Writing and the sickies

Both boys have a cold at the moment, just enough that it's warranted a brief cessation of hockey and skating.  They seem to be over the worst of it, but are both rather tired this afternoon, which means they're more than happy to "rest" on the couch with a snack and a drink, quietly watching episodes of Lego Ninjago on the PVR.

This is rather far from my normal writing time, but I'm taking advantage of the brief lull in activity to do a bit of scribbling.  I have a couple of characters that need to be fleshed out a bit, and a bit of transitional material that I need to write, along with a few other odds and ends.  The dogs are both keeping an eye on the boys, and the door's open so I can hear if either begins the coughing-without-end thing that's been going on for the last couple of days.

I think so much of finding time to write when you're a parent is seizing opportunities as they present themselves.  If I'm not willing to take pen to paper when a few spare moments present themselves, I'd never get anything written.  And the ironic thing is that I'm far, far more productive now than I ever was, before kids.  Go figure, eh?

This afternoon's writing accomplishments, over the course of an hour and a half or so:

• brief thank you note to a friend who allowed, on last minute notice, two of my students to interview him for a project (now I just need to pick up a Tim Hortons coffee card for him so I can mail it)
• several brief work-related email suggesting revisions to students' assignments
• one blog post
• two Christmas lists typed out
• a few article ideas jotted down to pursue at a later date
• one rough (and I do mean rough) draft of an article pitch
• two LinkedIn connections updated
• resume updated to include latest curriculum development project
• list made for items that I need to include when I update my teaching portfolio (hopefully I'll get around to this over Christmas)
• one character sketch written
• 462 words added to the novel I'm working on

Weekend madness

I've come to the conclusion that there are days where, if I want to do any writing at all, I've got to grab seconds and make them count.  Any corner or flat spot will do, so long as I have a moment or three to scribble something down.  My notebook is beginning to look a bit worse for wear, but it's brimming with ideas.  Now if I only had the time to elaborate on them!

On the plus side, I'm getting better at scribbling, and at taking moments when they appear to write something down.  On the down side, I've now got notes scribbled in a dozen different places, which does not bode well for (1) keeping them or (2) actually doing something with them.  Thus, when Nanowrimo is done, which it will be soon, I think I'm going to spend an afternoon typing my notes into Scrivener, which I've just started using and have completely fallen in love with.

In the meantime, I literally have a re-useable grocery bag sitting on the office floor, collecting remnants, ideas, scraps, and other detritus.  It's an odd reliquary, but it seems to be working.  Now if I could only find the top of my desk!

That won't be the case today, as we're off to skating with the boys, then they're off to Grandma's for the afternoon while we do a bit of Christmas shopping and have supper.  Then home to do homework and prepare for tomorrow, which includes another loaf of bread, a batch of muffins, and lunches all round.  But I'm still going to carve out a few minutes to scribble *something*, even if it's only a few words.

The dishwasher whirrs cyclically in the background, blade turning, turning, turning, doing a job I loathe. The oven beeps, up to temperature. I stop to pour a cup of coffee for D—would be nice if someone did that for me once in a while—then chastise myself for being snarky. Thing 1 calls from the bathroom, in the tub, “Mommy, Mommy, I need you.” “Just a second Thing 1,” I say, finishing with D’s coffee. Thing 1 needs a washcloth, so I flip a shark one into the bathtub with him. Breakfast is on the go, but my stomach is staging a mass revolt, so I grab a bag of dried fruit and nuts from the fridge to munch whilst the potatoes are cooking. Only then do I sit down to write.

One hundred and thirty words written, am just beginning to think of what I’d like to write next, then the timer for the potatoes starts beeping, just as the coffee pot beeps that it’s finished brewing. Against this cacophony, I deal with the potatoes, get Thing 1 out of the tub, consume a handful of fruits and nuts, and begin again only to pause … the potatoes, now in the frying pan, need to be stirred.

People ask me how I manage to do so much when I’m so busy … before I had a family, I had to concentrate, focus, and couldn’t write unless the circumstances were perfect. Now, kids, dogs, the craziness of daily life are things that cannot be ignored, which must be worked “around,” rather than through. Thing 2 stops to tell me he played “this many games of Mario Kart,” hands splayed wide to show he had 10 whole races to himself. I nod, smile, and say, “That’s great, little man.” Another pause to check the potatoes and add bacon to the other frying pan. Wet towels picked up off the bathroom floor, pjs and used wash cloths put in the laundry hamper, and sit down again for another few sentences.

