Here’s An Idea . . .

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.
— Joseph Stalin

Ideas are like slippery fish. They seem to have a peculiar knack of getting away from us. Because of this, the creative person always has a pad and a pencil handy. When he gets an idea, he writes it down. He knows that many people have found their whole lives changed by a single great thought. By capturing ideas immediately, he doesn't risk forgetting them
— Earl Nightingale

If you run out of ideas follow the road; you'll get there.
— Edgar Allan Poe

Sometimes I have a clear idea of what I want to talk about in my Sunday posts. A lot of time I just start typing and hope something will come to me. This is one of those times and I gotta tell you, I got nothing so far.

One might wonder, why even do a post today then? Well, because even a little, do nothing post is better than no post at all. And I feel like I’ve been such a slacker lately that I can’t bring myself to have another zero in my wordage report.

I keep saying I work better from a list, but so far I haven’t done much in the way of making any lists. I have a very specific process for list making, and every time I get up with the intention of going to my office to start my master list something distracts me, or I see something else I need to do first, and then I forget what I got up for. So then when I sit back down again at my lap top I remember what I got up for in the first place and figure, “Oh, I’ll do it later.”

Later. There’s always a later, isn’t there? Especially when you’re a champion procrastinator like me. Add to that having all the time in the world (AKA, no outside job to go to) and you’ve got a very dangerous combination.

Never put off till to-morrow what you can do the day after to-morrow just as well. ~ Mark Twain.

Words to live by, eh?

Well, they’ve been the words I’ve been living by lately, anyway. And it really has to stop. It’s appalling, the amount of time I waste doing pretty much nothing. I need to put on my big girl underpants and start spending more time in my office. Any time in my office!

Maybe it’s not as comfortable as sitting in my easy chair in the living room, but that’s a big part of my problem. I’m too comfortable in the easy chair. I can rock, or recline, and if I’m lucky one or more of the kittens will come and pin me down, usually lying on one of my arms so then I only have one hand free. Since I can’t type one handed, I’m forced to play mindless games on the laptop.

My office is a nice room, and it’s got all my stuff in it. I guess it’s like getting up in the morning to go to the gym. I just have to do it without thinking about it. Of course going to the gym is easier than going to my office. I get up in the morning and throw on my workout clothes, and I’m halfway through my first set before my body realizes what I’m doing.

But then I come home and have my shower and breakfast, and I’ll sit in my recliner checking my email and Facebook while I’m eating said breakfast. And then I never seem to get around to leaving my recliner. Because, you know, comfy.

As much as I hate to break with routine, maybe I need to start eating breakfast at the dining room table, like a normal person. And when I’m done, avoid the recliner and go down the hall to my office. Even though it’s still dark out. And cold.

And even if I start out just spending my mornings in there, sooner or later my mind will reset itself to realize this is where I’m supposed to be, and I’ll start getting some actual work done.

Hey, miracles do happen. Today is the start of the Year of the Water Rabbit. Anything is possible!

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

WORDAGE REPORT

Well . . . we did start out with some sun last week, but it took two days before my solar batteries were fully re-charged, and then it was back to the doom and gloom. One more day of sun and I might actually have accomplished something.

I dug out my compression gloves to see if they’d help my aching hands. They did for a while, but only somewhat. I don’t know what else I can do about it. It’s not like I can halt the march of time. But I gotta tell you, getting old sucks!

I did help a friend organize her poetry chapbook, or at least tried to. What seems easy to me is apparently not so easy for other people. Add into that her partner, who’s heart is in the right place but really seems to be determined to make things harder than they need to be, and you’ve got lots of frustration on the friend’s part and an unfinished chapbook.

NEW WORDS:
1526+0+626+705=2857
DOWN – 93 words from last week

Goals For Next Week:
Try to get my blog posts done earlier in the week.

EDITING:
0 pages
Still trying to get Elemental Spirit organized. There are going to be journal entries (kind of) at the beginning of each chapter, just like in Elemental Fire and Water, and I’m taking way too much time to decide whether I should writing them ahead of time, or just as I go along.

I can’t remember what I did for the other two, but I know they were a pain in my ass and I spent as much time on those two little paragraphs as I did on the whole chapter they headed. Still, I’m leaning towards writing them as I go along. Or maybe add them in after . . .

Goal For Next Week:
Start work on An Elemental Spirit.

MARKETING:
Yeah, nothing new here.

Goal For Next Week:
Set up author page on Amazon; update book page on blog

TECH & TRAINING:
Nothing new here, either.

Goal For Next Week:
Install software for inkjet so I can print to the colour printer.

POETRY WEDNESDAY:
Yes, I totally cheated on the poetry post. I used a form from 2009 – the Sestina. An oldie but a goodie. I did have a form I pulled out to try, but left myself short on time for the example. So maybe this week.

And I’ve made no progress on the poemwork for my poetry group, which meets this Wednesday. Guess I need to get on that, it’s not a short poem. We’re supposed to do a couplet for each month of the year, sharing our words of wisdom on dealing with each month’s challenges.

