I’m on the road one last day. Travel has gotten old. I will have traveled 2000 miles in a week when this trip is done.
No inspiration yet. Probably because this van is not Starbucks. I miss Starbucks.
I could use a mini-vacation, a weekend trip to Kansas City to write and maybe pet kitties at a cat cafe. Anywhere but right here, where my knees are screaming and I can’t take pain meds.
I’m the one to your far left.
I go here every year to do moulage (casualty simulation) for a disaster training exercise called New York Hope. The people with me are. Fellow students and faculty from the Emergency and Disaster Management at Northwest Missouri State University. And my husband.
We went to Niagara Falls on our way home. Here we are again.
When I get home, I promise I’ll write.
Describe one habit that brings you joy.
I try to write, or at least do something that pertains to writing, every day. Writing, like any flow activity, gives me joy.
I love playing with words, finding the right words, using my skills to eliminate extraneous words. I love using special words, exact words. Creating worlds, making characters realistic, building conversations — all of these are parts of writing.
Sometimes it’s challenging to build in writing time. In the summer, where I have responsibilities but freedom in scheduling them, I have written daily after my daily “day job” tasks. So after I have worked on my new class for the day, and after grading for my internship class, I have time to write. This fall (which starts in a couple of weeks for me), I will not have that early afternoon time. So most days, I can write after work; other times it will have to be early evening. But it’s important that I write, because I need a little joy every day.
What are you curious about?
I was born with an exceptional amount of curiosity. An inconvenient amount, in fact. When I was a child, I had to be shamed into not asking personal questions or snooping in drawers. Luckily, I have grown up to constrain myself from my urge to know.
And I do have an urge to know everything. Curiosity is just one of the tools we have to learn about the world, and it’s a great thing for scientific inquiry. But my curiosity about the minutiae of daily life could get annoying quickly, particularly when it comes to medical stuff.
For example, I read the obituaries trying to find out how people died. Memorials provide this information, unless the family of the deceased want memorials to be given to the Humane Society or the decedent’s Alma mater, in which case my inquisitiveness is frustrated.
I am a frequent victim of clickbait. A headline like “Hollywood Star Falls Victim to Rare Disease”? I don’t know who the Hollywood star is, nor care, but I want to know all about the disease. I admit that ordinary gossip does little for me, but that rare disease? I’m there. (Note: it’s usually something like diabetes, not a rare disease.)
I resist the more rude parts of my curiosity, like asking someone why they went to the hospital. But I am forever, embarrassingly curious.
Sometimes my curiosity has its benefits. I am on my first day of moulage for New York Hope, making people up to look like human casualties of an inland hurricane. It helps to know what an open fracture, a bruised spleen, or a case of cholera look like from the outside. I’d show you a picture, but we’d have some people getting ill.
Two days in a van did not yield any inspiration. However, a couple new developments in my writing life occurred, one good, one bad.
The bad first: A submission of mine on Submittable was rejected. I’m not surprised; I haven’t been able to find this particular story a home. Maybe it’s not a good story. I like it, but I consider myself a proud mom of what might just be an unlikeable kid. I get lots of rejections as a writer; I keep trying.
The good development: my niece is working on the sketches for the cover of my latest novel, Reclaiming the Balance, and it is coming along nicely. Looks like I have no excuses for not publishing it this January.
I don’t know a single writer who doesn’t have imposter syndrome (Ok, I know one who appears not to; he’s insufferable). We all take rejections hard, and when facing success, we feel like we don’t deserve it. I’m not sure why the insecurities but they seem like a universal.
I will keep on plugging, keep on editing the novels I have in reserve, and keep on waiting for inspiration for some short stories.
How would you describe yourself to someone who can’t see you?
How would I describe myself to someone who can’t see me? I assume they never had eyesight. I would have to rely on other senses, wouldn’t I?
I am round. Plenty round. Here’s a hug. My nose slopes slightly, but it’s pretty average. I wear glasses; I almost never take them off. My hair is fine and somewhat unruly.
I am not considered beautiful. It’s not a big concern of mine. I’m sixty; I have aged out of beauty.
My voice is a pretty good indicator of how I look; sweet, like a sticky bun. You have all you need about me.
Just a heads-up. Starting on Tuesday, I will be reporting in sporadically at best for a week. I will be at my annual remote disaster exercise, New York Hope. Here, I will be doing casualty simulation (moulage) for a few days. This means that I will be applying theater makeup to volunteers to make them look like victims.
