Blast into the Future

So, because I'm the "coolest mimi (aunt) ever,"as my niece told me yesterday, I'm babysitting her and her sister for four days.  My sister and her husband are going on a long over due vacation together and I get to be "mom" to their one and three-year-old.  I've done this in the past but not with both of them or for as long.  I told her "no worries, I just wing it."  Just in case though she wrote me out several pages of detailed instructions that I am hanging on the refrigerator for quick reference.

Me and the girls get along pretty well and I think things will go more smoothly than anybody may originally think.  Of course I'll let you know how I really feel in four days.  But during this time I would like to "play the role of mom" as I might really play it with my own children.  Amid all the nap times, play times, and eating times, my sister didn't schedule in my writing time.  Being single without kids I already find it hard most the time to fit in my writing.  Add two kids and it might feel like I should just give up, right?  I  admit in the past when I have watched my nieces and tried writing a paper or just reading a book it didn't go so well.  When I finally got the free time I often used it to nap.  But I like to think I have matured since then.  So how do you write when you also have two kids to chase around?  I don't know, but my guess is to always have your laptop out and bang away at it every chance you get.  This will take some training to being able to insert myself back into my characters and story at a rapid speed.  If I can accomplish that I might have an all-star quality on my side as a writer.  However, if I cant...well that is what editing if for.

Ironically, I was reading a story in Alice Munro's Selected Stories on the flight here that commented on mothers.  The story was "Miles City, Montana" and the main character is going on a road trip with her two kids and husband.  She is reflecting on herself as a mother and the type of mother she is and wants to be.  She says,

"I had dread of turning into a certain kind of mother - the kind whose body sagged, who moved in a  woolly-smelling, milky-smelling fog, solemn with trivial burdens.  I believed that all the attention these mothers paid, their need to be burdened, was the cause of colic, bed-wetting, asthma.  I favored another approach - the mock desperation, the inflated irony of the professional mothers who wrote for magazines.  In those magazine pieces, the children were splendidly self-willed, hard-edged, perverse, indomitable.  So were the mothers, through their wit, indomitable" (p380).

My sister is a great mother.  She takes the time to develop her children's interest and teach them things before they may even need to know them.  Mainly, she devotes, a lot, of her time to her kids.  I see many great mothers do this and in my single, selfish state of mind I think - I don't want to watch cartoons all day or repeat the same trick 100 times in twenty minutes.  And because I think this I don't know how I'll be as a mother.  Instead of worrying too much, I think will I worry enough?  Or will I be one of those crazy artsy moms who scream out in desperation - Mommy needs to work now go play somewhere else.  I know I don't want to turn into a mother "whose body sagged, who moved in a woolly-smelling, milky smelling fog." I don't think any woman really wants that to happen.  Watching my nieces is a great trial run and lets me know that not all my worse fears will come true about myself.  Having my own kids is nowhere in the near future, but I want to know that when I do that I will still have time for my writing.  I know most mothers must deal with this in their own ways trying to  stay involved in their own interest as their children require more and more of their time.

So, here I am day one alone with the kids and writing over breakfast and morning cartoons.  We'd be done by now and playing outside but my three-year-old niece is trying to whine her way out of eating her banana.  And although this may be the only time I write today I know at least I took the time to devote some minutes of the day to the process.

Hanging In There

It's been a week and I have been lazy about posting.  I think about it, does that count?  I took the holiday to rest despite my big plans to write like mad over it.  I got out of the city which was something I really needed.  I would like a private lake cabin to retreat to every weekend of the summer to replenish my mind.  Retreating to one is also a great way to get some solid reading done.  That is what I did over my holiday weekend instead of writing. 

Small confession,  I mentioned in an earlier post that I discovered I do not write like Alice Munro as much as I previously thought.  This is still true, but also, when I wrote that I had a small feeling that I didn't even like Munro as much as I previously thought.  I don't think I shared that because it felt like slightly admitting a previous teacher of mine had been right about her.  NO WORRIES, as it turns out reading through majority of her Selected Stories I feel like a mind f**k has been done to me.  The stories are arranged in the order that she wrote them and I feel perhaps that why I had those earlier feelings.  As I get further in the stories and toward the end I really find myself twisted into some of the character's lives.  Tricky of you Alice, tricky.  That is not to say I love all the stories only that I developed more of an emotional response to this author than I originally thought I would.

