Hello Out There

 I'm out of practice here. I also have nothing meaningful to wax poetic about.

You'd be surprised how often I lay awake and compose blog posts for that one day when I blog again. But no, I have nothing.

Right now my recently graduated daughter is playing Sound of Silence on the piano while my husband scrolls through his phone. I have some artichokes on the stove and expect my younger daughter home any moment from a date. My dog is staying behind the line of demarcation between the family room and dining room. I have increased my viewing size for all my writing to 150%.

If I don't finish and publish this post soon, it won't happen because my husband keeps talking to me (not a complaint, just an observation).

The main info I have to share is that I'm writing forward for the first time in a long time. I'm not piddling around with finished books or coming up with new idea... I'm writing and I WILL finish this WIP this month.

So there. Hello.

PS I was writing earlier while my eldest daughter played piano (it was ABBA). Later I shared that I had been writing a steamy scene. She said, "Oh, that makes sense." "Why?" I asked. "Oh, because you said 'straddled him' out of nowhere." Ah. Okay. At least she's old enough now for that not to be too weird.

A Journey Through My Mess

I woke up this morning inspired to write. I knew my direction but I also felt like I needed to find the notes I took at a session at the 2018 Romance Writers of America convention in Denver. I could not remember the name of the speaker, but it was about writing for your id. It was a great session and gave me permission not to try so hard to break out of the aspects of romance I enjoyed but worried were cliche. I shouldn't be different for the sake of being different. If it feels right to me, it will feel right to my readers.

The problem I have is that I have loads of spiral note books and I use them for all sorts of things. Which one I write in depends on which one I grab when I pack my bag. I do dress sketches for Irish dancing. I take notes on staff meetings. I write outlines and scenes for whatever is in my head that day, no matter what actual project I'm supposed to be writing. It's a mess. Most of the notebooks are half-full but not in any sort of sequential order. Some of them include ten pages at the back. Usually the very act of writing it down means I'll remember and then type it out later, but I don't do this with notes from events.

As I looked through my notes I found such stand alone, with no context at all, statements as:

• 200+ years of rape.
• Bags of seed save the day.
• "I trust you" is the highest honor you can give someone.
• Boob situation/solution?

I found World of Warcraft fan fiction that I'd forgotten about interspersed with teaching notes I never followed up on. The collection of notebooks went back to 2012 and one of the pages includes my attempt to turn the Batman image into Celtic knot work. I found pieces of a chapter based on the characters from Shakespeare and became inspired to work on the that project (something shelved four years ago so I could finish the manuscripts that needed it) then found notes for my actual work in progress that inspired this search through my notebooks in the first place. Thank goodness that got me back on track.

I did what I should have done in the first place and shoved all the book back onto my bookshelf to go through another time when I wasn't in the I NEED TO WRITE NOW mood. But first I took a picture.

The crazy thing is that I know there are more somewhere.

I did a search online after all of the fruitless digging through spiral notebooks and found the answers to all my questions -- but this puts a damper on the sense of urgency I had while looking through years of randomness. The speaker was author Dr. Jennifer Barnes. This post from Eight Ladies Writing summed it up well and gave me the basic list I was looking for. The blog post author, Jilly Wood, wrote that, "Stories or scenes depicting sex, touch, beauty, wealth, power, competition and danger push our pleasure buttons." Wonderful. Question answered. My journey through years of random notes/writing only served to let me know I needed to be more organized.

Celebrating Successes

By the time Courtly Pleasures was released I was thick into edits for Courtly Scandals. My husband wanted to have a release date party but it was on a Monday and it was my Mom's birthday and the kids had dance class... can we do it later? Or maybe after the series comes out?

We never did it and I didn't mind. I felt weird about celebrating myself, especially when there was so much to be done.

Fast forward six months to the 2018 Romance Writer's of America national conference in Denver and there I sat, at my first conference as a published author, feeling just as awkward as I always had. Not much had changed. I was still working toward whatever was supposed to come next but, unlike that first conference years ago, it was without a sense of joy. Instead I was stressed out about the books I haven't written yet and needed to write yesterday.

What happened to me? I should be more excited, more innovative, more confident and productive... right?

