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Posts from the ‘Miranda’ Category

Nov 6

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Miranda: “Someday” is today

someday_sky1I can’t remember where I picked it up, but at some point last week I heard the old reminder “‘Someday’ is today.” Those three words have been repeating in my head ever since.

When you aspire to living in the moment, it’s easy to forget about all those things you want to do “someday.” The only things that belong on a “someday” list, however, are things that you might be interested in but won’t regret if you never get to them: like taking a Thai cooking class or getting dreadlocks. If the prospect of not doing something on that list is upsetting, then it doesn’t belong on a “someday” list. It should move onto a real agenda. Because really, someday is today — and if dreadlocks really speak to who you are, then you need to figure out how to make that happen now, rather than leaving it to fantasy.

While I continually make progress incorporating creativity into my life — an erratic but upward stagger — I realize there are things on my “someday” list that I really could — and should (“should” because it would make me happy) — be doing right now.

For example, I’d like to have an art space in my basement. I have a huge, unfinished basement that is dry and not too unpleasant. There isn’t a lot of stuff down there because we moved many things into storage when we put our house on the market. We have a playroom of sorts in one area of the basement. Why not cobble together a studio so that I can do art projects whenever I like, without taking over the kitchen table or the dining room? A place where I can leave projects mid-progress, without having to clean everything up after every creative stint? I could put something together with little or no cost. Sure, I’m trying to sell my house, but so what? I don’t think that an informal studio area, even if it does get a little cluttered, is going to bother prospective buyers. (And the whole house selling thing is a “someday” trap if ever there was one.)

I also realized that I have another category of “someday” items that I never intended to put off; they’ve been relegated to the “someday” list by accident. These are things that I think I’m going to do “tomorrow,” but then tomorrow never comes. Every week I seem to repeat the same thing: “Well, THIS week is really busy because of X. Next week will be better, and then I’ll be able to do Y.” But then the next week I’m all “Well, THIS week is really busy because of Q. Next week…” And so on. Of course, this mythical week of relative calm and predictable schedule never arrives — and so I eternally put off whatever it was that I wanted to do. It’s a slow kind of death by the best of intentions. Who am I kidding? You’d think I’d have figured it out by now. I have five children and a freelance career. Obviously, relative calm and a predictable schedule are not high on the list of likely outcomes. Some weeks will be better than others; some weeks will be busier than others; but really, the bandwidth is not going to change that drastically.

Here are two examples of things that I intend to get to, but never incorporate as reliable habits:

  1. I’d like to spend less time on the computer (specifically time wasted on the computer). I always feel better when I put my laptop away for a day. And the kids love it too. Anyone who really needs to reach me urgently has my cell phone number. Even if I don’t go fully unplugged, I know I’m better off having set computer times — a few brief stints at specific intervals. Aside from my two full workdays (when I’m glued to my laptop nonstop) there is no reason that I can’t adopt a more reasonable computer routine. Making this happen today instead of later means spending more time focused on the kids, now, when they need me, which is another “someday” item of its own. Do I want to wait until ALL the children head off to college and I realize that I missed my chance to spend more time with them — and that the false promise of “someday” has actually evaporated?
  2. I’d like to get back on top of dinnertime. I usually cook something vaguely nutritious at least four or five times a week, but lately it always seems like my oldest one has just returned from work (at a coffee shop) and isn’t hungry or I cooked something that the ninth-grade son doesn’t like or I timed things badly and my stuffed squash isn’t actually ready until 8:00 p.m. — which is bedtime for the pre-schooler. (Tonight’s scenario, for example.) I want to increase my repertoire of yummy “regular” meals (the most recent set is getting tired) and add a little more ceremony — and creativity — to dinnertime.

Those are my “someday” items for the moment. I can’t say that “work on my book” is on my “someday” list, because I AM actually writing with some vague regularity right now. I’m even running, although not more than 2-3 times a week — but running nonetheless. So there are two perennial “someday” items that I am actually doing.

How about you? What’s on your “someday” list that you really should and could start doing right now? And what “someday” items have you actually moved into the “now” column?

Nov 3

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Poll: What does your creativity mean to you?

Election Day is upon us! Warm up your voting muscles with the poll below. Click the link to participate and view the results, which are anonymous.

Which of the following statements best describes how you feel about your creative work?
( polls)

Nov 3

3 Comments

Online Resource for Writers: Fiction Lounge

I recently stumbled into Adam Maxwell’s Fiction Lounge, and I’m glad that I did. While clearly a vehicle for promoting the author’s work, Maxwell’s site is attractively designed and offers a free writers’ prompt tool, which might just be enough to prod you out of a fit of writer’s block should you happen to experience that nasty affliction. There’s also a fun character name generator, which is mildly addictive, and an award-winning podcast of Maxwell’s short fiction. Enjoy!

