I made a joke on Facebook last Tuesday night about how I had invented a Canada Day eve tradition of baking cakes and drinking beer and I noted that I have been inventing traditions since 1972. My mom was quick to back me up – I do love to invent a tradition.
I think that time passes so fast that it’s good to have ‘markers’ in the year, signposts that make you notice what time of year it is and that give you things to anticipate and celebrate.*
So I have specific things that I do for Christmas, Hallowe’en, back to school, end of school, and so on. When it comes to summer though, I tend to gather a set of experiences that make it ‘feel’ like summer is here. Those range from visiting a couple of favourite parks, going for specific walks, drinking beer on the patio, having a Canada Day party, and having roasted marshmallows around a backyard fire at my friends’ house.
I like marshmallows any time, especially roasted ones, and I like them at camp or on the beach, but they are particularly good at Anne and Kevin’s place. I think that the whole experience makes the marshmallows taste better. Sitting in chairs around the fire, joking and giving each other grief. Burning some marshmallows and handing them to Kev or to Katie, striving for the perfect balance of brown on the outside and melty-ness on the inside (when you get it just right, the marshmallow slides right off the stick). The whole situation makes you slow down and enjoy everything about it – the trees above me, the sounds from the street, the smell of the fire, the looks on my friends’ faces. There’s a real power in how good it all feels.
Wednesday was the Canada Day party, today was our first fire of the summer, I can feel that I am gathering all the right experiences to make these summer feel rich and satisfying.
Now, my challenge is to keep this trend going so I can keep a balance between plans and spontaneous fun and be able to remember all of this clearly when winter comes again.**

*There’s a fair bit of happiness research that suggests this is a good idea, too, since anticipation brings a great deal of joy and stopping to notice good times is good for your brain.
**I don’t dread winter or anything, I have lots of fun when the snow flies, but when it gets long, I like to pull up memories of nights like this one to remind me that good weather will come again.

I’m a pretty good storyteller in a professional context but my real skill is apparently in creating my own life ‘story’ in my head.* I immerse myself fully in that internal every time and I have a hell of a time separating that story from reality.
In fact, I usually only catch myself crafting that story when I hear someone else constructing one for themselves. I hear other moms do it all the time. Like the Mom from Taekwon-Do who, when I asked how her class went, told me that she has trouble getting all the info into her ‘little pea brain.’ And then her daughter repeated it but about her own brain.
It hurt to listen to. I tried to find some way to help her see herself a little differently so she could understand that the material she was learning was challenging so she should give herself a break.*** I don’t know if I convinced her, but I had to try.
It was only later that evening that I realized that half the stuff I tell myself about ‘the way I am’ at TKD is a story. I have to make sense of why I am not learning something fast enough or why I can’t land that kick and instead of just giving myself time to learn it, I make up some context. I tell myself that those things aren’t my strong point or that I don’t learn those things well or whatever occurs to me at the time.
Now, it is true that I learn a little differently than most other people in the class and that certain things are a struggle for me, but I need to beware of stories that set those things as part of my identity. Instead, they need to be guideposts that show me a different way to reach the same destination. As in, I need to say ‘Sometimes the choreography of the moves confounds me, how else can I learn this?’ or ‘I’ll just take this super slow until it clicks.’ That way it becomes about the process instead of about my personality.
Do you construct stories for yourself like this? Do you tell yourself that the house isn’t tidy because you are a terrible housekeeper? Or that your work is late because you are a procrastinator?

Do you think you could find a way to describe the issue in a way that *isn’t* about you being defective?
I’m working on this stuff for myself and my coaching clients all the time and, I swear, you feel much better once you realize it’s all a story and you change the ending.

*We all have this skill, of course. We have to make sense of our lives so we create a narrative that helps us sort the details. I just find it amusing that it catches me off guard so often. I’m a trained storyteller, you’d think I’d notice more quickly!

**Dear friends of mine reading this. YES, I KNOW. It’s like ‘Life coach, coach thyself!’

(I’m blogging every day in July as part of NaBloPoMo!)

In June, I hit 250,000 words written for the year* and I feel a little at loose ends about it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to finally have established a daily writing practice. I can now fit at least 1000 words into my day without even breaking my stride. BUT, beyond the purpose of establishing the practice, I don’t feel like all of those words have their own purpose because they are not toward a specific project or group of projects. I have a couple of short stories and some bits and pieces of my novels, some essays, and a bunch of flash fiction.

All of those things are good and I’ll make more of them in the future, but it feels a little like I have done so many stops and starts that I haven’t gotten very far along the path to becoming a consistently published writer. So, I’ve been giving some serious thought to which projects I want to dedicate myself to at the moment and I am going to spend my next 115K on those.

What are those projects, you might ask?

After a lot of consideration, I’ve decided that I am going to focus on three writing projects for the next three months:

1) My urban fantasy novel – it needs a lot of revision and a lot more ‘filling out’

2) A group of three short stories to release as an ebook by October 13

3) A weekly entry in a flash fiction contest/post

That’s not to say that I won’t write other things as well, but I’m going to keep those things at the top of my project list and make solid progress. I’ll keep you updated as this story develops. 😉

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Topic Change!

This month’s theme for NaBloPoMo is Connect – a theme I adore because I am ALL about connecting things – ideas, people, places – so that pulled me in. Then, today’s suggested topic twigged for me as well. So even though I had already written the post above for today, I wanted to weigh in on this too:

“Do people generally understand what I am trying to say?”

I think people do understand what I am trying to say but I think it might be tied to the fact that I spend waaaaay too much time trying to figure out the most effective way to say the things I am tried to express. That, in itself, is tied to the fact that I have an almost pathological fear of being misunderstood. It’s not always my favourite feature of my personality and I send myself spinning in circles sometimes, over-explaining something so I can be clear about how I got to this point in the conversation. I frustrate myself with this frequently.

Of course, sometimes it works in my favour – it has taught me to make super simple explanations, usually via analogy, of a lot of complex things. And it has helped me to give serious thought to how I am being perceived and to choose my words and behaviour to match my intentions. So, even if I overdo it sometimes, perhaps the good outweighs the bad.

I think I would prefer when to turn that overthinking on, though!

*I’m part of the 365K Challenge from Katharine Grubb’s 10 Minute Novelists.

Some things are better to think than they are to do. Sneaking into your friend’s house to surprise them awake on their birthday is definitely one of them.

We had been planning it for weeks, the six of us. We know that Simon often left his living room window unlatched when he went to bed, so it would just be a matter of one of us crawling in and letting the others in through the door. We’d bring cake and balloons and have a kind of first-thing-in-the-morning surprise party. We figured there was no better way to start your birthday than having cake in bed.

The in-through-the-window thing went just fine. The sneaking up the stairs thing went just fine. The standing around the foot of the bed with cake thing was shaping up nicely when Olivia decided to lean in to wake Simon up. That’s when things went awry.

Simon, apparently, sits straight up when startled from a solid sleep. That wouldn’t have been a problem if Olivia hadn’t been hovering over him at the time. The crunching sound of their collision is not something I ever want to hear again.

So, now we’re spending the first part of Simon’s birthday at the hospital. I think Olivia’s nose is broken.