author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

The original mission statement with this blog was, "I will blog every day, and only after I've written that day." And of course I began to fail at that standard pretty much the moment I put it into place. But it's never too late to get back on board with a good idea. It's my reusable New Year's Resolution: This year I'll write more, with more self-discipline and better time-management! This will be the year I Act Like A Writer!

The problem with New Year's Resolutions, though, is the high expectations involved. It isn't enough to say, "Tomorrow I'll write more than I did today." Oh no. We have to put it in terms of a whole year. So the moment we drop down out of the stratospheric levels of Perfect, well, that's the year down the tubes. It doesn't help that we ante up an amount of self-esteem proportional to the impossibility of the perfection we seek.

Some people, recognizing this, turn the idea of New Year's Resolutions into a joke. They set deliberately impossible goals, or deliberately trivial ones, and they laugh about them. Laughing is good for you. Jokes are healthy. But I don't want to turn the idea of self-improvement itself into a joke. I seriously want to take all that magical, psychological power bound up in our communal awe for the event of the annual odometer ticking over, and push it into my personal engines. Vroom!

So. A do-able New Year's Resolution with a reasonable attitude toward success and failure.

Here's another tank of gas for that: John and I just purchased health insurance. He got a new job, and, since it's an hourly contract position, he didn't get a new company-paid health insurance policy with it. Well, they offered him one, but the options offered cost about the same but provided less coverage than what we were contemplating purchasing on our own. (His new employers did, however, offer him a dental policy worth the premium. I will never understand this system.)

What does health insurance have to do with my writing goals for the year? Well, it has to do with how we signed up. Since we had the option, we made me the primary insured. I'm the one with more time on my hands, after all, or, if not, if I actually am spending all the time writing I should and the rest of my work week being a housewife, at least I'm the one with a more flexible work schedule. I can bike down to the State Farm office on Mapleton just about any day, weather permitting, and sign stuff. Or make phone calls. Or whatever. Not that it this hasn't been the case since I quit my day job in April 2004, but I since I haven't been the insured employee, I haven't typically been authorized to handle the bureaucratic details. Insurance companies want the signature of the guy in the number one slot. They don't want to talk to the dependent or beneficiary.

(Speaking of companies that won't talk to the beneficiary, let us another day discuss companies who, when receiving an application from a married couple with a hyphenated last name, "helpfully" "correct" the husband's last name by removing the hyphened-on half, and then require the husband to call them and then fill out a change-of-name form rather than just saying "Sorry, we goofed" when the wife calls to point out the error. Shall we? It would be a blast.)

When you're the primary insured on the application, the application wants to know all about you. Including your employment status. I always fill out "Self-employed" not just because that's what writers are, even if they aren't making a lot of sales, but because it's an act of magic. Or psychology, take your pick. I am not unemployed and dabbling at a hobby. My writing is my job. I mean to treat it like a job, and I expect others to respect that it is my job, and I'm not going to wait until I've sold a novel to say so. "Self-employed." Emphatically.

And then when they ask "Part time or full?" a little sliver of conscience grimaces and admits I don't spend 40 hours a week on my writing like I think I should. "Part-time." Sheepishly.

Entering "self-employed" and "part-time" caused a new section of form to unfold on the web page (yay, Javascript!), "Determination of Self-Employed Business Group of One," asking me to check yes to four more questions. Among them: have I been doing it for at least a year? Do I have taxable gross income from my self-employment from which I have derived a substantial part of my income, defined as sufficient to pay the annual insurance premium, at least one year in three? And do I work a minimum of 24 hours a week?

This is Magic 101. Mundane action, or "sweat," is a necessary component of any spell. It's very important to say "Writing is my job! I am self-employed!" It is also very important to then write like it's my job. The Goddess is very prompt at reminding me of this, and very versatile in how She delivers the message. This day, She was sending the message via Assurant Health and Time Insurance Company.

Well. I wasn't exactly going to sit there with a calculator and go, "I think last week I only worked 15 hours, and the last time I had gross income sufficient to pay this policy was three years ago." I said yes, and yes, and yes, and yes, and I signed on the dotted line.

