The Gift of Friendship

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As I write today, I’ve been joined by a tiny parade of three cats taking turns at sitting or lying by my side. It’s a joyous reminder of the friendships I’ve garnered through my penmanship.

Even as I allowed a dry spell to overcome my creative tendencies, friends on this blog have continued to encourage and support me. Cards and gifts have come my way, much to my great joy. Also, kind words at the work place have occasionally brightened my daily routine as a few folks in the know inquire as to my doings in the realm of writing.

Thanks, my dears, for uplifting me! Now I’m going to move forth with some new project. All I really have to contribute to folks is the message that we must count our blessings in remembrance of all those things and people that help us create. Happy writing, or whatever endeavor you pursue!

~

Pursuing Perfection

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I had an experience today that brought home to me once again that the Critic is something I fight in my daily life as well as in writing, and that I often do things that make it even easier for the Critic to get some punches in.

Probably everyone says this, but it’s true for me.  My grandmother was a great cook.  She passed when I was in seventh grade, but I still have very vivid memories of Saturday afternoons in her kitchen, homemade beef noodle soup on the stove, fresh cinnamon rolls warming on top of the wood stove, and pies cooling on the counter.  My grandma was the first person to put milk instead of water in my tomato soup and to make me a gingersnap cookie.  I won’t pretend that my picky younger self loved every single thing my grandma ever cooked, but I always loved eating as a family, and I especially loved seeing the smile on my grandma’s face when we raved about what to her was a very minimal gift.

Now I’m grown up, and one of my favorite things  is to have family and friends over for a meal. It’s not an every Saturday sort of thing, but I do it whenever I can.  I don’t know that I actually enjoy cooking so much as I enjoy bringing everyone together, giving the gift of food prepared with love and taking the gift of love and conversation and time spent in return.

Which brings us to today.

Due to my new work schedule, I now eat “lunch” at 9am.  I have been bringing traditional lunch food, and that’s worked out fine, but towards the end of last week I was really starting to think about preparing some breakfast food on the weekend to take for leftovers during the week.  I invited my family over for brunch today as a way of nudging myself into actually taking that step instead of just thinking about it. 

It might have worked a little too well!  Before I knew it I had talked myself into making three recipes (sausage egg casserole because that’s what I’d been imagining, vegetarian egg casserole because my brother’s a vegetarian, and peach french toast because it’s so darn good.)  Both egg recipes were new to me.  I did five loads of laundry yesterday and cleaned the house in addition to grocery shopping.  The vegetarian egg casserole and the peach french toast needed to be refrigerated overnight, so I prepared those last night as well.  Suddenly it’s 9pm and I’m exhausted (I’ve been getting up at 3am, so 9am after a busy day is quite a bit past my bedtime.).

I woke up this morning and finished the housecleaning and started preparing the food, only to realized I’d put the vegetarian egg dish in the oven an hour too early. 

And then 9am came around and my growling stomach pointed out to me that scheduling brunch at 11am, two hours after I am used to eating my first major meal of the day, was probably not a great idea.

So, fighting low blood sugar because I had a cup of yogurt instead of the full breakfast I needed, I proceeded to brown the sausage by itself instead of with the onion the recipe called for.  I also put it in the oven for 30 of the 60 minutes it needed to bake without covering it.  And then I did the same thing with the peach french toast.

By this time, I have to say I was not expecting great things from brunch at this point.  I was sure the vegetarian casserole would be cold, and the french toast and the sausage casserole would be dry.  And that doesn’t even cover the bacon that got a little too reheated in the microwave as well.

But you know what?  Someone was really watching out for me today, because everything came out great.  The sausage casserole was awesome (We ate it all – so much for leftovers!), and the peach french toast was delicious.  Mom brought cinnamon rolls and Barbara brought fresh raspberries and pink grapefruit and oranges.  It was really a lovely meal.  Even better was having all of us around the table enjoying each other’s company.  There was so much positive energy in the room, I can still feel it.

So what does this have to do with the Critic, you ask?

