I tried to do nothing
Today I was supposed to do nothing. Instead, I revised two query cover letters and submitted two novels and two stories on Submittable.
Then I lazed around
So it’s okay; I got some rest.
Author: lleachie
I am an associate professor of human services at a regional Midwestern university. I am also a writer of fantasy and romance, hoping to get traditionally published. I have one husband and am owned by four cats.
Lazy Sunday
I can’t reach escape velocity
My mind is simultaneously antsy and lazy — I should be DOING something! I have an exam to grade! I could be creating advertising materials for my book! I should be — my brain can’t focus. I feel like laying in my bed all day watching House episodes on my phone.
The tired part — end of the school year
I understand the tired part — I just got off a full semester without any Spring Break, after a year of severely restricted activity due to COVID. I made it without more than one or two sick or mental health days all year (due to the ability to teach over Zoom). With finals all that are left, I find myself slumping my shoulders and relaxing.
The antsy part — in need of flow
It occurs to me that the antsy part is the craving for flow. Flow is a psychological concept that refers to the state of being completely captivated in an activity that uses your abilities at an optimal level. Writing is a flow activity for me, as is editing. Designing (with my limited abilities) is another. Most of my flow activities happen at a computer and fit in with my writing, which is probably why I write.
No challenge is optimal when I’m just coming off a brain-numbing school year. I’ve been challenged out. I’m still dealing with three exams to grade this week and unhappy students.
Antsy part 2 — in search of accomplishment
Another part of my always needing to do something is the feeling of satisfaction I get from accomplishment. I delight in making things happen. I love finishing a chapter, a novel, a cover letter. I get motivated by the finished product as well as the process (the flow). Again, my mind is having none of that.
How to take care of myself
This is a time where perhaps doing nothing (or next to nothing) would be the best thing to do. It’s hard for me to do, because I’m always trying to wrap myself in flow activities and completing projects when I’m not working. Although I’m addicted to flow and accomplishment, maybe I could use something more relaxing but inspiring like daydreaming or meditating. Or maybe I should just read reruns of House and see if I can diagnose those disorders.
Imagination Living Beside Reality
When I was a child …
When I was a child, I was an imaginative sort, and my imagination lived beside reality. I knew the tree wasn’t sentient when I spoke to it, but at the same time I had an attachment to it as if we had a relationship. The tree wasn’t and was sentient. I was and wasn’t a human.
I didn’t put away childish things
As I grew older, I discovered creative writing and received lots of encouragement from my English teachers. I mostly wrote poetry back then, prosy poems that tried to communicate emotions, and to this day I’m not enamored of my poetry.
But I wrote stories. My stories tended to involve imagination living beside reality — Santa Claus as a young toymaker in a small town (see my romance novel for how that worked out),an anthropologist who discovers a collective of otherworldly beings (which has been written and now needs a home), an unstable woman who meets the ghost of the boy she killed in a car wreck — or did she?
What I developed in college and later was the concept of world-building. I had to show people that there was a reason why the trees were talking telepathically, why the titans struggled with their too-human longings and why the humans struggled with their sudden preternatural gifts. The basis of my writing is the tension between the hidden and ordinary worlds, the stories hidden in plain sight.
My world today
My world is one where I keep my foot planted in both worlds. No matter what genre I start in, two things will show up: 1) that other world hidden in plain sight; 2) relationships between people who are coping with that “other” world, whether they be from the hidden or ordinary worlds.
I would love to share this world with you
Please let me know in the comments if you would like to know more about my writing!
When Being Good is Better than Being Great
My annual evaluation
I had my annual evaluation meeting yesterday, and I did good. I met expectations in all categories, and I was very happy. I was happy because I managed this two years in a row. I was happy because it seemed like I was settling into a new normal that was, in fact, satisfactory.
My former messy life
For anyone who has not been following me, I have bipolar II disorder. I wasn’t diagnosed until 9 years ago at age 48. The problem that brought me to the psychiatrist was a frightening lack of sleep — at least a month at 2 hours of sleep a night. I dragged myself through days yet had racing thoughts, half-finished projects, and broken promises. And a feel like I was about to accomplish something great.
