I officially do not believe in The Secret or manifesting anything, even if I did before, which I didn’t. I recited that I wanted a good class, a productive class — and my computer went on the fritz. My lecture wended painfully slow and nearly content-free.
What now? I think the recitation still stays, because it focuses me and perhaps keeps my inner saboteur at bay.
Let this be a better day …
Let this be
Lately I have been using this to start my day. I don’t think it’s a prayer per se, because I have very mixed thoughts about God answering prayers, as much “Should God answer prayers” as “Does God answer prayers?” I see this more to focus myself, to choose the actions that will best advance the day the way I want to.
Left to myself, I have good days and bad days. I have productive days and days where I do little but surf, largely influenced by what is due that day and how I feel. This works great when I feel possessed by an idea, in creative mode, perhaps even in a micro-mania, or if I’m down and have the time to relax. Right now I have classes and emails and panicked students and struggles with the writing.
With the — meditation? Litany? Shopping list? My days haven’t changed so far. On Wednesday, I had a good, productive, rewarding day at work with students right on target, work getting done at a good clip, an affirming conversation with a student. On Friday, my students couldn’t focus on class, and I felt argumentative.
Today, Saturday, I started the recitation again: “let this be a good day, a productive day, a rewarding day, a beautiful day, a day that gives me hope.” The blog has been the first productive act, and I will put up a tik-tok and start editing a problem child of a manuscript by noon today. Hopefully, it will be a day that gives me hope.
I’d like to get to where I have nothing left to lose with my writing. Not to stop writing, but to write without an external reason. Not for readers, not for recognition, not for money, not to see my name in print. Just for the sheer joy of writing (when it is joy; sometimes it’s tedium).
I’m not there yet. I don’t care so much about the money, having probably earned only a couple hundred dollars so far. But I want people to read my books, comment about my books, and like my books. I have books with five reviews or fewer (and I have no way of knowing how many copies they’ve sold).
My dream is to have people want to write fanfic about my books, which I would let them do, keeping in mind the restrictions of the world I’ve built. I’d like to be a non-evil version of Marion Zimmer Bradley. This is far from the desire listed above.
Maybe the desire not to care is because there’s such a gap between where I am and where I’d like to be. Like I shot for the stars and ended up in the neighbor’s backyard. On the other hand, the freedom of not caring is exhilarating.
It’s a Monday, a quiet Monday, with no visitors and an hour till class. I’m prepared for class, as prepared as I’m going to be. I even cleaned the sticky residue of stickers from my employer-supplied laptop. No chaos, no disasters.
Knock on wood.
It’s the first full week of classes, and if I think things will stay quiescent, I have learned nothing from my 23 years (24?) here. Something will happen, whether it’s me passing out from the residue of Goo Gone fumes, a student with an out-of-commission car (Oops, already happened!), or the Internet crashing. I don’t trust the calmness.
Frighteningly, I don’t relish the calmness. Not wishing a disaster on someone, but I like at least some activity in my office hours. The student who can’t find the supplemental book at the bookstore, the visitor asking for direction to an office, or the visit from a former student —
None of which is happening now.
I’ll keep you posted.
I’ve discovered in the past few days that 33 people have read Kel and Brother Coyote Save the Universe. I don’t know how many people have read any of the Kringle books because I only find out about those who have reviewed it, but I have a few reviews on each. There are a few reviews on Gaia’s Hands as well. There is hope.
I would like more readers. Of course I would. One purpose of writing is to have something for people to read. I could act selflessly and deny that, but I don’t do selflessly well. My goals are to have a readership and maybe make enough money to defray the costs I incur for writing and editing programs, the occasional book cover, and conferences.
My mission and vision are important. My mission is what I want to accomplish now and my vision is the dream.
My mission: To write books for geeks of all ages who like their fantasies romantic and their romances fantastic.
My vision: To write worlds interesting enough that other people want to play in them.
I’m definitely fulfilling my mission. I need more of a readership to fulfill my vision, although my husband has written in the Archetype universe.
I think I need to post my mission and vision statements on the office wall, along with my two posters from books I created. This should focus me toward what’s important to me — the writing and the connecting.
I’m sitting by the window at Starbucks. My husband sits across from me, finishing his first screenplay, based on my first Christmas novel. The Kringle Conspiracy has sold a few copies, and I have distributed free copies to almost 5000 people on BookFunnel in exchange for registration on my mailing list.
It looks like it wants to rain out. It rained earlier, but we could use more rain. I could use more rain, wind, and petrichor to remind me that summer will be over soon. I talk about the weather a lot, because the weather always surrounds us and engages our senses.
Writers use weather to inform their scenes, but not always in the way we expect. Do happily ever afters always happen under sunny skies with rainbows? I can see scenarios where the last scene, the big kiss, happens in the pouring rain, or in a snowstorm. Each of those would communicate two different feels — the pouring rain might be tempestuous or cathartic, the snowstorm cozy or threatening. A battle in a torrential rainstorm would be grueling, but on a sunny day, be ironic.
I want you to take a moment and imagine some weather, either some that you love or some you hate. Then tell a story about what happens in that weather, describing the air, the sky, the precipitation (if any). Make the scene about the weather and what happens in this weather. Write it down.
You are now a writer!
The semester is approaching, and I’m sitting in the neighborhood Starbucks. Two days until my freedom (such as it was) ends, and my fall semester begins.
