This was going to be a super-productive day. Heading to the book fair at school first thing* , swinging by my husband’s store to do a few hours of accounting before heading home to do some writing, and some planning for some AAMP** events we have coming up in the next few weeks.

It didn’t work out that way.

I did go to the book fair (yay!) and I did get to the store to do some accounting, but then I got tangled in a number-y mess that I kept getting glimpses of how to untangle. The glimpses gave me hope but it didn’t unravel quickly: it took all day.

The good news is that I did get it unravelled and the unravelling got me past several stumbling blocks in organizing that work. The bad news is that I am now writing at 11pm again. This doesn’t work well with getting up at 6:45 for yoga, but I’ll do it anyway – the yoga won’t do itself.

Speaking of my writing, I’m having a hell of a time with one of my characters. I’m used to my characters surprising me – they do that all the time.  What I’m not used to is one of them flatly refusing to settle into any behaviour at all. In my novel last year (she’s a recurring character), she was friendly and a little uptight.  This year she’s brilliant but flaky, and very concerned about odd things (not in a mentally ill way***, but in a quirky sort of way – and no, I don’t know exactly where that line is drawn, but like someone said about p*rn – I know it when I see it). I can’t tell if these are all facets of the same personality, or if I’m writing about different people. I hope it becomes more obvious as the story develops.

Writing this as part and parcel of a plan to teach myself to more effectively time and plan projects has made me even more aware of my own habits while writing. Not in the ‘compulsively drink tea’ sense, but in the ‘how I approach writing, how much writing it takes to make me feel like I’ve accomplished something, and what ‘good’ writing feels like’ sense. I have to do even more reflecting (me? NO!) before I have get into discussing a lot of it, but if you were wondering where all this wondering is coming from – there you go.

*2nd time in two days – two bookish boys and bookish mom =expensive visit

**The event info is going up tomorrow some time.

***Definitely NOT slagging the mentally ill here. Just clarifying the level and type of behaviour I mean.

Two weeks of writing, and two weeks of yoga. That’s pretty damn good, I think.

I didn’t write every day, but the one day I took off (my birthday) was a conscious choice, not slacking off and I made sure to get right back at it the next day.

I have done yoga every day and 9/14 times it was at 6:45am (on weekends and the day after my birthday, I did it later). It’s damn hard to drag myself out of a warm bed to hit the mat at that hour but I have committed to it, so I’m doing it.

And my reward has been insight into my writing process, 25, 614 words of a new novel, increased flexibility, and arm muscles. The muscles are still developing, but they’re there and they are getting stronger – I could feel the difference at taekwon-do tonight. Oh, and I’ve also been enjoying the self-satisfaction that comes with following through on a commitment to yourself.

I know that no one else cares about whether I write this novel, or build arm muscles, but I do. And so every time I fire up the laptop or roll out the mat, I am respecting my own wishes, and I am discovering the power in that.

I’m not sure what I will want to do after this month of practise. I may not want to write every day, I may not want to write this much every day. I may not want to keep getting up at 6:45am to do yoga. But now, I’ll have a choice and it will be a choice based on actual information, not an assumption. I can decide if I like the path I am on, or if I want to change things up, I can choose a new challenge. It’s exciting, and I feel really positive about where all this can lead.

Let’s see what the next two weeks brings.

There are a lot of hyphens in this post. Brace yourselves.

I have a bit of a problem with clutter. I’m not a hoarder, and no one is calling the health inspector, but I have a lot of might-be-useful-I-plan-to-do-SOMETHING- with-that stuff.  Given that on any different day I might be my writer-self, my Mombie-self, my Chair-of-the-Association-for-the-Arts-self, my book-keeping-self, my director-self, etc, I have a lot of different equipment for a lot of different roles.  A lot of this stuff has to stay because I really will need it – the ‘if you haven’t used it in six months…’ rule doesn’t work for me at all.