This is what hypomania looks like, at least in me. Overcommitment, sleep disturbances, slight grandiosity — but a brilliant ability to shine in those things I finished. I accomplished three things for each thing I abandoned.
Until I was depressed, and then I barely managed things. I would slump into deep depressions, barely making it to classes to teach.. My course evaluations would go down just as they went up during mania. During the last depression before the big crash, which I experienced near-simultaneously with the high, I would write these long, self-flagellating notes on Facebook, worrying everyone I knew.
After the crash
The inevitable crash sobered me. I spent a week in the behavioral health unit getting stabilized on my meds and walking off the most hideous side effect I’ve ever encountered (see akathisia). This is when I realized that I couldn’t go on as I had, and that I had to stick with the meds and find a new normal.
Learning to live with the new normal, however, was difficult for a person who had lived with effortless energy for a good part of her life. On meds, I didn’t feel the exhilaration of new projects that would buoy me up, so my productivity compared to my manic moments. My self-esteem went down, and I had trouble adjusting to this “new me” who didn’t get kudos for accomplishment.
Good enough
For a while, I didn’t do enough. Because I would get seasonal depression with a certain mix of meds, my fall evaluations would be down, and I didn’t do research because I had fallen out of the habit while my free-wheeling moods had taken over me before my diagnosis. Then, finally, my new department chair marked me as “not meeting expectations” in my annual report.
This shocked me. Other than gym class, I had never been marked unsatisfactory at any point in my career. I had had the fall/spring semester discrepancies, I had quit doing research, but I had never had an unsatisfactory mark in course evals. I panicked.
And then I set some things in place, knowing that I could no longer coast nor could I accomplish the wild amount of work effortlessly as I had in the past. I explained my bipolar disorder to my boss (I am protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act as long as I do the expected amount of work. I explained to him that the course evals might continue to be cyclical but that I would work on concerns. And I informed him that I would do enough work to get satisfactory scores, but would not be going for full professorship.
I have been working toward improving course evaluations and research. Some years have been better than others because I still seem to get seasonal depression. But for the past two years I have done good enough, and that’s the best outcome.
How about you?
What does a job well done look like to you? Feel free to answer in the comments.
Word Press Tricks?
Oh I have questions …
I haven’t been on WordPress very long, and WordPress is a very, very complex site. I like to play with the bells and whistles — but I don’t know them. Maybe it’s a matter of learning HTML, but I’m too old a dog to learn that trick, unless you have a quick way of teaching me. Maybe I haven’t found the right button.
I know about the context-sensitive menu on the right, and I know about the floating menu when I type, and I know about adding blocks, but a lot of the options I have trouble understanding. Here are my questions:
How do I make a numerical list?Never mind; I found it. And I found strikethrough too.- Can I do footnotes with numbers? Or do I have to fake it by superscripting in text and then at the end of the document in the descriptive part?
- How do I get a bigger caption size so I can describe a photo?
- How do I indent a block without using block quote?
- How do I get a photo to left-justify with wraparound? I don’t want all my photos to right-justify?
- What is the coolest or most useful “bells and whistles” you’ve found here?
- Why is the inline image below not letting me wrap text around it?
It’s your turn.
Readers — if you can answer the questions above, please let me know!
Kel and Brother Coyote Save the Universe
Kel and Brother Coyote have another episode!
I am writing a serialized novel called Kel and Brother Coyote Save the Universe and I now have the general shape of the two arcs — one being Kel and Brother Coyote’s chemistry, another being growth arcs for the main characters, and the plot arc that deals with the link between the restricted class-planet Ridgeway III and the exploitative colonial corporation InterGal. I think I will have at least 9 more stories, which should put me at 35-40K words, or a novella length.
