NaNoWriMo--Day 16? Yikes!

This awesome image, as many of mine do, comes from Stock.xchng. You should check them out.

I haven't been writing as much as I'd planned.  I'm definitely behind on my NaNoWriMo word count.  I'm not feeling worried about it, though.  I'm not so far behind that I can't catch up pretty easily, and I know the coming weekend is wide open for writing sessions.

I am feeling worried about something else, and I just realized last night that this has been going on inside my head for a while.  More than a while--probably for years. 

I went through a period of being afraid that I don't actually know how to write a whole novel, that I don't know how to finish one.  I've been working on that for a few years, and I think I'm at a point where I can make it happen.  We'll know for sure when I actually hit the end of this story (end of January, that's still the intention). But now that I'm feeling a bit more confident in my ability to actually write a whole novel from start to finish, I discovered that there's been a companion fear hiding back there all this time.  I learned that I'm even more afraid that, once I have a completed first draft, I won't know how or be able to revise it into something submittable.

There's good news here.  Not because once I recognized the fear I knew it was unfounded.  I don't have any idea if I will know how to revise my novel into something I can shop around. But now that I've seen the fear and recognized it for what it is, it doesn't stand a chance.  I usually only get completely derailed by amorphous, unnamed fears, and this one has a name now, and that means I own it.  And I will not let a fear that I can see, that I know is there, stop me from doing something I want.

This isn't a quick process for me.  It won't be "Oh, I see you, fear, and now you're out of here for good."  I know I won't traipse through finishing my first draft and then skip merrily through my revisions.  I know the fear will grab me and throw me down and hold me in the corner.  For a bit.  But then I'll shove it back in its box and keep going, because now I know it, and it can't control me, and I will win.

Wishcasting Wednesday--Flying Free

Back to the comfort of my Wednesday routine. I missed this last week!  I was on vacation visiting family, and I just couldn't fit it in, but I thought about all of my Wishcasting buddies and wished you all well.

This week, Jamie asks, "What do you wish to fly free from?"  Not only a great question, but capped off with lovely alliteration, too!  I'm a sucker for alliteration, what can I tell you?

I want to fly free of my fears--fears of always being stuck where I am, of not being able to do the things I want--not being good enough, smart enough, talented enough.  Fears of failing, of not knowing how to do "it" right, whatever it is.  I want to fly free of all the fears that keep me stuck, keep me from even getting started because I'm afraid I won't succeed.

Surprising Myself

When this happens, it's sort of like a double surprise.  Not only do I have a realization that surprises me, I'm always surprised that this can still happen. I'm pretty self-aware.  I journal and examine my emotions and actions and do all the things that help me be a calmer, happier, more balanced person.  And yet, I can still have sudden realizations about myself and about something I'm doing (or, in this case, not doing).  The subconscious is so intricate and just darned cool!

Over the past several weeks (really, several is mild--it's been about two months), I have been avoiding a project (an e-course I'm creating).  It's a project I really want to do.  It's a project I got a start on, and I was so excited about it.  And now I'm resisting it, ignoring it, allowing myself to forget that it even exists for long stretches of time.  Why?  I've lost faith in it.  I've lost faith that it's any good, that I can make it good, that people will want it.  I've become afraid and timid, and so I've stopped working on it.

Why did this happen?  Because I offered it to a very small focus group and didn't get any feedback.  Now, I know that it's mostly because all of the people in the group happened to have big, life changing events happen during the time we had scheduled for the group (out of five people, we had three new jobs and a new opportunity to teach at a major convention in the person's area of specialization).  So really, the focus group just had bad timing.  It probably has very little to do with the content of my course.  And yet I am still feeling as if doing this course is a waste of my time because it's no good.  No logic there.  That's the funny thing about emotions--they don't have to be logical, no matter how much you want them to be.

Now, add to my loss of faith the stress of knowing that I told the participants that I'd have the final version of the course PDFs to them as a gift by the end of this month, and it's a petri dish perfectly primed to grow the best, most stubborn and insidious procrastination around.