Fall semester, for faculty, begins with an all-faculty and staff picnic at the Pavilion on campus. It’s a ritual, one of many that start the school year. The Friday meetings (I’m booked from 8-4 and expect my eyes to glaze over by then), fireworks, even cleaning my office and buying office supplies I don’t need are my beginning of semester rituals. (I tried to convince my husband that a new iPhone fit the category of something I didn’t need but he didn’t jump on it.)
I am a great fan of rituals. Perhaps this comes from my childhood as a marginal Roman Catholic that helped me spot rituals in the least likely places (like a Quaker meeting) and caused me to make my own. Rituals help me focus, help me change my direction or rededicate myself to my intentions.
For example, let’s take the shopping for office equipment. Even though I do almost all my work on computers, I still associate pencils and pens with cognitive work and scissors and markers with creativity. Hence my ritual of buying those for the new school year. To be honest, I do use them (although with the markers, not as often as I should.)
I’ve been struggling with writing lately, focusing instead on marketing and this blog and TikTok. I wonder if rituals would help me in writing as much as they help me at the beginning of the semester. A new start, a refocus — I need this in my writing because I have drifted away from writing again.
What would be a good ritual to start me writing again? I asked my husband, whose response was “I don’t know”. Guess I’m on my own for this.
I don’t think I need new pens for motivation. I might need to do something in the office to make it feel more mine and less like some place my husband has sentenced me to. I used to work in the living room, and I felt more motivated because I wasn’t alone. The office is small and cluttered, and there is little to be done about it because much of it is items needing to be filed with no room to file them.
A ritual … I’m going to have to think about it.
I spent time with my family for the first time in over two years (longer in a couple of cases). COVID and distance kept me away from them; time passed faster than I noticed. But here I am in my hometown, catching up with my family.
My family, for the most part, talks a lot. Much of our communication manifests itself in storytelling. Seldom does someone ask a leading question like “How was your hotel?”, although those happen, particularly from the men in the family (outnumbered by females.) We tell our business through stories, we relate to each other through stories.
My older niece Robyn pointed out that the meaning and context of words is very important to our family. She’s right; we pay attention to these things and pride ourselves on the use of words. It would be understandable to think we’re a college-educated family, yet I am the only one who has gone to college.
As an illustration, Robyn launched into a discussion of swear words and what they mean in context. In a church-run coffee shop, with judicious use of the F-word. (I thought we would get thrown out of the place because the owners didn’t understand that F*ck meant different things in different contexts.) My niece Rachel expressed her preference for non-swearing creative phrases. As she is an artist, this is not surprising. Nor is it surprising that Robyn, who plays on a co-ed hockey team, dropped an approximate 18 F-bombs. My F-bomb use was limited to six or eight.
The introverts in the family (my dad and sister) ask questions and impart information. I suspect they despair at getting a word in edgewise. My husband is also an introvert, and he sits in the corner and interjects things so that nobody can hear him over the loud conversation. I thought I’d become an introvert in my old age, but if I can hold my own in my family, I figure I must be an extrovert still.
I find myself tired after a conversation with my family. Stretching back into our histories, slipping into challenge, playing with words, putting forth ideas — all that invigoration takes a toll on me. But I’m spoiled with conversation like this, so I have to get it when I can.
Sorry I haven’t written lately, but I spent the last two days riding cross-country in a van in order to spend three days making volunteers into victims. It’s New York Hope time again, and my skill set in moulage gets a workout at a disaster training center nicknamed “Disaster Disneyland”.
I don’t have any pictures to post because they’re just too gory. For example, a long gash down one’s arm with plenty of blood. Or a broken leg with the bone sticking out. A crush injury with lots of bruising. That kind of thing. No burns on this round, but those are fun to make too. We make the injuries with wax and paints and gel and prop impalements.
What do we do with the made-up victims? We train them to emulate victims in a big exercise where emergency and disaster management students work in teams to search and rescue in various habitats, triage, and provide basic first aid. We want to make this as believable as possible, so we have the volunteer role-players.
I do two major exercises a year, this one here in upstate New York, and one in Maryville where I live. I also do some smaller exercises like the docudrama in Savannah this year.
This is something I live for, a hobby that means something, and appeals to my creative side.
Wouldn’t you like being made up as an injury victim?
I can feel the end of the summer. The County Fair is over, the weather is boiling, and I’ve done all my digital setup for the fall semester. I always do it early, according to my Facebook posts from years past, mostly to prepare myself for the fact that my days will be fuller and more carefree, and there will not be nearly as much free time to write.
School starts August 17, less than a month from now. Meetings start a week before that, and there will (hopefully) be a beginning-of-semester cookout for faculty and staff which represents the beginning of the semester more than any ritual could.
What have I accomplished? I’m a quarter of the way through one book, an eighth of the way through another, and I don’t know which one to write. I have finalized It Takes Two to Kringle, which is waiting only for some last minute putting together before I submit it to Kindle. I have edited an old but (in my opinion) outstanding book called Prodigies, which I hope to send off to agents soon. I neglected my garden again. I relaxed.
Life is good and I passed through the summer doldrums without much damage. Soon I will go through the beginning of semester highs (If this sounds like bipolar, it is, sort of). But it’s my cycle of the year and I will do my best to meet it.
Words Like Me 