Here’s an excerpt from the latest episode:
In a strange room, on a strange planet, Kel lay on a strange bed on the floor, wrapped in tight bandages across her ribs. She glanced up at the glittering suncatcher that her shipping partner, Brother Coyote, called a Sun Mandala. Kel, hopped up on painkillers after a spectacular rescue of the leader of Ridgeway III, dared not look at the wall where the reflection of the mandala shimmered. If she did, she might see something again, and she didn’t want to deal with that just then. The prisms sparkled and made her sleepy. She closed her eyes …
She heard the doorknob open and opened her eyes to Brother Coyote and a floating carry unit. He shut the door and sat down next to Kel, folding his lanky legs up beneath him. The gravitation unit sank gracefully to the ground. “Mom sent me up with dinner from the buffet line. She’ll be up in a few minutes.”
“The party’s still on? After an attempt on her life? That’s a pretty gutsy broad — Oops,” Kel giggled. “I suppose I shouldn’t call the Convener of the — the Moot — a gutsy broad.”
“Mom would have no trouble with that,” Coyote chuckled, pushing back his blond hair. “As for the party continuing, that’s a Ridgewayan cultural tenet. The celebration must go on. We remember too many times we’d quarantined ourselves from various fevers on the planet, so we celebrate any time we can.” Coyote lifted the lid of the carry unit; savory smells enveloped her.
“How do you get carry units on this planet if you’re a restricted trading planet?” Kel wondered aloud. “I can’t make that make sense.” Kel found herself wishing her tongue weren’t quite so loose.
“It doesn’t have an internal grav source, of course. I’m levitating it. Luckily it doesn’t take too much energy.” Kel sat up and Coyote transfered the tray to her lap.
“Ok,” she said. “What’s this?” Whatever it was, it smelled much better than meal bars.
“The stew there is made with native mushrooms and a legume that developed into a landrace here.” The stew, she noted, was an intense golden color, and from the smell, she suspected that Ridgeway III had a local equivalent of curry powder. “Then, with that, is a mess of greens that combines diaspora culture DNA tailored for this planet and some local weeds we’ve cultivated into crops. The two grow together symbiotically, which is a bonus.”
Kel took a small spoonful of the stew. “Take a bit of both individually. Then take a bite of them together. Then try a little of that paste on the edge of your plate with them. It’s important to be creative with your food,” Coyote instructed.
“Tell me, how does one get creative with meal bars?” Kel smirked, but she tried the food anyhow. “Wow,” she said after a few minutes absorbed in her food, which smelled warm and mellow, contrasting tartness and a deep mellowness. “This is amazing. What do you use for spices?”
“A lot of things, largely local. We have a tropical belt which accepted diaspora spices, and we have many native herbs. This planet has immense agricultural potential, but only if it’s cultivated carefully. And by carefully, I mean as close to wild as possible.”
“So you’re hunter-gatherers instead of farmers.” Kel finished her meal and considered the pastry on the tray.
“Well, not hunters, unless you count mushrooms. We’re wildcrafters, we’re permaculturalists, we’re companion planters. We’re tree climbers, plant researchers — did you know there’s a plant here only pollinated by one particular miniature fruit bat? The guy’s not much bigger than a bumblebee and climbs into the fruit’s flowers and gets drunk, then visits other flowers on a bender. He finally passes out in a flower and sleeps until the petals drop out from under him.”
“You must have a lot of farmers if you can’t factory farm.”
“Yeah, but we don’t have a lot of factories. We have them for the technologies we’ve chosen, but we also have artisans and craftsmen. You might notice this tray is wooden.” Indeed it was, Kel noted. “We have a stepped-down economy, and not a lot of us go off-planet, as you might guess.”
Kel found herself looking at the reflections of the sun mandala, which were mere shadows on the wall as twilight fell. Her sight blurred as she found herself sucked into a vision — Keyli, the Convener of the Moot for Ridgeway III and Coyote’s mother, strolling down the hall with a feline creature that came up to above her knee, trotting beside her on a leash.
“Coyote,” she said, instantly regretting the words when they fled her mouth, “Does Ridgeway have felinoids the size of Terran Shepherd Dogs?”
Looking for Inspiration in the Hiatus
As time expands, inspiration goes down.