The basic injuries are lacerations, burns, impalements, bruises, and breaks. Moulage artists model lacerations and breaks with skin wax, burns and bruises with paints, and impalements with prosthetic plant-ons. There will be a lot of fake blood, which is made with liquid starch and food coloring. Illnesses are faked with cyanotic blue theater makeup, diaper rash cream, and glycerin water for sweat. Moulage is not for the faint of heart.
I will report when I can, but I will likely not be thinking about writing for the next few days. When I am in moulage mode, I am definitely in another world.
My name is Lauren Leach-Steffens; the Steffens got added when I got married. With a last name like “Leach”, it is only natural that one gets the nickname “Leachie”. This nickname annoyed me all throughout grade school, but I eventually accepted it.
The picture, by the way, is of Leach’s giant gecko (the gecko is not related to me.)So tha The nickname for it is the Leachie gecko. See how natural that is?
Then, in college, I became a denizen of the interactive computer habitat PLATO. PLATO was an educational system, but in addition to lessons, it had chats (called TERM-talk), topical threads (known as notesfiles), and email (called PNotes) — it was a lot like the Internet, only it had been around since the mid-70s. We had signons (what you’d call usernames, but they doubled as email addresses. Mine was lleach@pasrf (as in friend of a PASR programmer).
With a username of lleach, it was only natural to turn it into lleachie.
The name is pronounced in the typical English way: just like ‘leachie’, but spelled with two Ls. In Spanish, I guess it’s pronounced ‘yeachie’. A Polish friend of mine pronounces it ‘ell-ee-otch-ee’. I can’t say that’s wrong.
So that’s it. I have never run into a lleachie on the Internet who wasn’t me.
As I have bipolar disorder, I have to work carefully to maintain my emotional balance. I don’t want to become either hypomanic (a state of elation, grandiosity, irritability, and overwork) or depressed. This means I employ a variety of strategies to not only keep in balance, but provide a sense of well-being.
One strategy I rely on is a regular, adequate sleep cycle. I go to bed at the same time every night and wake up at the same time every morning. I do not take afternoon naps, and if I find myself sleeping more than 9 hours a night, I check in with my doctor. Lately, I’ve had daytime sleepiness, and I’m going to have a sleep study done to make sure there are no problems there.
Another strategy is to manage my emotions by cognitive journaling. In cognitive journaling, one confronts cognitive distortions, which are illogical ways we use to explain our emotions. For example, when we’re nervous about a test, saying “I know I’m going to fail the test” (a cognitive distortion known as fortune-telling). Or when we attribute a bad date to “nobody’s ever going to love me” (black-and-white thinking). Cognitive journaling helps us recognize that the response is illogical and helps replace that thought with a more logical one.
I want my balance to be a happy one, so I have a couple strategies that have been scientifically tested to work in increasing one’s well-being. I meditate (although lately, I have been falling asleep during meditation; see my sleep issues above). Meditation is an active brain state that has been shown to increase well-being.
I participate in flow activities (more on flow here). My favorite flow activity is writing. I can lose hours in writing, which is a sign of flow.
I practice gratitude, which in my case means spontaneous thanks to the universe for the things that have helped me in life. A great place to begin with that is with a journaling practice called “Three Good Things”. Here, you write three good things that happened during the day and explain why they happened in your life. This gives you not only gratitude, but a sense of efficacy — “I did something that helped put this into place.”
MSN today brought me an article on self-care activities (some of which are listed above) that will help provide a sense of balance. I could put a couple more of these in my routine; there’s always room for more tools in my toolbox.
I would highly recommend a routine of activities meant to balance one’s life. Work expectations often push us off-balance; family demands and news headlines pull us off our balance. Balance comes from within.
I’m trying not to write a lot about politics in this blog, because it’s a blog about writing. But if you read my works, you will get the idea of my political stances. In my writing, they look like this:
That many of my stories occur on a pacifist collective (that still struggles with these concepts) might help explain as well.
Some might argue that this list is not about politics at all, but about values. But that’s where our politics come from. The political climate in my country (US) tends to act as if one side has values and the other does not, but this is not the case. In some cases I am a political minority (with my pacifism stance, as I am a Quaker) but in others I’m a pretty average Social Democrat (if we had that party in my country.)
I know it’s controversial for a writer to talk about politics, but how can we not? Even in a genre like fantasy, where supposedly we’re divorced from real world matters, politics can seep into the writing. If you read me, it will be obvious where I sit.
Words Like Me 