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But please don't despair.

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Breaking the Rules and (Maybe) Winning. Yay!

On this quiet Boxing Day, please let me announce that my entry in the CWOW Phoenix Rattler Does Your Story Have Bite? contest has made the finals. My first contest!


I found this out on Christmas Eve, the day before my birthday, and how grateful I am! Glory to God for every victory.


I agonized over this entry back in October, up to the night it was due. I was supposed to submit the first ten pages of my unpublished novel, and I had a beginning that was...possibly...in the wrong place.


It's an agony felt by artists of all kinds: How can we bear to delete the bits we love so much, even though they're not entirely successful or in the right place, and re-start the story (or painting or score) somewhere else?


In the end, I took a deep breath, ripped out the questionable passage as if ripping out my heart, and trusted that the new hook was strong. Further, I chose to leave a huge flashback sitting smack in the first ten pages---which, ask anyone, is a humongous no-no. Forty pages too soon, they'll tell you. It's what all the books say.


The fact that I made the finals anyway highlights two wonderful points.


First of all, it pays to bite the bullet and do what you think is best for the work, no matter how in love you are with this bit or that. Second, if the flashback (or yellow tree or A-flat) is necessary, leave it in, no matter who tells you to take it out.


In other words, trust your gut no matter what.


Granted, I haven't won. But making the finals tells me that the story and writing dominated all else. As, of course, they should.


I have an advantage, I think, in that I haven't read the how-to books yet. I have them and I leaf through them periodically, but for the most part I've been too busy writing to study them. Well, good. Winging it isn't a bad thing after all.


The Internet offers a rainbow of possibilities for learning how to do just about anything, most of all write. There are books and courses and gobs of advice, both reliable and unreliable. With all these resources, we can quickly lose sight of our own intuition. There are times to take advice, of course, and humbly. But still, it's easy to get bogged down in how-to's. Gut decisions are most often right, and I for one am gratified to see my story advance on the basis of choices I made listening to the quiet voice within.


Contests are important for professional writers and I'm delighted to have debuted with this small success. It's a good feeling I can carry on to the next contest, already in progress.


Unfortunately, there's no snow in Baja to rejoice in, but what we do have are mariachi bands. I throw my paws in the sunny air and give thanks!

God bless you on this Holy Night!

May the light of Christ and the will of God illuminate your life.

I wish you peace, love, and joy,

today and always.

MERRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYONE!

And a Merry Band It Is

I never thought it would be so hard to write a simple essay on why I write. I mean, we all know why we write. Right?


As you can see, I've enlisted the whole band.


With the flurry of homemade Christmas gifts, life has been colorful this last week and I've thoroughly enjoyed it. But my laboriously won writing plan is out the window. In fact, the entire framework I so carefully set up before Thanksgiving is sagging under the weight of the last few weeks. Well, every message from Above starts out the same these days: "Take a deep breath, child, and relax. No stress!"


So this is what I'm doing. I refuse to worry about generating income or rewriting my plan until January, and I pray by then I have a new take on worry. Instead, I'm focusing on setting up my tapestry loom and writing this confounding essay.


And in that spirit, you might enjoy a peek at the world of tapestry weavers. Here's a link to the Canadian Tapestry Network, the Desert Tapestry Weavers, a fun blog called desertsong studio, and some pieces by one of my favorite tapestry artists, Silvia Heyden.


I hope that your holiday preparations are joyful and relaxed. I'm still finishing Christmas gifts, so no weaving or loom building today.


But dreaming, certainly. And, I hope, more writing. In the meantime, happy holidays!

Just Your Ordinary Extraordinary Life

Sometimes life is so extraordinary that no amount of theory can make it do what you want.


These last weeks of my life have been extraordinary. Illness and hospitals, rain storms and floods, lack of sleep and absence from work---well, from looking for work. We've all had times like this, powering through a tunnel with all our might, doing what's needed because we must, and emerging fragile and spent when the task is done.


I wish I could say that I stayed strong, creative, and joyful throughout, but I didn't. Powering through was all I could do. Now that I'm resting my aching heart and limbs, I feel rather like this little bird: delicate, tentative, and solitary.


As I began putting my life and home back together, I surprised myself two days ago by rummaging around in the weaving shed, pulling out projects that need finishing. I found strips of a brown, black, and white woven rag rug that need to be joined, and a fuchsia rag runner in a similar state.