And that's where the New Year's Resolution juice comes from. There's nothing quite like being unsure whether I've told the truth to inspire me to make it the truth.

So. My resolution, in precise: Write 5 hours each day, 5 days a week. This should consist of at least two articles for Demand Studios, any assigned blogging, and constant work on completing and submitting fiction submissions.

And blogging here when I'm done.

...And also flossing my teeth every morning, and achieving World Peace by December. [laugh track] No, no, but seriously, folks...

Happy Two Thousand And Ten!

It occurs to me that I forgot to blog for the entire latter three-fourths of November. You may have been under the impression that NaNoWriMo kicked me under a bus and left me for dead. If so, you would be wrong. Not far wrong, but wrong nonetheless. The bus analogy is just a bit too much. If you want accuracy, we could say that NaNoWriMo sort of prodded my backside while I was looking at something else, with the result that I sort of stumbled out in front of a moped puttering along at about 3 miles an hour, with the result that, to prevent my picking up moped tracks on the back of my favorite jacket, I had to keep running at a slow, steady, but unwavering pace for the entirety of November.

Which didn't leave me a lot of time for blogging, this year. That'll teach me not to watch my back.

In any case, the story's about the same as last year: Crossed the 50K line (see attached 2009 Winner Badge), failed to reach The End. Also, only managed to do about 9 of the hoped-for 30 Demand Studios articles; nevertheless, this total surpassed the totals of each previous month. So. Progress!

Going forward...

I have pledged to the other inhabitants of the "Life After NaNoWriMo" forum that I will finish this novel! I will finish this first draft in time to use my "free proof copy" code from CreateSpace (expires July 1). And, personally, I hope to finish it much sooner than that. Like, in time to give my wonderful, supportive husband a birthday present. "Limited edition," I told him. "Very limited. Like, just one copy. Signed and numbered and everything." This amused him.

As for my "day job," Demand Studios is doing something very special this month: Write For a Cause with Demand Studios. (Link goes to Facebook, where you can "become a fan" or just follow the cause's progress through the month.) For every eight articles their writers complete and their editors approve, they will donate a book to a child in need, via First Book. If you've been considering writing for Demand Studios, now's a darn good time. And this month's also a darn good time for me to finally reach a more respectable "day job" level of output with them.

And that's the news for now. Summary: Not dead, not under a bus, have won NaNoWriMo, will continue on.

The good thing about writing rituals is, they perform the purpose of any ritual. Which is: to shift your mindset in a conducive direction. Conducive to what? To whatever you're doing ritual for. Going to Mass puts church-goers in a frame of mind more in touch with God, community and prayer. Casting the circle puts Wiccans in a headspace where worship and magic come naturally. And writing rituals, theoretically, make it easier to achieve the focus needed for a productive writing session.

The traditional disadvantage to writing rituals is depending on them. I like to light a yellow candle, sip a mug of Assam or Pu Erh Tuo Cha, and turn on something instrumental and pleasant that won't monopolize my brain, like Blue Man Group: Audio or the Ink movie soundtrack. The combination generally turns on the "Time to write!" switch in my brain. But what if there's no quality tea to be had, the mp3s are on the other computer, and I'm in a no-flame zone?

So I'm trying to come up with writing rituals that require no external components, such that I'm never unable to perform them. This would make relying on them no downside at all. Well, except for the one perceived by people who like to huff that "if you need tricks to get you writing, you aren't a real writer." People like that can just ignore this post, kthxbai.

Three things you always have with you when you write:

1. Something to write with
2. Something to write on
3. Something to write about

For a while my thoughts were excessively religious. "The pen is my athame, which is Fire; the paper represents Earth and the ground I walk on; inspiration is Air; my imaginative attention to the world around me is Water." Except I'm not always using a pen, and my writing isn't always particularly imaginative. I mean, it's hard to get all RomantiWiccan about Demand Studios articles with titles like "How Does the H-R Diagram Explain the Life Cycle of a Star?" (Coming to you soon from eHow.com and Demand Studios and me!)

(And yet writing remains, for me, as much a religious vocation as a career goal...)