First of all, dinners for my family can’t be so-so, they have to be amazing.  Hence my decision to bake three different entrees instead of one, or even two.  And heaven forbid I serve them a recipe I’ve actually made before (Except chicken pot pie.  We all love that!).  So I end up with  two new recipes that weren’t especially complicated but that did require me to carefully read and follow directions, paving the way for lots of little things to go wrong.

Scheduling it at 11am instead of 9, or even 10 wasn’t so much an attempt to sabotage myself as it was fact that we almost always have brunch at that time (my brother and I are not early birds as a rule) and I simply forgot to take my new work and eating schedule into account.  But it was still something to kick myself with while I was trying to apply tinfoil without burning myself.

First and foremost I am taking away a whole bunch of new memories of a great day with my family.  I have a couple delicious new recipes, too.  But there is no denying that I’m also coming away from today with a strong reminder of how important it is to be reasonable and realistic with ourselves not just with the goals and expectations we have for our artistic selves, but for the balance of our lives as well.  Our inner artist shares space with our work self and our family self, and what happens to one can happen to all.  We must be kind to every part of ourselves. 

Today reminded me that sometimes it really is enough to take a step or two rather than running the whole race at once.  I hope all of you get to really enjoy those baby steps, too.

 

Darla’s Wiley Wednesday

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As I sit at home during a much needed rest from the day job, I’m trying to get caught up on blog posts for the month. I’ve allowed quite a dry spell after frenzied and joyous activity on all things blog related. Now it’s time to turn the tide and set aside precious minutes to indulge myself.

While having written that paragraph in the plainest of terms, I can’t help but think of Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way”. She would be aghast at how I’ve allowed the work week to stifle my creativity.

It’s time to remember how artistic productivity rewards and enlivens. I feel the energy coursing through me today even as I sit glued to my office chair. Well, I’m not entirely glued. My playfulness carried over to benefit one of my cats, also in a playful mood.

Now if I will just remember this feeling in the middle of a bad day at the office, then perhaps I can smile and look forward to coming home to a blank screen and another chance to create. Here’s hoping you find your own artful rejuvenation!

~

Thursday Thirteen

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Okay, so it’s technically Friday morning, but I wanted to put this up anyway.
Favorite ways to pamper myself.

1. Sit in the sunshine, just 15 minutes waiting for the car pool, the sunshine makes a huge difference in my mood.

2. New color of nail polish. For just $2 I can experiment and have fun. I now have over 25 different colors.

3. Gel pens. I use them like crazy, at least one a week. I particularly love the ones with glitter in the ink.

4. Morning pages. There’s something decadent and special about taking 20 minutes for just me, it’s a priority and a treat too. I have over 18 notebooks now filled with rambling over the last 4 years.

5. Writing and posting. On a difficult day, if I can put in 300 words or a drabble I feel I’ve accomplished something that no one else could have done today. Something unique to me.

6. A nap. Oh yes, sometimes a necessity, sometimes just for pleasure.

7. Reading. Even one chapter of a favorite book makes my day.

8. Frozen blackberries. I put them in my yogurt, my cereal, it makes everything seem extra special.

9. Clean sheets. An instant way to improve any day.

10.My iPod. Favorite tunes that make me smile.

11.Exercise. Okay, I don’t do it often enough but the high it brings is worth the effort.

12.Call my friends. One call to a fast pick me up.

13.Sex. ‘Nuff said!

Deep Point-of-View or “How Do You Really Feel About That?”

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As I learn more about the old writer’s dictum, write, revise, revise, and revise; and as I get practice submitting my work to publishers, I’ve found that one of the hardest parts is when you get to the nitty-gritty, down-and-dirty “let’s clean up this sucker because we’re about to hit ‘send’ to give it to the publisher and it’s time to make sure it’s free of any dumb-dumb errors.”

Dumb-dumb errors. Kind of like Dumb-Dumb Bullets in Lethal Weapon IV.

