When you live in a geeky house and geeky people often come to visit, you spend a disproportionate amount of time discussing superpowers and which ones you would choose.* My usual selection is to have the power to calm people – individuals who are anxious, crowds who are dangerous** – I’d like to be able to help. However, soon after I mention the power I would like to have, we tend to veer off into the powers I would definitely NOT choose. Here they are in no particular order:

1) Invisibility – I don’t think it would be fun to be invisible. For starters, it would be kind of creepy since you could sneak into places where you weren’t wanted (I don’t want to be anywhere that doesn’t want me). Also, you would end up hearing people talking about you – I don’t want to know what anyone has to say about me when I’m not there.

2) Flying – I would love to be able to just kind of flash from one place to another but I have no interest in flying to get from here to there. I don’t like wind in my face, I’m a bit wigged out by heights, and I am always chilly – personal flight just wouldn’t be my choice.

3) Silver-Tongue – I don’t know what you’d actually call this power but I don’t want to be able to persuade anyone to do anything they don’t want to do. I get that this *seems* similar to being able to calm them down, but I don’t want to change anyone’s minds with calming – I just want to change their methods or to help them out. The idea of making someone go against their own will is just icky beyond. This is an imaginary list and I am still getting a pain in my stomach.

4) X-ray vision – Sure, it would be cool to be able to look through walls and the like but I come right back to the fact that I would be invading people’s privacy left, right and centre. That’s just not okay by me.

Can you tell that I place a lot of importance on people having control of their own lives and people able to decide how they move through the world? And that I have a really strong personal sense of what is public and what is private?

Imagination is one of my real-life superpowers and I still can’t imagine away those basics of my perspective on the world. And, of course, I can’t imagine not being chilly – that’s just too big a task to ask my brain to undertake. 🙂

For the record – in addition to my calming power, I would totally take being super-strong or having super-fighting power. Those powers would rock.

*This is, of course, despite the fact that most people in comics and movies seem to just end up with superpowers instead of actually getting to make a choice, but just run with me here.
**Yeah, I know danger is in the eye of the beholder, there would be a lot of things to consider before I could use this power.

The trick is to not look directly at them. They can get you if you look straight at them, you have to kind of use your peripheral vision. It’s not easy to learn, not simple to do, but with practice, almost anyone can manage it, and it may be the very thing that saves your life.

I know that sounds melodramatic but I’ve seen them turn vicious in a moment, all because someone stared. It’s hard to resist. I don’t blame you if you want to look. It’s a natural inclination, I think. Human curiosity, we all want to know more and we’re just arrogant enough to think that it is okay for us to put our eyes on whatever we like to look at.

The creatures don’t like it though. They want to stay on the edges, not in full view. I’ve had to clean up the mess when someone has forgotten the rules and it was all over but the sobbing.

It happened a lot more often at first, right after they got here. I spent a lot of time scrubbing back then. Of course, the authorities cared a lot more about keeping things quiet at that point. Now, they’ve gotten sort of complacent, the government doesn’t even bother to try and hide what’s happening.

I still spend a lot of time scrubbing, just not as much. And I think the things are more vicious because they don’t get to attack as often. They kind of save it up.

I know you’ve heard the ads about trying to get along with the creatures. It won’t work though. They aren’t interested in getting along with us, they just want what they want. They’re just trying to find a reason to attack.

You’ve seen the posters about how to look without looking. No one can tell you how to resist the temptation though, the government thinks that telling us what NOT to do should be enough. It doesn’t work that way, your brain doesn’t like it.

I try to tell people how to keep things blurry in front of them and clear off to the sides. Back in my day, we had these books that would show you a 3-D picture if you looked at them just right – staring off into the distance but with the book in front of you – that’s the kind of thing I advise people to practice. It’s easier to bring to mind when you are in a panic than just trying to avoid looking.

If they put up posters like those 3D books everywhere then people could get in the habit of watching the world that way and we wouldn’t have so many people in danger. Then I’d have a lot less blood to clean up. I think I’d like that.

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.