Susanne

Hello, I’m still here, only I have been very busy with this novel thing. Those of you reading this through a feed reader (well, actually the one of you reading this through a feed reader) might not have noticed, but I have a little button in my sidebar with “NaNoWriMo participant” and my word count on it. As of yesterday evening I have written 20,505 words. So I’m on track though I had wanted to be a little ahead. Well, my son had another round of barfing, sniffling, feverish, almost better, and then ear infection sickness…

I’m quite confident that I will be one of the winners of NaNoWriMo. That’s somebody who has reached a word count of 50,000 words by the end of the month. But I didn’t manage to do this without disturbing my “normal life” after all. So I’m very glad that I told my husband. He was very still at first, and so I hastened to say, “If it interferes with our life, I’ll quit. I’ll do my normal housework, child care and errand duty. The time for this has to come out of TV and blog reading time.” Which it has. Mostly. And he only scolded me twice for doing it. So far.

Mary Tsao has given her readers a synopsis of her plot. I think that that’s a very good idea, so here’s my story:

I’m writing about a 104-year-old psychic woman married to an alien living on a star ship. Since it has aliens and space ships in it, I declared it to be science fiction. Though there is no science in it. The biggest part is a journal written by this woman to regain her sense of self. So far she has written about her youth, how she became interested in meditation, her first marriage, her six children, everyday stuff. For the sake of the word count this reads like my blog only longer and – more boring. Since she hasn’t had the time to tell anyone where she was going, she’s considered missing and there are two police-officers looking for her. Reluctantly. In the course of the last few days her great-granddaughter has arrived on the scene. She’ll probably be transported to the space ship too…

I really don’t know what will be happening. The only thing I knew in advance was that this woman (her name is Melissa by the way) would end up on that space ship. I really don’t know why or what will be happening then. With a plot like this you’d think this might be really interesting, but it isn’t. Telepathy, aliens, space ships… But I still feel like I have no plot. This is partly due to the fact that the whole thing is told through journals and dialogue. I didn’t plan it that way. Well, not much, I knew there would be journaling. I figured I’ d stick to what I write best… The dialogue was a surprise. I had always thought that I couldn’t write dialogue at all. As of now the people in my “novel” sound a lot like me, but they don’t sound all alike. Oh, and there are some paragraphs of “stream of consciousness”-writing where you can hear the alien think. That’s very easy to write when you’ve run out of ideas.

I told some of my students about NaNoWriMo. One dismissed it obviously as one of my spleens. The other one couldn’t believe it: Why are you doing this? Are there prices? Why don’t you cheat? They should be reading all the novels. What? Nobody is even reading the novels? So why do you do this? May I read your novel? It sounds really interesting. Well, I’m not sure. Nobody will read it in the state that it is now. It’s terrible. And boring, as I already mentioned. And I don’t think I’ll be working on it again after November. We’ll see.

So obviously I couldn’t quite make it clear to my student. But then, as much as I like exercising, I wouldn’t spend my days like him, training for three to four hours each day only to be fit for playing tennis for as long as I possibly could.
I’ve been quite proud of myself for having such a steady output. But every time that I congratulate myself like, “Yeah. I’ve done it! 20k!” I go to the German NaNoWriMo forum and find a thread like “I have reached 50k”. Argh. Interestingly my two writing buddies are nowhere near that word count more like 4,000 and 11,000. I really hope that they will speed up soon.

I’m spending the whole day procrastinating about the writing and then I spend my whole evenings typing as fast as I can. I write about everything, regardless of its importance to the story. This is not about quality. this is about the word count. Every day I have to force myself to sit down and write – and when I’m finished I find that I actually enjoy it. But I’m never looking forward to it.

And I’m already planning to participate again next year. (Which I didn’t tell my husband yet.)

Technorati Tags: NaNoWriMo

One of my dear blog readers (Hello!), who happens to be a close friend of mine, said that she really liked the blog but… (This is how you can tell we’re close. She always has a but too.) But:

“Sometimes I think, ‘If you already know what to do, why don’t you just do it then?'”