The work was done long ago and I remember doing it. Holding these pieces of my past in my hands was a wonderful comfort and finishing them will be a delicious domestic act, like building a nest. After weeks away from myself, it's a way of saying, "This is who I am," and then finding out, one piece at a time, what that means. 


Christmas is less than two weeks away. Short on cash this year and a terribly wasteful spender in the past, I'm enjoying learning a new way of life. I bought wrapping paper and ribbon for pennies in my village, and I'm giving gifts made from what I already have here at home. I suspect I'm not the only one celebrating a homespun Christmas this year. It makes me smile. This is how it should be.


This post, and my other blog Foghorn , mark my first writing efforts in weeks. Encouraged, I think tomorrow I'll work on my entry for the Editor Unleashed essay competition, "Why I Write." First prize is $500, and the top fifty entries will be published in a collection. Not bad as contests go! Editor Unleashed is an interesting site with an active forum. If you're a writer, it's worth a visit.


Please take care and enjoy your own Christmas preparations. Now that I'm back, I'll be here, building my nest.


Chirp.

Couching the Golden Thread

Since I started spending my time creating a day job, I haven't touched brush to paper and hardly strung a bead. In other words, I'm missing color. 


I love working with words, but there comes a point where I feel like grabbing a crayon and coloring in the O's. Fortunately, it doesn't take much to bring the color back.


There have been other times in my life when I've been estranged from my art. During those times, I made a point of devoting quiet moments in the morning to a small black sketchbook and some paints, writing a few words and finding the first colors of the day.


A fifteen-minute ritual each morning works wonders. It's not meditation, which works its own wonders. It's just a very private moment--no editing, no censorship, no expectations. It reminds me of couching. 


In embroidery, couching is a technique whereby a thick thread, often gold, is tacked at intervals to a piece of fabric using very fine thread. To my mind, each fifteen minutes in the morning is like one fine tack holding the design thread in place.


If you find yourself going through a time when your art is hard to get to, you might want to devise a little ritual for your own mornings. A regular quarter of an hour noodling on a guitar or pirouetting around the living room before work can uplift your whole day. 


Now the writer's tip of the day: Confused by the publishing industry? No wonder. It's confusing, and undergoing changes that make it more baffling every day. I just discovered the SFWA site--that's the Science Fiction Writers of America, in case you didn't know. They offer an excellent series of articles in their feature Writer Beware . There, you'll find clear explanations and opinions on electronic publishing, vanity presses, unscrupulous agents, and more. Have a look.


And, whatever else you do, keep that thread running, however you can.

It's About Time

Today, I wrote a writing plan.

Somehow that just doesn't communicate the complexity of the thing, or the difficulty. Allocating dates and times to tasks a half-year in advance is not easy. There are so many variables, so many unknowns.

Now that it's done, my plan looks good and it just might work. Unfortunately, I can't pass on any how-to tips because I honestly don't know what I did or how I did it. It was like walking up a black-iced hill in old cowboy boots--which I've done, by the way, and barely lived to tell about it.

There was precious little I could find on the Internet to give a bird's-eye view and help me find a place to put my feet. 

There's plenty on setting goals, of course, but whatever there is on outlining professional freelance writing goals is well hidden. Setting these goals demands a deft touch because of the unique nature of freelance writing. The spectrum is broad and, if you're anything like me, you're trying to move forward in ten areas at once, each of which has its own particular rhythm and requirements. And unreliability.

Writing-World.com offers a series of general articles on the business of writing, which includes a handful on writing plans. If you're wrestling the same octopus, you might find something helpful there.

Finally having a plan written down, even for just the next few months, certainly eases my mind. I'm relaxing now after a hard day of climbing ropes. There's enough time to start checking off boxes.

Tomorrow.

Putting the Artful into Day Job

There's been altogether too much "day job" and not enough "artful" going on around here lately.


While my pile is getting more beautiful, it's still an awful lot of rocks. But part of the creative process is sorting and tossing and hoping you keep what you should. Today, I do believe I came across a really good one.


If you're a writer, you must check out FundsforWriters , C. Hope Clark's amazing site for writers who actually want to make money. Hope spends her time ferreting out grants, foundations, contests, and publishing venues of all kinds for writers--specifically because we can't--and offers them in regular newsletters and e-books.


Please note that she refuses to list any venues that don't pay money. In other words, no booby prize of three free copies for a 5-page essay. Thank you, Hope. Her hour-long interview on The Writing Show is also worth listening to, with tips not mentioned on the website. 


