I'm in Maine at the moment, visiting my parents and also taking a few days away from my usual routines so I can tackle a couple sets of revisions with fresh eyes and a relaxed noggin, in a different space than I normally do. The drive from Boston takes about two hours, and I bet I spent at least half that time crying.
Before you worry, I wasn't sobbing, my vision wasn't impaired, I wasn't having a mental breakdown. I wasn't even upset. I blame the music… Though I must say, I was overdue for a good cry. Felt damn good.
Me crying to music isn't a phenomenon. I can't sing along to a single track on Joni Mitchell's "Blue" album without my voice cracking and my eyes watering, but that's Joni fault. Have you listened to Little Green or A Case of You? I defy you not to sob. Same with Martin Sexton's My Maria. Then again, I lose it over Tom Waits' Jersey Girl, so it may be me.
But the music in question from today's crying jag came from a CD I'd just burned for my mom, for her birthday. It was a compilation of a bunch of our shared favorites from my childhood, plus a couple numbers from my teenage and adult years, and it was pretty much all pop. So why the sobbing? I blame some kind of nostalgia allergy.
I started crying on track one, Judy Garland's Sweet Sixteen, which isn't sad in any way. Then the Carpenters' Top of the World, a ridiculously cheerful song, and similarly the Monkees' Daydream Believer. The next track, Bread's It Don't Matter to Me… Yeah, okay, I brought that on myself. And John Denver's Calypso, yup, balled through it, too. The Bee Gees—yeah, still crying, ditto Olivia Newton John. (I was born in 1979, so I grew up on a healthy dose of my mom's lingering disco records and early eighties' pop, and happily so. I blame my present-day Kylie Minogue habit on it.) I really lost it during James Taylor's Mexico, but I can't actually sing through any James Taylor song without crying for some reason…except Mockingbird. That one's safe. Anyhow, the list goes on, all the way north to Kennebunk. But then I let the CD flip over and started crying again when Bread cropped up a second time. Thank goodness the theme from the film version of The Goodbye Girl wasn't available on iTunes when I'd been putting the CD together. I'd probably have wrecked the car.
What is up with this? Most of these songs aren't sad, and they only trigger happy memories from my childhood…like dancing around to The Pointer Sisters' Jump in my childhood living room. Yet this happens to me regularly. It's almost like the songs are set to some weird wavelength that short-circuits the memory center of my brain. It's as potent as a scent-triggered memory, and a smell's never made me cry. Not that I remember, anyhow.
The singing has something to do with it, too. I don't cry just listening to James Taylor's Walking Man, but if I sing even a bar of it, my voice cracks and my eyes well. Is it just me? Does anybody else burst into tears, singing along with the songs from their formative years? Or am I just a sentimental weirdo?
I hope it's universal. Can't wait to imprint my future kid's brain with latent emotional triggers wired to Elvis Costello and Neko Case.
Showing posts with label mood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mood. Show all posts
Friday, January 13, 2012
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Why do I write?
I've been thinking this quite a bit the last couple weeks, probably because I fell victim to a week-long change-of-season funk, the annoying, lingering kind that makes you get all cerebral on yourself…
Why exactly do I write?
I've been able to come up with simple answers. There's the pragmatic reason—I write because I seem to be decent at it and am getting paid, with the potential to get paid more in the future. There's also the philosophical reason, which so many authors articulate as the over-simplified and frightfully hokey, "I write because I can't not write." Well, no, that's not really true, technically speaking. What they mean is, "I write because not writing feels bad," or "Writing gives my life meaning." Fine justifications, as legit as the money-based ones.
But why do we do anything? For the pay-off, financial or spiritual or social or manifested in our sense of self-worth and purpose. So, what exactly am I getting out of this gig?
Income-wise, divide what I make by the hours I put into writing, and in a good month, I'm making minimum wage, if I'm lucky. It ain't the money, honey.
There's a definite thrill in being praised, but truth be told, a lousy review hits me harder than a good one cheers me, as gloomy and ungrateful as that sounds. A bad review makes me feel more bad than a good review makes me feel good—if temporarily. That's a human instinct, to react more potently to threatening circumstances. Criticism is a threat in our modern society, as visceral a scare as being chased by a predator or attacked by a rival was in ye olde survival-times. It only makes good sense that our bodies manifest threats and criticism more potently than the triggers that tell us, "You're doing great! People like you! Five stars!" The latter is awesome…but it'll never compete, gut-impact-wise, with the negative. Not for me, anyhow, though I wish it would. I just have to keep reminding myself of that, so when I do stumble into a pile of the negative, a psychic foot-in-a-turd, my rational brain can remind itself that no, I'm not in mortal danger, my body's just awash with run-away-from-the-wolverine chemicals.
So it's not for the praise. The praise is a bonus, pretty blossoms worth dodging the turds for. What about success, the carrots of potential accomplishments dangling before me? The promise of the next contract, the killer agent, the big deal, the What's Next…? Those are good. I like those, as I'm very goal-oriented and I love qualifying my own progress. I certainly like the days when I make a new sale infinitely more than those naked-feeling book release days. Plus I've always been a bit of a teacher's pet, eager for authoritarian praise from on high. But that's not why I do it.
What about the characters? Do I owe it to my characters to tell their stories? Um, no. I made those people up. If anything, they owe me. Plus they're so much fun to abuse.
Setting aside the reviewers, professional and hobbyist and Goodreads-casual alike, do I write for the readers? Well, kind of. As a professional author, of course I do. I write stories that I hope strangers will read and enjoy. But I've had the good fortune of genuinely being able to accept Stephen King's advice on the topic of reader-pleasing; you can't aim to please everyone, because no book (or song or film or painting or person or recipe) will ever make everyone happy. Not even close. Not even remotely close.
You can only aim to please your Ideal Reader, as King calls him or her, and that's what I do, now. My Ideal Reader changes from book to book. Sometimes it's my targeted editor, or my avid-romance-reader-friend Amy, or my critique buddy Ruthie. But it's always just a single person I'm writing a story for, and hot damn, that's a huge relief. Especially since I have access to that person, and can ask them to read the story as it's progressing, so I know if I'm hitting the mark for my tiny, hand-picked audience of one. And in the end, as long as they're happy then the book's a success, and on an intellectual level, I can shrug off the knowledge that some people will be disappointed, inevitably. Thank you, Stephen King, for setting my brain free.
But I write for myself, I think, above everyone else. Not in a swoony book-of-my-heart-type way. I write because it puts me in such complete control—a control I relinquish the second the book's published, when it's no longer mine to fuss with and groom, set free to fend for itself in strangers' hands or on strangers' screens. But while it's still being written and polished, it's all mine.
It's no secret I used to be a designer. I stumbled across my penchant for fiction-writing three years ago, and though I was always proud as a designer to be able to say that I got paid to be creative all day…it doesn't compare. Ideal Reader aside, as a writer I spend all day doing exactly what I want, for myself. Even during edits and revisions, I still feel in control, because I trust my editors and I trust their opinions and advice will help me make my books better, which I want far more than I want to be perfect straight out of the gate. As a writer I've had incredibly free reign over my own creativity and process—freakishly free reign. And as a pretty autonomous, admittedly self-orbiting personality, that is fucking wonderful.
I guess I don't really know why I write. Not in a way I can distill into a single pithy line, at least. (Clearly not—look how bloated and gassy this very post has become.)
So maybe I should ask myself, why didn't I write, before? Why wasn't I doing this, four years ago? And the answer to that is, because I had no idea how important it was to me, and how much more fulfilled doing it would make me feel. It's like asking someone who hasn't yet discovered their inherent love of exercise, why don't they take up walking or yoga? Well, because you don't think you need to, to live. It's easier not to, and you'll seemingly have more time to yourself if you don't. You don't know until it's gone from chore to habit to hobby to passion, just how essential it is beyond the basic benefits of physical activity and fresh air. You don't yet know that feeling in your body, that thing inside that nags you to go take a walk, tangible as a toddler or pet whining at your hip. That magic that happens when you discover something that's not only good for you, but that you enjoy doing, that some days you downright love. A compulsive, perfectly selfish love, the kind that gets a marathoner in their shoes and out on the road each morning, through rain and snow and injury, against doctor's wishes, the draw of the punishment for whatever reason stronger than an excuse to stay in bed, warm and unchallenged. It's always easier to leave the page blank, after all. But some of us just don't get off on easy.
I think that's why I write, anyhow. What about you?
Why exactly do I write?
I've been able to come up with simple answers. There's the pragmatic reason—I write because I seem to be decent at it and am getting paid, with the potential to get paid more in the future. There's also the philosophical reason, which so many authors articulate as the over-simplified and frightfully hokey, "I write because I can't not write." Well, no, that's not really true, technically speaking. What they mean is, "I write because not writing feels bad," or "Writing gives my life meaning." Fine justifications, as legit as the money-based ones.
But why do we do anything? For the pay-off, financial or spiritual or social or manifested in our sense of self-worth and purpose. So, what exactly am I getting out of this gig?
Income-wise, divide what I make by the hours I put into writing, and in a good month, I'm making minimum wage, if I'm lucky. It ain't the money, honey.