I’ll supposedly have a bit of time to myself this afternoon to write, edit, and get a bit of work done, but I still use these odd, in-between moments as I’ve learned, the hard way, that unless I make time to write (and even a few seconds to scribble something down counts), I just don’t do it.

I pause, taking a brief moment amongst the dishwasher, kids, dogs, and Sunday morning talk shows to contemplate, breath a deep breath … it’s not quiet, but it’s calm, if only momentarily. I look forward to this afternoon, but take comfort in the busy-ness that surrounds me.

I took a brief look at my writing list's prompts for the day, but haven’t yet had a chance to discover where they might take me. A line from the prompter's discussion of the weather, however, has managed to get itself stuck to the bulletin board of my mind: “It amazes me that I used to house such contradictory sentiments.” Looking at my writing process, at what it was and what it now is, I can embrace this statement whole-heartedly. While there are, yes, times that I’d be willing to do many things to have a few moments of calmness amidst the chaos, those moments are few and far between. I love my chaotic life, and find that, strangely, I’m far more productive (writing-wise) than I ever was before. Go figure, eh?

It's quiet. What are they doing now?

I've had a few minutes this morning, between making breakfast, doing dishes, and sorting, loading, unloading, folding and putting away laundry. I actually drank an entire cup of coffee before it got cold. Something must be wrong!

The boys are almost always noisy, and combined with our two English Springer Spaniels, the house is almost always in some moving form of chaos. Not this morning, which has made me stick my head out of the office several times to make sure that they're not *doing* anything. Bizarre.

We're now a month into kindergarten for the eldest, Tae Kwon Do is well underway, and skating lessons started this week. Plus the eldest and I went for a run last night (well, as far as a five-year-old runs, but we still averaged a fairly decent pace). My theory: they're tired! We're usually quite active, but I think that they're going to take a bit to adjust to the added activities, which means I might have the odd morning like this one, where I can write for more than five connected minutes at a time. How heavenly!


PS ... all hell broke loose just as I hit "Post." LOL ... at least I got a few quiet minutes to write ;-)

Oy vey!

It's been a busy few weeks, with the eldest starting Kindergarten, the start of a new academic year for work, a short-term curriculum development contract, and a renewed commitment to my own fitness.

I've been home all week with the boys as they've both got pneumonia. I've managed to teach all my classes, with a little bit of creative child care scheduling, but haven't managed to do much else this week. Now that they're both on the mend (but still coughing far too much to go to school or daycare), I've sat down to try to get at least a little bit of work done.

I had the boys fairly well trained over the summer that Mommy needed a bit of time every day to do her work, and now I'm having to reinforce that. On the plus side, they're taking it fairly well, but I think I'll be waiting until their afternoon naps (and trust me, they'll both need one today, especially at the rate that they're coughing) to get any significant writing done.

That being said, this morning has been fairly productive, with about 2 000 words written, 8 email messages responded to, and a bit of online research. All that in amongst breakfast, one potty incident, three "disagreements" between the boys requiring mommy intervention, one crazy barking dog, one phone call, and one search for a lost website bookmark. I'm not feeling overly productive, but looking at this list, I'm amazed that I managed to get anything done at all. ;-)

My cluttered desk

It must be part of the Mom Rules, somewhere in the fine print, that Mom's desk is the place to put things without homes. At the moment, most of mine is fairly clean. But there remain things that make me sing in my head “one of these things is not like the other.”

At the moment, my desk contains the usual writerly detritus (pens, Post-It notes, stapler, desk lamp, clock, a few random pieces of paper in my to-do pile, a three-hole punch, a half-filled notebook, and a copy of the writer's book I'm currently reading. In addition to this, however, are the following:

• a 6370D Makita cordless drill
• a half-used box of #8x1¾ Robertson wood screws
• a 6-inch Robertson bit
• an Ironman battlesuit card
• one orange shoe lace
• one blue shoe lace
• one 6” Ironman
• half of a Transformers plane
• the string (complete with anchors) from a Playmobil jungle set
• one of the dogs' shock collars (including charger and remote)
• a Ziploc bag containing parts and software for the boys' LeapPads

Not bad, actually. The drill's off to the side, with its bit and screws. Not really in the way, but in the way nonetheless. It needs to go back downstairs to the workshop, and have its parts housed in their respective homes. The LeapPad stuff belongs in the filing cabinet, but is out because I need to remember to update both LeapPads. The toys, well they're rather self-explanatory. They just need to be put back where they belong, but were likely hauled in here by the boys whilst either my husband or I was on the computer. The shock collar doesn't really have a home, which is why it's here ... better here than on the kitchen counter, anyway.

