakfast and then we headed off to our annual Mother’s Day super-hero movie tradition. We saw Captain America: Civil War, which was unexpectedly good. I’d been careful not to read or see anything about it — I actually didn’t want to be spoiled, because my expectations were so low. I usually don’t mind spoilers, but in this case, I anticipated that spoilers would reveal things that would make me unhappy and I didn’t want to dread the movie, if that makes any sense. But it was surprisingly enjoyable and far more fun than I expected it to be.

Afterwards, he worked on his final papers and I thought about Grace. Didn’t write a word, but did finally decide to go backwards again. R came into my room at one point and I told him I was debating throwing the whole thing away and he forbid it, very sternly, so I guess I’m not doing that. But the last six weeks of words just don’t work for me, so I’ve deleted them from my file (saving them, of course, for when I change my mind again) and am starting over again from the point where I think it stopped working. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to re-use some parts, but I’m going to work on writing it as if it’s a clean slate.

Meanwhile, a friend taught me to knit on Saturday, so I have been knitting and thinking and knitting and thinking. No words written (unless I count these) but at least I’m not feeling frozen anymore which is how I spent the last week. I’m trying to remind myself to put progress before perfection, like a good positive discipline parent.

But I’m also thinking that maybe knitting would be a good metaphor for how I should be treating writing. Because in my knitting, I’m trying really hard to focus on process, not product. I finished off my first skein of yarn, and then I ripped it all out and started over. Not because I was worried about it not being good enough, but because the point of knitting for me is not to produce usable objects, but to have the mindful meditative process. I’m trying to find flow states, not create scarves. Maybe I should be treating my writing the same way. The goal isn’t to produce an end result that follows other people’s rules of storytelling and satisfies every single person who ever picks it up — the goal is to love what I do while I’m doing it.

Process, not product. It feels right. So now let’s see what the words are like when my only goal is to enjoy writing them.

Inspiration strikes

25 Monday Apr 2016

Posted by in Grace

≈ 3 Comments

I’ve had a stuck day. Like my head is elsewhere and my body is moving around without it, no imagination, no ability to put a coherent word next to another coherent word. I suspect this might have something to do with the ibuprofen PM I took before going to bed last night. Well, not before going to bed — before going to sleep, after an hour or so of lying awake.

I’ve been eating more sugar than I should — fresh peaches, bananas, and these yummy gluten-free cookies. End result: joint inflammation. I would still totally eat more of those cookies if I hadn’t finished the box yesterday. But interestingly, I found it very easy to resist the peaches. Why is the unhealthy food so much more tempting? Anyway, sugar leads to joint pain, which led to an over-the-counter sleeping aid, which led to a very groggy day.

My progress on the current chapter I’m working on, in sum total, consists of: “Noah settled into Tassamara as seamlessly as if he’d lived there forever.”

Next line should be… something? Anything? It’s an area that I’ve had trouble with before, narrative something-or-other. Basically making time pass. The next interesting thing to happen is when Akira and Zane get back from their honeymoon, so basically I want to skip ahead to that, but you know, it requires something more than… huh.

I could just skip ahead.

I could leave a note to myself in the file, along the lines of (Write Something Here) and write the part that’s more interesting. And maybe when I come back I’ll know more about what happens in that time period or else I’ll have a better idea of how to skip ahead.

*sigh

This idea is ridiculously obvious, but I have spent four hours sitting in front of this damn computer waiting for inspiration to strike and getting nowhere. I really need to remember somehow that inspiration strikes more readily when the fingers are moving. But now I need to go write Akira and Zane getting home from their honeymoon, and that makes me feel surprisingly cheerful, given how much of a miserable grind this day has felt like.

Writing Akira is always fun, though. One of my closest friends told me that I am more like Sylvie than I am like Akira, which might be one of those times when someone else sees you better than you see yourself, but writing Akira is easy because she just does and says and feels whatever I would do/say/feel in the same situation. I enjoy writing characters that I don’t have much in common with, but when the going gets hard, it’s nice to write someone who flows by instinct. Fingers crossed that she will do so for me now, because I’d really, really like to get some words written today!

Gloomy Thursday

14 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by in Grace

≈ 6 Comments

It’s a grey, gloomy day, perfect for wandering around an office, aimlessly chatting to coworkers and attending unproductive meetings in which everyone wishes it was Friday and no one gets any real work done. It’s been fifteen years since I worked in a real office and most of the time I don’t miss it, but today I could use the co-worker vibe and also the sense that hey, I made it to the office, surely that’s enough productivity for the day? Not that office days were often like that. If I was in a cubicle, I probably wouldn’t even have a chance to notice/appreciate/be depressed by the weather, because my head would be down and I’d be typing away.