There's a definite thrill in being praised, but truth be told, a lousy review hits me harder than a good one cheers me, as gloomy and ungrateful as that sounds. A bad review makes me feel more bad than a good review makes me feel good—if temporarily. That's a human instinct, to react more potently to threatening circumstances. Criticism is a threat in our modern society, as visceral a scare as being chased by a predator or attacked by a rival was in ye olde survival-times. It only makes good sense that our bodies manifest threats and criticism more potently than the triggers that tell us, "You're doing great! People like you! Five stars!" The latter is awesome…but it'll never compete, gut-impact-wise, with the negative. Not for me, anyhow, though I wish it would. I just have to keep reminding myself of that, so when I do stumble into a pile of the negative, a psychic foot-in-a-turd, my rational brain can remind itself that no, I'm not in mortal danger, my body's just awash with run-away-from-the-wolverine chemicals.
So it's not for the praise. The praise is a bonus, pretty blossoms worth dodging the turds for. What about success, the carrots of potential accomplishments dangling before me? The promise of the next contract, the killer agent, the big deal, the What's Next…? Those are good. I like those, as I'm very goal-oriented and I love qualifying my own progress. I certainly like the days when I make a new sale infinitely more than those naked-feeling book release days. Plus I've always been a bit of a teacher's pet, eager for authoritarian praise from on high. But that's not why I do it.
What about the characters? Do I owe it to my characters to tell their stories? Um, no. I made those people up. If anything, they owe me. Plus they're so much fun to abuse.
Setting aside the reviewers, professional and hobbyist and Goodreads-casual alike, do I write for the readers? Well, kind of. As a professional author, of course I do. I write stories that I hope strangers will read and enjoy. But I've had the good fortune of genuinely being able to accept Stephen King's advice on the topic of reader-pleasing; you can't aim to please everyone, because no book (or song or film or painting or person or recipe) will ever make everyone happy. Not even close. Not even remotely close.
You can only aim to please your Ideal Reader, as King calls him or her, and that's what I do, now. My Ideal Reader changes from book to book. Sometimes it's my targeted editor, or my avid-romance-reader-friend Amy, or my critique buddy Ruthie. But it's always just a single person I'm writing a story for, and hot damn, that's a huge relief. Especially since I have access to that person, and can ask them to read the story as it's progressing, so I know if I'm hitting the mark for my tiny, hand-picked audience of one. And in the end, as long as they're happy then the book's a success, and on an intellectual level, I can shrug off the knowledge that some people will be disappointed, inevitably. Thank you, Stephen King, for setting my brain free.
But I write for myself, I think, above everyone else. Not in a swoony book-of-my-heart-type way. I write because it puts me in such complete control—a control I relinquish the second the book's published, when it's no longer mine to fuss with and groom, set free to fend for itself in strangers' hands or on strangers' screens. But while it's still being written and polished, it's all mine.
It's no secret I used to be a designer. I stumbled across my penchant for fiction-writing three years ago, and though I was always proud as a designer to be able to say that I got paid to be creative all day…it doesn't compare. Ideal Reader aside, as a writer I spend all day doing exactly what I want, for myself. Even during edits and revisions, I still feel in control, because I trust my editors and I trust their opinions and advice will help me make my books better, which I want far more than I want to be perfect straight out of the gate. As a writer I've had incredibly free reign over my own creativity and process—freakishly free reign. And as a pretty autonomous, admittedly self-orbiting personality, that is fucking wonderful.
I guess I don't really know why I write. Not in a way I can distill into a single pithy line, at least. (Clearly not—look how bloated and gassy this very post has become.)
So maybe I should ask myself, why didn't I write, before? Why wasn't I doing this, four years ago? And the answer to that is, because I had no idea how important it was to me, and how much more fulfilled doing it would make me feel. It's like asking someone who hasn't yet discovered their inherent love of exercise, why don't they take up walking or yoga? Well, because you don't think you need to, to live. It's easier not to, and you'll seemingly have more time to yourself if you don't. You don't know until it's gone from chore to habit to hobby to passion, just how essential it is beyond the basic benefits of physical activity and fresh air. You don't yet know that feeling in your body, that thing inside that nags you to go take a walk, tangible as a toddler or pet whining at your hip. That magic that happens when you discover something that's not only good for you, but that you enjoy doing, that some days you downright love. A compulsive, perfectly selfish love, the kind that gets a marathoner in their shoes and out on the road each morning, through rain and snow and injury, against doctor's wishes, the draw of the punishment for whatever reason stronger than an excuse to stay in bed, warm and unchallenged. It's always easier to leave the page blank, after all. But some of us just don't get off on easy.
I think that's why I write, anyhow. What about you?
Saturday, July 9, 2011
11 Things Top Model Taught Me About Writing
 |
| Laura and Ann, go on with your weird, charming selves. |
1. Everyone has an off week. Even the stand-out talent on any of those weekly whittle-down shows gets a lousy critique or two. As long as the judges know you've got potential and want to see more, one missed target isn't enough to sink you.
2. The judges want to be wowed. Most judges—and indeed editors, agents, contest entry readers, reviewers—don't get off on ripping people apart. A toxic few may, which is unfortunate, but the professionals don't, I promise you. They'd far rather be delighted than disappointed.
3. Be yourself. This comes up constantly on those creative shows—know who you are and play to your strengths. Don't try be someone else, even if you love their work, and don't just go through the motions of what you think a writer does. Don't just pose. A genuine weirdo is infinitely more charismatic than a soulless imitator.
4. Be a pro. Be humble, but not self-deprecating to a point where people cringe. Believe in your work, but not to a point where you're telling the judges they don't know what they're talking about. Always be gracious, sincere, and attentive, but unafraid to admit politely that you disagree.
5. Be emotional. You know all those boring, wooden, flat, cold girls who get sent home at the start of any Top Model cycle? Don't confuse strength and poise with bottling emotions. Self-control is good. Repression is not. Unless you want to deliver stiff, lifeless, forced work, don't be afraid to feel.
6. But don't be a psycho. Like a shaken soda, intense sensations like anger, jealousy, distrust, and betrayal need to be allowed to settle before they're uncapped. Nothing undermines professionalism quicker than a reactionary outburst, fight-picking, retaliation, or passive-aggressive gossip or sabotage.
7. Be a good housemate. Your fellow writers are many things; your peers, your friends, your colleagues, your competition, your connections, your future collaborators. Friendships are invaluable in this brutal business, but respect professionalism. If you're tempted to gossip or blow off some steam, never take it for granted that no one else is listening. Snark isn't the same as wit, and as good as it might feel in the moment, it doesn't flatter you. If you're tempted to vent online, ask yourself, "Would I put this in a public post?" It's the interwebs, people. The cameras are always rolling. Never forget—the reunion show's got clips.
8. Accept defeat gracefully. If you get voted off (a contest loss, a rejection, a shitty review) take it like a pro. If appropriate, thank the judges for their time and interest, and exit with a smile. Last impressions count, too, so leave a pleasant taste in their mouths. It's okay if you're faking it for the sake of dignity—grace doesn't have to feel good.
9. Triumph just as gracefully. If your fellow contestants are heartbroken, don't do a touchdown dance at the podium. Own and celebrate your happiness, but again—dignity.
10. Tabloids are a bitch. On the grand scale of a national reality show, no matter how popular a contestant is, for every ten fans, every ten flattering gossipy blog posts about them, there will be a certain percentage of cruel ones. The same goes for reviews. No one—no author or genre or book or voice or plot—can please everyone. Not even close. And not your job. And sad as it is, some people are naturally, toxically contrary, and will make it a point to hate things that others praise. They don't matter—dodge them like turds on a hot sidewalk. For the rest, know yourself and what you're feeling, and if you're going to click on an editor or agent's e-mail or a review link, do so when you know you're in a frame of mind to handle it, good news or bad.
11. The show ends, but the job doesn't. No triumphant high or sting of defeat lasts forever. Take heart if you struggled and came up short, because one set-back is just that—one set-back. You didn't final in the Golden Heart, but a year from now, who'll care? You still get to write, and isn't that what you love? What's that you say? You won the Golden Heart? Well, bask in that excitement and take your bows, savor but don't wallow, because the glow is joyous but fleeting. Careers grow or fizzle well after the show's finale airs. When the newness and attention of a triumph wanes, what you do, alone in front of your keyboard, is what really matters. So make damn sure you love it.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
My Thirty-Third May
I feel as if I've barely blogged this month. I feel just slightly as if I've barely been conscious this month, actually, especially during that week and a half of non-stop rain and gloom. At the same time, I can't believe how much I've gotten done. I turned thirty-two on the second, and so far the thirty-third May of my life has been…all over the place.
As the month started, I'd just thrown in the towel on a third failed Blaze proposal, eyeballs-deep in a weird mix of frustrated / discouraged and liberated / hopeful. Two weeks after hearing I needed to put that last proposal out of its misery, I'd started and finished the next proposal (synopsis and first three chapters) and sent it off to my intrepid editor. I got a call about it just this past Friday while I was waiting in the train station—I'd gone into Boston for a physical and to get my possibly stress-fractured shin x-rayed. My editor wanted to see some deeper emotional insight in both the hero and heroine's initial opening POV scenes, and a stronger first couple paragraphs. Um, period.