So the ritual use of "what I'm going to write with/on" has to accommodate both pen and laptop keyboard, both paper and word processor. The role of "what I'm going to write about" must encompass both the creation of fantastic worlds and the writing of how-to documents.

What I end up with are meditations. Here's one; feel free to use it if you find it useful.

Gaze meditatively at your blank sheet of paper or new word processor document. Envision whatever you plan to write about, even if you have no concrete idea, as a tangible, visible, simple object: a flower, a feather, an apple, etc. See this object on the page/screen. Hold this visualization until it's strong and comfortable.

Now let the object dissolve in your mind's eye and see a Door appearing to take its place. Give it solid detail: see every crack in the wood or inconsistency in its paint. Has it a doorknob? What sort? A doorknocker? Made of what? Is there a peephole? Which side can see through it?

Now see the Door opening. It opens away from you, "inward" from the point of view of someone approaching you. As it opens fully, you see The Muse standing in the doorway, smiling. Let yourself envision The Muse in full detail: gender, complexion, clothing, and all. The Muse need not be adult. The Muse need not be human. The Muse certainly won't be the same every time you do this.

What can you see of the room, or the world, on the other side of the door?

Now The Muse reaches out to you. Imagine that you lean forward, out from the safety of your chair and your body, and you take that offered hand (or paw, or mandible, or tentacle). Imagine that you allow yourself to be drawn through the door.

Remain inside this daydream for a minute or two, experiencing whatever is on the other side of this door.

When you are ready, begin writing.

Went to my usual bimonthly writing group Wednesday, and, as sometimes happens when there's no manuscript for critique in a given classtime, the conversation turned from commenting on each other's in-class writing to sharing with each other our writing processes. Specifically, the question was, "Where are you in your writing?"

I both love and hate that question. Love, because I love talking shop. I love talking about myself--why, yes, I've got a bit of an ego, how can you tell?--and I love getting together with other writers and attempting to put our experiences into words. Verbalizing my inner world requires a certain introspective clarity; in trying to find the words, I am forced to look more closely at mental realities I've been taking for granted. It's a process that results in knowing myself better. Which, yay!

But I hate that question, too, mainly because, if I'm going to be truthful, I have to give an answer beginning with, "Still difficult. Writing more now, but every single freakin' day it's a struggle to get past the resistances and fears and feelings of inadequacy that I call WRITER'S BLOCK. Every. Single. Day."

So I started there. But in continuing, I shared with my colleagues the current thing that's been working well for me (for certain definitions of "well"). "I've been letting myself consider writing to be play," I said, "so as to escape the downward spiral of guilt I've been flailing around in for years."

One of my friends said, "It's just the opposite with me. I have to tell myself that writing is my job, or it won't get done."

I am, of course, paraphrasing. But the conversation made me think about that balance between work and play that I think needs to be struck.

So. Writing as play. I've spent far too much time stuck in the idea of "OK, I quit my day job. I owe it to myself and my husband to GET STUFF DONE! Must work! Must turn out new short stories! Must get published! WHAT THE HELL I DIDN'T GET ANY WRITING DONE YESTERDAY I AM WASTING EVERYONE'S TIME I'M A BAD PERSON I SUUUUUUCK."

(The above has been dramatized for your entertainment.)

Obviously there's a problem with that. Well, not for everyone. For me, anyway. My reaction to obligation and guilt is less to get the thing done and more to hide away from the thing, because the thing, whatever it is, gets associated with Reasons To Conclude I'm A Bad Person. Also, the more I don't do, the more there is to do, the more impossible it seems to do. So. I've had ample opportunity to watch myself flail between the twin ouchies of "if you don't do it you're a waste of oxygen" and "you have to do it ALL, today, or yesterday for preference."

Which leads to the changes in my routine, methods, and attitude I've been attempting to effect lately. First, instead of Writing As Obligation, there's Writing As Play-On-The-Page. And second, instead of Get It All Done NOW, there's Just Take A Nibble.

But at the same time, I recognize that, as my friend put it, writing is my job now. It's how I want to make money. It's how I want to spend my working day. I can't just play; I have to produce. There's only so far "I'll take care of the quantity and the Gods will take care of the quality" goes before I realize I do have to get some quality out there if I want to be published.