But I’m not having a lot of luck focusing today. I’ve really been trying to get back into Grace. I’m so close to the end. I don’t understand why I can’t just polish it off. Seriously, word count wise, it should be a matter of days. Instead I spin my wheels, going back over and over the same scenes, trying to push my way through but instead meandering. I’m not going to put the house on the market until after I finish Grace so really, all my house efforts are pointless. Well, not pointless — just in the wrong order. If I keep this up, I’ll be living in an empty house, pacing through echoing rooms while I try to find a happy ending — even a Happy For Now ending! — for Noah and Grace. Eh, my house is probably too small for the rooms to echo much. But the pacing works.

I’ve been reading about the Snowflake method. I may try it for my next book. I’m yearning to start the next book. I’m not sure which one it will be, whether I’m going to write the next Tassamara book or Fen’s sequel, but I so want to start putting my energy into something new and inspiring, something fun and… oh. Ha. Instant writing revelation. The parts I need to write on Grace now — they’re not fun. They hurt. Noah has to confront what he’s been avoiding for so many years and so does Grace. And it’s cathartic, but hard. And that’s why I’m avoiding it so much. Ugh. All right, I need to just take the plunge and stare at those files for a while and see if I can get my fingers moving. I may have to start posting daily writing updates again for a while, trying to keep myself honest and get myself moving. But for today, staring at the file and refusing to let myself be distracted by bathrooms that need to be cleaned, laundry that needs to be done, old journals that need to be paged through, etc. etc. etc. is probably the place to start. Wish me luck!

Sophia

28 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by in Grace, Personal, Writing

≈ 9 Comments

I took the weekend off — yes, my chain is broken and I start it anew today. I have no regrets. My house had hit a place of chaos that was becoming unlivable for me and it was stressing me out. Stuff everywhere. I should post a picture of my coffee table, except that it’s so much better than it was that it wouldn’t accurately represent the chaos.

Instead, how about a picture of a dragon?
2016-03-25 12.59.44

On Friday, I took my niece to Universal. She, unfortunately, is not in a phase where she likes roller coasters and the Universal Parks are very roller-coaster centric, so we mostly just wandered, but we had a good time. We watched a couple shows, including the singers in Diagon Alley and the animal training show. During the latter, she leaned over to me and said, “I am completely and utterly happy,” so score, she had at least a few good moments. Her mom has been sick, so her spring break was not the imagined ideal of vacation time. A fire-breathing dragon can’t make up for that entirely, but it’s impressive nonetheless. (It really does breathe fire. You can feel the heat of it on the street below!)

But this morning I was walking the dogs and thinking about Grace and getting back into it and where I was going and I realized again that Sophia is my problem. Some characters are just really determined to steal the show and she is one of them.

With Ghosts, very, very, very belatedly (last fall if you were reading then!), I realized that I did indeed have a classic hero’s journey plot, but it was Dillon’s, not Akira’s. Akira was the mentor character. And this is Ghosts, not Thought, which was much more obviously Dillon’s story. With Grace, I realized on some revision that yes, it wanted to be Dillon’s story again. Maybe that was the third revision? On the fourth, I gave Sophia more story. Now that I’m on the fifth (I think, unless this is the sixth), it’s obvious that she’s not satisfied with what she’s got — she wants even more.

It’s strange: I realize none of you know her yet, so you can’t know what she’s like. But… hmm, an excerpt? Okay, here’s her intro. This is from the first chapter, so it’s not exactly a spoiler, but stop reading if you don’t want to know anything until the book is in your hands (or on your Kindle).

*****
A soldier in desert camouflage was leaning against the same wall. He was young, tan, brown hair cropped short, and he looked solid, just like a living person, but Dillon was almost positive that he was a ghost. Next to him, a woman in a long dark robe, her hair covered by a tight scarf, crouched by a small boy in a blue-and-white striped t-shirt. They had to be ghosts, too, and the teenage girl with a nose ring sprawled across a bench, ignoring the men on whose laps her body rested, was definitely a ghost. Around everyone, cloudy wisps of white light bobbed and floated in the air.

Had all these people died in the courthouse? Dillon paused a careful distance away from any of the ghosts. Two of the living people walked through him, their heads bent together, their conversation low-voiced, indistinguishable in the ambient echoes and sounds of the hallway.

The soldier spotted him. “Hey,” he said, straightening. “Welcome to the party.”