By the way, I'm not affiliated--just impressed, and very, very happy to have found her!


Well, back to the quarry.

11 Tips. Count 'em.

Today is VETERANS DAY.

God bless our troops all over the world who are sacrificing their lives every single day

to protect our right to live in freedom and to write whatever we please.

Thanks will never be enough.

I thought you might like to read something you can actually use, so here are some tips I jotted down several years ago while I was falling asleep over a translation job. Enjoy.

11 Tips For Surviving a Day Job with Your Creativity Intact

There’s no doubt about it—maintaining a day job while everything in you is roaring in another direction is one of the toughest things a creative soul can endure.

If you’re keeping body and soul together for hourly wages and find yourself too tired or distracted or frustrated to be creative after work, you’re not alone. It can be a superhuman challenge to sustain creative energy so that the switch to art or writing is even possible once you get home.

Here are a few of the many things you can do to keep your creative thread running when you can’t be in your studio or at your writing desk.

1. Name your vision.

If you’re in love with a particular medium, you’re heads above the crowd because you know what you want to do. And once you know what you want to do, you can create a vision of how to express that in your life.

If you love to dance, your vision may be to choreograph your own dances or have a dance troupe. If you love to work with color, your vision may be to paint lots of canvases or illustrate children’s books.

Your vision functions much like the keel on a sailboat, cutting through the sea to keep the boat upright.

If you’re working a day job and feel the urge to make art but have no larger vision, you probably find yourself scraping through the day with annoyance gnawing holes in your belly, saddled with a general sense of dissatisfaction and malaise.

This isn’t surprising, as you have nothing to carry you through the everyday, and your feet soon start to drag in the sand. Visions are buoyant bubbles that lift the heart and make it sing. What’s your vision for your art? What do you really want to do?

2. Set a creative goal that will keep you moving.

Once you know what your vision is, you can bring it to life by setting a goal and working towards it.

While we’re very familiar with setting goals within the scope of individual projects, we may not have thought much about setting goals for the larger context within which we’re working. Many artists feel uncomfortable with speaking about their art in terms of goals, preferring to “make art for art’s sake.” But goals can be applied creatively to even the most process-oriented methods.

It may appear that creative souls require absolute freedom from restrictions in order to thrive, but this is just one of the many myths surrounding productive artists and their work. Productive artists do set goals and work toward them with consistency and persistence, and it is exactly this that fosters the growth and advancement for which the human spirit yearns. A goal that serves your vision will give your everyday activities meaning and clarity.

3. Begin the night before.

Now it’s time to break the big goal down into do-able steps. What are your three most important goals for the next day?

Before you go to bed, think about the three most important things to do the next day to bring you closer to your goal. Now write them down. If you know that you want to publish a novel or exhibit your paintings, your daily goals can comprise small but consistent concrete steps toward that end. If your aim is to explore your medium without worrying too much about a product, decide what you want out of that exploration (fun, challenge, greater self-knowledge), and then think of small things you can do each day to make it happen.

By writing down your goals the night before, you’re already ahead of the game when you wake up in the morning. Choose your goals realistically, keeping in mind the time and energy required for your job. Don’t be too hard on yourself; you’re learning to balance.

4. Get up early.

Don’t laugh—those extra moments or hours can be the most productive of your day. Just one extra half-hour in the morning can result in a chapter outline or five more woven inches on the loom. The stillness of the early hours is a fine time to concentrate. If you use the time wisely, you’ll be miles ahead of the rest of your time zone.

Not everyone functions well in the morning, however, and you may resist this idea. Please don’t discount it until you give it a fair try. The body can adjust to almost anything, and it takes a good three weeks to assume a new habit.

Give yourself a month of early rising before you go back to burning the midnight oil. Just remember to set your goals the night before so you’re clear in the morning about why you got out of bed—don’t give yourself an excuse to crawl back under the covers. If you’re still too tired when the alarm goes off, consider going to bed earlier. If the early morning hours turn out to be the best practical time for you to make progress on your work, it’s a small price to pay. And you may be pleasantly surprised!

5. Design a morning ritual and do it every day.

Ritual is like the steady tick-tock of the minute hand through our lives. It keeps us on track and moving forward. A ritual is a reverent and purposeful act designed to focus energy and concentration.