So it's a balancing act. It's got to be play enough that I want to do it. But it's got to be work enough that I do do it, daily, with the aim of finished drafts I can submit to paying markets.

Recognizing that, I'm not so much changing my current approach as I am my perception of it. I'm working on Writing Is Play, No Pressure because until recently I've had too much weight in the Writing Is My Job half of the scale. It'll be time to shift my focus only when the scales shift.

But in the meantime I can probably risk injecting some direction into my daily "playtime". That means two things: Knowing what finishable, potentially submittable project to work on tomorrow, and knowing which, say, two hours of the day (or so) will be devoted to working on it. Having that in mind the night before allows me to wake up with a sense of purpose, a structure within which to Get Things Done. I'm a very Type-A creature; I thrive on structure.

Doesn't mean I did a good job today, mind. But yesterday I was fairly productive: got to the end of this week's rough draft (never mind that it was last week's rough draft, and that of the week before... anyway, about that, more later), and even uploaded an article to eHow (about what? Three guesses). Go me! {{pats self on back}} But then I woke up today, and dragged about the house until my first externally-enforced obligation. Gah.

Well. I knew consistency was once of my Areas Where Improvement Is Needed.

So. To summarize: A possible balancing point is to consider writing play, but impose a structure of What and When upon it in order to get work done. How well will this work? Find out next time, when I babble some more! Maybe.

I used to do this in college, every morning:

The exercise I set myself was to write something which filled exactly one page in WordPerfect and had a beginning, middle, and an end. Then I'd revise it just enough to meet the arbitrary length requirement. Most of these vignettes came to about 700 words long. They took about a half-hour to finish (for these standards of "finish"). At the end of the year I'd print them all out and bind them into a chapbook. I'm really proud of those chapbooks.

I think part of the reason I go through dry spells occasionally is I lose faith in myself, in the process, in writing itself. Sometimes it's more specific than that: Losing faith in my ability to improve a piece of writing, feeling that I've "lost my ear" and can't revise a story without somehow breaking it. Or losing faith in abundance, losing sight of the truth that you can't use it up. That last is what the Daily Story Idea is about.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you that writer's block doesn't exist. It does. I suffer from it constantly. It requires consistent, relentless effort to push through it every day. Rewarding effort, but effort nonetheless. But there's a lot of misconceptions, I think, about what writer's block actually is. It's not lack of ideas or unwillingness to do the work. It isn't sitting around waiting for the Muse to visit. It's not "not feeling like it today." It can cause all of these things, but those things are symptoms. The cause is something else entirely.

The cause is fear.

Irrational, unhappy fear. Frustrating fear. Shameful fear, because there's no shortage of self-proclaimed gurus out there proclaiming that "If you were really a writer, this wouldn't be a problem."

Writer's block isn't about being abandoned by the Muse or running out of inspiration. But it can take the form of a paralyzing, perfectionist fear that convinces you that ideas you're coming up with aren't good enough, worthy enough, imbued with enough potential to be the Next Great Internationally Acclaimed Novel.

Work through the fear, and there are story ideas all around, more than you can ever use in a lifetime. ("The Louisiana Steam Equipment Company. That is totally begging for a steampunk alternate universe story set in New Orleans.")

Writer's block isn't about being unable to turn an idea into a new story. But it can be a fear of failure that paralyzes you from even making the attempt, so that you sit and look at that one sentence you've typed out, and you go blank.

Let yourself play through the fear, and suddenly stories come with ease, spinning out of the barest hint of the idea like Rapunzel spinning a gold thread from the humble piles of chaff at her feet. ("In the steampunk alternate universe version of New Orleans, the same steam that voices the calliope on top Creole Queen would power a clockwork construct that played the calliope. And you'd bring that construct to the Steam Equipment Company for repairs. But it would be sentient, like one of the Girl Genius clanks, and it would in fact be the main character of the story, and...")

So I'm doing this Daily Story Idea for all those reasons. I'm reminding myself that one new story idea every day is easy; ideas are an inexhaustible resource. And instead of just writing down a sentence or two and considering myself done, I'm trying to hold myself to few minutes of playing around with that idea. It's a reassuring thing to look back over the last month and see that I can come up with the bare bones of a new story, poem, or novel every day, and indeed I have.