The girl on the bench sat up. She stared at Dillon, her gaze accusing. “Who are you?”

The scrubbing woman lifted her head to look at him. “Oh dear, oh dear,” she mumbled before bending back to her work. “This floor will never get clean if people keep walking on it.”

“Um, hi.” Dillon gave a tentative wave in the direction of the bench. “I’m Dillon.”

The soldier pointed at himself, the woman in the robe, the boy, the teenage girl, the man in the apron, and the cleaning woman. “Joe, Nadira, Misam, Sophia, Chaupi, and Mona. Don’t worry about the others.” He waved a hand through a ball of light drifting near his face, then gestured toward the woman in the long dress and the man who paced. “She sings and he rants and some of the others say stuff once in a while, but they don’t talk to us.” His smile was friendly and his tone matter-of-fact. He seemed welcoming, but not unduly excited.

He must never have met any dangerous ghosts. Dillon hadn’t been so lucky.

But he said, “It’s nice to meet you all,” and glanced from face to face, trying to connect each of the names to its owner. If he had it right, the woman in the robe was Nadira and the little boy was Misam. From their closeness and their matching dark eyes, Dillon suspected they were mother and son.

Sophia, the girl with the nose ring, didn’t look related. She was perched on the bench, hands tucked around the edge as if gripping it, gaze intent on Dillon. With wrists like toothpicks and collarbones jutting forth from thin shoulders, she reminded him of a fledgling bird.

“Hey, you, too.” Joe gave him an easy smile. “The more the merrier, right?”

Dillon wasn’t so sure about that. But Joe’s smile was hard to resist and none of the ghosts seemed threatening, not even the nameless pacing man, so he stepped closer.

His mom was back on her cell phone, talking to his dad. Her presence wasn’t reassuring, exactly—it wasn’t like she could do anything if these ghosts were trouble—but it was comforting to know that he could communicate with her if he needed to.

“So what are you all doing here?” Dillon asked. “Is this where you died?”

Sophia snorted. “Here? With all those metal detectors at the entrance? What do you think, mass poisoning? Bomb?” She rolled her eyes and flopped back down across the laps of the men sitting on the bench.

*****

Posting this makes me want to write, so I’m going back to Grace. But as I head back into the thicket of the middle (yet again!), I’m going to be trying to untangle Sophia’s threads from the rest of the story. If I know where she is going, I think I’ll know how to get to where the story is going. It’s not her story, but her threads are a big part of my current knot, I think. Here’s hoping that insight gives me what I need to make great progress this week!

Motivation

21 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by in Grace, Writing

≈ 10 Comments

Both days of this weekend came perilously close to being the first day of 2016 on which I didn’t do any writing at all. But I eked out a couple of sentences both evenings, so my streak is not technically broken.

I say technically because I’m sort of dubious about yesterday’s words. On Saturday, I knew the words were incoherent and probably not going to last, but that’s okay, because it’s a first draft and incoherent words can get fixed. It’s much tougher to fix no words than it is to fix bad words. Yesterday, though, I was so utterly blank that I couldn’t come up with anything. Close to three hours spent flipping in and out of the file and my mind stayed stubbornly empty. I finally decided that I’d just write part of something that might happen later, so I switched PoV’s and wrote a couple paragraphs of Grace thinking. I know those words won’t get used. They don’t fit anything that should be going on now.

I’m not sure why I’m so stuck. Apart from the distractions of life, of course. Usually this level of stuck would mean that I took a wrong turn somewhere, that I’ve headed down a dead end. But this is where I wanted to be. I may have to go back and re-read the whole thing — so, so, so dangerous — to see where I should go. But yes, I am afraid to do that because so often that drives me back to starting over and I am just not going to do that again. I’ve got 57K good words. Another 20K and I have a book. But at the moment, it sure doesn’t feel like a book to me. *sigh.

Today’s plan: well, R is home for the one full day that he will be here on his spring break. So really, I’m going to be kind to myself. I’m not going to stress about getting lots of writing done or cleaning or organizing or anything. I’m going to try to enjoy his company. I’ll lose another day this week when I take him back to Sarasota, but I’m going to not worry about that either. Out of the two years that I’ve spent working on this book, another two days is not going to make a difference. But I do hope that I can figure out where I’ve gone wrong and what to do about it. I have the annoying feeling right now that as I was falling asleep last night I had an idea and it’s not coming back to me, but maybe that’s an illusion, anyway. Ideas when falling asleep often seem great but that doesn’t mean they are.

My bipolar book

07 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by in Grace

≈ 11 Comments

Someday, when Grace is long finished and I haven’t read it in years, haven’t thought about it in ages, I’m going to pick up a copy and think, “Right, the book that made me crazy, I remember this one.”

