Our long-time blogmate Brittany Vandeputte was recently published in the Petigru Review! I stole the following from Brittany’s blog:

Yesterday I received my two free author copies of The Petigru Review. It felt good to hold a big chunk of a book in my hands, flip to the table on contents, and see my name listed three times. The $15 I made in “royalties” felt good, too. It brought the total profits from my writing to date up to $115. What a lucrative career choice I’ve made for myself…

Obviously I’m not in it for the money. It’s more the satisfaction of knowing someone else read my writing and thought other people would like it, too. That feels good. And it also feels good to be published in a literary journal named for James L. Petigru, SC stateman, who famously said “South Carolina is too small to be a republic, and too large to be an insane asylum.” I love my adopted state, but as a born and bred Tarheel, I do snicker (quietly) to myself whenever I hear that quote.

I had hoped that I could brag that it was now available on amazon.com, but it isn’t yet. It is, however, available at a local bookstore, Fiction Addiction.

I’m only doing my due dilligence by pointing out that it would fill a stocking nicely and would most certainly impress all your book-loving friends with its sophisticated, artsy, literary-journalness. Plus, I have it on good authority that you might even persuade one of the contibutors to autograph your copy.

Brava, Brittany! We’re so proud!

A roundup of recent mentions of Studio Mothers on the interwebs!

1. Kate at Simply Mother blogged about the article on time management that I posted last week. Kate credits the find to Tara, The Organic Sister, who tweeted about our post. Thanks to both Kate and Tara! These are two bloggers that you don’t want to miss. Seriously.
2. Christine McCombe at Spaces Between blogged about Alison Wells’s post on 5 ways to be a writer when you’re not writing. Christine’s blog is another lovely find.
3. Alison’s post was also mentioned by our friend Liz Massey at Write Livelihood, in the context of a terrific roundup of writing and editing links. Thanks, Liz!
4. And this is very cool…Studio Mothers has been featured in an academic paper about blogging! The author is Cathy Coley’s niece. She also posted us on Tumblr. Thanks for including us, Libby!

New friends = lots more blog reading to catch up on!

Our friend Debra Bellon, a writer and filmmaker who lives in Toulouse, has a two-year-old son and a brand-new baby girl. Debra has been creatively percolating during the past couple of years, as many of us do while we’re otherwise occupied caring for little ones. To that end, Debra just launched a new blog site for her poetry: No Haikus. Debra says, “I’m going to see if I can write a poem a day, with each poem using a word from the last, if that makes any sense.” She has asked for support and encouragement from the Studio Mothers community — so please visit Debra’s blog from time to time. You know how having an audience helps to keep us honest and committed!

Félicitations, Debra! We much look forward to seeing more of your work.

My husband often forwards me tidbits from the interwebs that he knows I’ll find interesting. Last week he sent me an article about time management that really blew my mind. In some ways I think it’s the paradigm shift I’ve been looking for, as I often feel lost in the vortex of caring for young children and stepping between motherhood and work.

The answer to feeling overwhelmed and overbooked is NOT throwing more time at your workload — it’s about prioritizing and working in a more condensed framework. It’s about working smarter, not working MORE. Just what busy mothers need, right? We can’t add more hours to our day, but we can use what we have more efficiently WITHOUT running around like maniacs.

This article was truly an eye-opener for me. There’s even discussion of synthesizing parenthood, domestic life, and work. Here’s an excerpt (although I do hope you read the whole thing):

I must emphasize that I’m not some laid-back lifestyle entrepreneur who monitors an automated business from a hammock in Aruba. I have a normal job (I’m a postdoc) and a lot on my plate. This past summer, for example, I completed my PhD in computer science at MIT. Simultaneous with writing my dissertation I finished the manuscript for my third book, which was handed in a month after my PhD defense and will be published by Random House in the summer of 2010. During this past year, I also managed to maintain my blog, Study Hacks, which enjoys over 50,000 unique visitors a month, and publish over a half-dozen peer-reviewed academic papers.

