Today, the same thing happened (although to be fair to myself, I did have to help take everything out of the basement, go to a four hour workshop, and host The Boy’s birthday party, so I am going to totally let myself off the hook for today).

Clearly, having a time to write is as crucial as picking a time to exercise.

I didn’t pick a time to write this and now I’m exhausted and I am choosing to take good care of myself and head to bed. That makes this post a kind of a placeholder for the post I meant to produce.

Check back tomorrow for a real post.

It was very much worth the discomfort of the situation though, because I want to be a better storyteller. It was another of those types of situations where I could put aside my immediate pain for the gain of improving my stories (I like how many of those I have discovered lately – good to use as reminders that I can do that).

A certain level of storytelling comes naturally to me.  I come from a family where stories are valued, and being able to remember the odd things someone said, or a funny thing that someone did, is encouraged. We love to use stories as round about ways of explaining things, and we can draw parallels between pretty disparate things by using a good narrative.  When I began visiting friends on my own as a kid, I was surprised to discover that not everyone’s family does this, that not everyone knows about the foolish tricks their father played on their uncles as a kid, or the way their mom used to wear her jeans as a teenager.

But as much as that comes naturally to me, I still have a lot to learn. I still need a lot of practice, and I still need to increase my repetoire,  and not just to have stories to drag out as entertainment. I need all of these storylines so I can help people. I’ve found that having so many stories at my disposal has helped me figure out how to comfort people in many tough situations, it has helped me reframe people’s self-narrative so it becomes more empowering to them, and it has helped me show others where their opponents might be coming from in an argument. Being able to say ‘What about if…’ and either run with a story I know, or develop one on the spot, is one of the skills I value most and so I want to hone that to as sharp a point as possible. If standing up in front of a group with a half-done story is the way to do that, well, I will suffer through.

Telling people stories is one gift I can give, telling people a kinder version of their own stories is a far greater one.

*when I was telling someone about it earlier, I compared it to going to a baking contest and then allowing them to judge my cookie dough against other people’s cookies.

It hurt, but it was also really weird because I just wanted to take it as part of the process and carry on.* When you’re practicing a martial art (or any sport, I guess), there is a certain amount of discomfort/minor pain that is expected and acceptable, You just tough your way through it, and usually come out the better for it on the other side.

I’ve been thinking about it since it happened earlier this evening and I realized that learning how to just live with temporary** discomfort ties into a whole bunch of other things I am trying to teach myself.  If I can extrapolate from how I just work through some things at Taekwon-do, perhaps I can learn how to recognize when stress or frustration or temptation away from my goals is also temporary.  That would let me learn to just ‘be’ with whatever I’m feeling for the moment and figure out how to let it pass.

The question is, how to I do that extrapolation? That’s something else I have to ruminate on further.

I have a lot of thinking ahead of me. Luckily, I’m a thinky kinda dame.

*Obviously, I wasn’t seriously hurt, no bruises or anything, but I was stunned for the moment and I had tears well up. If I had been really hurt I wouldn’t have just carried on, I’ve got nothing to prove.

**And realizing that it IS temporary.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

10.

I have no idea how that happened. I swear that just a minute ago I put an infant in his stroller to take him for a walk, and the next thing, he’s offering me the perfect hook for the novel I’m writing.

Yes, it really feels like an infant helped me figure out a major plot point for my novel.

The Boy was born 7 weeks early and I could hardly believe I got to keep him. He was 5lbs when I brought him home and he was only as long as from my fingertips to my elbow (his feet hung over a little) – I could carry him on one arm, his head in my hand, his feet by elbow. He didn’t sleep more than 2 hours at a time until he was almost 3 (and I was already pregnant with his brother).

He was a bright-eyed little monster who absorbed the world around him from day one, and who took everything quite seriously. He can still be very serious, but when you make him crack up, his laugh is a gift. He’s too hard on himself, and he has trouble falling asleep. He’s like a clone of his Dad, but he’s bookish and dramatic like me. He’s the kindest creature you will ever encounter, he has a vast imagination, and he loves video games, fact books, and crazy eights.

He’s my boy, and I am lucky that I get to accompany him as he grows up.

Thanks for choosing me, kiddo.

Last week at the competition, two of my competitors were near my age*, one was 39, and the other was 40 or 41.  I thought nothing of this at first, because I think age is, overall, no big deal, but then they started referring to themselves as members of the geriatric squad.

Geriatric squad. Seriously? I am not a child and I would balk at being called a ‘young woman’ – not because it would be insulting, but because it is inaccurate.  But I am not part of the geriatric squad by any means. Despite being the same age, I felt significantly younger than them because I had a different attitude.

It just seems so weird to me to claim to be soooooo old at our age. Sure, I joke about being old from time to time, but it’s along the lines of ‘Oh, I’m old, I don’t have to try and impress people anymore.’  – All about the advantages of being my age, instead any possible disadvantages.

What is the purpose? Is it to let yourself off the hook for not performing up to your own expectations? Is it to get people to give you a break, or to not expect much of you? **Is it about checking out of things a bit early?

My Uncle, who died in 2001, decided at 40 that he was old. He started referring to himself as ‘an old fella’ and he started aligning himself with my Grandmother, who was almost 40 years older than him. He began complaining about aches and pains all the time, he stopped trying new things, and he developed a really closed-minded attitude toward the world around him.

So clearly, I have baggage about people claiming to be aged. But this was definitely beyond my baggage. I can’t figure out exactly what it was about though.

Maybe it had to do with being a woman who is now standing on her own, no longer trading on being cute (or whatever)? Perhaps if you admit to being old first then no one can accuse you of acting young, or dismiss you because of your age?

For me, being 39 is just fine. I feel mostly the same way about the world and its possiblities as I did when I was 20, or 27 or 33, except that I am much more confident in my role in it. So I will keep operating as if I can do the things I want to do, until I find things that I can’t. Then I will figure out if those things are actually impossible, or if I just need to practice.

And let me tell you, those things better be pretty clearly impossible, or I will likely just keep beating my head against the wall of whatever I am trying to accomplish until I find a way.

I don’t have a set of behaviours (too old/too young) attached to any given age, and I will keep doing the things I enjoy whenever I can. I won’t determine that I am ‘too old’ to get good at Taekwon-do, or ‘too old’ to go dancing, or ‘too old’ to try a new way of looking at things because that mindset makes no sense to me.

The only downside about being 39, is that people assume I am lying and that I am actually 40 or 45. Seeing as I would never try to claim to be any younger than I am, I find that really damn irritating. I am the age I am, and that’s cool. Claiming anything else is inauthentic, and that doesn’t fly with me.

I would like to be able to tell the other competitors that their divisions don’t work for me, and that they don’t have to think like that. Except, of course, that they might be ‘too old’ to believe me.

*The fourth was 26, but she wasn’t part of the odd situation I’m describing.

**Am I overthinking a casual joke? Highly likely.