And though the chapbooks back in college weren't the point, they were nice to have. Just as it's nice to have a month's worth of potential stories sitting on my hard drive. I can look at them and say, "Check out all the stuff I could work on this week!" After all, the next commitment I made was to produce a complete rough draft of something every week, and any of these little weekday vignettes could be a head start on next week's assignment.

So that's what that's all about.

I may have mentioned the loveliness that is Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way... oh, maybe a hundred times by now. As it happens, I finished my most recent journey through the 12-week course described there just last month. And on May 4, I began adhering to my "Creativity Contract"--a written declaration that Cameron encourages artists to customize, sign, and stick to for the next 90 days. So here's how that's going.

The "Creativity Contract" starts out with a commitment to continue using the tools introduced in Week One: the daily Morning Pages and the weekly Artist's Date.

Morning Pages are three long-hand pages scribbled without excess thought or planning; just dump the contents of your brain onto the page. Preferably, they take place first thing in the morning. Failing that, they should take place at some point during the daily awake period. The author Kit Whitfield has a great essay on why this is useful, here. (She mentioned Morning Pages in passing at a blog we both frequent, and I pestered her to talk about it more. She is most obliging.)

I've mostly managed to do them every day in May. The "mostly" refers pretty much to the week before I left for Chicago; travel planning tends to hit me hard. Missing morning pages should not be an occasion for self-recrimination, giving up on the whole Creativity Contract idea ("I missed once! Now it's broken! Forever!" ...no), or attempting to make it up by doing twice as many pages tomorrow. At most, I look back and try to determine how/why I didn't manage to get my three pages done, and use that as a signpost for making time for it tomorrow.

On a related note, I try not to say to myself, "Let this be a lesson! Never do X!" but rather, "Let's take this as a signpost against doing X in future." Being kind to oneself is a big lesson in The Artist's Way, and I find I get a lot more work done if I'm not constantly fighting self-inflicted guilt.

The Artist's Date is an amount of time--half an hour, two hours, maybe even a whole day--dedicated toward pampering one's inner child/inner artist/sense of play. It serves the function of making oneself feel loved and happy. At the same time, it helps replenish the well from which one draws inspiration. Sometimes I walk into a stationary store and make a purchase or just enjoy looking at all the pretty paper. Sometimes I go to the library, pick an interest, and visit that section of the non-fiction stacks. Sometimes I just give myself half a day to play Puzzle Pirates without guilt.

I... think I've done this? Every week? Maybe? I have always, throughout my adult life, tended toward giving myself whatever I'm craving. My problem has been feeling guilty for it because I'm procrastinating with it, spending too much money, not spending enough time with various other people because I'm busy doing my own thing, etc. Guilt again! See a pattern? And since rejourneying through The Artist's Way, I've found it hard to say, "Yes, I did my Artist's Date," because I didn't have the specific intent of "doing an Artist's Date" when I did the thing that qualifies as one. Bwah. Well, right now, I'm having that aforementioned Chicago and New Orleans trip, which I think qualifies as a two-week-long Artist's Date. The only real challenge is not feeling guilty for having indulged in it, and not feeling like I'm Wasting My Precious Vacation Time by not doing Worthwhile Enough Things with it. (For crying out loud - guilt again!) My mantra for this week is, "The way I spent my day made me happy. That is enough."

After that, the Creativity Contract prompts the artist to create specific goals for creative output. These are mine:

• Every weekday, a new story idea - no matter how slight, no matter how stupid.
• Every week, a new rough draft of something, no matter how short, no matter how rough.
• Every month, a new submission to a paying market.

Now we'll see whether anyone reads my blog I don't know about. Because I'm rather guilty of telling nobody in the area--including, with one exception, family--that my next stop after Chicago would be New Orleans.