It seems, however, that anything that comes into the house that doesn't have an immediate (or immediately accessible) home ends up here. My husband's papers land here, when his half of the desk has begun to overflow. His clothes, discarded as he gets ready for work, end up on my desk and chair. And don't even get me started on how it is that I have a perfectly good year-old computer at the other end of the desk, yet end up using my 6-1/2 year old Linux box for most of my writing ...

In the meantime, I've gained a half-opened package of juice boxes and the wrapper from a granola bar, courtesy of the youngest.

What kind of a writer am I?

I used to be an “I'll do it later, when I've got time to focus” kind of writer. That was before I had two jobs, a husband who's out of town frequently, two medium-sized dogs, and two kids. Ha! How things change. Now I'm an “I'll write whenever, wherever, however, with whatever's on hand” kind of writer. And the funny thing is that I'm more prolific now than I was back then. Go figure.

I don't think I need to answer the more obvious parts of the “what keeps you from writing” question. One of the not-so-obvious things that keeps me from writing is my perception of its value. I carve time out from my busy schedule for at least an hour of yoga a day, plus strength training and cardio (both of which play second fiddle to yoga, if there's any question of lack of time). I have a number of reasons for this, but the primary one is that I value it, and my family has grown to accept it and value its benefits (both for me and for them) as well.

Writing, on the other hand, doesn't seem to rate the same level of value, and I always seem to find excuses to put it off, “just for a bit.” Knowing the success I've had integrating daily yoga into my life, my goal for July is to make sure that I'm doing the same with my writing. Part of the problem is my perception of it, especially my often incorrect assumption that I'll carve time out to do it later. A second part of the problem is that I haven't published or presented anything in a while (since late October of 2011, to be exact), so there's the perception, both on my part and on my family's (okay, my husband's) that the time isn't necessarily worth the outcome. Personally, I know that this is primarily due to my lack of time spent (1) producing material for publication and (2) polishing and sending out material for publication. The third part of the problem is that I spend a *lot* of time writing in my “real” job as a professor of English and Communications. So when I come home at the end of a workday, I often don't feel like writing much of anything at all.

Just as I've spent the last six months slowly moving my family towards healthier behaviours (eating, exercise, stress reduction, etc.), I'm planning on spending the summer carving out and keeping time to write. I'm going to make sure that if I put my writing off, it does get done later. I'm going to work toward publishing, with a goal of submitting several pieces by the end of summer (and I'm aiming for those to be *gasp* non-academic pieces, to boot). And because I'm currently off for the summer, writing “too much” during the workday isn't going to be a problem.

I've learned from the last six months of focus on my own health that habits, once formed, are hard to break. I had to skip yoga one day earlier this week (it's been a week of tornadoes, torrential rain, and overall wild weather ... house preservation had to come first). The next morning I was already busy plotting how I'd work the lost time into my schedule, and managed to do two hours that day, rather than my normal one. I'm hoping that, with perseverance, I'll see the same success with writing ... making a habit of it.

Ideal writing setting? LOL ... it used to be quiet, peaceful, perfection. Everything had to be “just so.” Now I'm writing whilst the kids are playing some weird game in the background involving Hot Wheels cars and a lot of crashing, my husband's busy trying to keep them in line while watching Saturday morning talking heads (which I can't stand ... hence my writing at the moment), the washing machine's whirring away in the background, and one of the dogs keeps barking at the birds outside. My desk looks like a small bomb has gone off on it, and I'm surrounded by Rubbermaid tubs of camping gear that needs to be put back into our basement. Yet I'm still writing ... so at the moment, I'm going to say it's finding the time and space to actually sit down and write. I'm aiming, by the end of the summer, for it to be a regular time and space in which to write, not entirely free of distractions, but one in which interruptions are only tolerated for specific reasons. I'd love a door on my office, but that's just not going to happen ... so I'll settle for creating intangible boundaries, instead.

Ideal time? During morning coffee or after yoga, which is usually done in the evening. I'm not overly productive, creativity-wise, during the afternoon, although that's a good time for busy-work and editing. I'm not exactly a morning person, though, so early-ish morning writing isn't usually practical. I've trained the boys from a young age that they're not to bother me during the 20 minutes or so it takes to drink a cup of coffee, so am aiming for the next couple of months to take that time to write, as well. I'd love to have the entire morning to write, everyday, which is what I did when writing my thesis for my MA ... hopefully I'll be able to do that again!