Period?
Period! No changes requested on the spartan synopsis. No issues with either characters' conflicts or motivations. Nothing wrong with the hook, the setting, the premise. For reals?
Apparently, for reals. When I had what I'd cautiously hoped was a light bulb moment, chatting with senior Blaze editor Brenda Chin at the New England RWA conference, I prayed things might go this way. The last three proposals have missed the mark flagrantly and unsalvageably, though I thrashed and struggled as much as anyone could, trying to force them to work. Then at conference I finally gave myself permission to quit overthinking and overworking, overguessing the details of the overwrought plot, when I'm simply not an up-front plotter. I got the green light to explore a workable hook, and did just that, 100% chart-, graph-, and fourteen-page synopsis-free. It may not have scored a resounding, revisionless acceptance, but the writing process felt infinitely more organic and intuitive that the last few efforts, and I'm not surprised it garnered far fewer editorial misgivings.
This morning I finished (I hope) addressing my editor's concerns with the opening chapters, and sent the revised proposal back out into the ether. And she's encouraged me to keep working on the subsequent chapters, which can't be a bad sign. So keep those fingers crossed, if they haven't grown arthritic and mangled with your unwavering empathy. Maybe I'll have extra-good news to share soon. Maybe I'll even manage to make my second Blaze sale within a year of the first… For those with Doomsday clocks at the ready, set them to July 12.
May was also the month of no meat. This experiment, of all the Discipline Year self-imposed challenges I've yet tackled, was far and away the easiest and the most fun. The only temptations came during family barbecues, and I resisted with little angst. Otherwise I had a blast rediscovering an interest in cooking. I always enjoy cooking, but in the past year or two I'd gotten to a point where I simply recycled the same half-dozen dinner standards over and over. Meat-Free May was a great excuse to try out new dishes. In fact tonight I'm making that African stew again, so my repertoire of regulars has expanded! And of course, my life will no longer be complete without tempeh making the occasional appearance.
I didn't lose or gain any weight, so no revelations on that front.
My husband suspects that, in part, my unnaturally long blue spell (nearly two weeks' funk) in the latter half of the month could be linked to the decreased protein intake. I'll buy it. It was also rainy and I had PMS and was dealing with stupid social media melodrama angst and was uncertain about my proposal, but I rarely stay bummed that long without something else going on, so perhaps he's on to something.
Still, I'm in no rush to bring the meat back. I'll be excited to order seafood at my favorite restaurants once more, and it'll be nice to toss chicken in with the stir-fry, but I haven't missed meat all that much. Doesn't hurt that I have a broad-palated partner with West Coast ideals, either. The entire household went veggie this month, at least at home. Thanks, manfriend!
Next month was supposed to be No Java June, when I go coffee-free (if not caffeine free—tea was to still be kosher) but I think I'll switch it up. All things going well, I may be on deadline, and that is not the time to volunteer for chemical withdrawal. So I'm likely going to swap June and July and go sugar-free for the next month. Anyhow, more on that tomorrow.
Despite the possible stress fracture, which is keeping me from running, May has been a great month for exercise. Lovely spring temperatures for my daily walks, plus we've been cycling a couple times, hiking even more, and at long last I got my shit together and rearranged my room, making it yoga-friendly again. Unless you're talking to someone who's practiced and enjoyed yoga themselves, it's hard to say how powerful and awesome it is without sounding like a self-satisfied hippie-dippy douchebag. So I won't ramble, but since I got back to hardcore stretching before bedtime in the last week or so, I've slept better, felt better, blah blah blah. Go yoga.
Back to work! Hoping to finish my evil conjoined erotica-writing twin's edits quickly, so I'll have time to indulge in a beer and last night's Bachelorette episode before chores call me to wifely duty. Enjoy the final day of May! Or if you're already in June when you read this, don't tell me what happens. I hate spoilers.
As the month started, I'd just thrown in the towel on a third failed Blaze proposal, eyeballs-deep in a weird mix of frustrated / discouraged and liberated / hopeful. Two weeks after hearing I needed to put that last proposal out of its misery, I'd started and finished the next proposal (synopsis and first three chapters) and sent it off to my intrepid editor. I got a call about it just this past Friday while I was waiting in the train station—I'd gone into Boston for a physical and to get my possibly stress-fractured shin x-rayed. My editor wanted to see some deeper emotional insight in both the hero and heroine's initial opening POV scenes, and a stronger first couple paragraphs. Um, period.
Period?
Period! No changes requested on the spartan synopsis. No issues with either characters' conflicts or motivations. Nothing wrong with the hook, the setting, the premise. For reals?
Apparently, for reals. When I had what I'd cautiously hoped was a light bulb moment, chatting with senior Blaze editor Brenda Chin at the New England RWA conference, I prayed things might go this way. The last three proposals have missed the mark flagrantly and unsalvageably, though I thrashed and struggled as much as anyone could, trying to force them to work. Then at conference I finally gave myself permission to quit overthinking and overworking, overguessing the details of the overwrought plot, when I'm simply not an up-front plotter. I got the green light to explore a workable hook, and did just that, 100% chart-, graph-, and fourteen-page synopsis-free. It may not have scored a resounding, revisionless acceptance, but the writing process felt infinitely more organic and intuitive that the last few efforts, and I'm not surprised it garnered far fewer editorial misgivings.
This morning I finished (I hope) addressing my editor's concerns with the opening chapters, and sent the revised proposal back out into the ether. And she's encouraged me to keep working on the subsequent chapters, which can't be a bad sign. So keep those fingers crossed, if they haven't grown arthritic and mangled with your unwavering empathy. Maybe I'll have extra-good news to share soon. Maybe I'll even manage to make my second Blaze sale within a year of the first… For those with Doomsday clocks at the ready, set them to July 12.
May was also the month of no meat. This experiment, of all the Discipline Year self-imposed challenges I've yet tackled, was far and away the easiest and the most fun. The only temptations came during family barbecues, and I resisted with little angst. Otherwise I had a blast rediscovering an interest in cooking. I always enjoy cooking, but in the past year or two I'd gotten to a point where I simply recycled the same half-dozen dinner standards over and over. Meat-Free May was a great excuse to try out new dishes. In fact tonight I'm making that African stew again, so my repertoire of regulars has expanded! And of course, my life will no longer be complete without tempeh making the occasional appearance.
I didn't lose or gain any weight, so no revelations on that front.
My husband suspects that, in part, my unnaturally long blue spell (nearly two weeks' funk) in the latter half of the month could be linked to the decreased protein intake. I'll buy it. It was also rainy and I had PMS and was dealing with stupid social media melodrama angst and was uncertain about my proposal, but I rarely stay bummed that long without something else going on, so perhaps he's on to something.
Still, I'm in no rush to bring the meat back. I'll be excited to order seafood at my favorite restaurants once more, and it'll be nice to toss chicken in with the stir-fry, but I haven't missed meat all that much. Doesn't hurt that I have a broad-palated partner with West Coast ideals, either. The entire household went veggie this month, at least at home. Thanks, manfriend!
Next month was supposed to be No Java June, when I go coffee-free (if not caffeine free—tea was to still be kosher) but I think I'll switch it up. All things going well, I may be on deadline, and that is not the time to volunteer for chemical withdrawal. So I'm likely going to swap June and July and go sugar-free for the next month. Anyhow, more on that tomorrow.
Despite the possible stress fracture, which is keeping me from running, May has been a great month for exercise. Lovely spring temperatures for my daily walks, plus we've been cycling a couple times, hiking even more, and at long last I got my shit together and rearranged my room, making it yoga-friendly again. Unless you're talking to someone who's practiced and enjoyed yoga themselves, it's hard to say how powerful and awesome it is without sounding like a self-satisfied hippie-dippy douchebag. So I won't ramble, but since I got back to hardcore stretching before bedtime in the last week or so, I've slept better, felt better, blah blah blah. Go yoga.
Back to work! Hoping to finish my evil conjoined erotica-writing twin's edits quickly, so I'll have time to indulge in a beer and last night's Bachelorette episode before chores call me to wifely duty. Enjoy the final day of May! Or if you're already in June when you read this, don't tell me what happens. I hate spoilers.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Spring Revamp
I've been quiet for the past few days—did you worry I got Raptured? If so, you clearly don't know me very well. The manfriend and I were away in Vermont over the weekend visiting friends, then on Monday I was all over the place for a freelance meeting then an appearance as a special guest at my husband's colleagues' book club (they read Caught on Camera of all things, quite the literary fiction palate cleanser). And yesterday I was busy doing something that was looong overdue—a spring revamp.
The main project was rearranging my office so I'd have the space to comfortably practice yoga again. Which I need desperately—I've been a bit of a basketcase lately. Making it happen meant giving the boot to my "editing nook", ditching a side table and moving my beloved papasan chair to the living room. I also went to Target and bought a new shelving unit (among many other things). It took pretty much the entire day (I did some kitchen improvements and a ton of cleaning as well) but now I've got a faboo new space beneath the skylight for my stretching and calisthenics:
It also felt good just to do the whole spring cleaning / space freshening / reinvention thing. I don't know if it's the redecorating or the blessed absence of rain for the first time in a week, but I'm finally perking up. Oh and if anyone's curious where I write, I do 95% of it in the space just to the right of my new micro yoga studio (in fact I'm sitting on the "black pearl" as I type this):
Anyone else have any big spring projects going on?
