The Paradox of Motivation

Motivation is such a funny thing, isn't it?

On Tuesday, I had an appointment in the afternoon and was also going to get groceries, but was otherwise intending to put tons of time into Blueberry.

I'm not tracking time any more, but I do know that I got 2,489 words for the day and felt that I wasted quite a bit of time, especially in the morning. And I was seriously mentally tired by the evening.

Wednesday, I did a 91-minute (hey, that last minute can be a killer :) training run and then had lunch with my sister/training partner/motivational speaker, and intended to come home to write.

Unfortunately, I came home with a sore throat and fell asleep on the couch for three hours. When I woke up, I had that "incompetent sword swallower" feeling, where you feel like your throat's been slashed to ribbons on the inside. This is not conducive to sleeping well, obviously, and so I had a rough night last night.

On to today. I woke up with a slightly improved throat but the unpleasant addition of a stuffed-up nose. I have a lot of things this weekend that I need to be NOT sick for, so my plan was to spend the day on the couch. No pressure, just relaxing and recovering.

Which I did. See this? This was my office today. I spent the day propped up on the couch under a faux polar bear blanket. (I loves me my polar bears!) The little laptop, and the laptop pad, just snuggled right in there. Whenever I felt like taking a break, to get another drink or just to get my blood moving, I did. But otherwise, I wrote pretty much the whole day.

5,930 words, to be exact. I think that's my record for a single day of writing. On a day where I've gone through nearly a whole box of tissues and a full two litres of orange juice. And, even right now at 10:30PM, I feel like I could write another scene or two. You know, to relax me before bed time.

I don't know why Tuesday, which should have been a good solid writing day, was less than half as effective as today. But I think part of it might be because I didn't put any pressure on myself. I do want to write Blueberry, and I know this, but sometimes I get all hung up on exactly when I write and how much and where (mustn't write just anywhere, you know... I have a perfectly good writing area set up and so it's not 'correct' to write on the couch).

Maybe it's better just to open up and let the words come out.

It certainly was today.

I started Blueberry on February 1st, although it was interrupted several times by Aardvark's final editing and query assembly. The current word count is 21,427 words. I wrote nearly 28% of those words today. Without being in my usual chair, with my usual things around me, with the cat on the table 'helping' me out (she spent the morning sound asleep on the bed, but did come meow at me in the afternoon, apparently also concerned about my 'inappropriate' writing location).

I think I've been putting a little too much emphasis on the props, on where I write and when and how and how long a session is and all that stuff that truly doesn't matter because when the words start flowing the biggest problem is typing fast enough to keep up. I want to remember today, and how my relaxation, the thing I did to not think about this stupid cold, was writing.

I always want that feeling. I hope this will help me remember it. And maybe encourage some people out there to drop even one of the props they think are necessary for whatever it is they do. If the props help, great. If they might be holding you back... drop 'em and see what happens!

Three Thousand Blueberries

Well, three thousand words on Blueberry.

I used to do daily "here's what I was going to do and what I actually did" posts here, and I eventually stopped because... well, I'm not sure why. But I miss it.

2010 is my year of NOT doing all my time tracking and word count analysis and all that stuff that made me even more deranged than usual. (When you spend time, serious time, trying to decide whether driving to Starbucks to write counts as writing time, you need to stop tracking.) But I want to document my progress, and where better than here?

SO...

Writing
- wrote exactly three thousand words on the new book. (It always amuses me when I get round numbers without even trying.)
- updated my character description lists for what I've written so far (so I don't later have to look through everything to figure out, say, whether Crystal wears makeup or not) (she does, in case you were wondering :)

Fitness
- ran outside, fortunately before it started snowing. I haven't been outside much and it was surprisingly nice.

Housework
- laundry. Lots, but not nearly enough. How Mr. W and I manage to generate so much laundry is a mystery to me. How people with children EVER have clean laundry is an even bigger mystery.


I'm making this up as I go along, but I think on Mondays I will include a "what I plan to get done this week" and then on Fridays I'll see what happened. I need a bit of accountability, I think!

This week
- two days on Blueberry
- three days doing the very final re-read of Aardvark and assembling its queries, which are going out on the weekend! (Ah, the query process. How I have NOT missed you.)
- dentist appointment for cleaning. (Boo. I want to cancel SO much but I will behave.)
- two more runs and at least two non-runs (swimming, Wii boxing, or whatever I feel like)

I want to revamp the whole blog, and I will, but not at any time where it can take me off Blueberry. My problem (if I may pretend I have only one) is that I actually dislike writing the first draft. Weird, huh? I LOVE the planning stages and editing, but I find the first draft exhausting. Not hard to do - the words seem to fall from me sometimes - but really tiring, and so it's hard to make myself sit down and do it. But I did it today, and I will do it tomorrow, and when I keep that up for 6 weeks or so, I'll have a book!