Put another way: I’m no slacker. But with only a few exceptions, all of this work took place between 8:30 and 5:30, only on weekdays. (My exercise, which I do every day, is also included in this block, as is an hour of dog walking. I really like my post-5:30 free time to be completely free.)

I call this approach fixed-scheduled productivity, and it’s something I’ve been following and preaching since early 2008. The idea is simple:

Fix your ideal schedule, then work backwards to make everything fit — ruthlessly culling obligations, turning people down, becoming hard to reach, and shedding marginally useful tasks along the way.

The beneficial effects of this strategy on your sense of control, stress levels, and amount of important work accomplished, is profound.

<snip>

Michael Simmons’ [business] expanded quickly in the years following college graduation. Around the time I was reading The 4-Hour Work Week, I started to discuss the possibility that Simmons tone down the hours. It was his company, I argued, so why not take advantage of this fact to craft an awesome life.

Among the specific topics we discussed, I remember suggesting that Simmons cut down the time spent on e-mail and social networks.

“This isn’t optional for me,” he explained. “Any of these contacts could turn into a important partner or sale.”

But then Simmons’ daughter, Halle, was born.

Simmons’ work schedule reduced from 10 to 12 hours days to 3 to 5 hour days. He took care of the baby in the morning, then worked in the afternoon while his wife, and company co-founder, took over the childcare responsibilities. Evenings were family together time.

Halle forced Simmons into the type of constrained schedule that he had previously declared impossible. And yet the business didn’t flounder.

“The baby turns ’shoulds’ into ‘musts’,” Simmons explained to me. “In the past I used to put off key decisions, or saying ‘no’, because I didn’t want to deal with the discomfort. Now I have no choice. I have to make the decisions because my time has been slashed in half.”

“Since out daughter was born about a year ago, our business has more than doubled.”

The Fixed-Schedule Effect

Collins, Saunders, and Simmons all share a similar discovery. When they constrained their schedule to the point where non-essential work was eliminated and colleagues and clients had to retrain their expectations, they discovered two surprising results.

First, the essentials — be it making sales calls, or focusing on the core research behind a book — are what really matter, and the non-essentials — be it random e-mail conversations, or managing an overhaul to your blog template — are more disposable than many believe.

Second, by focusing only the essentials, they’ll receive more attention than when your schedule was unbounded. The paradoxic effect, as with Collins’ bestsellers, or Saunders and Simmons’ fast-growing businesses, you achieve more results.

Living the Fixed-Scheduled Lifestyle

The steps to adopting fixed-schedule productivity are straightforward:

1. Choose a work schedule that you think provides the ideal balance of effort and relaxation.
2. Do whatever it takes to avoid violating this schedule.

This sounds simple. But of course it’s not. Satisfying rule 2 is non-trivial. If you took your current projects, obligations, and work habits, you’d probably fall well short of satisfying your ideal schedule.

Here’s a simple truth that you must confront when considering fixed-schedule productivity: sticking to your ideal schedule will require drastic actions. For example, you may have to:

• Dramatically cut back on the number of projects you are working on.
• Ruthlessly cull inefficient habits from your daily schedule.
• Risk mildly annoying or upsetting some people in exchange for large gains in time freedom.
• Stop procrastinating.

In the abstract, these are all hard goals to accomplish. But when you’re focused on a specific goal — “I refuse to work past 5:30 on weekdays!” — you’d be surprised by how much easier it becomes to deploy these strategies in your daily life.

 
Read the full article here. Really, it’s worth the read!

I’ve already begun applying these principles to my work life, and I see how powerful this approach can be. Knowing that I need to tie up all loose ends by a certain time (various intervals throughout the day) really helps me stay focused. It’s kind of like applying the urgency of NaNoWriMo to your regular schedule. Do it now; there’s a deadline; stay focused. When you know there really are only 6 hours to get a project completed (rather than telling yourself you’ll work a second shift to get it done) you don’t waste time on Facebook or comparison shopping prices for Seventh Generation Diapers online. And in the end, what do you get? A finished project AND an evening to spend doing whatever you want to do. Suddenly there is time for creativity, reading, whatever. Sounds so simple, I know, but I can’t tell you how much I DON’T do that when left to my own instincts.