The main project was rearranging my office so I'd have the space to comfortably practice yoga again. Which I need desperately—I've been a bit of a basketcase lately. Making it happen meant giving the boot to my "editing nook", ditching a side table and moving my beloved papasan chair to the living room. I also went to Target and bought a new shelving unit (among many other things). It took pretty much the entire day (I did some kitchen improvements and a ton of cleaning as well) but now I've got a faboo new space beneath the skylight for my stretching and calisthenics:
It also felt good just to do the whole spring cleaning / space freshening / reinvention thing. I don't know if it's the redecorating or the blessed absence of rain for the first time in a week, but I'm finally perking up. Oh and if anyone's curious where I write, I do 95% of it in the space just to the right of my new micro yoga studio (in fact I'm sitting on the "black pearl" as I type this):
Anyone else have any big spring projects going on?
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Dear Reader
I'm always a bit of a basketcase the week following a release. I'm one of the least literate people I know when it comes to recreational drug use (despite having gone to art school), but I imagine it's the emotional equivalent of mixing substances. Take an upper—the excitement of sharing your work with the world—and a downer—the first lousy review—then another upper—a high-profile write-up—and another downer, and so on until you're reduced to a sweaty, shaking heap. It cycles you through a weird circuit of joyous, slapped, vindicated, paranoid, heartbroken, then after a couple of weeks, a healthy baseline of "Well, I did my best and a lot of people enjoyed it," and you cease to actively worry what people think of you once more, focus firmly locked on the next book.
Monday morning I woke in a particular deep rut in the downer end of the cycle. A long training run cleaned me out of much of my chemical funk, but over the last few days, I got a boost from another source, one which warmed my heart instead of merely flushing out my brain.
Readers!
It's lovely getting kind reviews from strangers, but when one actually takes the time to write directly to me, not an audience of their friends and online acquaintances…? For swoon! Yesterday I received three kindly reader e-mails—not bragging, it just felt really cool, like people out there could sense I needed an injection of a happy-making drug. I even got an e-mail from a frustrated reader who couldn't get their review to appear on the B&N website, and wondered if I'd heard of this issue before. Wow. So not only were you nice enough to take the time to write up your thoughts about my work, you're actually willing to troubleshoot a vendor website to see it posted? Dag! You can has OSSUMEST READR EVAH badge.
But no one reader e-mail is superior to any other. I get the same thrill and egomaniacal glow whether it's a sentence or an opus (or indeed a tweet), whether you gush profusely or politely enumerate your criticisms. Well, as long as you butter me up first before laying down the complaints. I'm not that well-adjusted.
Readers nearly freak me out with their kindness. I'm always surprised when they thank me for the book. The book is no biggie—I write those for myself. But readers…they're the ones who pay for my work and invest a few hours of their lives with my odd and prickly characters. I want to reach through the digital ether and shake them and scream, "NO, THANK YOU!" but thankfully I'm not clever enough to mastermind the technology to make that possible. Instead I respond with an e-mail of my own (always straightaway because I'm so outrageously touched), with whatever's on my mind in the moment.
I keep a folder in my mail system called "Fan / Hate Mail." I've yet to get a single piece of the latter—not even for any of my erotica alter ego's spuriously moraled tales. In it I have every kindly message I've yet received (for either of my authorly identities). And so I say to Pamela, Michelle, Danielle, Cat, Erica, Marianne, Cindy, Lanae, Judith, Tricia, Tiffany, Clicia, Carol, Anne, Kate, Tammy, Andrea, Jeff, Victoria, Arlene, Kathy, Jessica, Christine, Tara, Abigail, Dana, Petro, Bobbie, Elaine, Hailey, Amy, Joyce, and KK (to date):
Thank you so, so much. You really have no clue how much it means to us lowly writers. It's a big part of what gets us to peel away the covers and scuttle to our keyboards each day.
My very best,
Meg
Monday morning I woke in a particular deep rut in the downer end of the cycle. A long training run cleaned me out of much of my chemical funk, but over the last few days, I got a boost from another source, one which warmed my heart instead of merely flushing out my brain.
 |
| You can has! |
It's lovely getting kind reviews from strangers, but when one actually takes the time to write directly to me, not an audience of their friends and online acquaintances…? For swoon! Yesterday I received three kindly reader e-mails—not bragging, it just felt really cool, like people out there could sense I needed an injection of a happy-making drug. I even got an e-mail from a frustrated reader who couldn't get their review to appear on the B&N website, and wondered if I'd heard of this issue before. Wow. So not only were you nice enough to take the time to write up your thoughts about my work, you're actually willing to troubleshoot a vendor website to see it posted? Dag! You can has OSSUMEST READR EVAH badge.
But no one reader e-mail is superior to any other. I get the same thrill and egomaniacal glow whether it's a sentence or an opus (or indeed a tweet), whether you gush profusely or politely enumerate your criticisms. Well, as long as you butter me up first before laying down the complaints. I'm not that well-adjusted.
Readers nearly freak me out with their kindness. I'm always surprised when they thank me for the book. The book is no biggie—I write those for myself. But readers…they're the ones who pay for my work and invest a few hours of their lives with my odd and prickly characters. I want to reach through the digital ether and shake them and scream, "NO, THANK YOU!" but thankfully I'm not clever enough to mastermind the technology to make that possible. Instead I respond with an e-mail of my own (always straightaway because I'm so outrageously touched), with whatever's on my mind in the moment.
I keep a folder in my mail system called "Fan / Hate Mail." I've yet to get a single piece of the latter—not even for any of my erotica alter ego's spuriously moraled tales. In it I have every kindly message I've yet received (for either of my authorly identities). And so I say to Pamela, Michelle, Danielle, Cat, Erica, Marianne, Cindy, Lanae, Judith, Tricia, Tiffany, Clicia, Carol, Anne, Kate, Tammy, Andrea, Jeff, Victoria, Arlene, Kathy, Jessica, Christine, Tara, Abigail, Dana, Petro, Bobbie, Elaine, Hailey, Amy, Joyce, and KK (to date):
Thank you so, so much. You really have no clue how much it means to us lowly writers. It's a big part of what gets us to peel away the covers and scuttle to our keyboards each day.
My very best,
Meg
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
On Crustaceans and Bathroom Stalls
I'm not a narcissist. Not full-time, anyhow.
I won't claim to understand other writers' psyches or imply that we share a singular set of traits, but I suspect my part-time, selective narcissism is not exclusively mine to claim. I think many authors—perhaps even most of us—swing wildly between two states: abject spinelessness and soaring, improbable demigodism.
From hour to hour and day to day we go from cowering delusions of unworthiness to the height of self-worship. It's hard not to, given how this job is built. We work alone, trapped inside our heads for weeks or months at a time, struggling and second-guessing until a story is complete. Once it sells, we're on top of the world! Success! Edits may bring more doubts, but then release day douses us with a fresh fistful of confetti. The first review plunges us into despair yet again or buoys us to new heights of manic happiness. Up, down, up, down, until finally we're safely steeping in the next project and the bipolarity surrounding the previous story levels out.
Between the highs and lows we have days of relative calm, when we feel worthy without psychosis and humble without crippling self-doubt.
We live in a dangerous time for such mood swings. Though some of our lows come from the frustration (or crustation, as I typed at first, hence the new mascot) of writing itself, they often come from the outside. A snide review, a rejection, a comment or tweet that dings our previously shiny egos. As I've said before, participating in the internet is like living in the midst of a gigantic house party, and the more rooms you poke your nose into, the more likely it is you'll accidentally walk in on a conversation you might have preferred not to overhear. Not poking your nose in could also mean you don't overhear kind words, however, and some days you need that boost just to open the work-in-progress and jab at your keyboard with the bloody stumps we writers call our fingers. The trouble is, you can never predict what lies behind a given door.
I'll disclose my own insecurities so I don't have to talk in hypothetical terms. A Twitter friend of mine, @thedaisyharris, referred to the nose-poking as self-stalking a few weeks ago, which I thought was brilliant. I self-stalk, as most of us do, even though I like to pretend I'm totally above such things.
I self-stalk at different levels of obsessiveness on a given day. If I'm in the writing zone I might only pop onto Twitter a few times to be social and check my @ replies, and read my Google Alerts as they come in. Days when I've reached my writing goal early and have free time sometimes spiral into full-on self-stalking marathons. I'll search for my full name on Twitter to see if anyone's talking about any of my books or tweeting my links, spend way too much time on Goodreads trying to figure out what new review made my overall rating average fluctuate .02 stars. I check my publishers' sites for customer reviews, roll around in Google Analytics, monitor my meager blog visitation stats, and painstakingly tweak things on my websites.
But I do have my own limits. Even on my self-stalkiest day, I never check Amazon ratings for my books or track my sales. That's because one has to draw a line somewhere, and I choose to check Goodreads reviews and the ones on my publishers' sites, and the random blog-based ones that find me via Google Alerts or Twitter, and no others. Those are plenty. It's also because I've heard the vastness and anonymity of Amazon brings out the rock-throwing meanies, and they scare me. I also don't do Facebook, because I don't trust myself with it. Twitter is the right speed and commitment level for me, and anything more would cut too deeply into my actual fiction-writing time. Oh and also because I'm one of those snotty non-joiners who gets off on resisting trends (while embracing others—it's very selective, my self-importance).