About my EARLY MORNING WRITING, I'm still doing it.  It's not as consistent as I would like but it's getting done.  I've officially vetoed getting up at 6am until I get used to getting up at 6:30.  That little half hour makes a huge mood difference for me.  Best feeling ever though is when I do manage to get up right away and get a solid word count in before work.  I know if I keep with it it will become second nature, but geez this beginning period is rocky.

ordered, shipped, and RECEIVED!

My books cames in yesterday.  I was a happy receipant of two used books ordered online.  Now I feel pressured to finish Alice Munro's short story collection so I can crack open my new books.  This holiday weekend is going to be books books galore!

It Continues...

If you took bets I called it quits after one week - pay up! Last Thursday was the most difficult to get through. I wrote the least amount of words (171), BUT I found something interesting, and important, out about one of my characters. This was huge because as much as I thought I knew what my novel was about I didn't know many specifics about my characters. Well now I know one of them has dropped out of college. That's potentially good stuff, right? Lots of examples to chase after and cause and effect scenarios to arise later.

I took a break from writing on the weekend. The sleep experiment made me more than moody by Friday and I already had a jam packed schedule ahead of me for the rest of the weekend.  Monday, I would have liked to sat down and added to the word count, but I took the day to recover from my weekend and pay special attention to my pup.  He is sick.  This morning, though, no excuse was acceptable and I was up and typing.  Another secret reason I avoided writing over the weekend and Monday - I didn't know what to write next.  This morning felt tough and each word and sentence was fragmented writing but I squeezed out 228 words.  I'm proud of that for now.  No onward with the day and the vet I go. 

Day Two - Change Up

295 words today. I had to check that count three times just now because I kept forgetting as I tried to login to my blog. Good indication at how my body is taking the VERY slight change in sleeping pattern. I couldn't get up when my alarm went off today. I got up to use the restroom in the middle of the night and could not fall back asleep for awhile. Its funny how that can happen and not so funny when it puts you on your arse when the alarm goes off.

I didnt give up (completely) though. I fought the sandman! And I eventually won --> fast forward to a half hour after my initial alarm and I got up. I still had the time to give myself an hour to write but I only took about 40 minutes of it because my morning was already off. Instead, I took my dog for a walk - quite a treat for him. The pup is not sure about this whole mom getting up early thing. He likes to follow me to bed and usually gets up with dad, who gets up an hour later and takes care of him the entire morning. And on the days mom is still in bed (I only work part-time)and dad leaves, the pup makes sure to wake me up so I don't waste my morning getting more beauty sleep than dad. Long story short, the pup deserved the walk, my experiment is throwing off his morning too and he walks so nice when he's sleepy.

Story/Novel update: I have absolutely NO clue where this novel is going or what it wants to be. However, my 30 second sales pitch makes it sound earth-moving, life-changing, and marvelous. This morning I just switch into whatever scene I thought I could write and threw my type A personality and need for order out the window. This is something different for me and for now it is racking up the word count and forcing me to figure out my characters and their lives. These are all good things.

Here's crossing my fingers that tomorrow feels more like the first day and not more sluggish than today.

GOODNIGHT.

Finally An Explanation

What is a sleep deprivation experiment, you ask? Followed by, how could she tweet such a cliffhanger so early in the morning? Well let me explain...

Monday, I played catch up as most writers do after neglecting my writing and writer duties for a good few weeks. This included reading everything in my Google Reader. I struck gold. A past classmate and fellow writer was blogging about something writers always claim they do. And by writers, I mean the visiting writers that travel around the nation for "Reading Series" appearances on college campuses. At these events someone will always ask - "Could you talk about your writing process?" Nine times out of ten the writer will say they make time to get their writing done by getting up extra early to write before their day gets started. How simple, you think, how obvious, right? Then all the students leave thinking to themselves that they will do this early writing technique too (or some students opt for the stay up all night alternative). I, too, thought this every time I left one of these events, BUT I never actually did it.

Well, perhaps it's because it's a person I actually know and admire, but reading her blog the other day really jump started my motivation. So I set my alarm an hour before I usually get up and went to bed at a decent time. When my alarm went off, I mulled over my options (as is always the case when I say I'm going to get up early for anything). And I'll even admit I was going to let myself go back to sleep, I even tried to get back into a slumber. Yet, my guilt, I think, kept my mind clicking at a fast pace and sleep was no longer an option. So I got up and opened up the laptop and began pounding away on the keyboard. I decided to work on my novel project since that was the project I was avoiding the most. I started about 10 minutes after I planned too and I allowed myself distractions because complete focus that early is not normal for me. I wrote, I checked my email, I wrote, I checked facebook, I wrote, I took the dog out, I fed the dog, and I wrote some more.