Goal For Next Week:
Share a new poetry form; work on my poemwork.

CRAFTING:
I need to buy a couple of medium sized bins to move my fabric stash from downstairs to upstairs, and I need to buy a (folding) work table. And deal with the toys I have kind of piled up where the work table is going to go.

The spare bedroom had originally been set up for the granddaughter’s use – night light, music thingie to help her sleep, books, toys – but other than a few naps when she was little, she’s never used it. Who knows, maybe we’ll both use it for doing crafts.

No progress to report on the afghan. *sigh*

Goal For Next Week:
Work on the afghan – the person it’s for has a birthday coming up. Finish craft migration.

WHAT I’M READING:
Still on a Nora Roberts kick, unfortunately. Just can’t seem to help myself. I re-read The Liar, and I’m working on Brazen Virtue.

The daughter and I are both curious about Prince Harry’s book, Spare, but not enough to actually pay for a copy ourselves. So I talked my father-in-law into buying it, and we can just borrow it from him. LOL

Goal For Next Week:
Continue making a little time to read every day.

GOAL REVIEW:

When you spend the previous week alternating reading and playing mindless games, there’s really nothing to write about in a blog post. Add to that the weather was spectacularly uninteresting, and there was nothing else going on, so I just didn’t have anything to say for my Monday blog post last week.

Tuesday we had just enough freezing rain to cancel the school buses, so I had the granddaughter for part of the day. But that’s still no excuse for not being able to present a new form on Wednesday. At least the poetry post was up on time though.

No editing as such, but some strategizing on Elemental Spirit. Not even a passing thought to marketing or tech. I have the installation CD right here, waiting for me to install the other printer onto my laptop, but it means having to dig out my external CD drive and that borders on having to, you know, actually get up off my lazy butt and do something.

At the very least, if I’m going to recycle a poetry post, I should write a fresh poem to go with it. But we’re talking Sestina here, and they’re kinda long. And hard. So I used my original Sestina. It is what it is. Going forward, however, I think that would be only fair – that if I use an old post I should at least write a fresh example poem.

I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get any work done on my craft room. I really can’t do any more until I get the table and bins, and I kept putting it off, figuring I’d do it on the weekend, forgetting of, course, that I was invited to go to Ripley’s Aquarium in Toronto to help celebrate the granddaughter’s 8th birthday.

Which is why this post is so stupendously late. Normally I write it on Saturday, or at least the wordage report part on Saturday and then the rest early Sunday. But I got none of it written yesterday, and then I dozed my morning away today. Oops!

But today is the first day of the Year of the Water Rabbit, and I firmly believe that better days are on their way.

Or at least more productive ones. :-)

A Funny Thing Happened…

… on the way to becoming more productive. AKA excuse #0573 for not writing.

The way my new office is laid out, the desk throws a shadow on itself. I have a desk lamp, and of course my spiffy new lap top has a back lit keyboard, but there’s just something about that layout that bugs me. I keep wanting to turn and face west, which puts the desk on my left.

So I spent most of Saturday rearranging my furniture. It’s not as though I could go anywhere, after all. We were in the midst of a raging ice storm. It started out as rain, moved on to ice pellets, then by noon it was freezing rain. In the morning the water on the tarp covering the pool was clear, but as the day continued I watched the steady progression of the ice until it was fully covered. It was kind of neat, although I’m sure I wouldn’t have thought so if I’d had to leave the house for anything.

Laugh if you want, but I think there’s something to be said for the idea of feng shui. I didn’t consult a book or Google it or anything, but I can’t help feel that if I get my office set up in just the right way, I’m going to start being more productive. Maybe I’m crazy, but there you go.

And that is how I ended up spending most of my Saturday cleaning the stuff off my desk and cursing and swearing as I moved stuff around. I stopped when it started to get dark because I wasn’t sure how long the power would last and I didn’t want to be in the middle of something if the lights went out. Although I enjoy the romance of candle light, it’s not exactly the safest thing around stacks of papers and books.

But while I didn’t trust the power to stay on to work in my office, I had no problem with it staying on so I could start binge watching the new Lost In Space series on Netflix. :-D

I loved that show as a kid, and in fact I have the complete series on DVD. I enjoyed the movie with Matt LeBlanc in it too. Normally I don’t like when they make a lot of changes to old favourites – don’t get me started on the changes made to Battlestar Galactica – but I have to say, I love how they’ve updated Lost In Space. I don’t even mind that they turned Dr. Smith into a woman.

But I digress.

None of the changes I made to the arrangement of my desk felt right so in the end I moved everything back the way it was. Of course I’m not ready to give up quite yet, I had another couple of ideas on Sunday, but it was so late in the day by that time that I didn’t have a chance to test them.

After all, I had blog posts to write. ;-)

What’s Your Excuse?Fun With Quotes

So how, exactly does one have fun with quotes?
Glad you asked! If you’re like me, you start by exchanging quotes on a daily basis with your Best Bud. But not just any quotes, writing quotes, to give each other inspiration. And then you pick the two best quotes of the week to share with the rest of the world - because ... why not? :-D

You can always tell I had trouble picking the quotes for the week when I’m late with this post. Once I decide which quotes I’m going to use the rest of the post seems to just fall into place. Unless, of course, I pick a quote and then change my mind, which happened this time.