And I am comfortable with having a lot of gear around, most of the time. In fact, if I had some more shelves (which I will soon – thanks to my BIL SuperDan) I wouldn’t even notice most of it.

The stuff that gives me trouble, the heart-jerking, brain-bending stuff, is the gear for the person I meant to be at different times in my life. The person who would put photos into albums, the person whose books were organized, the person who wrote in different journals for different topics, and, -this one is the hardest – the superactive, totally engaged mom who was doing regular enriching activities.

I can live with not having turned into most of the people on that list, but that last one just kills me. Now, I know your knee-jerk reaction is to say ‘Nooooo, you’re a good mom! Think of the things you do, not the things you don’t.’ And that is true, I am a good mom. I’m an excellent listener, I help them sort emotions like I was born doing it, I help them keep perspective, I teach them to be optimistic, and I can be pretty fun.

What I don’t manage is consistent activity, and that drives me batty. * We have all manner of cool things, games, activities, and plans that I picture us doing, but then I will hit a bad day, or they will, or the effort to get it set up is so great that I run out of energy for the activity itself.  Then they end up playing video games too long, or they watch tv, and I spiral into a combination of irritation and frustration at myself.

The point of this is that we have more toys and games and activities that we will ever use, because the mother I meant to be all along had great plans for them.  Take, for example, the Easy Bake Oven I mention in the title.

My sister came over today to help me get rid of some stuff in my kitchen (Do plastic containers replicate? It’s the only explanation), and she asked about the Easy Bake Oven in my cupboard. Santa brought it when The Boy was 3 or 4, and I had visions of he and I using it when TLG was asleep. I can remember using my Easy Bake type oven when I was a kid and it was sooooo cool, and I thought I would give him the same memories.

I think we used it once. TLG was a lousy napper, making the little recipes was annoying, and, overall, it just seemed easier to bake something in the real oven.** But I’ve kept that Easy Bake in my cupboard for at least 6 years now*** because I intended to turn into that patient mom who will give her sons that experience.

The Easy Bake Oven has been plaguing me all day. It’s on the landing waiting to be donated somewhere, and thoughts of different cool ways to use it have been popping into my head, and I’ve been thinking of how fun TLG would find it.

The reality is, of course, that the two of them would argue over who got to do what part, the cake would be too small, and we’d probably all end up annoyed.

What I’m hoping is that when I ditch the Easy Bake, it will open the door to me being able to ditch all sorts of mothers I might have been, and give me the space to be the mother I could be.  Perhaps when there are fewer ‘might-have-beens’ in the way, it will be easier to just be.

I’m also hoping that 30 days of writing and yoga practice can teach me a lot about easing past the rough spots in setting up routines and being consistent in other areas of my life too. I’ll let you know how it goes.

*But to be fair to myself, I have trouble with that for myself on all levels, and that’s part of what I am working on this month.

**Which we do on a semi-regular basis. One point for me!

***When I write 6 years, I have to say, it really seems like a no-brainer to ditch it.

I still don’t have a full outline. Deadly irresponsible of me, like writing without a license or something, but there it is.

What I do have, however, is a list of about 15 different scenes that I think need to happen to move the story along.  I made the list, one scene per index card, while I was in the bath this morning.* I figured that with just a single thing written on each card, I could then brainstorm right on the card before working on each scene. Once I picked the ideas I liked best, or the ones that made the most sense, I could put them into the synopsis part of Scrivener and have a record, right on the screen, of the ideas I wanted to include.**

I followed that plan this morning to see if knowing what I wanted to cover in a given scene actually helped me to write faster. I’m pleased to report that it did.

Normally, I can write about 300-350 words in approximately 10 minutes (unless I am doing a writing exercise that doesn’t have to fit anything else, then I can do more). This morning I wrote a scene that was a little tangly with detail, about 450 words in about 11 minutes. I probably would have gone faster but I had to stop and think of the names of a few spices, and I had to imagine some geographical detail (not my strong point).  So, this mini-experiment was a success: having a plan did help me write more.