Yes. Sneaky stealth French Quarter stay. John and I had a week with Interval International to use up, and John was out of vacation days, so it was up to me. I plugged a likely looking week into The Quarter House and called it an extended writing retreat. (It just happened to line up well with the annual Chicago crawfish outing.) Also a preview homecoming, given that I'm hell-bent on moving back to New Orleans someday, at least part-time. I mean, it's home, dangit. I ought to spend more time actually living there.

So why haven't I told anyone about it? Because... well, a week and a half can go by really quick if it fills up with visiting obligations and other unforeseen restrictions. And I just want this week and a half to myself, right? I'm allowed, right? Right?

So. If I get a phone call tomorrow afternoon with disappointed family members scolding me for this (or even saying "hey, it's all right, enjoy your vacation, just promise to visit next time"), that will be an interesting and possibly scary way to find out that Mom and Dad (or friends of theirs, or other family members) are reading my blog. If they are, I must beg them not to get mad at my brother, who mixed me this lovely, lovely Bloody Mary I am drinking. I swore him to secrecy on pain of pain. Blame me, not him! I'm the older one, right? I'm a bad influence, clearly!

OK, well, you can blame him for any typos. He mixes a non-trivially strong Bloody Mary. Vodka makes me insanely uncoordinated as far as fine motor control goes. I'm fixing the fat-finger fuxxups as I go, but I may miss a few.

Don't worry, gross motor control should remain trouble-free. This is important. I'm on my bike. Woo, Riverbend to French Quarter. Woo, past midnight.

This update is not turning out to be so quick. On with it.

1) Got here. Pleasant train ride. Interesting scenery, among which I will count the guy who was shouting at everyone who would listen that "They Blew The [17th Street Canal] Levee!!!" because "They" wanted to shut down the Lower Ninth Ward and needed a Cat. 5 Hurricane for cover. I think this particular theory has been around since before Camille, actually. Most of the times I hear it, it's attached to, I dunno, a canal with less proximity to multi-million-dollar neighborhoods like Lakeview. But whatever. He says he heard a BOOM, and Gods know there's nothing but dynamite can cause a boom, right? Like I said - interesting scenery on my train.

1)b. No free wi-fi in the W, and I refuse to pay when any number of fine establishments like Z'otz and Bruno's will give me what I want. Also the Royal Cafe, if I'm not feeling all that "woo" about biking to the Riverbend and I'd rather just walk about 4 blocks instead.

2) Nibbled at the short story WIP. Really, only nibbled. And not until I got into town and was having dinner at this little Vietnamese place two doors down from Camillia Grill. My nibbling gave me an ending, and it gave me an unforeseen backstory complication. I'm so proud of my little 650-word story! It's developing a back-story!

3) Will probably do more nibbling tomorrow, as well as a visit to the Williams Research Center for microfiche reading to buttress the verisimilitude of "A Surfeit of Turnips" (which will probably get a new title before it goes out again). Hey, when Gumbo Ya-Ya tantalizingly mentions a 1930 story in the New Orleans Item Tribune referencing the most bizarre ghost story I have ever heard, who am I to resist?

4) Will probably have lunch here (via both Neilhimself and docbrite).

And that's it for now. Laters!

So there's this One-Minute Weird Tales thing, which I may have mentioned before. At this time, there's just one on the site. Weird Tales would like there to be more, so, they're encouraging submissions. So I wrote a little something... oh, Tuesday. I think. Yeah. Tuesday.

I just submitted it today.

Why so long? Because I couldn't decide on a freaking title, that's why! Gah. But then, in a story 120 words long, the title comprises a non-trivial percentage of the text, right? Deserves a bit of thought, right? Possible not six days of thought, though. In any case, I stopped whiffling, and it's on it's way now. Go me.

In other news, I've started pulling another story idea out of the Demonbox and potentially into the light of other people's eyeballs. Kicking and screaming. See, I'm in Chicago. It's Monday night. Monday night in Chicago means Twilight Tales Open Mic! Or, as it turned out, Twilight Tales Mini-Workshop. I wanted to bring something short to share and get critiqued, just in case there was room on the schedule. So I spent much of today trying to decide which half-baked idea might profitably go back into the oven. And then, once I decided, I spent half the afternoon getting around to the blackbirds-leaving-the-wire moment of "OK, all right, time to get to work! Really!"