It’s practically end of semester at Northwest Missouri State. We’re in the middle of Prep Week (often called “dead week” by the number of faculty who are overwhelmed by the end of the semester) and I have nothing coming in until Friday to grade. I’m in t-shirt and sweats mode, only because I have a student appointment over Zoom today; otherwise it would probably be PJs. In other words, I have three more days of Nothing. To. Do. But. Write.
I have a massive amount of time to write. Am I writing? No. I’m looking for more work to do. I’m halfway to the end of the Internet. I’ve fallen in love with three Internet cats and could dissect the modus operandi of successful cat influencers (photos plus merchandise plus charity). The inspiration to write is nil.
On the other hand, when I’m grading midterms, I suddenly explode with inspiration. If I have deadlines to meet, I feel like writing a novel. NaNoWriMo, the international writing event in November, is perfectly nestled between surviving midterms and prepping for finals. I write the beginnings of novels during that time.
But now? I’m staring at the screen drooling on myself.
Making a plan for summer
My whole summer is wide-open. Although I have interns to supervise, I can work around them pretty readily, and will probably do most of my meetings on Zoom. But the thing that takes up most of my summertime, the online class, isn’t happening. I need to write this summer to keep me sane.
I can make some plans to increase my inspiration:
- Write this blog daily as warm-up
- Spend allocated times at the Cafe for discipline and change of scenery
- Work on outlines for short stories
- Sketch brainstorming notes on paper with fountain pen (this slows thoughts down)
- Find a muse (hopefully he’s a-muse-ing too)
- Only surf the Internet for 5 minutes an hour
- Find a writing sprint timer
Some of these are writing rituals, meant to separate writing from the mundane world. I’m all about ritual and its ability to make space for important things.
A question for you
If anyone out there has some ideas for getting inspiration (especially some fantasy-based prompts) please tell me in the comments!
The Day of Writing Prompts
First, drink too much coffee.
My husband and I went to the local game cafe (Board Game Cafe in Maryville MO) for the sole purpose of brainstorming some writing prompts for me for the summer. And, I guess, drinking coffee, whereas we drank too much. Three cups of coffee later (plus the two we had in the morning) and we had not only come up with some prompts but we were overcaffeinated enough that I could hear angels singing in my dental work.
Second, come up with some writing prompts.
We discovered that it’s hard writing prompts for someone else. My husband’s prompts are awesome, witty, catchy, and science fiction. I’ll play with them, but I’m a romantic, atmospheric, emotional fantasy writer. So I need to figure out how I will write “Writer who has to keep writing or reality stops”. I don’t know if I can write these. I can’t feel them. Does that make sense?
But I’m having trouble writing my own. I’m very character-based, and that’s hard to convey in a short story prompt. I have written some pretty good standalone stories (although I haven’t found the right place to send most of them because they’re fantasy) but most of my writing has been within my universe. So, reader magnets instead of submittable short stories.
I promised myself I would write some short stories for submitting for publication rather than novels (I have too many) or more reader magnets (I have enough to fill a chapbook). So I will work on these prompts and come up with some on my own.
Please help me!
Here’s where I need your help. If you can come up with any writing prompts (especially in the fantasy/science fiction vein) I’d love to hear them!
Need Ideas for Writing!
Where do my ideas come from?
Most of my ideas, strangely enough, come from dreams, and I haven’t had any inspiring dreams lately (except for the one last night where Jason Momoa helped me with an awkward yard task and then winked at me.) I write fantasy and science fiction with a strong relationship (one might call it romance) element, so dreams about unusual happenings or intriguing strangers (not counting Jason Momoa) tend to provoke my dreams.
My imagination of course fuels and expounds upon these dreams. A certain “what if” element comes into play. What if there was a collective in the middle of nowhere that had to keep its reality secret? What if a woman’s annihilating power was disguised as a mental illness? What if the end of the world could be triggered by killing one person?
The well has run dry
Here’s my frustration — I haven’t come up with any new ideas lately. This could be because I’m just coming off a semester; it may be because I’m doing very well with my moods; it could be because nobody intriguing has visited my dreams (not counting Jason Momoa). I have been assigned by an editor I met to start writing short stories for submission until I can get some traction on my novels.