Yesterday my erotica-writing alter ego finished a novella, and as such I get a day or two off from writing to recupe and catch up on other responsibilities. With writing no longer taking up the morning, it's easy to get one's wheels stuck in the self-stalking groove. I think we tend to live today based on what we did yesterday, and live this hour as we lived the previous hour. Creatures of habit. If I set a pattern of checking all my usual haunts for evidence of my existence in other people's consciousness, I may wind up cycling back, over and over, for the rest of the day, fiending for a fresh hit of validation. Is anyone talking about me? Did anyone tweet me? Refresh! Refresh!!
It doesn't take much to get brainwashed by the cult of self, and to find yourself spending an entire afternoon staggering around on the hinterwëbs, sniffing for a morsel of other people's admiration. It skews your thinking, as well. Your mind glazes over. You begin to read into things.
For example, I check my Analytics every morning while I drink my coffee. I like to see where my website traffic is coming from and what makes it spike. I'm also nosy and I love seeing what cities and countries visitors come from. So Analytics told me that yesterday a new visitor from New York City was on my site for five minutes! The crustacean of egomania immediately scuttled in and began rewiring my normally rational thought processes. "Surely it's an agent!" the crustacean said. "I mean, who else would it be? There's bound to be more high-powered agents looking you up than oh, I don't know, readers, in a city of seven million people, right? Better stare at your dusty phone for the next eight hours and wait with bated breath for a Very Important Call."
Depending on what my brain chemistry gets up to today, I will either tape this post onto the digital bathroom stall wall and wander away to tackle actual real-life projects, or else I will come back again and again, monitoring comments and checking traffic…basically returning ad nauseum to the same stall to see if anyone's decorated (or defaced) my flier. And so it goes.
If I had to offer advice for getting one's self out of the obsessive validation-seeking loop, it's not remotely revolutionary. Get away from your computer or your internet-connected phone. Take a walk. Meet a friend for lunch or a drink and talk about anyone aside from yourself. Drink less coffee. Read a book outside your genre. Unfollow the Eeyores and the industry bloggers on Twitter, if all their tweets or updates do is put you on edge and distract you from your actual job—putting words on a page with a modicum of confidence. If you've got it really bad and lack any measure of discipline, install one of those internet timers and literally shut off access to your self-stalking hot spots for a set period of time each day, and force yourself to do other things.
My personal solution has so far been to wait out the storm. If I'm feeling self-stalky, I do make sure I go for a walk that day. But most often, unless I really need to buckle down and write, I indulge and embrace the urge to self-obsess, binge on it, and before too long I always OD and wind up strung out and listless and just wander away to sober up. I get sick of myself, and thank goodness. It frees me of caring what others think for a while. Soon enough I want to go back to plotting the next story or painting the bathroom or posting on this silly blog, anything but think about me me me. After all, no one finds me as fascinating as I find myself. And how could I not? We're all—with the exception of those who put their children or partner at the center of their lives—the suns at the hearts of our own solar systems. In the absence of a higher power to worship and seek to please, we naturally become our own gods. That may not be especially healthy, but it is human. And until I wake up a more well adjusted person, I'll continue to indulge my inner narcissist whenever he scuttles up.
And refresh, refresh, refresh…
I won't claim to understand other writers' psyches or imply that we share a singular set of traits, but I suspect my part-time, selective narcissism is not exclusively mine to claim. I think many authors—perhaps even most of us—swing wildly between two states: abject spinelessness and soaring, improbable demigodism.
Between the highs and lows we have days of relative calm, when we feel worthy without psychosis and humble without crippling self-doubt.
We live in a dangerous time for such mood swings. Though some of our lows come from the frustration (or crustation, as I typed at first, hence the new mascot) of writing itself, they often come from the outside. A snide review, a rejection, a comment or tweet that dings our previously shiny egos. As I've said before, participating in the internet is like living in the midst of a gigantic house party, and the more rooms you poke your nose into, the more likely it is you'll accidentally walk in on a conversation you might have preferred not to overhear. Not poking your nose in could also mean you don't overhear kind words, however, and some days you need that boost just to open the work-in-progress and jab at your keyboard with the bloody stumps we writers call our fingers. The trouble is, you can never predict what lies behind a given door.
I'll disclose my own insecurities so I don't have to talk in hypothetical terms. A Twitter friend of mine, @thedaisyharris, referred to the nose-poking as self-stalking a few weeks ago, which I thought was brilliant. I self-stalk, as most of us do, even though I like to pretend I'm totally above such things.
I self-stalk at different levels of obsessiveness on a given day. If I'm in the writing zone I might only pop onto Twitter a few times to be social and check my @ replies, and read my Google Alerts as they come in. Days when I've reached my writing goal early and have free time sometimes spiral into full-on self-stalking marathons. I'll search for my full name on Twitter to see if anyone's talking about any of my books or tweeting my links, spend way too much time on Goodreads trying to figure out what new review made my overall rating average fluctuate .02 stars. I check my publishers' sites for customer reviews, roll around in Google Analytics, monitor my meager blog visitation stats, and painstakingly tweak things on my websites.
But I do have my own limits. Even on my self-stalkiest day, I never check Amazon ratings for my books or track my sales. That's because one has to draw a line somewhere, and I choose to check Goodreads reviews and the ones on my publishers' sites, and the random blog-based ones that find me via Google Alerts or Twitter, and no others. Those are plenty. It's also because I've heard the vastness and anonymity of Amazon brings out the rock-throwing meanies, and they scare me. I also don't do Facebook, because I don't trust myself with it. Twitter is the right speed and commitment level for me, and anything more would cut too deeply into my actual fiction-writing time. Oh and also because I'm one of those snotty non-joiners who gets off on resisting trends (while embracing others—it's very selective, my self-importance).
Yesterday my erotica-writing alter ego finished a novella, and as such I get a day or two off from writing to recupe and catch up on other responsibilities. With writing no longer taking up the morning, it's easy to get one's wheels stuck in the self-stalking groove. I think we tend to live today based on what we did yesterday, and live this hour as we lived the previous hour. Creatures of habit. If I set a pattern of checking all my usual haunts for evidence of my existence in other people's consciousness, I may wind up cycling back, over and over, for the rest of the day, fiending for a fresh hit of validation. Is anyone talking about me? Did anyone tweet me? Refresh! Refresh!!
It doesn't take much to get brainwashed by the cult of self, and to find yourself spending an entire afternoon staggering around on the hinterwëbs, sniffing for a morsel of other people's admiration. It skews your thinking, as well. Your mind glazes over. You begin to read into things.
For example, I check my Analytics every morning while I drink my coffee. I like to see where my website traffic is coming from and what makes it spike. I'm also nosy and I love seeing what cities and countries visitors come from. So Analytics told me that yesterday a new visitor from New York City was on my site for five minutes! The crustacean of egomania immediately scuttled in and began rewiring my normally rational thought processes. "Surely it's an agent!" the crustacean said. "I mean, who else would it be? There's bound to be more high-powered agents looking you up than oh, I don't know, readers, in a city of seven million people, right? Better stare at your dusty phone for the next eight hours and wait with bated breath for a Very Important Call."
Depending on what my brain chemistry gets up to today, I will either tape this post onto the digital bathroom stall wall and wander away to tackle actual real-life projects, or else I will come back again and again, monitoring comments and checking traffic…basically returning ad nauseum to the same stall to see if anyone's decorated (or defaced) my flier. And so it goes.
If I had to offer advice for getting one's self out of the obsessive validation-seeking loop, it's not remotely revolutionary. Get away from your computer or your internet-connected phone. Take a walk. Meet a friend for lunch or a drink and talk about anyone aside from yourself. Drink less coffee. Read a book outside your genre. Unfollow the Eeyores and the industry bloggers on Twitter, if all their tweets or updates do is put you on edge and distract you from your actual job—putting words on a page with a modicum of confidence. If you've got it really bad and lack any measure of discipline, install one of those internet timers and literally shut off access to your self-stalking hot spots for a set period of time each day, and force yourself to do other things.
My personal solution has so far been to wait out the storm. If I'm feeling self-stalky, I do make sure I go for a walk that day. But most often, unless I really need to buckle down and write, I indulge and embrace the urge to self-obsess, binge on it, and before too long I always OD and wind up strung out and listless and just wander away to sober up. I get sick of myself, and thank goodness. It frees me of caring what others think for a while. Soon enough I want to go back to plotting the next story or painting the bathroom or posting on this silly blog, anything but think about me me me. After all, no one finds me as fascinating as I find myself. And how could I not? We're all—with the exception of those who put their children or partner at the center of their lives—the suns at the hearts of our own solar systems. In the absence of a higher power to worship and seek to please, we naturally become our own gods. That may not be especially healthy, but it is human. And until I wake up a more well adjusted person, I'll continue to indulge my inner narcissist whenever he scuttles up.