Rituals are intensely intimate and private acts, so there are as many possibilities as there are individuals. Yours may involve writing or painting for a certain time each day, meditating, dancing, walking to a special tree, reciting a poem. A fifteen-minute ritual in the morning is all it takes to start your day with a creative act that will reverberate through all your subsequent movements and activities.

Make it small and keep it simple, something easily hold-able in your heart for the rest of the day. Consecrate that act to your art and do it every morning. Watch it take root and secure the soil in which it grows.

6. Learn to do the Lifeboat Exercise.

In his marvelous little Creativity Book, Eric Maisel suggests doing the Lifeboat Exercise once a day for three days in a row, but I find it works well as a life raft all year long.

Find yourself a raucous bell, he says. Ring your bell loudly and shout, “Create!” Go to your workspace, set a timer for ten minutes, and work. When the timer goes off, shout, “All clear!” You’ve just made ten minutes progress on your creative work and fed the connection to your heart.

Now, it may be that your day job is located in such a place that you are not able to ring a raucous bell and yell, “Create!” without jarring your neighbors. That’s all right. Set your computer timer to alert you silently and perhaps at random, or simply stop for your ten minutes when you can. Take a ten-minute break in a quiet spot and scribble some notes on your novel or carry water-soluble colored pencils and a small sketchbook. Outline the next act of your play.

A lot can happen during a ten-minute break. Just do it the best way you can. But it might be wise to practice ringing bells and yelling when you get home. Stopping whatever you’re doing to create for ten minutes is an invaluable survival skill, and practicing drills at home can save your life out in the world.

7. Set a theme for the day.

Just as you would identify the underlying theme of a story or a sculpture, you can declare a theme for yourself and give your day the characteristics of a work of art, allowing the parts to inform one another with more intent.

You might choose to heighten your experience by looking at the day through the filter of a project you’re working on, or you may decide to play with a new theme, such as gentleness or rapture, that speaks to current states of your heart and that just may become the theme of an actual project. The point is to see the day (and the day job) as a work of art rather than a series of drudgeries keeping you from your true vocation.

Your art is everywhere in your life—it is your life and your life is your art. Practice holding this truth in your awareness and you will never be bored.

8. Practice relevance.

It’s easy to see our day jobs as intrusions on our valuable time and basically irrelevant to the important things in our lives. Practicing relevance can enhance the productivity of those hours by influencing both the day job tasks and our own art.

I’ve been a day-job translator for many years. I sit at my computer, sometimes falling asleep as I slog through other people’s texts, all the while dreaming of my own unfinished work as the frustration rises—until I start to look for the relevance, that is. Suddenly, I’m gleaning all sorts of marketing tips from promotional texts, examples of style from annual reports (including what not to do), and interesting topics from just about everything else.

Staying awake to what our paid work has to offer our creative work enriches the moment, makes the time go faster, and enhances the quality of everything we do.

9. Put on the headphones and crank up the volume.

Don’t underestimate the power of fun to jog the energy and get it moving in a more creative direction.

Listen to music, if you can. If you work at home, pet your dog. Open a window and breathe in some fresh air. Walk around the hallways and do a little dance when no one’s looking. Tell a joke and make someone smile. Pack yourself an unusual lunch. Have a cappuccino instead of tea.

Fun is everywhere in this wonderful universe, just there for the picking. Plan a reward for yourself when you get home—a hot bath, a good meal, a comedy on DVD. Laugh. Relaxing into laughter or contentment renews the connection with your creative self. It can also be as refreshing as a nap. Clear the fuzz, blast through the cement ceiling in your head, welcome in some sunshine, and let the energy flow.

As artists, our media may appear to be stone or words or movement or music, but as creative souls our medium is energy. You cannot use energy creatively if you stop it from flowing; you won’t have any material to work with. Be its friend, invite it in, learn to dance.

10. Surround yourself with who you are.

Everyone in every job has at least two inches of workspace they can call their own. You may have a desk or a locker or an entire office to yourself. Bring your inspiration to work, and don’t be shy.

Decorate your office, select a motivational screen saver, dress the part (if you can). Surround yourself as much as possible with what you do and what you love. It will bolster your spirits, remind you of who you are and what’s important to you. Do not be afraid of using props—be a stage designer.

My painting teacher was fond of hanging plastic wrap from the ceiling across the width of a room to demonstrate that light was traveling through the space we occupied and affecting the colors of the objects we saw. For years afterward, I would drape plastic wrap from whatever ceiling I could, wherever I worked, wherever it was tolerated, to remind myself of what I wanted to remember.