What are the solutions?
One thing I’ve done is write new stories based on the already written ones. This is why I have four novels and 10 short stories dealing with the universe of Archetypes. I have been charged with writing short stories, however, and I need to get out of my world and write standalone stories rather than “reader magnets”. One solution writers often use is writing prompts, or phrases/sentences providing an idea for the writer to go forth with. a couple of my favorite short stories were written on prompts (not about Jason Momoa). Another solution, one that I will be using today, is bouncing ideas off my husband (who is not Jason Momoa).
My request to you
I would love it if you threw me some story prompts to write with, hopefully fantasy (and not with Jason Momoa).
Courting Luck
The Day I Gave Away my Luck
I used to be a lucky person — you know, the person who wins random (small contests, not the lottery) and could be in the right place in the right time. Not that I never had setbacks or rejections, but that occasionally something delightfully unexpected would happen.
For the past few years, I feel like all my luck has gone, especially in the area of writing. Getting published is, to some extent, a matter of luck — having the right materials in the right place in the right time. This has so far, not happened to me. And I think it’s because I gave away my luck.
I did it for the purest of reasons, or the most obsessive of reasons. I was trying to be a good Christian and sacrifice myself for the good of others. There are ways of doing this that are helpful for the world, but I didn’t choose one of those. I instead decided I was unworthy of luck, given my privileged status, and so I gave up my luck. I said, “God, I don’t deserve my luck, please take it away from me.”
I brainwashed myself into believing that I didn’t deserve luck, and that other people deserved to have my luck. I believed that luck was a scarce commodity.
A Fanciful and Superstitious — and Conflicted Person
Writing this down in pixels, it all sounds very stupid, I admit. I am, however, a fanciful and superstitious person. I don’t believe in The Secret (a book about the “law of attraction”) because it’s very materialistic and I don’t believe the universe could or should shower that type of abundance on individuals.
I do believe, however, that my negative attitude may keep me from seeing the good side of things and might blind me — ok, fine, I believe that giving up my luck is refusing to see what the divine could be calling me to find. As I said, I’m hopelessly superstitious. I honestly believe that I had luck, I rejected luck, and I am now less lucky than I used to be. Or at least, I believe myself less lucky than I used to be. I don’t know what I believe.
I am a fanciful and superstitious and rational and really conflicted person right now.
A Ritual Would Be Nice Right Now
I am not a witch or a Wiccan or any sort of pagan, but I still see the value of ritual. How do I divorce ritual from religion? The same way millions of people across the world do. People who wear lucky socks are performing a ritual. Traditions are ritual. Going out to a prime rib dinner the night the COVID vaccination takes hold is a ritual (one I did the other night). So what do I have to lose?
Luck, if one thinks about it, is a type of optimism. It’s an optimism that the unexpected good thing can happen, that one does not have to exert infinite effort for something good to happen. Not like effort isn’t necessary, but that there comes a point where effort doesn’t work any longer, and that’s a great place for luck to intervene.
A luck ritual, in my opinion, would:
- Reattach me to my optimism that good things can happen without my control
- Tell me it’s okay to have good things happen to me
- Emphasize that optimism is self-care
What Does This Ritual Look Like?
Again, this is a psychological ritual (like lucky socks and Christmas china) rather than a pagan ritual, so I’m not calling up any spirits as much as I’m trying to make a break with old thought patterns. What I plan to do is:
- Take a bath in milk and honey bubble bath
- Write some journaling on luck using my favorite fountain pen
- Eat some bread with butter and honey (the milk and honey symbolism is deliberate symbolism)
- Find one of my four-leaf clovers in a book (or better, find one in the yard. We have some.)
What Do I Expect This to Do?
What I expect is that this will help me stop declaring myself unlucky, I will likely suffer less from griping about my bad luck this way. That itself would be an improvement. I hope that my better attitude will help me to see opportunities and make me resilient to adversity. I will believe that I am deserving of good things. And maybe, just maybe, I will be (or believe I am) luckier.
Words Like Me 