And refresh, refresh, refresh…
Monday, March 7, 2011
"Someone already hates your book."
 |
| No amount of philosophy can ever prevent the screaming. |
I'm at a funky, unnerving point this week. Advanced review copies of my two romances are circulating, and the paperback and ebook versions of my April Blaze seem to already be available to buy from eHarlequin.
Reviews and ratings are already trickling in for both stories. Positive ones. Out of the blue I discovered that Caught on Camera (the Blaze) had earned four-and-a-half stars from Andrew Shaffer at Romantic Times (you need a subscription to view the review for the time being, but the highlights are on my books page). The story also received glowing praise from Penelope's Romance Reviews—Penny and I are RWA chaptermates, and she told me up front in her charmingly blunt way that if she hated it, she'd be diplomatic enough not to post her opinions. She doesn't mince words or kiss asses, so I was relieved as well as surprised when I earned a lovely write-up from her this morning. Also today, I Twitter-stumbled (twumbled?) across this review from a self-described Harlequin aficionado. Colored me flattered!
So I'm on cloud nine, right? Dear God, no! I'm terrified.
I've never owned a new car, but I have to imagine this is what it feels like, right after you've been handed the papers and keys to your dream ride. At this moment in time, it's perfect. Unmarred by scratches and mud and spilled drinks. The second it leaves the lot, the danger begins. You almost beg for a dent, just to get it out of the way, so that you may give up the suffocating dream of perfection and the pressure that comes with it. That's where I am now, waiting for the first inevitable ding. Practically praying for one, so I can breathe and move on in glorious, dignified imperfection.
When I reach this phase and become nervous and self-doubtful and sometimes downright paranoid, my husband likes to lay that line on me. "Someone already hates your book." What he means is, no matter how great a job a writer did, somebody, somewhere, won't like it. Quite possibly, many somebodies won't like it. It's a scientific fact. When he says that to me, he does so hoping to set me free from my own expectations. It pretty much works, at least in theory.
This job comes patterned in alternating stripes of relief and fear. Relief at the hands of a satisfied reviewer, fear that the next one that won't be so kind or impressed. Relief to have finished a book, sold a book, seen its cover, smelled its pages. Fear of what will happen to it, thrust out into the world and the interwebs. For each book, this pattern has a peak, and the descent down the other side eventually smooths out as my release day [or week, or month] high fades and my focus shifts to the next story. I'm not there yet, though. With a double romance debut ahead of me in the next month, the white-knuckling is just beginning. I am making the jerky, clunky ascent to the zenith of the roller coaster's highest drop, awaiting free fall, twists and turns before I'm deposited sweaty but safe back on the ground. And wouldn't you know it? The second I am, I'm already counting my tickets and scouting for the next ride.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
The Chemistry of Writing
Nope, nothing to do with a leading couple's attraction. Nothing to do with plot formulae. I'm talking about basic bodily chemistry here, and how it affects writing, or how it affects me as a writer, at least. Bear in mind, this ain't proper science…
I think any dedicated fiction writer will agree, this job is unpredictable. One day you write five thousand words, all of them as brilliant as first drafts come. Euphoria! The next day, you tweeze out six hundred, each feeling like a tooth being extracted. In between are the adequate days, maybe one or two thousand usable words, steady forward momentum. But one thing is certain—you can't guess which type of day you're in for until you sit down and start listening to the voices in your head. Or in the case of a bad day, straining to hear them, desperate for the tiniest scrap of inspiration.
That's all very annoying, because some days, due to deadlines both external and self-imposed, we feel we need to hammer out three thousand genius words, but it just isn't going to happen. However, there are certain chemical aids and hindrances you can either avoid or harness to help stack the writing deck in your favor.
Caffeine. If you're a coffee (or Coke or tea) drinker, this is major. I think we underestimate how strong a stimulant caffeine is. A highly reliable scientific reference (Wikipedia) tells us "caffeine is an ergogenic, increasing a person's capability for mental or physical labor." It is my opinion that writing is both a mental and physical labor, so one might think this would bode well. I disagree.
Too much coffee and I swear my brain dries up from a lake to a gully. I may be alert, but the thoughts I'm having feel very surface-level, very uninspired. The movies that play in my head when I write become faint and fuzzy. It's my experience that too much caffeine makes the brain shallow. That reads like the label off a Victorian quack medicine bottle, but I stand by it. Caffeine can push your body into jacked-up faux-survival mode, heart beating faster, all impulses feeling urgent and immediate…kiss your creativity and emotional awareness goodbye. Stick to the same dosage each day. I have a mug of coffee first thing with breakfast, and that's it if I want to stay relaxed enough to write. For me, much of the appeal of coffee is the comfort factor; having a mug of something warm by my side makes work feel less worky, as if I'm getting away with something. My twenty year old self would scoff, but I can't say enough good things about decaf.
Sugar. Similar to caffeine, but different. The illusion of instant energy, but in my opinion, the crash is far worse. I try to not eat anything too sugary until after dinner, because it just wrecks me for the day. Also, during the brief window when one does enjoy a little energy hit, I find myself very distractable. I may be going a million miles a minute, but generally only around and around in circles, from Twitter to Google to the kitchen, to the work-in-progress, which I stare blankly at before deciding to see if anything's changed on Twitter in the ninety seconds since I last visited. Then, cue the robot slumping as it powers down. The only thing worse than a sugar buzz for getting words written is a sugar crash. Just stay away from that white powder…at least until you've hit your word count.
Adrenaline. This is a tricky one…again, I can only speak for myself. If you work great under pressure, more power to you. But my body does not process adrenaline the way I wish it would. I would love to be one of those people who, when confronted or in the midst of a competition, get a surge of superhuman strength and ride that wave to victory. Not me. My adrenaline highs make me shaky and short of breath, turn my mouth to a desert and my knees to jelly. Ask anyone who's watched me right before I had to spar in Taekwondo or at the start line of a 5K. I would love to be that person who feeds on the surge, but something about my engine just does not process that chemical to the best effect. Flight, not fight, for me.
As such, I know I can't function as a procrastinator and succeed at this job. I don't work well under pressure at all, so instead I go the teacher's pet route and do every assignment as soon as it's given, so I won't find myself in the midst of an anxiety attack the night before it's due.
The only times I do enjoy adrenaline rushes are when I'm competing against myself, with low stakes. If I'm running and I decide to push myself to go a bit faster, a bit farther, suddenly I'm there—an actual, enjoyable adrenaline high, and nothing to lose if I fail. Same with the writing—if I set my daily goal at a thousand words, I nearly always double it or better. It sounds lame and counterintuitive to our reach for the stars culture, but the more reasonable the goal, the more likely you'll surpass it. Set too high a goal and you're inviting pressure. If my goal is a thousand words, I might hit it, get a surge of accomplishment, and write another thousand. Set it at four thousand and the uphill climb wears me out and I begin to doubt myself by word 1,500. I hate to say it, but if you're like me and don't process adrenaline the way Gator-Aid and Under Armour like to suggest we all should, set your hurdles low. You might go soaring over that hurdle way up in the air, but if you set it too high you're likely to just whack your head on the bar.
Endorphins. Ah, what makes running an admissible form of torture for me. I wanted to be sure to offer up a couple of positive chemical aids after villainizing caffeine and sugar and adrenaline. Endorphins are the body's own self-made opiates, triggered by such things as exercise, love, spicy foods, and orgasm. I'll focus on that first one.
This post was actually inspired by my trip to the Y yesterday. I'd started my day less than chipper, filled with low-level angst and mild annoyance, an overall sensation of meh. But I knew from experience that this meant I needed to get a nice sweat on. Thirty to sixty minutes of good old fashioned exercise and I can suddenly find myself staring wide-eyed into a totally new day. During my walk to the gym, the snow looked gray, the people seemed like slow-moving obstacles blocking my way, the cars like death machines hell-bent on running me down. On the walk home, the sun was shining (it had been before, but I hadn't bothered noticing), the people were friendly, and the cars all seemed eager to stop and let me cross the street. Oh, endorphins. Best drug ever, and totally free! Another huge upshot to exercise is of course better health, plus a feeling of accomplishment, competence, a temporary sense superiority to others (if you're a jerk like me), and I firmly believe, increased creativity. Plus you can eat more.
Serotonin. I won't pretend I have any authoritative understanding of this one, but I did want to touch on it. Please don't trust my science. But here's what I believe to be accurate: serotonin is a neurotransmitter that can create in us a sense of well-being and contentment. Highly conducive to writing. The tryptophan in turkey we've all heard about is an amino acid that our bodies convert to serotonin, hence that happy, sleepy feeling many of us Yanks experience after Thanksgiving dinner.
Serotonin production and release is highly influenced by diet, and things like complex carbohydrates help us create it, while things like protein do not. Junk foods, particularly those high in simple carbs, trigger the serotonin effect, but because they don't actually provide us with the nutrients to replace the serotonin they unleash from our bodies' stores, they give us a temporary high that can later result in a depressed sensation. The obvious lesson here—eat junk food in moderation. The little high it gives us is short-lived, often chased by the low that spurred us to head to the cupboard in the first place.
Hmmm… I hadn't intended this post to become an "Eat right and exercise!" PSA, but here we are. I would have liked to cover alcohol as well, but that hotbed of emotion- and impulse-modification is a post or two in itself. Plus, I need to go write…just as soon as I steep myself a cup of decaf.
