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Rabia Gale

alchemical fantasy

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motivation

motivation

i am writer, hear me roar!

It is HOT in here. Muggy hot. Stuffy hot from drawn shades and closed windows. Outside, it’s my-steering-wheel-is-going-to-burn-my-hands and the-pavement’s-going-to-melt and the-metal-is-going-to-take-off-my-skin HOT.

Yes, folks, we’re having a heat wave of temps in the mid-90s up here in Vermont.

I’ll wait while all you Florida and Arizona and other southern state people stop laughing.

Remember, we have no central air conditioning (thank God I insisted we install ceiling fans in every bedroom!). Our house is designed to trap heat (we can thank our Vermont winters for that). Our kids have been going about with flushed cheeks and heat-induced hair-trigger sensitivity. The Baron’s curls have been plastered to his head with sweat all day. I’m seriously considering cutting them off, poor child!

And still I revised. Got a whole new scene written, despite my laptop overheating and dying right in the middle. I feel victorious, the writer who triumphed over the weather, who did her writerly thing under less than optimum conditions, instead of filling up the bathtub with ice cubes and lying in it and insisting that no human body come within ten feet of her.

My friend Jo also got creative over the last day or two so she, too, could write.

Have you ever had to take drastic measures in order to write? Written a novel in 30-minute increments on a library computer? Scribbled flash fiction on a burp cloth while nursing twins? Let us know.Β  πŸ™‚

keeping up the routine

One of the great things about summer is the lack of a schedule. One of the bad things about summer is the lack of a schedule.

With no school routine to anchor us; with plenty of one-time playdates and field trips to juggle; with all these one-week trips and camps to prepare for and keep track of, I’m just having a hard time getting into a writing routine. Even blogging has slid (as you can tell) (but I’m revising more diligently than blogging, so yay?).

Then yesterday, I succumbed to my weakness for a good story and spent all Quiet Time and Post-Kids-Bedtime Time reading this awesome book I got for my birthday (thanks, Robin?). Yes, I am a full week ahead of where I thought I would be, but isn’t it a little too early to be resting on my laurels with more than half of Quartz still ahead of me?

Don’t answer that.

Okay, so now that I have flagellated myself with chocolate bar wrappers and the shredded remains of previous manuscripts, I can marshal all my troops for the next assault on Quartz.

Some of the weapons at my disposal are:

Mandatory Quiet Time and Strict Bedtime: Napping and non-napping children must have an hour and fifteen minutes of down time in the afternoon. They are to be separated and occupied with quiet activities and not allowed to disturb Mommy unless there is blood, breakage or burning. Also, bedtime is semi-strictly enforced (the olders come out at least two or three times afterward, ungh :P).

A Timer: I use this online timer to write in 10, 20, 40 or whatever-minute sessions. If I have a short period of time and I’m in danger of frittering it away entirely because I’ll be gone in X minutes, I set the timer for 10 minutes (I can fix at least a couple of sentences in that time, right?). If I’m settling in for a long evening, I break the time into 40-minute sessions, giving me time to stretch, drink water, walk around, mull things over in my head.

Mundane Repetitive Housework: Washing dishes, sweeping, driving and folding laundry all keep my hands busy while giving me some headspace to think over my stories. Er, this would work better if I could focus only on Quartz and banish all the other ideas clamoring for my attention into the abyss.

External Motivation: The Sunday progress update posts on this blog and a small group board on the HTRYN forum both keep me from backsliding too much. Furthermore, I have given everyone permission to poke me every now and again.

So, how are you keeping motivated? Any tricks or tips you want to share?

saturday ponderings

Do you ever feel that you can never fully immerse yourself in one project without fretting about all the others you still need to get to? Does the shadow of all the other things you could (or should) be doing darken your enjoyment of what you are doing? Do you feel guilty for blogging when you could be writing, for journaling when you could be revising, for baking brownies when you could be scrubbing the bathroom floor?

Saturdays are often the worst days for those feelings. I put so many expectations on the weekends–I’m going to do everything I didn’t get to over the week, clean the house, run errands, pursue my various creative activities (ALL of them), read books, hang out with my family, do something fun and go some place new, and, oh, yes, take a nap. Ha!

Early this afternoon I was starting to get all panicky over how much I wanted to accomplish and how the day was half over and how I wasn’t going to get even a quarter of it done and ohgosh I’m such a lazy, unproductive… er, yeah. I cut myself off right there and instead focused on doing a few things. And enjoying them.