Now I need to take the lesson learned and make it work in a bigger context, but, like I said, it will have to wait until Wednesday.

*Apparently hot water helps me think, so when I’m stuck, I either need to drink tea, soak in the tub, or take a long shower in order to get my brain working again.

**The next stage of my plan is to do my thinking, my brainstorming and my synopsis-ing for the rest of the book at once, but I’m not going to have several hours to do that until Wednesday and in the meantime, I must continue writing.

I’m still having trouble developing a full outline but it has been more of an issue of not having the time to sit down alone and map it all out than a reluctance to think about the big picture. I can sort of see how the story is going to shape up, but until I carve out about two hours to jot notes on index cards, I may not know how things will happen.

Three things I did to facilitate my writing this week:

1) I bought Scrivener for Windows: I wrote my NaNo novel in the Scrivener beta last year and even though I didn’t make full use of its features, I found it enormously useful. This year, I am breaking my novel into pieces to write it and Scrivener really lends itself to writing in sections. It’s kind of a relief to be able to work just on this one section and to know I can easily add pieces before and after it without having to scroll through a long document to do so.  Scrivener will let me just add another scene (in a separate section) right before or after and I can move the scenes around as needed.

2) I talked about my novel: I was having a little trouble moving past where I was earlier the week. I could tell I was just spinning my wheels, trying to up my word count. And that’s fine,within NaNoWriMo, if you are using it to get past the obstacle of writing in the first place. I don’t have that obstacle, I’m not afraid to put words on the page – not even 50,000 words (although, admittedly, I did need to use last year to prove to myself that I could write something that long, but I was never afraid to do it). My issue is in creating the habit of writing regularly, in not letting all the other priorities of my life crowd out my writing.

So I don’t want to just produce 50, 000 words, I want to create a complete skeleton of a story, much like I did last year. In order to do that, I need a solid thread to pull all the way through my writing and I have several key areas that I need to cover. So when my brain was spinning, I started talking about it. And I got cool input from all sorts of places.

As I mentioned yesterday, The Boy, in a matter of fact sort of way, gave me a key plot point – the demons’ motivation for certain actions.  Katie and The Man let me talk out another plot snarl and gave me good points to think about. Derek, Ange, The Man and Katie brainstormed weapons and demon defenses with me.

I’m really lucky to have such creative people around me all the time, people for whom writing isn’t a silly waste of time, but an interested, worthwhile endeavour that can be discussed just like any other work. It’s also a stroke of luck that my friends have such varied knowledge and interests that they can pull all manner of obscure and arcane references out of their heads to solve problems and help me create workable scenarios.

3) I was stubborn: I took my birthday off. I didn’t mean to, but it just so happened that there was just no time for writing that day. However, the other days this week when writing was hard, I forced myself to the keyboard and insisted that words must be generated. Last night it took me about 3 hours to produce 1205 words, partially because I was trying to write in a room full of people (writing in a room alone probably wouldn’t have worked much better though, I was not on my game yesterday) and partially because I didn’t know where to start next. I wouldn’t let myself away with less than 1200 words though because that’s how much I needed in order to be on target for day 11. So even if I ended up writing about what it felt like for my character to drive her car, I was going to keep typing until I got to 1200.

After a few false starts I ended up with a decent scene about her meeting a new character at the airport. And then with the infusion of that new character who could bring all sorts of new knowledge with her I was able to easily write over 2000 words today. I could have even written more but I decided to leave the story somewhere exciting so I could jump in tomorrow.

I’m enjoying this project and I’m enjoying learning about how to get myself to work more consistently. I am also looking forward to my experiment in increasing my word count quickly once I get that outline written.

Do you write? Do you use an outline? Does it help you write more quickly? How do you create your outline? How detailed is it? Do you find questions at the end of a post annoying? 🙂