Oct 28

3 Comments

Dreaming of a few more entries for this week’s contest…

Only two entries thus far for “dream,” this week’s creativity contest prompt. If you sent something in and didn’t receive an acknowledgement from me, it didn’t come through. Please post a comment here to let me know. And if you haven’t sent anything in yet, you have until 11:00 p.m. eastern time to do so! (Deadline extended by a few hours, just in case that helps.)

Oct 23

11 Comments

What are you doing tonight at 10:04?

Are you one of the many mothers who make the most of the evening hours after all the kids are in bed? Maximizing the later hours of the day may in fact be an excellent strategy, according to the results of a new research study. Forget the early bird; the most likely time of day for a creative breakthrough is 10:04 p.m. As reported by the UK’s Daily Mail:

Early to bed, early to rise, makes you healthy, wealthy and wise.

So goes the old proverb, but research now suggests that if you want to be the wisest, you really need to stay up — well, until 10.04 pm at least.

This is supposedly the best time for a eureka moment, according to research. [A]round a quarter of us feel we formulate our most cunning plans when we are burning the midnight oil, the survey of 1,426 adults found.

By contrast, despite what many managers may believe, daytime in the office is not conducive to blue-sky thinking. The afternoon…is when an overwhelming 98% of those polled say they feel most ‘uninspired’.

The creativity drought just gets worse over the nine to five working day, hitting rock bottom at 4.33 pm.

When asked about methods they use to get their creative juices flowing, 44% said they took a shower.

Unfortunately for mankind, even when we do get a stroke of genius more than half of our ideas are lost forever.

When inspiration strikes, 58% of us fail to write the idea down immediately and forget it….Women were better than men at jotting down their best ideas for posterity.

A third of over-35s chose to scribble the thought on the back of their hand, perhaps having learnt from experience how forgetful they are. The findings echo an Italian study in 2006 that found those who stay up late have the most original ideas.

Night owls came up with the most creative thoughts — perhaps because they are more likely to be unconventional and bohemian than early birds — according to the research by the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan.

So, if you like to stay up late and squeeze in a bit of creative time, take a look at the clock when you hit your groove. It might just be 10:04. Oh, and if you have a great idea, write it down — preferrably on a piece of paper!

Oct 21

17 Comments

Inspiration: NaNoWriMo

In case you hadn’t heard, November 2008 is NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. Not a month for celebrating the novel; rather, a month for actually writing one. From the NaNoWriMo website:

    National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30. Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

    Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

    Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

    As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel. Wrimos meet throughout the month to offer encouragement, commiseration, and—when the thing is done—the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children.

    In 2007, we had over 100,000 participants. More than 15,000 of them crossed the 50k finish line by the midnight deadline, entering into the annals of NaNoWriMo superstardom forever. They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.

What an amazing event. I don’t think I can pull this off (not this year, anyway) but I would really like to try a year or two down the line. I love the concept of simply encouraging output — given the deadline, there really isn’t time for editing or hesitating over the keyboard.

Here’s how to sign up. I see from her blog that Brittany has already committed. Anyone else? (Is this actually possible with young children at home?) Brittany, please keep us apprised of your progress!

Oct 20

16 Comments

Miranda: A question

If you were to drop dead right now, this very minute, and you had a moment of last consciousness to weigh your life in the balance, what would the verdict be? Would you feel that you had lived your life to the fullest; that you had accomplished something important, whatever that means to you?

I admit to an unhealthy fixation on mortality. I think about this kind of thing a lot.  The topic came up recently with my cousin Charlotte (OK, so we covered almost everything in the domain of life and art within a few hours). Charlotte noted that I had just referred to death and dying about 30 times within 20 minutes. I’m not usually quite that bad, but I am frequently troubled by my fear of dying before I’ve completed a few important things on my list.

Charlotte was surprised to hear that I don’t think of my five children as “accomplishments.” But I don’t. They are really just these random people who I’m taking care of. I don’t take credit for having “good” kids — so much luck is involved; really I just try not to mess them up too much. Yes, being a mother, a good mother, is important to me, but it isn’t my life’s work. Sometimes I wish it were. Things would be a lot simpler. But while I try to apply creativity to motherhood as much as possible, my children do not feel like my “creations.”

