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Posts from the ‘Miranda’ Category

Jan 6

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Miranda: Cleaning up

barbie_carnage.jpgWe’ve been divesting the basement, part New Year’s motivation and part preparing for putting the house back on the market. I’ve latched on to the idea that getting rid of the old and unused helps to make room for the new and unknown. I’m letting go of old things I’m attached to in hope that waves of creativity will sweep in to fill in the gaps. (Why not?)

Since my daughter has outgrown her Barbies, I combed through the boxload in preparation for passing them on to a family with younger girls. A few Barbies didn’t make the callback–bad haircuts, or missing feet and heads. I handed a pile of the cast-offs to my older son to toss for me. When next I opened the kitchen garbage, I discovered this violent still life. If you have Barbies in your house, you’ll appreciate the accidental carnage.

I hope this isn’t the kind of creativity I’m making room for! (Although I can certainly relate to the feeling of desperately clinging to your own decapitated head by a few strands of hair…)

Jan 6

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Miranda: Fruitful weekend

Weekend was a success. Yesterday managed to get through a bunch of things on my household to-do list and spent Toddler’s naptime camped out in bed myself (luxurious 2.5 hours), cozily writing thank-you notes, writing in my journal, and starting a new sketch. (Yeah, OK, I had total trash TV on in the background, sound turned low…) During naptime today, I made good progress on Chapter 3 and made some revisions to the earlier content based on a reader’s feedback. Still have some Sunday-night tidying up to do, but the weekend was a good mix of productivity and fun (went out for Mexican food last night with six kids in tow, and fit some reading in too).

I hope everyone else had a few rays of creative sunshine this weekend!

Jan 4

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Miranda: Results for week #1

Chapter 2, first draft completeWell, I’m amazed, but I finished Chapter 2. Finished to the point of sending it to one of my readers. I’d told myself I’d need two weeks for each chapter, but since there is already a good amount of draft in Chapter 3, I’m going to set next Friday as my deadline for its completion.

Meanwhile I’ve been doing a lot of surfing, reading the blogs of other creative women and writers. So many people are doing such cool things! It always inspires. I especially enjoyed the two blogs MartaWrites and On-My-Desk. Got me thinking about keeping a visual journal, and taking more pictures of my kids with my new (good) camera.

I also managed to spend at least an hour poring through Google images for the perfect picture for my laptop’s desktop. I really don’t know how I am able to waste so much precious time doing nearly nothing.

My dilemma for the week: keeping up my momentum. The weekend looks full of errands, and I’m worried that I’ll fritter away naptime on Saturday and Sunday (doing dumb things like searching for the ultimate photo of Edith Wharton). I’d like to do a bit of cross-pollinating this weekend–finish a painting I started last spring, or do some graphic journaling–and of course, get busy on Chapter 3. But I need to write thank-you notes and work on cleaning out the basement, on top of the usual domestic tidal wave. My best defense is usually trying to create a schedule for the weekend, so that I have time for myself before it all gets swallowed up. Then, even though the schedule is likely to get thrown off at some point, at least I have a lighthouse to swim toward.

Any other suggestions?

Jan 1

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Miranda: Here goes…week #1

I’ve worked out a schedule whereby I can complete my nonfiction manuscript by early April. As I have 129 manuscript pages in hand. (These pages are patchwork bits and pieces of the whole book, rather than the first 129 pages. Chapter 1 is a solid draft.) If I crank, I can finish each one of the eight chapters in two weeks’ time apiece. This is aggressive, but I am determined to have a fairly complete draft in hand before baby #5 arrives in early May.

I’d also like to do a little sketching and drawing, but I won’t have a lot of spare time–especially as we may be putting our house on the market again. So for now, I need to focus on the book. According to my spreadsheet, I’m supposed to finish Chapter 2 by this Friday. Ack! This will be a challenge, but I don’t have a heavy client workload this week, so I can commandeer a good amount of my babysitting time for the book.

Longer term, I need to focus on two things: just write something, every day–even if it’s only 5 minutes’ worth–and use longer, scheduled chunks of work time. Just creating this blog post makes me feel more committed!

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