Be creative in designing your stage. See working with the limitations of your workspace as an artistic challenge. Learn to see yourself and your vision for yourself reflected in your environment, wherever you are.

11. Be grateful.

Gratitude is a prosperous and productive state of mind, and absolutely essential to true creativity. Remembering to be grateful for the fact that we’re earning money at all and putting food on the table keeps us open to the positive things that come our way throughout the day.

Gratitude for what we do have, not resentment about what we don’t have, is what makes it possible for the Universe to send us what we want. It keeps a smile close to our lips and makes us much more pleasant to be around. Gratitude is a miraculous blessing, because while we’re being grateful for the gifts that have been given us, the very act of being grateful benefits us in ways we cannot count.

Practice being grateful, deeply grateful, for a short period of time and see how you feel. If you’re having trouble giving thanks because you can’t see past your lack of money or time or the necessities of life, try starting with air, sunshine (or rainfall), blades of grass, leaves on trees, roofs over heads.

Abundance is all around us. Once you start naming the blessings that surround you, you may not be able to stop.

.  .  .

Each of these points deserves a book of its own, and there are many more tiles in the ever-surprising mosaic of creative process. For now, just start where you are. Look at your day job as the blessing it is. Use your formidable creativity to honor your art every day.

Examine your big vision, select a goal or two, and watch everything in your life align as you move steadily and surely toward your heart’s desire.

-- by Durga Walker © 2005

Piling Rocks Instead

Okay, maybe building an empire was a little overblown at this point. Maybe for the moment it's enough to build...well, a pile.


I was sorting through some old articles yesterday with the idea of uploading them to Bukisa so that people could read them and my millions could come pouring in. And I ran across an article I wrote a few years ago and I thought, "Hey, this one's really good."


It occurred to me that if I put it on a content website, I might not be able to get it published anywhere else--like with a real publisher. So I've decided to send it to a magazine. The subject covers day jobs and creativity (big surprise), and I'm wondering where it will find a home. Maybe an art industry journal like ArtCalendar, where I was published once before, or perhaps an open-minded business magazine.


Writing query letters  is a task that's bewildered me for years, not least because of the oddball topics I write about. Sad to say, there doesn't seem to be any way out. Freelance article writers have to write query letters. Bleh. Let's hope they don't turn out like these . 


You should see my To-Do lists. They're at least as long as yours. I want to do everything at once, and I want it all done now so I can sit down and weave beads.


But time is chronological. This is a slow planet and I'm particularly slow. Building a pile is about all I can manage these days. An uploaded article here, a query letter there, and wa-ay over there a translator application form.


In the end, my pile will look like something. Not an empire, maybe, but perhaps a well, or even a fountain. I'll just keep putting one rock on top of the other and stand back to have a look when the last one's on top.


Still, it'd sure be a lot easier with one of those nifty tripods.

Building the Empire

Wikimedia's great. I just learned about Sweden's Bernadotte Dynasty, which must have one of the nicest coats of arms I've ever seen.

However, this is not the kind of empire I'm building.

Especially not today. Today, I'm staying home with my cat. He's got the right idea. Lie down here, lie down there. I completed a freelance writing job this morning, so I have the luxury of taking a few minutes off.

That's what I told myself, anyway, but I keep gravitating toward the keyboard. Stuff wants to come out. Isn't that grand?

So yesterday I joined Bukisa, where I might just be able to earn a little bit of money by writing what I really love to write. Of course, $4 per 1,000 hits on an article doesn't sound like much, but you know, it's all cumulative. If you've got old articles or ideas lying around you might want to spruce them up a bit and post them. There's a networking element to Bukisa, so if people sign up under you, you'll benefit from their hits, as well.

Last night, I spent some time with my evergreen article, 11 Tips For Surviving a Day Job With Your Creativity Intact, and sent it on up. And I've got a store of others I can dig out and tweak. Bukisa accepts previously published articles as long as you own the copyright.

All in all, an interesting concept. Whether or not the website lives up to the idea remains to be seen. I'll keep you posted.

But today I'm calling in the generals and mapping the advance, i.e., my career plan as a writer. From the looks of it, we may end up in Sweden. At this point, I'm pretty much following my nose. And the light from above.

The Homogenized Life

It's a good thing for my clients that they don't pay me by the hour. I live a homogenized life. I wouldn't know where to start billing.