So I ended up leaving myself only 30 minutes to get a real draft done--as opposed to the "babble draft" that was sitting on my hard drive, containing characters with no excuse for being in the story beyond the fact that they were in front of my eyes when I wrote it. I mean, this two-year-old draft had "I Am A Writing Exercise!" written all over it. You read it, you can almost hear Natalie Goldberg's voice saying "What are you looking at? Fifteen minutes. Go." And this was not getting turned into something presentable in 30 minutes.

Which was fine. On the one hand, the event was well attended, and the last person due a turn in the hot seat ended up postponing until next time. No one was hurting for me not offering up more that my opinions on others' writing. (As to that: Gods, I'm a mouth. Sorry.) And on the other hand, the simple act of getting started on the draft was beneficial in and of itself. Now I have something else to work on during my multi-city writing retreat.

A bit about the "getting started." This came up on the Absolute Write forums: Someone started a thread called "How do you motivate yourself to write?" Someone who, much like me (more frequently than I like to admit), has a work in progress but has a hard time making themselves sit down and work on progressing it. And the thread turned into a real treasure house of strategies for beating writer's block. Writers being a varied bunch, the suggestions offered were wildly divergent. So... read it. If one trick doesn't work for you, another will. Some depend on guilt and duty, others on excitement and play. Others depend on psychology, hypnosis, mood-altering of the non-drug-related kind. Some mix and match!

My main contribution was about the "getting started" thing that I keep mentioning but not really going into. My issue is, once I get the right momentum going, it sustains itself. The trick is generating that momentum in the first place. I've got, like, rubber in my butt and springs in my ALT-TAB fingers--I sit down, I get up again; I open up my word processor of choice, I ALT-TAB away to some blog or other. What finally works is to identify the first bite of any given task: Reading the critiques. Fixing the teeny-tiny nit-picky stuff in the draft. Describing the one scene. Printing out the babble draft and scribbling notes on it. Something, some small nibble like that--it "tricks" me into entering the room where the story is, and being in that room at all will result in story happening. For five hours, if need be.

(I have to admit that being away from constant Internet access does help.)

So I'm all started now. With any luck (and discipline), I'll manage to continue the momentum tomorrow evening on the train. We Shall See.

(Boy, this entry fits under a lot of categories. Also, I'm sure we can dig out 9 other ways of looking at procrastination and make a nifty pastiche reeeeal easy. "A writer and a story / Are one. / A writer and a story and an hour of Puzzle Pirates / Are one." You can probably fill in the rest.)

It's that time of year again! FROOTCAKE TIME. As we speak, the concoction is in the oven being converted from jewel-studded goop to jewel-studded yummmm. Well, the raw goop is yummmm too, but it doesn't have nearly the same shelf life. Still, looking forward to cleaning out the mixing bowl, 'cause that'll be the last taste I get until Solstice.

After a one year hiatus, I have returned to the most excellent recipe received some years ago from fellow long-time Misc.Writing netizen Wendy Chatley Green, whose own annual fruitcake warnings in the newsgroup prompted me to beg shamelessly for instructions. I went astray last year, I admit it. But the temptation was understandable. When in the course of blog controversy a regular doesn't simply call an ill-mannered comments troll a fruitcake but instead hands them a recipe, well, that's just too cute not to try. The recipe, sadly, was dry, not as tasty, and suffered furthermore by my not having cheesecloth on hand to wrap the cake in during its three-week boozing period. Tea towels, sadly, make inadequate booze delivery systems.

Anyway, this year's fruit-a-licious ingredients are...

• 12 oz. papaya spears
• 12 oz. candied ginger
• 9 oz. dried blueberries
• 9 oz. dried strawberries
• 12 oz. dates
• 9 oz. Buddha's hand citron
• 8 oz. slivered almonds

On Buddha's hand citron: It's the tentacular yellow thing in the picture. It's basically like a lemon, only it's nothing but rind. The recipe wanted it candied, but in the excitement of actually getting my hands on one, I forgot. So I just sliced up half a pound of it real thin and let it soak with the dried fruit in the brandy. There's a lot of citron left over. I shall probably candy that later on this week.