When it comes to assessing life on a macro level, blogs like 37 Days only feed my obsessive nature. While the question “how would I spend my last month of life” is an important one, such a short timespan by necessity requires letting go of everything unimportant, immediately. For me, if I only had a month left to live, I would be entirely focused on my family and creating as many memories as possible — and creating reminders of my love for my children that would live beyond me. Would I worry about finishing my book? Probably not, although I think I would hand the project off to a trusted friend and ask her to finish it for me. I would probably write a good number of poems instead.

But since none of us can know exactly how much time we have left, we can only muddle through, trying to keep our perspective on what’s really important. While I might not work on my book if I only had a month left to live, I would work on the book if I knew had a year.

I hope that whenever the Big Mac Truck comes my way, I can go without regret. Of course there would be immeasurable sadness for leaving my family — but I would hope that I would be comforted by the feeling that I had done my best with the time that I had. That my children could rest contented in the knowledge that I loved them deeply. And that I had left something else behind — a book, perhaps? — that could touch the lives of strangers and help them make the most of their lives.

Maybe in our very last moments the only thing that matters is our relationships, and everything else becomes irrelevant. I wonder. How about you? What is the measure of a life well lived, and where does your creative mark fit into that assessment?

Oct 16

17 Comments

Miranda: Getting my #%^&* together

It’s been a long time since I last posted a personal entry. Regular readers of this blog will know that I spent the last two months under an intense pile of client projects and had little bandwidth to do anything else. I have finally — and gratefully — emerged from under the mountain. I should now be able to get all of my work done on my two full workdays each week plus an hour or two of client e-mail and quick projects on the other three weekdays.

It’s time to take a little inventory and get back to my two main priorities: family life and finishing my nonfiction book.

The Current Condition

What’s my current landscape? We’ve settled into some kind of new routine and I’ve adapted to my preschooler’s pickup schedule. I have to leave every day at 11:30 to get him — but my husband takes him to school, so I don’t have to do both legs. The pickup takes 45 minutes in total, which does eat into my two workdays. But I try to use some of that car time for phone calls.

All five kids are in good places at the moment; no real issues or crises. That said, the 5-month-old doesn’t yet sleep more than three or four hours at a stretch during the night, which obviously means that I’m a little tired, but I’m usually able to just deal with it. I do have to pay some attention to my oldest son’s college application process and all that that involves. Toilet training with the 3.5-year-old is not going well at all (in fact we’ve regressed) but my husband and I are launching a new strategy this weekend (putting him back in underwear and then totally laying off the pressure, rather than keeping him in pull-ups and laying on the pressure), which we’ll commit to for a month. But nothing is going on beyond the usual parenting agenda. In fact, the household is in a pretty happy place right now. My husband and I are in a great place and we’ve had a nice long run without blended family conflict. In fact, there have been some very positive developments on the domestic front.

I’m also trying to up my fitness level — running at least twice a week and hoping to get back to my 4-6 mile runs three to four times a week before too long. I’m making progress. Yesterday I had a terrific run and really felt strong the whole time.

Our house is still on the market, but showings are infrequent and I’m able to keep my perspective. I no longer agonize over what will happen if we stay and how much I want to move; things are workable where we are and I will just make the best of it. At some point I realized that I have to get on with it and not wait for the house issue to be resolved; in this economy it could easily take us another year or longer to sell.

The only other significant time drain at the moment is the election. We’re an avidly political family and I  have to get my evening fix of political shows on cable. I often multitask with the laptop during this time, but I do look forward to enjoying other schedule options post-election.

So, not much to complain about. Guess I’ll have to rely on Cathy’s 24 ways to avoid your manuscript if I need an excuse to procrastinate. But of course, I don’t need any more excuses. It’s time to finish the book and get on with my stew pot of other creative projects.

The Plan

My nonfiction proposal is being shopped by an agent, but as I’ve said here before, if we have no takers I will self-publish. I can’t let the manuscript languish while waiting to sell it. If I end up selling the thing when it’s already near completion, and the editor wants to make substantive changes (as would be expected with a nonfiction ms), I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. Time to commit to the work with a concrete roadmap.

On Monday I made some calculations. My manuscript is currently 53K words long. I estimate that I need another 40K-50K to finish. Seeing as I’m working from a fairly comprehensive outline, the writing comes quickly when I’m actually writing (or, I should say, quickly for me — compared to writing fiction). I can probably count on writing 1,000 words in four hours. I’ll round that up to five hours just to have some margin for the remaining research, etc. Now comes the sticky part.

If I spend five hours a week on my book, I will finish the first draft in a year. If I double that and eke out 2,000 words a week, I will finish by the end of April. That’s a little more appetizing, wouldn’t you say?