But in all seriousness, I wanted to share with you my magic list of POV [point-of-view] problem words that I got when I attended a self-editing workshop put on by my editor, Tera Kleinfelter, Assistant Managing Editor at Samhain Publishing:

  • assumed 
  • considered 
  • decided 
  • felt 
  • figured 
  • heard 
  • knew 
  • realized 
  • remembered 
  • saw 
  • thought 
  • wondered 
  • worked out

One of the challenges with writing deep point-of-view is that there are so many different definitions for it, but little concrete advice on how to do it. I have found that doing a “find” command on my manuscript for these words, then rewriting the sentence in which they occur, does wonders for deepening my POV.

Which leads me to my next point. WHY are these POV problem words? After all, fiction is full of “He felt a shiver,” and “She wondered if he would ever get up the nerve to ask her out.” So why are these words “problems?”

In deep POV, the objective is to get as deeply as possible into the mind of the character. The better that I, as an author, get at giving the reader the exact thoughts as though my character were thinking them without translation, the better I’m accomplishing my goal of going deep into POV. I do not profess to be an expert that this, by any means, but here’s how I understand that to work. Let’s use the “He felt a shiver,” as an example.

What is the statement? It’s the author telling the reader what the character is feeling; it’s not the character himself doing it, nor is the author showing the reader anything. (Remember that old saw, “Show, don’t tell”?) “He felt a shiver” could apply to the President of the United States entering a room in which the President of Russia and the King of Monaco are sitting; it could be a spy entering a room in which his target is dancing with the person with whom the spy has fallen in love; it could be a serviceperson discharged from the Army after a tour in Iraq and finding out that his baby brother has been in a car accident. It doesn’t show us anything unique about the character.

“A spasm shivered up the side of his neck, vibrating all the way into his ear and making his stomach roil with dread.”

That tells us a lot more about the character. It’s probable, of the three examples I listed above, that it’s the serviceperson finding out about his brother. It’s unlikely that the President is going to report a feeling in his stomach as “dread,” particularly when meeting two other heads of state (although, if it is, you can use this description to “sell” the reader on WHY it’s plausible that the feeling belongs to the President). It’s unlikely it’s a spy, since a trained spy is unlikely to feel dread like that, and certainly not upon seeing the person he loves in the arm of an opponent or an enemy.

The more directly you can describe for the reader the emotional flavor that is referred to by one of our problem words, the more deeply you are showing the reader the character and, therefore the more deeply you are getting into POV.

Happy writing!

A Beautiful Day

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Today was gorgeous.  I mean really beautiful. It was not only sunny, but warm.  The kind of day that makes it impossible to stay inside.The kind of day that makes the doctor’s request that you take vitamin D a little harder to brush off.

I live in the Northwest, so believe me when I say that I would never take a day like this, especially in March, for granted.  But I lit up on the inside, too, and I can’t help feeling that my reaction to this day isn’t just a reaction to a sunny day.  It’s actually been building over the last couple of weeks, and today is just the moment the switch finally flipped.

Making notes for this post, it occurred to me that I’ve been holding things in.  Not avoiding, exactly – at least not consciously.  Just not reaching out.  Not doing morning pages.  Barely posting on my Writer’s Retreat journal, even though in the past I’ve been on there every couple of days.  I see friends and family regularly, but when I’ve talked about my life it was books I read or movies I saw, not what jobs I applied for and how my interviews went.  In fact, when the job search did come up the other day, my family was genuinely surprised to find out I was stressed out about it.  I’m not one who really hesitates to say what’s going on with me, so the idea that they really hadn’t been aware was eye-opening for me.

So I wrote in my Writer’s Retreat journal this week.  A friend who usually calls so we can talk about her actually called to see what was happening with me, and I told her.  I wrote in my journal again.  I took advantage of a business meeting to have an artist’s date, as well.  I actually had a story idea.  I sang out loud in the shower.  I marked my blog deadlines on the March calendar.  I put my storage stuff back up on the shelf in the laundry room instead of leaving it on the couch a few more days.  I beat down the Critic and applied for a job I really wanted instead of putting it off another day.  Things that seemed little enough at the time, but that built momentum as the week went along.