Okay.  Now it's all out there.  The project is woefully sidetracked and way off schedule.  Maybe I'll e-mail the group and let them know it will be later than I had anticipated.  Maybe I'll just get it done and send it when it's ready; I think they've probably forgotten that I was planning to send out the final product to them.  Maybe I'll just do it and see how it looks and then decide what to do with it next.  Maybe I'll find someone to talk to about it and ask if it's a worthwhile project--maybe I've committed myself to something that isn't so great.  I do know I can't just sit around doing nothing and fretting over it.  So now I've seen the problem, seen the "why" of it, and now I will move ahead.

Fears already?

I am reading through my Flying Lessons stuff.  Making desultory notes.  Remembering something else I "really need to do" about every three minutes.  Pushing forward.  Not enjoying. What the heck?  Something is not right.  And I'm skimming the reading for the most part, too.  Can't remember what I've been looking at.  What's wrong?

Back to the beginning.  Oh.  I see.  Make a commitment to the dream and vision of what I want my creative business to look like.  Oh.  Okay.  I wrote this:

I commit to a life where my coaching and writing and art all come together to buoy and sustain me.

Um, okay again.  Something is still not right.  This is a good statement.  But I still don't actually know what this would look like.  I am supposed to commit to a dream and vision.  This is not a dream and vision.  It's an affirmation.

I think I see your problem right here, lady.  You're scared of actually delving in and going under the surface and finding out what you really want because you don't think it can work.  You think if you look at what your real dream is, it will be impossible.  It's just an attack of the worries, the uncertainties trying to trip you up.

What's my dream?  My dream is that I get up in the morning and go to work in my own studio upstairs.  I use those first couple of hours, when I'm not quite at my best because it's morning, to take care of the more mundane things.  Set schedules, take care of e-mails, all of that.  Then late morning I do client phone calls and e-mails with a break for lunch. After lunch and finishing up client work, I write for an hour or two depending on what I've put on the schedule.  Then I work on my online classes I'm teaching or work on course outlines, things like that (this is a holdover from my teaching days because I always found that working on class stuff right around 4 p.m. was really good for me).  Then a break for some exercise--a walk outside, or something inside or at the gym if the weather is not so good.  Home for dinner, and the evening is open for me to play with art and embroidery, read, catch up online.  Then when M gets home from his evening of teaching or sword practice we hang out and chat and maybe watch TV and then go to bed.

Some days would include late morning or early afternoon client visits, although I don't anticipate doing that many face-to-face sessions.  Some evenings might include teaching a class or even taking a class.  Some afternoons might involve classes, too.

Is this a vision? It feels more like one.  I don't know if I have to be more detailed. Or less?  I really don't know!  I know I want to combine coaching/teaching and writing; I'm not willing to give up one or the other, to pick one to focus on, so whatever I'm committing to has to have both.  Is that okay? Will it work?  Can I do this?  How do I know if I'm doing this right?!

January 22 Photowalk

That was so much fun!  I can't believe I kept putting it off because I was worried I wouldn't be able to do enough walking.  I didn't have to do that much walking at all, and I got nearly three dozen really good photos.

Here are some of my favorites:

The sign for Ladybug, my favorite coffee shop.  I had tea there at the end of my walk, as you can see (that shot was taken with my new camera phone).

This sits outside the cycling shop when they're open.  I'd love a ride someday!

The St. Johns Bridge--I love this bridge!

It was a wonderful day, and now that I know I can actually handle some small walks without getting pains in my feet or ankles or knees, I'm going to do this more often.  Prepare yourselves for pictures to go with the words, finally, just as my blog title promises!

Obsessions and Focus

This month of productive obsessing is going along pretty well. I am re-learning how to turn my focus to things I actually want to be concentrating on. I also had an epiphany about some of what holds me back in my writing, and I think this could end up being really useful.

For a long time now I've known what at least some of my fears are, but I haven't been able to figure out what to do about them. This week I realized that while I had a general fear category that my conscious mind was aware of, I didn't actually know the details. I think it's very hard--maybe impossible--to deal with unnamed fears.

But now I have a name for those fears. Or at least a description: I fear that, while I have plenty of story ideas and even scene and dialogue ideas, I don't have enough depth of ideas to flesh them out and make them into full stories that are worth reading and writing. I am also afraid I don't have the technical know-how or the ability to take all of the disparate scene ideas and dialogue snippets and weave them together into a whole story.