And then I'll get to edit it. :)

Oh, and remember I said I was going to blog daily in February? I didn't. :)

I wear my heart on my... loaf?

I decided to make bread this morning. It did not go as planned.

I put all the ingredients for my current favourite loaf (Light Oat Bread using 1 tbsp of olive oil instead of 2 tbsp of margarine) into the breadmaker. We've had a bit of trouble with said machine (the base of the pan kind of rusted because someone kind of left it in the sink sitting in water instead of washing it like she kind of meant to do) but Mr. W had oiled it and all seemed to be well.

Today, instead of its usual few half turns and then an energetic spinning away at the dough, the breakmaker made a few pathetic half-turn attempts and then a faint whining sound but no spinning. So I dumped all the (unmixed) ingredients into a bowl and decided to try out being my own breadmaker.

This was at about 9:30 this morning. It's now 6 pm and the heels of my hands are STILL sore from kneading the dough. (I am a delicate one at times... my favourite story about this is the time I was assisting the school's (really good former national team member) volleyball coach in serving to the kids and having them return my serves, and I couldn't bring myself to tell him I had to quit because my hand hurt, so I kept going and and ended up with the heel of my hand seriously bruised as a result. He was impressed and a bit pitying at the same time. :)

The dough, theoretically, was supposed to get smooth and elastic. I have no idea how this is supposed to look, so I kneaded until I lost interest (about 6 minutes, I'd say) and then let it rise for an hour.

It got HUGE, which seemed like a good sign, so I kneaded it again and then put it in a loaf pan to rise again. It did, as the picture shows, but it was already thinking about overflowing and I was afraid it'd get too big for the pan when I baked it so I cooked it on a cookie sheet instead.

Not sure why, frankly, since now that I think about it it makes sense for it to spill out a little bit to make that nice bread shape.

But oh well. Here's what I got.

In the first picture you can see the dough looks vaguely jellyroll-ish. The instructions I found online said to fold it like a business letter into three parts. Why a business letter and not some other letter, I know not, but I envisioned a query letter and folded 'er up.

Only to have 'er unfold in the oven.


While I doubt it's exactly going to set the world on fire for sandwiches, it was kind of nice having two hearts with peanut butter and strawberry jam for lunch. :)

In other news, I was cleaning the house (no, that's not the news, I do it pretty often) and singing along to The Dana Owens Album (Queen Latifah doing jazz and R&B classics - link goes to Amazon where you can hear some clips) - I am no singer but I like to belt stuff out when there's nobody but the cat to hear me.

And as I was singing I realized what the new book, Blueberry, was missing. I felt like the main character needed something, another interest or subplot... and now I know. She's a jazz singer. Not as a career, just for fun. And someone'll push her to go further with it.

I love when my random stuff actually clicks for a book. :)

A writing update

I don't think of this blog as being exclusively about my writing, because I myself am not exclusively about my writing. But I do like to occasionally make it clear that I am still writing.

So here's where we're at.

The book code-named "Aardvark" is finished in its second draft. I, frankly, adore it. It was uncooperative at times, but that's because it resonates with me in a way nothing else has so far. In it, a woman's car slides off a deserted icy road leaving her trapped and bleeding, and between escape attempts she comes to realize she's focused her life on everything except what really matters. I love the character and the realizations she finds, and so far the people who've read it (my sister, my friend TS and Mr. W) seem to agree.

I will be beginning the final revisions on Aardvark next week. I am both excited and nervous: I have some fears that I'll mess this up because I really care about it, but I think that my care for it will also make sure I don't go too far afield.

I have also been looking for the next book, Blueberry. (In case you want to keep track, the next one will be codenamed Cookie, and the next Dragonfly. Mr. W gets to choose the codenames... he was gunning for Dodecahedron for the D name but I refused on the grounds that I have to think too hard when I type it.)

I had a great story coming together for Blueberry, deep and interesting and moral and all that. Unfortunately, it's not MY story. Dean Koontz or Stephen King could do it justice (and if they want it they're welcome to email me :) but it just isn't the kind of thing I want to tell. And I have recognized that and set it aside, which was nervewracking because I'd spent well over a month on it and what if I didn't find another one?

Well, I did. The new Blueberry involves Kegan from my free book "Life, Love, and a Polar Bear Tattoo" (go download it if you haven't already :), but it's not really a follow-up to "Polar Bear". It's just singing for me now and I love it. So I'll be editing Aardvark and working on Blueberry's outline and I'll be busier than the proverbial one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest (which saying always makes me wonder a) why'd he want to enter the contest and b) why would ANYONE enter the contest??) and I think I will be loving the whole thing.

I'm lucky enough to have a job I love. I even love the parts that make me twitchy and insane. (More insane.) Very lucky.

And now, off to bed to let my mind wander through Blueberry and see what happens. (I only track "writing time" when I'm actually at the desk, but all the good stuff arrives when I'm half asleep. Yet another of the mysteries of this job!)