Where am I going to get 10 hours a week? At first glance it’s hard to see, but I know it’s really a matter of priorities. How is it that I can be so committed to keeping this blog going, for example, but not show the same level of commitment with my manuscript? Since we started the weekly creativity contest, I’ve never missed posting the Wednesday winner post, even though it sometimes takes well more than an hour of work the night prior or early that morning. Tomorrow I will post our 20th Breakfast interview — a weekly project that sometimes takes three hours of work or more. But I would never miss that deadline, even if I’m up until well past midnight staging the post.

As my cousin Charlotte rightly pointed out over coffee on Tuesday, the blog involves a lot of other people, and I hold myself accountable. That’s why I am able to stay up late at night preparing a post when it wouldn’t occur to me to spend those same hours on my manuscript. True, I can also rationalize the time investment with the knowledge that the content of this blog as well as the creative social network it provides are both intrinsic parts of my book. I have no intention of cutting back on the blog, but I need to keep my eyes on the real goal: finishing my book.

While 5 hours a week seems do-able, the year-off finish line is a real party killer. A 6-month timeframe is much cheerier, but I don’t know if I’m going to have 10 hours for writing every week. I spent some time going back and forth, trying to decide which way I should commit. Charlotte suggested starting with the 5 hours for a few weeks to see how it goes, which was a practical suggestion, but seemed to rub my Superwoman instincts the wrong way (yes, I should know better). But I agreed with Charlotte in that I didn’t want to set myself up for failure by setting the bar to high.

It occurred to me that my son’s Montessori school has a schedule arrangement that I really like. Instead of having a straight pickup time (say, noon) we have a pickup window: 11:45 to noon. I have 15 minutes within which I can arrive and not be late. Every day, I appreciate that I can vary my arrival time within those 15 minutes and still be right on time. Why not apply the same forgiving structure to my ms goal? This “range” makes sense to me and allows me some wiggle room within a demanding and unpredictable schedule.

So, I have now committed to writing 5 to 10 hours every week. If I only manage 5, I have still succeeded. If I make it to 10 or more, I am simply moving that much more quickly toward my goal. I will be tracking time and wordcount to monitor my progress; adjustments will be made as needed. Each Sunday I will map out where those hours are going to come from, and add them to my Outlook calendar as I would any other appointment.

There it is. I have a plan, and I’m sticking to it. Gotta go — I have 2 hours of manuscript time to complete today. 🙂

Oct 13

Submissions: Carve Magazine

Carve Magazine — the well-respected online literary publication that offers the Raymond Carver Short Fiction Award — is looking for artwork and photography for issue covers and interiors. A great opportunity for visual artists. More info here.

You can also find out how to submit your fiction, read the current issue, or browse the archives.

Oct 6

6 Comments

Onscreen: Who Does She Think She Is?

Wouldn’t it be affirming to see your experiences as a creative mother captured on film? Filmmaker Pamela Tanner Boll, who won an Academy Award for the documentary Born Into Brothels, now addresses the issues well familiar to readers of this blog.

Who Does She Think She Is? explores the lives of five creative women, all professional artists and mothers. Boll is personally familiar with the challenges that creative mothers face: credibility, the juggling act, financial issues, marital stress. From the Director’s Statement:

At the age of 32, I had my first child. On becoming a mother, the buried part of myself — the emotional and curious, the creative — roared back to life. I wrote, then began painting again. Motherhood had returned me to my creative, expressive self.

Over the next 30 years, I painted and wrote but always in the spaces left over after my family’s needs. If I did the work it was with guilt. At the studio, I felt that I should have been reading to the children. At home with the boys, I often felt bored by the routine of feeding, cleaning, comforting, caring. [More here under “About the Film”.]

You’ll find lots of behind-the-scenes details at the film’s impressive website. Opens in theaters October 17, 2008. Until then, here’s a clip. I think this is one film that we all need to see.

Sep 25

1 Comment

Inspiration: A Year of Mornings

The photo blog 3191 is a daily pairing of photos taken by two friends, MAV and Steph, who live 3,191 miles apart — one in Portland, OR, and the other in Portland, ME. (Read my previous blog post about this treasure trove). The friends have just published their first book, A Year of Mornings. I received my copy this week and it’s beautiful.

Cathy recently noted that she can pick up just about any book and flip to a random page to find exactly what she needs to read at that moment — and I think this book serves that purpose beautifully. Bravo.

Sep 22

2 Comments

Online Inspiration: How to write

Charlotte sent in this suggestion, from her side of the pond. How to write from the UK’s Guardian: ongoing advice on writing fiction, poetry, and comedy. Lots of good tidbits and resources. Enjoy!

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