These are more specific issues, and I am hoping that it will be easier to deal with them than with the general "I'm afraid I don't have talent" fear that has been living in my brain for so long.

I had another epiphany while working on my productive obsession. My choice to obsess about writing a novel and getting it ready for submission was big, but it wasn't big enough. Or maybe more accurately it was just a part of a whole. I realized that I want to focus on changing my life and creating a career that means something and feels right to me. So, in September, I'm going to start training to be a creativity coach. Scary and exciting and that's exactly how I want to be feeling! Right now I'm just getting money together for the first course and weeding out some time killers in my life so I'm ready to start the training in the Fall. But look for more on this new addition once September rolls around.

Moving Merrily Onward

Okay, maybe not so merrily. I feel clunky and uninspired still, but I know that will go away once I can get myself back into a normal routine of writing regularly. Meanwhile, while I work toward that routine, I am slow and sludgy and draggy. And yet...And yet there is a story building in my head. It's a Greenvale story--Greenvale is my made-up city on a bay on the shore of the Pacific and has a university and a lighthouse and a thriving art community. It's a great place even mostly unformed as it is now, and a few of my story nuggets are going to be Greenvale stories.

So I am still left with the question: Why am I so resistant to writing? I can't stop thinking about writing and my stories. My head is filled with all of it all the time. So what's the problem? What is holding me back, keeping me from actually doing it? I think there's a lot of worry that once I really try I'll find out I'm not actually good at it. I've had positive feedback in the past on both my fiction and other writing, including from professors and other teachers. But I find a quiet, whispery worry in the back of my mind that warns that those situations might just have been flukes and that I won't be able to repeat my success. That whisper is accompanied by another that tells me that my years of not doing a lot of regular writing have probably dried up my talent so I have nothing left to actually put down on paper.

I don't think those whispers are actually telling me the truth. At least, my rational mind doesn't believe them. But I am somehow letting them thwart me even though I know they lie. Part of my plan to overcome them is to keep writing about all of this here. Maybe someday this will even be useful to other writers and creatives who are caught in the same sticky trap.

Now, though, I am going to do one thing. I am taking one step. I am going to post this and then get out my Lesson 5 papers and finish my D&L. By tomorrow, I plan to be able to write here that I'm ready for the next phase.

Fingers crossed...

Just do it!

I just made my Potlatch reservation. I will pay for my Potlatch membership and the buffet banquet when I get paid on Tuesday.

I talked to M. last night, and he convinced me that my anxieties were more about succumbing to my shyness and my general social anxiety than about my actual writing or anything that has to do with building my writing career. He thinks I should go, and his reasoning is sound. So I'm doing it. I am working on the plans for "A Gift of Crows." I will be ready to start writing tomorrow, and may manage to have a rough draft by the end of the weekend. If it works out that I can fit it into the word count needed for the workshop, I will submit it. If not, at least I'll have a new story written. And the panel discussions and contacts I will make will be worth the trip up there.

I was thinking about volunteering to lead a discussion group on mythic fiction. I'm not sure if I'm going to volunteer or not. Since I've never been to this conference, I don't know how they run their discussions, so I don't really know what I would need to prepare for it. I may post this question on the e-mail discussion group and see what people have to say. That might also let me see if there's actual interest in the topic.

I don't know what to do

(x-posted from my personal blog)


I have been planning for a while now to go the the Potlatch writers/readers conference at the end of February. Of course, now it's time to make reservations, and now I am not sure if it's a good idea. Why?

For one thing, I don't have a short story written that I can submit so I can take part in the mini Clarion style workshop. The submission deadline is February 1, but can I really write something new and get it polished enough that it's worth submitting? I don't know. I guess I could give it a go. But I don't want to turn in crap just to have something to turn in. And I'm not sure "A Gift of Crows" is ready to be written yet. I also don't know for sure that, once I figure out the actual story idea beyond the first scene in my head, it will be a short story. It may be longer. The limit for the Potlatch workshop is 2,000-8,000 words. That's actually pretty short, somewhere between 4.5-18.5 double-spaced pages. I think "Crows" is going to be longer than that. So, there's a major consideration. Of course, attending the workshop part of the conference is not mandatory, but since the conference is one of the things meant to propel me forward in my writing career (or into a writing career), I'm not sure it's worth attending without doing the workshop.