It was about five minutes from when I told myself I'd call it quits and I thought I'd just stop anyways. I mean how much more could I write. I had 281 words, I was still stuck in the same scene (the first scene) and I had no idea where it was going or what was coming next. Guilt got a hold of me again. I could not quit early. Quitting early defeated the entire point of getting up early to dedicate time to writing. (Maybe I'll save "quitting early" for a time when the experiment becomes more of a habit) So I stuck the five minutes out and ended with 356 words. I was not blown away by the word count. However, put in perspective...I strive to write 500 words a day (I hardly do but that is my long-term goal). If I would have quit early I would have only been just over half way there. By sticking the five minutes out, instead, I was more like two-thirds of the way to my goal. And if I didn't get up early at all I would still be at zero words today. From that perspective I feel pretty good about my writing today.

So why call it the sleep deprivation experiment and not something with writing in the title? Because the hard part about this experiment is not so much the writing as it is the giving up of extra sleep time. I confess I LOVE to sleep. Some people tell me I sleep or want to sleep more than anyone else they know. Eight hours is never enough for me. I prefer to get a solid nine or ten hours in if I can. When I don't, I can be moody and short-tempered. YIKES, right? Well, day one results are in and it was a long, long, long day. But a GOOD one! I was up and alert for a solid two-hours before I wanted to crawl back into bed. But I was close to a Dunkin Donuts to snag a coffee and bring me back to life. I worked a good eight hours, took the pup to the dog park for an hour, and even got in a run. Current status --> TIRED. The couch never looked so good. But the extra encouragement throughout the day from friends that knew right away what I was doing this morning makes me ready to start tomorrow the same way.

In other new, before I go, I ordered East of Eden again along with Joshua Henkin's Matrimony. He was one of my very first graduate professors and I should have read his book years ago. My bad, Josh. But better late than never, right? The books are being shipped to an non-disclosed address for the safety of all parties and objects involved. I want to help the world love literature and read books, but on my own terms. You got me?

Book Crime & Forgiveness

I am late posting this but I still feel as strong about it as I did a week or so ago. I ordered Steinbeck's East of Eden using a fantastic gift card given to me. I was anxiously awaiting its arrival and after waiting over two weeks and checking the mail at all hours of the day I finally called the store. They claimed the book had been delivered days before, so I called the post office. They seem nice enough to look into the issue for me despite their poor reviews but all they could tell me was it was probably stolen. I will not go as far as to include my list of suspects in this post BUT I will say I was extremely upset. I have already read the book and fell head over heels for it. And when my good friend mentioned that she was going to be reading it soon I jumped at the chance to escape into that world again and have someone to dish the "dets" with.

For awhile afterwards I did not think there was anyway to come back from this tragedy. (No I don't think I am being dramatic) I had my assumptions that someone took the book out of desperation hoping it was a biology book that they could sell for $$$$ lots of dollar bills. Then they opened the box only to be let down. But then I thought to myself, I hope whoever has my purchase actually opens it and their curiosity gets the better of them and they READ the book. And by reading it they become enthralled with literature and its magic. Then because they are sorry for their theft they remember my name so that one day while feeding their new appetite for books and reading they purchase my newly published novel as a gesture of apology for stealing my book (scene fads into darkness and sappy triumph songs plays in background). And that was how I got over my book thief.

In other news - I am way behind on my writing. No new novel additions - but a newly revised Charlie Hoot draft of Story One (it has no title yet, just the first story I wrote in my anticipated series). This morning - through some sinus congestion I will be working on getting a new draft of my "Charlie Flies" story. And despite my lack of writing (insert slap on the hand) I have been more than up to date on my reading. I am juggling three different books/journals right now Alice Munro's Selected Stories, Salt Hill's Issue 27, and Mark Bittman's Food Matters. What a selection, right? Most important thing learned about juggling these particular books --> I don't write as much like Munro as I once thought, nor do I want to. Not in a bad way either, I just know at this point in my writing that that is not the direction I see myself going. It is always great learning things about yourself.

Stay tuned in, more to come this summer.