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| Proper science. |
That's all very annoying, because some days, due to deadlines both external and self-imposed, we feel we need to hammer out three thousand genius words, but it just isn't going to happen. However, there are certain chemical aids and hindrances you can either avoid or harness to help stack the writing deck in your favor.
Caffeine. If you're a coffee (or Coke or tea) drinker, this is major. I think we underestimate how strong a stimulant caffeine is. A highly reliable scientific reference (Wikipedia) tells us "caffeine is an ergogenic, increasing a person's capability for mental or physical labor." It is my opinion that writing is both a mental and physical labor, so one might think this would bode well. I disagree.
Too much coffee and I swear my brain dries up from a lake to a gully. I may be alert, but the thoughts I'm having feel very surface-level, very uninspired. The movies that play in my head when I write become faint and fuzzy. It's my experience that too much caffeine makes the brain shallow. That reads like the label off a Victorian quack medicine bottle, but I stand by it. Caffeine can push your body into jacked-up faux-survival mode, heart beating faster, all impulses feeling urgent and immediate…kiss your creativity and emotional awareness goodbye. Stick to the same dosage each day. I have a mug of coffee first thing with breakfast, and that's it if I want to stay relaxed enough to write. For me, much of the appeal of coffee is the comfort factor; having a mug of something warm by my side makes work feel less worky, as if I'm getting away with something. My twenty year old self would scoff, but I can't say enough good things about decaf.
Sugar. Similar to caffeine, but different. The illusion of instant energy, but in my opinion, the crash is far worse. I try to not eat anything too sugary until after dinner, because it just wrecks me for the day. Also, during the brief window when one does enjoy a little energy hit, I find myself very distractable. I may be going a million miles a minute, but generally only around and around in circles, from Twitter to Google to the kitchen, to the work-in-progress, which I stare blankly at before deciding to see if anything's changed on Twitter in the ninety seconds since I last visited. Then, cue the robot slumping as it powers down. The only thing worse than a sugar buzz for getting words written is a sugar crash. Just stay away from that white powder…at least until you've hit your word count.
Adrenaline. This is a tricky one…again, I can only speak for myself. If you work great under pressure, more power to you. But my body does not process adrenaline the way I wish it would. I would love to be one of those people who, when confronted or in the midst of a competition, get a surge of superhuman strength and ride that wave to victory. Not me. My adrenaline highs make me shaky and short of breath, turn my mouth to a desert and my knees to jelly. Ask anyone who's watched me right before I had to spar in Taekwondo or at the start line of a 5K. I would love to be that person who feeds on the surge, but something about my engine just does not process that chemical to the best effect. Flight, not fight, for me.
As such, I know I can't function as a procrastinator and succeed at this job. I don't work well under pressure at all, so instead I go the teacher's pet route and do every assignment as soon as it's given, so I won't find myself in the midst of an anxiety attack the night before it's due.
The only times I do enjoy adrenaline rushes are when I'm competing against myself, with low stakes. If I'm running and I decide to push myself to go a bit faster, a bit farther, suddenly I'm there—an actual, enjoyable adrenaline high, and nothing to lose if I fail. Same with the writing—if I set my daily goal at a thousand words, I nearly always double it or better. It sounds lame and counterintuitive to our reach for the stars culture, but the more reasonable the goal, the more likely you'll surpass it. Set too high a goal and you're inviting pressure. If my goal is a thousand words, I might hit it, get a surge of accomplishment, and write another thousand. Set it at four thousand and the uphill climb wears me out and I begin to doubt myself by word 1,500. I hate to say it, but if you're like me and don't process adrenaline the way Gator-Aid and Under Armour like to suggest we all should, set your hurdles low. You might go soaring over that hurdle way up in the air, but if you set it too high you're likely to just whack your head on the bar.
Endorphins. Ah, what makes running an admissible form of torture for me. I wanted to be sure to offer up a couple of positive chemical aids after villainizing caffeine and sugar and adrenaline. Endorphins are the body's own self-made opiates, triggered by such things as exercise, love, spicy foods, and orgasm. I'll focus on that first one.
This post was actually inspired by my trip to the Y yesterday. I'd started my day less than chipper, filled with low-level angst and mild annoyance, an overall sensation of meh. But I knew from experience that this meant I needed to get a nice sweat on. Thirty to sixty minutes of good old fashioned exercise and I can suddenly find myself staring wide-eyed into a totally new day. During my walk to the gym, the snow looked gray, the people seemed like slow-moving obstacles blocking my way, the cars like death machines hell-bent on running me down. On the walk home, the sun was shining (it had been before, but I hadn't bothered noticing), the people were friendly, and the cars all seemed eager to stop and let me cross the street. Oh, endorphins. Best drug ever, and totally free! Another huge upshot to exercise is of course better health, plus a feeling of accomplishment, competence, a temporary sense superiority to others (if you're a jerk like me), and I firmly believe, increased creativity. Plus you can eat more.
Serotonin. I won't pretend I have any authoritative understanding of this one, but I did want to touch on it. Please don't trust my science. But here's what I believe to be accurate: serotonin is a neurotransmitter that can create in us a sense of well-being and contentment. Highly conducive to writing. The tryptophan in turkey we've all heard about is an amino acid that our bodies convert to serotonin, hence that happy, sleepy feeling many of us Yanks experience after Thanksgiving dinner.
Serotonin production and release is highly influenced by diet, and things like complex carbohydrates help us create it, while things like protein do not. Junk foods, particularly those high in simple carbs, trigger the serotonin effect, but because they don't actually provide us with the nutrients to replace the serotonin they unleash from our bodies' stores, they give us a temporary high that can later result in a depressed sensation. The obvious lesson here—eat junk food in moderation. The little high it gives us is short-lived, often chased by the low that spurred us to head to the cupboard in the first place.
Hmmm… I hadn't intended this post to become an "Eat right and exercise!" PSA, but here we are. I would have liked to cover alcohol as well, but that hotbed of emotion- and impulse-modification is a post or two in itself. Plus, I need to go write…just as soon as I steep myself a cup of decaf.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Some days, I am that white duck.
At thirty-one, my baby-making machinery is humming insistently, but I can't help but think that if I routinely feel this overwhelmed, working full-time at a job I truly love and also playing the homemaker role, how on Earth can a child ever fit into this equation? If I already feel like I don't have enough energy to go around between my husband, work, friends, and day-to-day chores and errands, what could possibly be left after a day spent caring for a baby?
I suspect my genetically inherited Catholic guilt wants me to suffer. I should be thrilled—my husband is thus-far supportive of me writing full-time, despite the major income hit. I seem to be good at it, and I possess the discipline and drive. No longer commuting, I have the time to exercise and relax and read when the day's writing is done. If the house is clean, that is. On paper, I have it all. But I frequently find myself crushed by the pressure to revel in it. I feel crushed by frequent feelings of inadequacy, when I should be all set up to thrive. Water, sunlight, and nice, nutrient-rich dirt, and still some days I wither.
I take criticism of my housekeeping and other wifely tasks intensely personally, because if there's truth to them, it must mean I'm failing miserably. After all, I work from home. Surely I should be able to accomplish X, Y, and Z around the house. But X, Y, and Z take time, and that times takes away from the forty+ hours a week I feel obligated to spend on my writing and related tasks, and that makes me feel as though I'm falling short in that department. If I tackle all the chores and write five thousand brilliant words and make a delicious dinner, I'm pooped, and then I'm failing at the role of affectionate and charming partner. Seriously, how much worse could a child make this? How do my mother-author-partner Twitter friends do it all?
I want to say I'm not neurotic…perhaps those who know and love me will disagree. But I welcome germs with open nostrils. I don't care what the latest trends are and if I'm hitting the mark. I don't generally worry about what people think of me, unless they feel as if I've hurt them personally. I hope most of my acquaintances would say I'm easy-going. The struggles I'm feeling…they don't feel neurotic or frantic, generally speaking. They feel more like hopelessness. Not quite depression (I know what that feels like), just a sense that I'm failing when I'm not living up to my various daily roles.
When I feel like a worthy professional writer and a creative person, I feel like a lousy partner. When I feel like a stand-up housewife, I feel I'm neglecting my duties as an-author-who-treats-her-work-seriously. If I nail both of those, I probably neglected exercise or friendships or blogging or items on my miscellaneous to-do list as a consequence. As I write this, I feel I should be hemming my husband's pants as I promised. I need to eat dinner, but I need to blog. I need to be reading my friends' books, because they're kind and supportive enough to read mine. I need to find an agent. I need to cure whatever's making my toes all itchy and fat like sausages because I haven't been able to work out enough. I need to schedule this and that and return this e-mail and get groceries and learn to make homemade curry sauce because the store-bought jars are so pricey. And I need to relax, because not relaxing makes everything impossible.
But of course, I don't need to do any of these things…except perhaps the groceries, from time to time. My husband probably won't leave me if I don't hem his pants tonight or schedule this or that utility. My writing career will probably not flop if I take a weekday off to relax or tackle some other project. My friends will probably still like me even if I don't read their books the month—or year—they come out. This blog will not cease to exist if I fail to write twenty posts a month. I do, however, need to fix my itchy sausage-toe problem.