So, today I

  • went out with Miss M. to buy food and plants (phlox, marigolds, black-eyed susans and onions to plant), and got some one-on-one time with my daughter, to boot!
  • took lots and lots of pictures of flowers (I can’t help it, it’s an obsession!)
  • wrote several hundred words on Secret Project X and wrote conflict arcs for several sub-plots in Quartz
  • worked on my latest fiendishly difficult piano piece
  • cooked two new-to-me recipes from scratch
  • and watched the first half-hour of Fantasia with my family (I’ve never seen it before)

Not bad at all! I even remembered to throw a load of laundry into the washer, then the dryer. And I have plenty of leftovers for lunch tomorrow.

Little things make me happy. πŸ™‚

How was your Saturday?

this procrastinating writer

Blog reader Megs introduced me to the blog Procrastinating Writers, which is full of tips to help overcome that particular demon. It’s a smart idea to blog on this topic–there’s quite an audience for it–but it makes me a laugh a little, too. And think.

Why am I (and presumably hundreds of other writers) so prone to procrastination? Why is it that even though I want to write, I fail to, you know, actually do it? Why is it that when I sit down with my MS (after hours of anticipation), I would rather scrub the shower or organize my socks by color?

What is it about writing that makes it so easy to push on to the back burner?

Lack of deadlines. There are people who make a living from writing.

I’m not one of them.

Luckily for my family, we do not relying on my writing to pay the heating bill or buy groceries. Unluckily for my works-in-progress, it’s easier to goof off when not facing subzero temps inside my house or days of beans and rice.

Solution? Join writing groups and challenges (like NaNoWriMo) to help keep you on track. Get a good writing buddy to prod you every now and again. Get your spouse to block you from the Internet in the evenings–and refuse to give you that $#@!! password.

Lack of warmups. Sometimes, I’m writing along (lalalala) and all is well.

Then I hit a wall (shoulda seen that one coming!). A massive concrete monstrosity with barbed wire at the top and crude graffiti sneering at me. Unclimbable. Undrillable. Laughs at the stick of dynamite I’m waving at it

I’m stuck, the story is going nowhere. Every time I think about writing, I think about that wall. Why, yes, I’d rather play 87 games of Solitaire tonight, thanks.

Writing–as I do it–doesn’t have much in the way of warmups. When I have a difficult piece of music to work through, I usually don’t jump right into it. I’ll do scales for a while, work on easier songs, go back to the pieces I played a few months ago. After building up my confidence, I’m able to tackle the harder piece.

Solution? Begin writing sessions with ten minutes of freewriting. Create a novel journal for writing down all your anxieties and issues with the story. All story-related angsting goes here. Use this journal to brainstorm, cluster and talk your way out of story problems.

Lack of step-by-step instructions. When you knit, you follow a pattern (mostly). When you play music, you follow the music (mostly). When you act, you have a script.

Writing a novel doesn’t come with an instruction manual. Nobody tells you where you should start, when you bring in new characters, where those twists should go. It’s both liberating and paralyzing. There is nothing to gauge your work against. Nothing but that slowly sinking feeling in your stomach when something goes wrong.

Solution? This will be different for different people. Maybe planners need to ditch their outlines. Maybe pansters need to step back and work out one. I find that I need to have a strong premise, a sense of the ending and a handful of beginning scenes before I sit down to write a new novel.

Not tactile, not physical. Writing is a mostly a cerebral activity. Yes, there is the physical act of typing or writing longhand, but that is a very small component of a novelist’s skillset. And because writing mostly goes on in my head, it can be harder to make the leap to writing things down. With many other activities–you just do. Making up stories? That seems like a mystical process, one that cannot be corralled or controlled. One that does not produce something tangible or functional, unlike crocheting a warm blanket or harvesting lettuce for lunch.

Solution? Doing something physical–walking, washing dishes, gardening–often gives my brain a chance to tease out my story without my active interference. Seeking out new experiences, or just stopping to fully enjoy the ones I do have, store up a wealth of sensory detail for me to draw on when I am writing a story.

And, last of all, writing is hard work! We have so many leisure options available to us: movies, TV, Internet, video games, books, (let others do all the work), watching paint dry (just kidding!). After a long tiring day, all my brain and I want is to be entertained, not be entertaining.

What about you? If you’re a procrastinating writer, what makes it hard for you to get started?

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