Last night I hit the point where I had to turn the TV off because no matter how much I turned the volume down it was just too much noise.  There is no denying that part of me is concerned about being in that place when I don’t have active stress in my life, but for the most part I’m actually relieved.  It feels like I am really hearing myself, like I’m totally present in the moment in way I didn’t realize I’d lost. 

So I left the TV off today, too.  I walked to the store for shampoo instead of driving.  I bought sparkly pink polish so I can have pretty hands at the new job on Tuesday.   I walked to Starbucks and sat in a comfy chair and drank coffee and read Z. A. Maxfield’s The Long Way Home.  I still wasn’t quite ready to be inside when I got home, so I grabbed a lounge chair by the pool and read some more.  I played cards with my brother in the garden of one of our favorite restaurants until the sun went down.  I wanted as much sunshine as I could get, and I wallowed in it.

Obviously the nice weather helped make today pretty fantastic, but what really made this a beautiful day was feeling the door open inside me, being able to take things in rather than being caught entirely in my own head.

I have a whole new appreciation today for how important it is to keep ourselves open.  When the door is shut, two things happen.  First our brains have no outlet for all the noise our daily lives build up and we start focusing on just managing the volume instead of listening to what we’re actually hearing.  Second, we have no way to let new things in.  It’s like driving on the freeway at seventy miles an hour.  Everything that happens becomes a flash across the windshield, there one second and gone the next, rather than sticking with us, making an impact.

I don’t mean to say that I plan on spilling my guts to everyone I meet.  But I do think that communicating and opening myself up is something I have to be consciously aware of.  Simply trusting myself to do it naturally is apparently not enough.  I’ve learned this week that my Critic is very good at making isolating myself seem like a perfectly rational thing to do, and I know it isn’t.

Sharing and keeping the lines of communication open doesn’t just give us a chance to blow off steam.  It lets us share our joy, too, and allows us to take things in from the world around us.  I opened myself up and had a really beautiful day today.  I hope you have a beautiful day, too.

Wiley Wednesday: Life After NaNo

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Those of us who have done NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) share one thing in common, whether or not we actually completed our project or not: there’s a sense of let-down after November is over, a feeling of “what now?” Rest easy, writers; you’re not alone. There are others out there to play with, other projects to tackle, and other crazy goals to set.

A great place to look, even if you didn’t do NaNo itself, is the “I Wrote a Novel, Now What?” section on the main NaNo site. It has several sections useful to writers of all stripes:

Revision Advice – After the draft is done, the editing begins. There are as many ways to revise as there are to edit, and this section features excellent suggestions to make the process less painful.

Revision Pep Talks – never underestimate the power of a good pep talk! Marathoners and long-term Weight Watchers can tell you, attitude is everything; a good pep talk can help give you a well-placed attitude adjustment.

NaNoWriMo-style Events On the Horizon – I love this section! It is comforting, particularly in the first and second weeks of December, to find that there are others out there doing what you’re doing – or, in some cases, doing WAY more. There are blog-everyday-for-a-month people, editing people, and NaNoNotNovember folks. This is a great place to come to get ideas about where other writers hang out, and what you can do to keep up the madness of NaNo. Momentum’s a beautiful thing.

Novel Writing Contests Without Entry Fees – This is a great way to test your mettle. Many contests out there do not require entry fees and this is a place to find many of them. Not all of them are for novels, either – the Writer’s Digest “Your Story” contest is 750 words or less – a great way to prime the pump.

Some Thoughts on Publishing – This is a very useful section. Rather than pimping for the publishing industry, it contains links to some excellent advice sites, particularly helpful for avoiding scams.

More OLL Goodness – Last, but not least, this is the place to come to find out what else the crazy folks at the Office of Letters and Light (the organization that brings you NaNoWriMo every year) are up to.

Bottom line, if you love to write, there are others out there who love it too. Even if you don’t have an in-person writing group in your very own town, with the internet, you don’t have to. Writers all over the world connect and support each other every day. What are you waiting for? Get out there and write!