Writing for me is like living. Well, it is living. I eat a banana, let the cat lick my nose, type a word, scrape dust bunnies off the floor, write a blog post, type another word...you get the picture. Rarely do I sit at the computer and Just Write--until I get to the revision part, when I'm glued to the keyboard because slashing and burning my own work is just so much fun.


But that first draft? How do people do it? I know there are writers who barrel through pages of material just to get it down. At least, that's what I hear. Who are these people? Is this skill or heredity? I give it a shot it periodically, but I think I'd get better results milking a cow.


My pea-picking way of writing overflows into my work, of course, so I always bill by the project. Want to see me squirm? Watch a client ask me for an hourly rate. It's not possible. There's no way I can tell you how much time I spend on a project because 90% of that time was probably passed watching flies and moving paper around on my desk.


I may not make it as a freelance writer. This method can't be cost-effective over the long run.


On the other hand, I remember my first attempt at copyediting. It took me six hours to do a half-hour job. The agency was shocked, but of course I didn't bill them for that. "It's my on-the-job training," I told them. And in fact I got much faster and now everyone's happy.


Still, I'm not a novice writer. And I've always preferred the homogenized life. Nine-to-five never suited me, even when it was possible for me to do. So maybe difficult billing and jobs that take an eternity are just the price to pay for being able to meander through a job like I would through the botanical gardens.


Working at home. The adventure goes on.


By the way, I just discovered the greatest site. Probably everyone in the world has known about this forever, but in case you don't, here's a link to Wikimedia , where you can get public domain pictures to plaster all over your blog or whatever you're making. Because, in case you were wondering, no, I didn't shoot the milkmaid.

Speed Warp

I don't usually notice the remarkable velocity of, well, everything in the world (except me) until I try to go fast.


My fibromyalgia isn't something I talk about often. It's hard enough to live with, who wants to hear about it? But there's a strange phenomenon associated with fibro that I don't find nearly as annoying as I'm sure my loved ones do. I get to live in a speed warp.


It doesn't matter how fast crowds, other people's thoughts, or the Internet may go roaring past. I get to walk. Sometimes it's my body that won't move quickly, and sometimes it's my brain. Sometimes it's both.  Sometimes it's pain, but often it's just a cloud that settles around my head like a halo of fog on a mountaintop. Whatever it is, it slows me down and reminds me how nice it is to amble.


I registered my blog with StatCounter today. This is an amazing site where I can track my visitor traffic. No personal data can be seen, of course, so there's no need to hide. But what I can see is an overview of where visitors are coming from. It's very cool. My favorite feature is a map of the world with little pins that show me where you all live.


I mention this because writing to pins in a map is a whole lot more motivating than writing to nobody at all. Each pin represents a real person living in Montreal or Hawaii or Japan. And I try to picture each little pin-person sitting at a computer, speeding through the Internet on his or her own trajectory, searching for one thing or another and making good time as they whiz through all the really fast and up-to-date sites there are out there, then crashing to a halt when they hit my blog before whizzing off again.


I've been ambling--and rambling--a lot these days. There are times when I'd like to run, particularly when I think about all there is to do. And jumping over houses is much more successful when one has a good running start. But all in all, I like having an excuse not to speed.


It gives me a chance to listen for the sprouting of seeds I continue to drop on the path, one by one, as I go moseying by.

The First Bird

Prompted by a discussion on a writers list, I'm finally reading Bird By Bird for the first time, and now I know what all the fuss is about.

If you've been living on the moon and are unfamiliar with Anne Lamott, here's the blurb from the back cover:

"Thirty years ago my older brother, who was  ten years old at the time, was trying to get a  report on birds written that he'd had three months to  write. It was due the next day. We were out at our  family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen  table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper  and pencils and unopened books on birds,  immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my  father sat down beside him, put his arm around my  brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy.  Just take it bird by bird.'"

I wish I could write a review of this wonderful book, as if the world needs another one, but I've actually been commissioned to write a review of a different book (yippee!) that I should be working on as we speak.

Instead of working, however, I found myself thinking about how important it is to sit down and write every day, and how I don't, and about what might happen if I did, and in a flash this came out: 

"Felicity, for the thousandth time, stop kicking the back of the seat."

...and is now the first sentence of a short story that's been rattling around in my brain forever.

The first bird. Hey! And the second bird, too, because a whole paragraph followed, unbidden.