Can you see ways of applying these principles to the domestic side of life? Obviously, children aren’t going to observe a “fixed” schedule, no matter how much we might want them to, but there must be ways to apply the “container” approach in a way that makes the domestic scene feel less overwhelming. Your thoughts?

The point here is that the bonds formed during NaNoWriMo should continue beyond November — so keep us in the loop, NaNo winners

Cartoon courtesy Inky Girl — thanks, as always.

crossposted from musings in mayhem

I am happy to have taken part in NaNoWriMo this year for the first time. It put me into a good lead on a companion book to my first novel, and now both need some serious editing. I lost my momentum between lots of doctor appointments for my whole family, getting quite ill myself and caring for sick kids, then my back went out as we leaned toward Thanksgiving, and I got hung up in word count rather than having fun enjoying writing well.

That last part was what killed the project for me. Not the whole project, I am happy to continue work on this particular piece, but I want to go about it in the way that is familiar to me. I am an editing nightmare to some, but I’ll tell you, that is what I really enjoy about writing as I write, the scribbles and rewording, the back-typing and rewording, the considering of the scene from an entirely different angle, etc. It’s what I enjoy about the middle of breadmaking, too: the kneading, the punching it into form.

I have just a few days left to try to make it to 50,000 words. I am at 19,201 and have my family home, no one at work, no one at school or at senior exercise programs until the thirtieth. I don’t think reaching 50,000 is my personal goal anymore. A children’s novel is typically about 30,000 and I don’t want to just write crap for filler for a contest that has lost meaning for me in it’s final goal. I’ve also lost my thread plotwise and feel like I’m wasting precious word count time doing what I actually love about writing and my process in it. That is indicative that it’s time for me to move on and refocus without the contest looming.

For now, for me, this year 19,201 is a fantastic stopping point. Now I can sink my teeth back into the edits of the first novel and then run right into edits on the second I started because of Nano.

Does this then make me a loser if I am not a Nano winner? Certainly not. I have 19,201 words written that I didn’t have before I started NaNoWriMo. That’s a big win in my book. I’ve never written 19,000 words toward one thing in three weeks time in my whole life, nevermind with a houseful of sickies and also school days off throughout the month.

I may not have hit 50,000, but I did a lot more than I would have if I hadn’t tried.

The latest installment of cool creative mom blogs and websites worth a visit!

Creative Mums: An Australian site providing networking, support, and business resources to creative mothers.

Maternal Spark: Inspiration and support for creative mamas of all types.

She Writes: An extensive network and forum for writers.

As most mothers are painfully aware, transitions can be difficult for children — and mamas. I’m not talking about those big transitions like starting school, or moving — I’m talking specifically about those little daily leaps from one activity or focus to the next.

I’m hoping that my dear Studio Mothers community can help me with a particularly sticky transition that crops up in my schedule tree times a week. On the days that I work, my sitter leaves the house at about 4:40. I’m usually working frantically right up until the last possible moment. Then I emerge from my work space and greet my little guys (who I have likely seen at several intervals during the day).

Here’s the thing: Ironically, I almost dread this moment. I’m happy to see my little boys, and they’re happy to see me. We share hugs. But the transition is hard. I’m still in work brain, and I have a hard time switching gears. The boys are hyped up because the sitter is leaving and Mom is taking over. It’s a transition. And the big question looms: What do we do NOW? There is often a full hour or more before I need to start dinner. We usually just spend that time hanging out in the playroom, if we don’t have to get in the car to drive an older sibling somewhere. But that hour always feels awkward. I feel like I should be doing something really cool with the kids during that time. Craft projects are pretty much impossible right now, however, as the older of the two boys is 4.5 and the youngest is 18 months. We can’t yet play a board game or do anything particularly structured. I also often feel anxious about preparing dinner; will my little one “allow” me to cook? Or will he be hanging on my leg, crying for my attention, making me wish we’d just ordered pizza again?