Another problem--I don't have anyone to go with. That means that I will have to pay the $119 per night hotel fee myself. That makes it pricier than I was really planning for, especially since that's just the accommodations, and I still have to take into account the gas, food, and conference fees . It also makes me feel anxious and nervous. Driving up to Seattle by myself (yes, I've done it before, but still...). Finding the place. Trying to make friends with people who are probably all going to be there with someone they know. Trying to fit in, not feel like an outcast, find people to talk to so I'm not alone all weekend. The whole thing makes me feel really anxious, and I can't shake it off.

There are some good talks happening. If I decided to go, there's still enough time that I could even put together a talk about mythic fiction if I was willing to facilitate it. So there could be good stuff. But the main reason I that thought about going. Of course, I had managed to forget that it had to be a complete short story and not part of a larger work... I seriously don't know what to do, and I am stressed.

January 2008 BIW Challenge

My major writing goal for 2008 is to finish Blood of the Mist and submit it. To that end, I am participating in the Book-in-a-Week group (pretty sure I’ve mentioned that here already). Monday starts the first BIW challenge of the year!

I intend to write at least 40 pages of new material each month, not necessarily all during the BIW challenge week, but I’d like to get a good chunk of that done every month during the challenge. So, this month my challenge goal is 30 pages. If I am figuring things correctly (and I could be way off since this will be my first time completing a full first draft of a novel), with the 40 pages per month, I will complete the first draft by the end of March. Three months!

I am almost there, getting so close…This is exciting and scary and…WOW! As I come closer to the point where I’m going to have to start revisions and then finally let someone read it, I am getting nervous. What if I suck? What if my book sucks? What if I can’t fix it? Aack! But now is not the time to let myself think about that. Now is the time to finish the first draft. Then I can think of what comes next. If I let myself think about it too soon, I will become paralyzed by fears and self-doubt. No fears. Just words.

I wish blogging counted for my NaNo word count

I have to wonder if there’s some fear involved in writing that keeps me from finishing a novel. I wonder this quite often. I frequently determine, then re-determine, that my procrastination is at least in part fueled by fear. I am working on overcoming the procrastination. Maybe overcoming the fear? I had a glimpse just today of what that fear might be (or at least what part of it might be). If I finish, if I am out of the rush and the flood and the challenge of putting the words down, making new things happen, twisting the plot, heading toward the end, if I am done, then I must go back and look at this thing I made. I will have to read it. I will have to see its flaws and blemishes and ugliness. I will have to face all of the shortcomings and foibles and try to find some way of fixing it. And I am not sure I know how. I don’t know what to do with a completed story to make it really shine, make it great, make it saleable.

In a way, this is amusing. I guess it’s a form of progress. I used to be afraid that I couldn’t really write, was not a writer, was a bad writer, all of that. Now I am afraid that I can’t rewrite.

Of course, the bad writer fear still ties in there. It is both comforting and a bit disappointing to read the blogs of professional writers and see that they still fight with these "bad writer" fears (the disappointment is only because I was hoping that one day this would go away). Mostly, it's a comfort. It makes me feel like someday I might just be One of Them.

Okay, I am supposed to be writing Novel Words right now. Must go. But first, can I comment on the fact that blogger doesn't recognize the word "saleable"? No, I probably can't.

Adjusting Goals for Today

I realized that, with everything else I have to get done today and the shortened work schedule leaving me with no afternoon writing time, my goal of writing 2500 words today was not even remotely realistic. I am not sure my reduced goal of 2051 is realistic. But I'm going to give it a try. This will have me needing to write just over 600 words tomorrow. More realistically, it will have me going into Friday just over 600 words short. But that's as it must be. I will see if I can get the 2051 today and let the rest of the week worry about itself. I am thinking of setting a goal for myself for Friday to write 5K. I'm not sure if I can do it. I feel really nervous about setting that goal. I want to do it, but I'm afraid I might be setting myself up for failure. Maybe I will try. (The Yoda in my head is giving his speech.)

Oh what the hell. I did 4004 words on Saturday, and I slept really late and had to run out to do errands for a few hours in the afternoon. I *will* do 5,000 words on Friday. And I think I will make my 2051 today, too. Maybe I will just stay up really late...