As we all know, birds tend to fly away to be replaced by other birds, but capturing the first one, even for a little while, is like spotting the first robin of spring--sweet, hopeful, exhilarating.

And infinitely better than spotting the last witch of Halloween!

...And I Did NOT Get Wrapped Around a Pole

All I can think of to say right now is...I DID IT!!!!


Yes, I just sent in my first entry to my first writing contest. I stopped dusting the studio and rewrote Chapter One. I grit my teeth like nobody's business and made changes I didn't want to make, and after all I'm very pleased. Fancy that.


This rewriting thing has got me thinking. Revising a manuscript over and over is like whipping up alternate galaxies.


I threw together the first three pages of Chapter One two years ago simply so I could submit my thin skin to a thick-skinned manuscript clinic run by Jerry B. Jenkins at my first Christian Writers Guild conference. Turns out he liked it (not that he didn't rip it apart, but he liked it while he ripped it apart). I was stunned and gratified. And, by this time, stubbornly attached to the part he liked.


But of course, getting precious about any creative work is death for creativity. As soon as something becomes absolutely essential, that's the time to throw it away.


Over the next two years, Chapter One went through both drastic overhauls and minute tweaks. Yet every time I overhauled or tweaked, I did so around the part I was hanging on to, which didn't help the situation. Anyone who's revised a text knows that changes in one sentence mean changes in another. It's like boxing clouds. Blink your eyes and you've got a whole new chapter. Except for the parts you refuse to change.


Then I joined a crit group. Oh dear. They were kind, but it was a structural issue, you see.


Resistant to the end, I dug in my heels. I tried every which way to keep that part. It was my opening hook. Jerry loved it! Maybe it could be a prologue...except it happened in the past. Maybe it could be not exactly a prologue but not exactly part of the chapter, either...Well, even I could see how far that would fly.


So yesterday I took a hatchet to it and started Chapter One in a whole new place. Know where? In the place I'd started the very first draft almost three years ago. Now it's a whole new old chapter, and much better besides.


How many incarnations did Chapter One go through to get to where it is? And how many more lie ahead? If I lined all the versions up like cousins with a family resemblance, they'd reach around the globe. And there are twelve chapters to go.


What am I doing with that precious severed limb? I'm hanging on to it. It'll make a perfect blurb for the back of the book.


Tomorrow I'm dressing up as a clown witch and letting my split personality slug it out. But tonight, I'll sleep the sleep of the just. The just entered, that is.


HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Dusting the Studio

My painting teacher used to call the fiddly prelude to creative work that we all seem to indulge in "dusting the studio."


We walk around and rearrange things just so, stack these over here instead of over there, hang something on the wall and scrutinize it for the thousandth time, or, for those of us who work at our desks, maybe pay some bills...or write a blog. Very helpful stuff.


Still, there's a fine line between getting ready to work and postponing the inevitable. The personal dance that marks the start of our creative time is magical, intimate, and unique to each of us. And we each have a tipping point: One moment we're psyching ourselves up, the next moment we're procrastinating. Knowing our own special moment to stop fussing and get down to it is one sign of maturity in an artist.


My one and only job this morning is to get Chapter One ready to enter a contest. I'm excited, scared (it's my first writing competition), and generally overwhelmed by the amount of work there is to do on my entry.


Last year at this time, I thought my manuscript was ready for submission to anyone, anywhere. Then I joined a critique group of specialists in my story's genre. God love them, they put Chapter One back on the front burner and handed me a lesson in humility.


This first chapter has a slight structural problem that I've been pondering for weeks, along with some protagonist issues that affect the mood of the entire story. These are not small obstacles and I really don't know where to start, which is why I'm still polishing Chapter One two short days before the contest deadline.


And still dusting the studio.


But because I think I know when to dance and when to stop, I'll leave you with this: Dust away to your heart's content, and then get to work.

When Your Home Is Your Studio (or is it the other way around?)

Look closely. Bet you thought this was a photograph of a real quilt.


I've had this photo in my file for a long time and have no idea who did it. If someone knows who the graphic artist is, please let me know. I'd like to give very full credit!


In the meantime, today it represents a perfect meld of home and studio. How many of us work in our homes or live in our studios? I do. My floor looms, thank heavens, are in an airy larger shed on the property, but my more immediate art--my writing, painting, and beading--live here with me in my new little cottage.