Friday was fantastic. The words flowed like they haven’t since… oh, sometime in A Lonely Magic or maybe even back when I was writing fanfiction. They just poured out of me.

But this weekend was anguished. Torture, misery, deep reflections on whether I should quit writing and what I wanted to do with my life instead. Seriously, I had a brief moment of thinking maybe I could go back to waitressing. I can never go back to waitressing. I was a great waitress, but that was a long time ago, and I don’t have nearly the stamina or patience that it would take to do it again. But it was that kind of weekend.

Today I finished the chapter I was working on. And I like it. It makes me laugh. The characters are such… people. They’re so real to me, so alive. And these are the dead ones.

I think I’ve also managed to embrace the weirdnesses. This book, which will someday, fingers crossed, be finished, is going to be the weirdest book I have ever written and that’s saying something, given the others.

Bittersweet

03 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by in Grace, Writing

≈ 7 Comments

Before I started writing Grace, I knew what it was about. It was about being the normal one in a family of people with gifts (Grace) and about being the different one in a family of normal people (Noah) and about finding out that you can be yourself–whoever you are–and still belong.

I read that and sigh. It still sounds like a good book to me. That’d be a good book, wouldn’t it?

But that’s not what that book I’ve written is at all. Not even to the teeny-tiny-most minute degree. This is a book about moving on. About letting go. And I don’t have the slightest idea how it turned out this way. The name doesn’t make any sense at all anymore — not that I’m going to change it, because what would I change it to? But Grace was supposed to realize her own gifts, along with giving Noah the gift of acceptance, and I really don’t see that happening at this point. Instead… well, I won’t spoil it. Suffice to say that that’s not the direction in which I’m headed. But this fairytale’s ending is going to be bittersweet, I think.

My Monday to-do list worked out pretty well, though. Oh, I still haven’t folded the laundry. Ha, I should maybe do that. But I did clean the kitchen and I did work on painting the bathroom and I did walk the dogs, and most importantly, I did manage to map out the remaining chapters of Grace. I had one last plot point that was unresolved and sticky, and I figured it out this morning. It leads to a short story that’s not going to be included in the main story, but that’s okay. I’d actually really like to write more short stories that are scenes — not full-fledged plots, but more just moments in the day. I’m not sure I’d feel right about publishing them, but I think I would find them soothing to write. Low pressure!

And now back to it — I’m glad I know what comes next, but it feels like I’ve still got a lot to write.

Pendulum swings

29 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by in Grace, Tassamara, Writing

≈ 6 Comments

This weekend I decided that A Gift of Grace was abysmal, unreadable, the worst thing I’ve ever written.

ARGH!

I wound up reading the current version from beginning to end, and concluded that I’m just in a little bit of a murky middle space. I know how it ends, I know a couple more scenes before it ends, but I don’t entirely know how to get from where I am to there. So that’s going to be my goal for this week, to make it through the murky middle and onto the solid end ground. Or at the very least, map out the path through the murky middle.

My secondary goal is to stop beating myself up for not having finished yet. I wanted to finish by the end of August. Ha. And then the end of November and then the end of every month since. I can’t believe that we’re entering March and I’m still not done. But being mean to myself about that is not helping me in any way. If I could take all the time I waste telling myself how incompetent I am and turn it into time that I am writing real words, I’d be doing so much better.

Of course, that’s always easier said than done. I tell myself to be nice to me and yet I often just can’t figure out how. I used to make to-do lists when I felt overwhelmed so I could start checking items off. It gives a nice sense of accomplishment on days when the universe makes it impossible to feel complete. Item #1 on the kind of to-do list should always be “Make a to-do list” so that I have something to check off as soon as I’m done. Maybe I’ll start there today.

To-do list
#1: Make a list.
#2: Write a Monday morning blog post
#3: Answer emails and clean out in-box…

Hmm, and it’s 7:07 AM and look, I’m off to a much better start than I would ever given myself credit for, since #3 is done, #2 is almost done, and #1 will soon be done.

#4: Outline all the remaining scenes in Grace.

And that’s the stumper. But it’s a great goal and I think I’ll get started on it now. The nice thing is that having established that it’s my goal, I can be working on it while I walk the dogs, clean the kitchen, fold the laundry and maybe finish painting the bathroom. And those are all good goals, too.

End of the month check-in: I have not yet broken my streak. The words weren’t many yesterday or Saturday or even last week as a whole, but I’ve written every day of 2016. Go, me!