I started out with a different quote from Jamie from last week, but I had a lot of trouble expressing why it stood out for me. Darn you Jamie for making me think! LOL They were all good ones though, and this one was my second choice:

What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you - what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind - you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.
~ Jeff Bezos

This certainly applies to me - the “complaining isn’t a strategy” part. Not that it stops me, but complaining about something is almost counter-productive. All that time spent complaining about the spanner life threw in the works would be much better spent working on a solution - how do I fix this?

Life rarely runs smoothly - how boring would it be if it did? There are going to be ups and downs and unexpected events that impinge on your schedule. Instead of bewailing your loss of writing time, you need to face these changes head on and learn to work with them or around them. If your writing is important to you, you’ll find a way.

My quote for last week kind of dove-tails into Jamie’s, because aren’t excuses born of complaining?

Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

Talk about your excuses! It ranks right up there with “the dog ate my homework.”

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll know I’m a champion at making excuses. Why haven’t I been writing? It’s too hot, too cold, the stars aren’t in the right alignment.

To be perfectly honest, for the most part excuses are just a way of covering up sheer laziness. Like my excuse from a couple of weeks ago for not writing: it’s too hot and the bathroom renovation is too noisy. Well yes, that was true. But the hubby was home doing the renovating that week, which meant the car was home. There was nothing stopping me from driving to the library to get some writing in. Not only would it be quiet there, it’s air conditioned.

Excuses are the gateway drug that leads to more dangerous things, like procrastination. It’s too hot to write, I’ll put it off until it’s cooler. I really want to write, but I have to do seven loads of laundry first. I’d like to write but my family needs me. And once you start putting it off it gets easier and easier for other things to become your priority.

Homer Simpson said, “I wasn’t lying, I was writing fiction with my mouth.” That pretty much sums up what writing fiction is all about - getting paid for telling lies. And the lies we tell ourselves that prevent us from writing are just the excuses that keep us from getting paid.

So ... what’s your excuse?

The Best Laid Schemes ...

... o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
from To a Mouse, by Robert Burns

Procrastination is the name of the game folks. Of course there are a lot of other names that apply to me these days, but that's the one I'm picking. ;-)

A few weeks ago I finished reading a book and if it hadn't been on my Kindle I would have pitched it across the room. And if you know me at all, you know it would take a lot to make me treat any book so badly. However, this one ended on a cliff hanger, one of my pet peeves. Normally I'm pretty good at ferreting these offensive tomes out and just not downloading them, but this one managed to slip through. At any rate, I sat down and started a nice, rant-worthy post about it, and ... it's still not done. I just keep putting it off.

I've also been putting off the edits for An Elemental Earth. No idea why; I just can't seem to get in the right head space. It's done, it just needs to be edited. And because it was serialized the editing shouldn't be all that difficult - no major changes or anything.

And as far as other writing goes ... yeah, I've pretty much been putting that off too. The Toronto Star runs a short story contest every year and I actually have a story that's close to being done for it, but I keep putting off finishing it. Why? Who knows. I even started to rewrite it completely in an effort to not finish it. Maybe I'm waiting for Wednesday when I'll finish it in a flurry and then overnight it so it gets there in time. No electronic submissions allowed, it has to be physically in their hands on February 29.

I'll open up one of the things I should/could be working on but then I'll figure I've got a big block of time coming up later, so I'll do it then. Or I really need to beat the devil at solitaire, otherwise I'll have bad luck. Or maybe I should write that email I've also been putting off. Or ... you get the idea.

I've got all kinds of other things I could be working on as well, but ... It's not like I'm not coming up with ideas, I've got oodles of ideas. I've got one that's been marinating in my brain for a while now and I keep refining it. But that's as far as it goes. The words in my head just don't seem to make it onto the paper. It's like they're being diverted somewhere - I just have to figure out where.

Another word that might be applicable here is distraction. I remember when I used to be able to focus (usually on a book) on something and nothing in the universe would distract me. In fact, family members would think it rather amusing (okay, more often they found it annoying) that World War III could be going off around me and my attention would never waver from the book I was reading.

However, as I've grown older I find I'm losing the ability to focus with that kind of intensity. That's not to say I've lost it entirely, sometimes my husband will be talking away to me and I just won't be aware of it. Then five minutes later something will click and I'll look up from my book or my lap top with a, "What?" Drives him crazy.

When I started writing this post, I put some CDs on to listen to and suddenly my attention wavered from what I was doing to what I was listening to. It was Two Steps From Hell, Battleborne from their newest CD Battlecry. This is one of the few songs of theirs that have lyrics and I love the story it tells so much that I decided to look it up to see if it was from a movie or something. That led to finding it on YouTube, then posting it to Facebook for others to enjoy, and then ... then I remembered I was actually working on a blog post.

And so it goes.

Some people call it writer's block, I call it procrastination and distraction.