I'm now out of brandy and forgot to get more, so I'll either pass by a liquor store this evening (I can do that; Colorado finally repealed its Puritanical "No Liquor Sales on The Lord's Day Of Rest" stupidity; now if only it would allow real liquor sales in supermarkets it might be as enlightened as Louisiana, she said ironically) or just use a mixture of rum, bourbon, and Amaretto.

So there's the fruitcake.

You'll notice it's November 30th. This is fairly late for me to be baking fruitcake, but as long as I do it during November, it gets its minimum three weeks of boozing time, so what's to complain about?

You might also notice that my NaNoWriMo word count isn't yet 50K. That's all right. After I turn off the oven, I'm going to Denny's with some other local participants for a Mad Dash To The Finish Line! I think I'll actually manage to reach "The End" tonight in addition to the word count goal. I just need to bridge the story's current "where we last left our heroes" position with where the "candy bar scenes" I snarfed two weeks ago pick up. Then I need to write some sort of denouement.

More later (i.e. when I "win"!). For now, I have a mixing bowl to clean. Yummmm.

(See, there, I nearly did that "disappearing in a puff of shame" thing again.)

It's November 2nd. What's your word count? Yes indeed, it's that time of year: National Novel Writing Month! And we had a huge handful of local and not-so-local participants come over for the traditional all-nighter kick-off party. Great conversation! Great food! And, starting at midnight, great productivity! I don't think any participants who attended left having written anything less than 1200 words.

This was, of course, why I knew I'd get nothing whatsoever done on the StyleCareer.com project on Friday. After I got home from work (for the last time), I had a lot of cleaning up and prep cooking to do. Then people came over, and it was no use thinking about anything but NaNoWriMo.

It was Samhain, by the way. John and I celebrated Samhain by filling out our ballots together over dinner. Symbolic, that. Out with the old, in with the new! Our contribution to turning over a new leaf for the new year!

So I did in fact reach and slightly surpass my daily 1667 for Day 1. Then, after everyone went home and I puttered around the vast Internets for a while, I went to bed. At 5:00 AM.

Saturday I got nothing at all done towards anything at all. I slept and read and slept and read. I went to a NaNoWriMo write-in, and did nothing more than smile, hand out stickers, and try to stay awake. We call this "all-nighter recovery."

So now I'm sacrificing NaNoWriMo Day 2 in order to finish up the StyleCareer.com project. My editor granted me an extension, and I am not going to ask for another one. I'm still feeling terrible at how little I got done on Thursday. How does one go into the Denver Public Library with the intention of working, but in fact end up reading web comic archives for four hours? I kept thinking to myself, "Just another few minutes. Then I'll start." And, "I really should start. Why am I not starting?" Click. Click. Not to over-dramatize my particular indulgence in the doldrums, but it's these sorts of shameful, stupid afternoons that bring me closest to possibly understanding what it's like to live with depression.

I thought hard about finishing the project via an all-nighter Thursday, but not only would that result in a much too rushed product, but then I'd be in terrible shape for the planned all-nighter Friday. Of course, now I may be looking at an all-nighter tonight, but that's not nearly as bad. I slept a lot yesterday, and I have nowhere to be tomorrow. Nothing scheduled. Hell, I can be a nocturnal writer now, if I want. I'm a free woman!

So that's the status report. There will quite likely be another one in the wee hours.

Enough about that. It's NaNoWriMo, did I mention? This year, for the first time, I have no idea what I'm writing. Nearly none. I'm out of ready-made novel plots! How did this happen? This past year has been a terrible one for ideas--I've let myself get out the habit of producing them. Been trying to fix that lately, though. Been going on writing dates with a friend, forcing myself to stay in the notebook or word processor just a little longer than I think I can. One Monday morning a few weeks back, I started a character sketch describing a man I saw exiting the bagel shop, and the character turned into one of two guys on a road trip, on the run from a mysterious, scary, supernatural something or other that was tracking them across the country. So that's where my Day 1 words went: imagining how that story might have started. Hopefully, the Muse will be kind, and She'll keep feeding me enough of the story each day so that I'll reach the end of it by November 30.