I would really like to develop some kind of ritual for easing back into the mom role. Maybe that means stopping work five minutes earlier and getting myself sorted out and mentally prepared. Maybe it means some kind of “thing” that I do with the boys — something that I can look forward to, and they can look forward to — that will ease the transition. Maybe I need to plan that pre-dinner hour in advance, so that I feel like we’re using the time to the fullest.

One thing is for sure: I need to learn to wrap up any loose ends BEFORE the end of my work day. If I try to sneak back onto my laptop, or check mail/facebook/twitter on my iPhone, I always feel guilty and/or disaster ensues. I don’t WANT to do that. So I’m not going to do that anymore. (Stake in ground. You are all my witnesses.)

Do you have any thoughts about ways to make that time the BEST hour of the day — something I really look forward to — rather than something I feel ambivalent about? I’m hoping that if I turn this hour into what I hope it can be, dinner preparation will be easier too, because the boys will feel like they had my full attention before I start cooking. The whole evening will probably flow more smoothly if I get things off to a good start at 4:40.

Any ideas?

Courtesy Inky Elbows — thanks, Debbie!

You think I would have figured some of this stuff out by now, seeing as I have a few years of experience in the motherhood department. My oldest is nearly 19 years old (freshman in college) and my youngest is 18 months old. Five kids in total: three teenagers, a preschooler, and a toddler. Many people smack their heads, V8 style, when I tell them I have five kids. As in, who on Earth would be nuts enough to have five kids? I don’t usually give it much thought. Well, obviously I didn’t give it any thought at all, or I never would have had five children. Duh.

Just this past month, I had an epiphany about motherhood — something that helped me understand what fuels the “mommy wars” (mothers working outside the home versus SAHMs). I sort of straddle the two groups, as I work from home 30 hours a week. I have a babysitter here in my house three full days a week, so I’m not on duty during that time, but the kids often run into my workspace and I inevitably interact with them throughout the day. They know I’m here. When I was nursing, my babysitter would bring the baby to me for feeding. But I was fortunate to have that luxury. Without question, I get a significant break from having to prepare food and change diapers and be the one in charge of keeping everyone alive. Oh, and I get to focus on something aside from my kids: my work.

While my work has many stresses — impossible deadlines, panicked clients, difficult personalities, too much to do in too little time — it’s still my own domain. I have clients, not bosses. It’s up to me to prioritize and manage my workload. I’m really only accountable to myself. If my clients aren’t happy, then they won’t  be my clients for very long. (And I have the delicious flexbility of being able to run out for a couple of hours to get my hair done or go to a doctor’s appointment without dragging the little ones with me. That’s huge.)

I find that on my workdays, when I step into my office/library/workspace at 8:30 in the morning, a wave of relief washes over me. I don’t always love my work, and it isn’t my reason for living, but I do love being the master of my own domain, and not having to keep anyone else alive. I’ll be honest. On the days when I don’t work, I often look at the clock and think “My God, it’s only 3:00. What are we going to do until dinnertime?” On my work days, I never look at the clock and wish it read a few hours later than it does. This is why SAHMs are like: “You just don’t understand how hard this is.“ And the women who are earning paychecks are like: “I work my butt off all day for a difficult boss and THEN I get to come home to my second job — domestic life. You just don’t understand how hard this is.”

I get it. Working fulltime outside the house is extremely challenging. (I’ve never done it, so I can only imagine. It seems like an impossible proposition.) But staying at home with your young kids fulltime requires a very different kind of sacrifice, even if you love being there. I hate to say it, because I’m sure some won’t like me for it, but I think that the sacrifice is you.