I was in a workshop given by Rosanne Bane about ways to get past writer's block and had a moment of personal insight. The entirety of her workshop had to do with the physiological function of the brain and the way it responds to stress and, in turn, the way we, as writers, respond (usually by creatively shutting down). She gave a list of better brain responses and the way to train myself to shut down my limbic system response and get back into the creativity of my cortex. The PowerPoint is available to you here.

Her points were easily understandable, the solutions reasonable, and I have already started to change my approaches to self care.

One point she made, more of a side note in the section about the lateral habenula (the teeny tiny section within the limbic system that decreases dopamine) was to follow through on rewards. She advised us to set incremental goals with corresponding rewards for goal completion. I never did this because I was always too busy with the next step. How simple would it be to take the time to pause and congratulate myself?  To be proud and excited and feel successful? Instead I jump right back in and feel only the weight of everything else left undone.

I should have celebrated that contract and the first round of edits. I should have celebrated the second and third round of edits and the book cover. All of these milestones along my journey deserved a moment of acknowledgement. I deserve to acknowledge my own successes as they come. Writing a book, following through, publishing... all of that is hard work and I wouldn't do it, couldn't do it, if I didn't believe in myself. I don't know if it's false humility or that I'm just an absolute buzz-kill, but I feel guilty being proud of myself and celebrating myself and I think it has put a big fat damper on my joy about my craft.

SO...

I'm going to set goals (baby-steps) and celebrate myself when I achieve them. I don't think it's a carrot on a stick--I think it's allowing myself to write without worrying about everything I could be doing better and just do it. After all, If I'm not writing forward, I'm accomplishing nothing. So huzzah for me.

Current goal: build sexual tension between my main characters (which is rough because she just had a baby and had been abandoned by her husband before she even knew she was pregnant). It's easier said than done because every time I write, she gets irritable and irrationally suspicious  Once I accomplish this I will get a pedicure as a reward and celebration.

Do you reward yourself for goal completion?


***Note 8/5/18: I finished the chapter that I was struggling with in regard to building sexual tension and then I did NOT go for the promised pedicure because I felt like the reward was bigger than the goal and added a new section to the goal (to lay the foundation for a future conflict) and have not been able to write anything since. I think I need to 1. get that pedicure and 2. make sure my rewards are of like weight with the goal. In this case I should have promised myself a cookie.

Summer!

I am a teacher from a family of teachers and having a summer break is the norm for me. In my young adult life, pre-teaching, it was reality check when I had a serious job and had to work year round. As a teacher, I really do need the summer or I wouldn't be able to face my new batch of students with a sense of optimism. I teach middle school and the kids test my limits each day and, every morning, I start again by giving them a clean slate and a chance to make good choices about kindness, self-respect and respect for others, accountability, honesty, and character. Sometimes they do. By the end of the year I'm a hairsbreadth away from my spirit being broken and I need the summer to emotionally heal and put me in the right mind-set to start that challenge all over again.

The good news is that  my school year is finally finished. My class is clean-ish and packed up. I have put the polite auto-response on my school email. This means the summer is MINE. From now until August 14th (which, coincidentally, is my birthday) I am free. Sort of.

During the summer I am a real writer. Writing becomes my job, not just something I squeeze in around everything else. It's great for my acceptance of myself as an author, to have that time where I can take myself more seriously. It's not just a hobby. It helps that the Romance Writers of America annual conference is in July. It gives me a professional goal to work toward which keeps me on my self-imposed deadlines and makes me wear pants. This conference I hope to find a home for my Courtly Love book 3, Courtly Abandon. I will not be signing this year, but I look forward to seeing many of my peers (and taking home oodles of books). The first book of my new series won't be finished, but I'm laying a fertile foundation with my setting and my characters are slowly becoming themselves and starting to tell me their story. Surprisingly, I even wrote a synopsis (blame my critique partner for making me organized) which is something I usually struggle with after the book is finished. It's my hope that the finished manuscript resembles my synopsis, but I never really know what direction my characters will take me. It's a mystery.

I hope you have a great summer. My family and I will be visiting Ireland next week. I lived there as a child. It's been thirty years since I've been there and I can't wait to share it with my husband and daughters. I'll include some pictures in my next blog post. The image below is of me and my brother (circa 1986) in the wood at Vienna Woods Hotel in Glanmire, Co Cork.

What are you doing this summer?