Since there simply isn't room to carve a studio from my living space, I'm creating a sort of "living studio." All my choices for decorating and arranging things in my limited space are based on whether or not they serve my work with words and colors. Watercolor table in the sitting room? Why not? It's a feature. Desk in the bedroom? No, that's a bed in the writing room.


This last juxtaposition worried me before I moved in. I've always had separate office and bedroom, and I have to admit I was concerned about not being able to relax, what with my work staring me in the face every night. But I've discovered that I sleep very well surrounded by what I love. When I look at my shelves of books about writing, poetry, creativity, and children's literature (even those stern dictionaries in five languages), I see possibilities for creating my future. If anything keeps me awake these days, it's too many ideas!


If working at home is a problem for you, there are ways to shift the orientation of your living space to support your creativity.

• Ask yourself what sort of home would feed your creative dreams. Give more space to what you love and give it a place of honor. Surround yourself with things that make you want to be creative. Cut out the clutter that keeps you stuck in the uncreative past.
  
• What about setting up a dedicated workspace? Think about how that would change your life. Clearly, the more of your home that is dedicated to your art or craft, the stronger the constant creative energy will be, pulling you in and jump-starting your work. But even if all you can manage is a convertible corner or a roll-out unit, it's a seed waiting to grow.
  
• Think about what you would pack in a portable studio. A space-saving backpack stuffed with miniature versions of your favorite tools is a possible solution for a crowded living space (and a great idea for taking advantage of odd moments on your job, by the way).
  
• Another question: What sort of inspiration would a fairy sprinkle on you? Got it? Now sprinkle it around your house.

One of the best ways to grease your gears is to keep a steady stream of exciting and interesting ideas coming into your brain. What sort of inspiration tickles your fancy? Literature, music, motivational tapes? Films, friends, the Buddha? 

Select things that make you want to strive for the very highest within yourself, images or objects that remind you of who you really are: a magnificent spiritual being, a naturally creative soul. Surround yourself with messages in a language that speaks to your heart. Put them in places where you can't help but see them. What is it that touches you right where you live and makes you want to be your very, very best?

-- from The Day Job Survival (and Escape) Kit

Time and Space are two of the issues I look at in The Day Job Survival (and Escape) Kit --hopefully coming soon to a computer near you. And am I glad I've finally got a living studio. Time to edit! 

On Not Standing Still

I live in the wine country of Baja California, where the time changed last night.


This puts us an hour behind San Diego, directly to our north, and it'll stay that way for the next week until the US changes its time. I'm reminded of of the arbitrariness of time zones, Daylight Savings, and sometimes even national borders.


But did I enjoy that extra hour last night? You bet! Having no work and moving house are numbers 3 and 4 on someone's list of the 10 most stressful things in life . I think they're right. I could sleep for a week.


Nevertheless, for fun and professional fluff I've decided to enter the Phoenix Rattler Writing Contest for unpublished writers. This means I've finally got to get the first ten pages of Chapter One of my YA novel in submission shape this week. I've been dallying with this manuscript for too many months now, reaching for perfection. It's time to pick a solution and get on with it. Nothing like a deadline to kick in the spurs!


It's going to be a week full of writing, and maybe even some actual work. Of my 28 translation applications from last week, I've had a 10% return so far (not bad!)--and 5% of them were actively positive. They've got me in their stables now. Will they send work? Who knows? It's exciting, though, like digging for clams. Maybe this shovelful...or maybe this one....


If I'm learning one thing from this rather stressful time, it's that nothing happens if you stand still. A nudge here, a nudge there, and suddenly things start to pop. After two years of professional stasis, I'm launching a flotilla of messages into the void, like so many bottles on the sea, all saying the same thing: "I'm here."


Inch by inch, row by row...

Housewarming

Today was moving day for me. Hoorah!


In the absence of pictures of my new home, I chose this one to commemorate the day. All those rakes and wheels must mean good luck somewhere in the world!


Tomorrow starts a new chapter. It's good to shake things up once in a while. My friends will tell you I spend most of my time shaking things up and that this is a relatively small one, as my shakes go. But even a small shake can change your perspective completely.


I moved my stuff only about 50 feet from the main house to a small cottage on the property. It's a move that won't keep me from coming back every night to watch the World Series. Still, a new house means new wall colors, new views out the windows, new energy around me.


New movements through the environment generate new thoughts. I like to shift my furniture around a lot, too. It's a brain stretch.


So Happy Housewarming to me (and my cat). May those new thoughts be ever better ones!