I recently had several occasions to spend some time away from my little ones. A handful of long days out of the house, and then earlier this month, I went away with two of my teenagers for three full days to visit the oldest at college. The two little ones stayed at home with dad.

I began to notice something interesting. When I am not with my little guys, I am somehow more myself. I found that the way I parent my teenagers was actually different when we were away from the toddler and preschooler. I had the time to formulate a complete thought; I had the ability to focus and connect with the older kids. I connected with them as me, not as a harried mother. I began to recognize myself again. Oh, right! This is who I am. I felt more emotionally centered; less like I might burst into tears just because two unrelated things happened to go wrong at the same time. I had reserves. There is a French phrase that doesn’t translate very well but described the sensation exactly: I felt good in my skin.

I’m fascinated by this discovery. I am not saying that I don’t love spending time with my young boys, because I do. Yes, there are challenges, but there is a lot of fun, a lot of laughs, and a lot of cuddles. I have always adored the period of infancy. I will admit, however, that during the weeks when I’m short on babysitting or end up spending more time with the boys than usual, it’s not always so much fun. I am coming to understand that I need my three work days to do my thing. Even though my work can be stressful, it is at times satisfying. And, most importantly, it doesn’t involve keeping anyone alive.

There is something about the intensity of caring for very young children — about up to first grade — that is profoundly draining. They need you. It’s not enough just to be there. They want your attention; you need to feed them; you need to change them; you need to read them that Elmo book — the one you can’t stand — 834 times in two days. You need to pluck them off the bookshelves before they kill themselves in an avalanche.  You need to come up with yet another way to entertain them on a rainy day, when at least one of your kids is too little for the craft project but just big enough to wreck it for an older sibling. The sheer noise factor — shouting, crying, screaming, fighting, talking, jumping off the furniture, chasing the dog, electronic toys, “musical” instruments — is often enough to make you want to poke your eye out with a Brio train. They gift you with moments of independent play, and perhaps a decent nap schedule, but there is nothing that you can really count on.

As the kids get older, you can position yourself to take advantage of those gifted moments of opportunity to do something on your own list, but it isn’t until the kids are at least 3 that you can stall them for any length of time when you’re trying to get something done. There are days — and nights — that are utterly filled with pee and poop and vomit. During some stretches it seems like you haven’t had a solid, uninterrupted night of sleep in years. (Because you haven’t.) Your time is largely spent wiping noses, picking the same toys up off the floor over and over again, and finding ways to be cheerful and support your child’s emotional and intellectual development even though you’re dog tired and really just want to go take a nap. Every day seems to be a variation on the same theme, which at time feels more like Darth Vader’s theme from Star Wars than anything Raffi might perform.

Then, eventually, the kids start going to sleep at a reasonable, predictable hour — which you’ve been looking forward to for months years — but it turns out you’re still so brain dead by 8:00 p.m. that you can’t carry on a coherent conversation with your spouse or a relative who calls to chat. Forget about working on your novel or starting a new oil painting. Somehow your time is still not your own, even when you’re not technically on duty. And I assert that you cannot be yourself until your time is once again your own, for more than an hour or two at a time. (Although an hour or two is a great place to start.)

When does your time become your own again? Kids grow. They go to school. They become more independent. You no longer have to worry about keeping them alive from moment to moment. Gradually, you come back to life, sort of like a slo-mo version of Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future when his parents kiss on the dance floor and he reappears in the snapshot tucked into the neck of his guitar. One day, you are you again. Sure, now you’re driving kids all over town and trying to lure them to the dinner table for family time, but this lacks the intensity of parenting a 2-year-old.

There are lots of wonderful things that happen while you’re taking care of young children, but I don’t think that you can really see the gravity of what that experience is like until you come out the other side. I was actually OUT when I stepped back in. My third child was 10 years old when I had my fourth. Perhaps that’s why this realization has hit me so hard. That, and the fact that I’m 40 now and I feel a little more selfish about “me” time. I’ve spent my entire adult life being a mother. I love being a mother, but I’m ready to also just be me. From my current vantage point, the energy and focus required in caring for young children makes it impossible to also be myself. The two seem like incompatible objectives — a more all-encompassing twist on our discussion of A Divided Heart.