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How do you do it, Claire Huxtable? With pills? It's pills, right? |
Some days life, no matter how good it truly is, feels very difficult. And I don't feel as if I'm allowed to feel that way, given how much harder many, many people have it in the world and in this economy. In addition, I've semi-consciously designed my own life to be as simple as possible—don't acquire too many things, live in a condo that's a nice, modest size, only spend the energy cultivating friendships and acquaintances and family bonds that feel mutual and healthy, strive to do work that's challenging and creatively fulfilling… Generally keep things casual and manageable, so that when a child does enter the picture, they'll be part of a humble, adaptable, content family. And content is fine. Jubilant happiness is impossible to maintain for more than the odd fleeting moment, plus it's exhausting. Content is healthy. Content is doable.
Or it should be. So why do I feel so helpless some days, amid all the positivity and ease of my life?
I don't have an answer, and I'm sick of analyzing myself, trying to sleuth one out. I'm just pleased that today—or at least in this hour or minute or moment—I feel calm and content. Just this second, I feel like enough. If only it could last.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Brain-Body Balance…
…I does not have it.
This is more a rant than a blog post, so bear with me, or go elsewhere until I return tomorrow with a regularly scheduled angst-free installment of Thrusty Thursday.
I think there's such a thing as a healthy brain-body balance. I mean those days or even weeks when your body and mind are both feeling settled and performing capably. I think more often than not, I have this balance, or something approaching it. But this week…and indeed last week… Dear God, I don't. Not even close.
I don't know what's up with me. My brain is burned out, largely from being stuck on a romance proposal that I just cannot seem to tailor to get my editor on board. I want to be successful, so I'm thinking of ways to fix it, non-stop. It's exhausting, and naturally the franticness isn't actually helping to generate anything new and fresh. After today I'm just taking a break and switching to edits and admin until next week, lest I give myself a nervous breakdown.
Body-wise, I would hope that if my brain's doing crappily, my body's at least in decent working order. It's so not. I've been jittery and irritable, and sleeping terribly (which is not like me). I'm also blessed a sort of low-level but chronic stomach issue, which gets set off by stress. It leads to abdominal and back pain. Oh joy! Jittery, under-rested, and achy all over.
On the other hand, now that it's getting to be too cold to run outside, I joined my local gym. And I love it! My body may not be feeling stellar, but I'll give it credit for performing. I've been using the elliptical machine and treadmill and today I took my first Pilates class in several years (man, there are some muscles in my core I haven't dusted off in ages) and my body's largely cooperating. And I do think all the exercise refreshes the brain a bit…though I've still yet to wow my editor.
Like a bad mood or a shitty weather pattern, I'll just have to wait this out, I suppose. Though I hope it moves on soon—us writers get mental constipation when our creativity stays blocked for too long.
This is more a rant than a blog post, so bear with me, or go elsewhere until I return tomorrow with a regularly scheduled angst-free installment of Thrusty Thursday.
I think there's such a thing as a healthy brain-body balance. I mean those days or even weeks when your body and mind are both feeling settled and performing capably. I think more often than not, I have this balance, or something approaching it. But this week…and indeed last week… Dear God, I don't. Not even close.
I don't know what's up with me. My brain is burned out, largely from being stuck on a romance proposal that I just cannot seem to tailor to get my editor on board. I want to be successful, so I'm thinking of ways to fix it, non-stop. It's exhausting, and naturally the franticness isn't actually helping to generate anything new and fresh. After today I'm just taking a break and switching to edits and admin until next week, lest I give myself a nervous breakdown.
Body-wise, I would hope that if my brain's doing crappily, my body's at least in decent working order. It's so not. I've been jittery and irritable, and sleeping terribly (which is not like me). I'm also blessed a sort of low-level but chronic stomach issue, which gets set off by stress. It leads to abdominal and back pain. Oh joy! Jittery, under-rested, and achy all over.
On the other hand, now that it's getting to be too cold to run outside, I joined my local gym. And I love it! My body may not be feeling stellar, but I'll give it credit for performing. I've been using the elliptical machine and treadmill and today I took my first Pilates class in several years (man, there are some muscles in my core I haven't dusted off in ages) and my body's largely cooperating. And I do think all the exercise refreshes the brain a bit…though I've still yet to wow my editor.
Like a bad mood or a shitty weather pattern, I'll just have to wait this out, I suppose. Though I hope it moves on soon—us writers get mental constipation when our creativity stays blocked for too long.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Reliable as meteorology
I'm speaking of my chosen profession—writing. Just a quick rant from me on the topic of weather and wordsmithery and mood.
I live in New England, a region infamous for its bipolar weather patterns. November is particularly unpredictable, when it could be 34°, gusting and sunny one day, 59° and drizzly the next, haling the day after. Moods can feel that way too. Cheerful and productive yesterday, gloomy and uninspired tomorrow. I'm a pretty moody bastard, but my outlook tends to swing in intervals of several days. Three or four productive, upbeat days when I write three thousand words each morning and tackle my paperwork diligently, followed by two where it feels like five hundred tooth extractions getting as many lackluster words on the digital page.
Sometimes I think the weather feeds into my mood. A week of clouds and rain suck the life out of me, and a walk in the sun can shift me out of a funk. But other times, the storms or sunshine in my head feel as random as the ones outside.
I know I'm not the only one at the mercy their moods. Like forecast blurbs, I notice from day to day on Twitter as my fellow writers fluctuate. One day they're chatty and excited, tweeting about their excellent word count or new story idea. The next they're grumbly, in need of commiseration and a kick in the butt just to open up the work-in-progress. Why are we so inconsistent? Why is out chemistry seemingly designed to vary so much from day to day?
Over the years I've been fortunate in gaining a lot of self awareness on this topic (thanks, awesome psychotherapist mom!) When I was in my teens and early twenties I was pretty much at the mercy of my moods, then I got fed up with that and read a lot of Gary Zukav, learned to see my moods as physical manifestations in my body, rather than proof that there was something to feel angry or sad or maniacally happy about. Awesome tool. Now I feel jealous and I think, "Hmm, I feel a sour sensation in my solar plexus. My body is reacting to a feeling of jealousy. Oh well, it'll pass." I don't think, "Goddamn it, Jane just got a new book contract and I haven't had one in months! It's not fair! Why do I bother? I must suck!" To be fair to myself, I was never that petulant, but you see what I mean. Foul moods, like foul weather, will pass, if we're patient and rational and wait it out.
I'm cool with my moods being what they are, but as calm and non-reactionary as I usually manage to be about them, that doesn't help me tweeze the words out on a day when each letter and apostrophe and space feels like water torture. I couldn't tell you yet which mood I'm in today, but I'd guess it's somewhere in the middle. This post is flowing easily, yet I suspect I wrote it so I could put off some rewrites that intimidate me. Well, I'm shit out of luck now. Time to face the storm.
I live in New England, a region infamous for its bipolar weather patterns. November is particularly unpredictable, when it could be 34°, gusting and sunny one day, 59° and drizzly the next, haling the day after. Moods can feel that way too. Cheerful and productive yesterday, gloomy and uninspired tomorrow. I'm a pretty moody bastard, but my outlook tends to swing in intervals of several days. Three or four productive, upbeat days when I write three thousand words each morning and tackle my paperwork diligently, followed by two where it feels like five hundred tooth extractions getting as many lackluster words on the digital page.
Sometimes I think the weather feeds into my mood. A week of clouds and rain suck the life out of me, and a walk in the sun can shift me out of a funk. But other times, the storms or sunshine in my head feel as random as the ones outside.
I know I'm not the only one at the mercy their moods. Like forecast blurbs, I notice from day to day on Twitter as my fellow writers fluctuate. One day they're chatty and excited, tweeting about their excellent word count or new story idea. The next they're grumbly, in need of commiseration and a kick in the butt just to open up the work-in-progress. Why are we so inconsistent? Why is out chemistry seemingly designed to vary so much from day to day?
Over the years I've been fortunate in gaining a lot of self awareness on this topic (thanks, awesome psychotherapist mom!) When I was in my teens and early twenties I was pretty much at the mercy of my moods, then I got fed up with that and read a lot of Gary Zukav, learned to see my moods as physical manifestations in my body, rather than proof that there was something to feel angry or sad or maniacally happy about. Awesome tool. Now I feel jealous and I think, "Hmm, I feel a sour sensation in my solar plexus. My body is reacting to a feeling of jealousy. Oh well, it'll pass." I don't think, "Goddamn it, Jane just got a new book contract and I haven't had one in months! It's not fair! Why do I bother? I must suck!" To be fair to myself, I was never that petulant, but you see what I mean. Foul moods, like foul weather, will pass, if we're patient and rational and wait it out.
I'm cool with my moods being what they are, but as calm and non-reactionary as I usually manage to be about them, that doesn't help me tweeze the words out on a day when each letter and apostrophe and space feels like water torture. I couldn't tell you yet which mood I'm in today, but I'd guess it's somewhere in the middle. This post is flowing easily, yet I suspect I wrote it so I could put off some rewrites that intimidate me. Well, I'm shit out of luck now. Time to face the storm.
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