I imagine that there are many mothers out there who simply love every aspect of motherhood and flit through their days like Mary Poppins and would probably tell me that I should never have had so many kids, seeing as I’m not really up for the job. Maybe that’s true. Maybe those mothers already knew who they were before they had kids, so it’s not as difficult for them to stay in touch with that inner anchor.

In the short term, I’d like to brainstorm ways that mothers of young children can stay connected to themselves, their real selves, while their children are young. I firmly believe that maintaining the creative self is absolutely essential. (Of course I do. I’m writing a book about that.) Finding ways to spend a bit of time alone is also vitally important, although often difficult to accomplish.

Oh, and just for the record, I’m going away again this weekend. Three days. Flying away by myself. And I plan to practice being me while I’m away, as much as possible.

What do you think? Does any of this ring true to you, or do I just sound like a cranky mother in need of Prozac?

Courtesy Inky Elbows — a great site for all procrastinating writers!

crossposted from my personal blog

Life happens,
doctors happen,
and this past week, a lot of doctor appointments happened and other sundry bits of attending to sick self, sick kids, etc. So in the interest of pediatrics, Nanowrimo fell somewhat behind and has been having trouble catching back up. also, I really got walloped by news of Brother Blue passing away.

Nanowrimo is an excellent tool to get yourself writing if you call yourself a writer but don’t find yourself doing much of it. It’s an excellent jumpstart, you feel inspired, and even if you don’t, you push to meet that 1667 words per diem minimum. But once you fall behind, it becomes really hard to scramble. but I figured out a a few little secrets today:

1. I don’t have to write 1667 words per day.

2. But it works a heck of a lot better if I do. Otherwise I’m playing a deceitful game of catch-up – which is really very much like swimming against the riptide during hurricane season.

3. Nanowrimo becomes an obsession. Possibly a very unhealthy obsession. I sat in the pediatrics office for six hours on Wednesday thinking not so much of my kids and their various stages of this long, non-h1n1 flu we’ve had, but of how I could be writing instead of sitting in this waiting room, exam room, phlebotomy department, radiology department because when I took my daughter to the hospital the previous week, they didn’t run all the tests they now had to run during Nanowrimo. The boys were with me, too for their wellness appointments, etc, vaccines, etc. I was barely concerned, except when C was crying from getting stuck with a needle for bloodwork or having a big loud machine shoot light boxes all over her leg and hips, while mommy wore a big lead apron. Nano becomes unhealthy when your spouse and you are sitting right next to each other all night long on separate computers not saying a word to each other until he does, and you get annoyed that he’s interrupting your train of thought, but more importantly, your word count. It becomes an obsession when every time your toddler wanders over and whines and pulls to be on your lap, you act like it’s the end of the world because you can’t finish your train of thought or your word count. Same with the preteen mom-mom-momming in your ear and poking you in the arm or the teen mom-mom-momming you on the cellphone until you realize in a half-attention moment you allowed him to sleep over someone’s dad’s house and you don’t even know where he lives, because you were still typing when he was asking and you just wanted him off the phone.

4. But Nanowrimo is important, because you will write a novel in thirty days, whether you make the word count or not, and you will have another manuscript to edit and eventually shop with the other one, because you now can market it to agents as a series of sorts….and you will have two books at the end of this! And at the end of this, you’ll pay better attention to your spouse and your kids and yourself for that matter, and to the fact that maybe the sun is in fact shining outside and oh, yea, there’s an outside…..

5. I don’t have to write the parts in the order in which they come chronologically, but in the order in which they travel through my bleeding brain.

6. Ok that’s more than a few things, but I also figured out it is much better to write about what you know than have to research about something for a novel you’re trying to write in thirty days. Set it in a country you’ve been to, and forget about wildlife, unless of course, it has become a central theme in the book….