My first, and not very mature, reaction to this was: Look, who’s talking. Fortunately I didn’t say it loud. (Until now, that is.) My second thought, the one I did say, was, “If I’d knew the secret to that, I’d bottle it, sell it to everyone who needs it for 50 Cents, and become a millionaire.”

For me the gap between insight and change of behavior is huge. And I know that I’m not the only one. If it were as easy as having an insight and then cheerfully applying it effortlessly, nobody would be fat, or messy, or disorganized. Apart from the people who don’t think. Maybe.

But then I thought again, and she does have a point. All this talking and talking is a form of whining and the high art of procrastination. But, and what you can’t see when you’re only reading my blog, after years and years of just talking I finally entered the stage of behavior change for a lot of areas in my life where I have been wanting to change.

I’m talking about these things so that others can see that they’re not alone. It is easy to think that everybody has his act together except for you. One of the bloggers that I read has put it this way: Stop comparing your insides to the outsides of others. (Sorry, I forgot where I read this. I’ll be happy to give credit when anybody remembers.)

And, in blogging things I’m making myself accountable. And I’m thinking things through. All of that is very helpful. And really, who wants to read a blog that goes all: I’m the best! I do accomplish every single thing on my to-do-list everyday! I never make mistakes! We’d all think that this person could only be a figment of imagination.

So, while I don’t recommend doing without thinking, it’s always good to remember that only doing gets things done. Especially for those of us to whom thinking comes so easy.

Technorati Tags: behavior change, blogging, thinking, self-help

or why it is easier for me than writing music.

For a musician I sure have a lot of books on writing. I own exactly 1 book on songwriting. I own (gets up and counts) about half a dozen books on writing.
But when asked I’d never say that I’m a writer. “I’m a musician.”, I’d say, adding in my mind, “But not a good one.”
So I thought about why writing is easy for me. (And yes, you might ask me again after NaNoWriMo). In preparation for next month I’m re-reading “Writing down the Bones”. Natalie Goldberg wrote:

“This is the practice school of writing. Like running, the more you do it, the better you get at it. Some days you don’t want to run and you resist every step of the three miles, but you do it anyway. You practice whether you want to or not. You don’t wait around for inspiration and a deep desire to run. It’ll never happen, especially if you are out of shape and have been avoiding it. But if you run regularly, you train our mind to cut through or ignore your resistance. You just do it. And in the middle of the run, you love it. When you come to the end, you never want to stop. And you stop, hungry for the next time.”

“We get better because we do it every day”. Yeah, that’s it.

For years I have been writing without realizing it. I started keeping journals at age 9. As a teenager I wrote lots of letters, some bad poems, and I loved writing assignments in school. When we had to write a poem as homework, I wrote two.
Then I wrote my master’s thesis. I wrote in the mornings. Every day I’d sit down at my computer in my pajama – to catch myself unaware before procrastination could set in – and start warming up by writing diary entries on the computer. Though I didn’t like writing the thesis very much, I realized how much I loved writing.

At that time I bought my first book about writing. I still have a file with an idea for a screenplay. (I just wonder if that would make a novel for November. Hm.) And before finishing school I applied to drama studies, where I had to write something. As far as I recall, I wrote down the idea for a play.

But I never did something with this stuff. There are only beginnings in my files. And stories in my head. (I recently thought, if only I had a way of syphoning my thoughts into a computer… There are stories and stories and songs in there. I tell and sing them to myself all the time. High level daydreaming.) When I finished my master’s degree one reason for going for Ph.D. was the chance to go on writing as intense again.

Then, seven years ago (and almost to the day) I read the “Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity” by Julia Cameron and started writing morning pages. That’s three pages a day written by hand about anything that crosses your mind. Let’s see, 7 years times 360 days times 3 pages … that’s 7,560 pages that I have written. And I do it every day, whether I feel like it or not.

My computer holds a file with beginnings and ideas. And then I started the blog about six months ago. More writing. (And you know that I’m not in for the one-sentence-post). I’ve never written fiction, though, that will be new in the month to come. But I don’t suffer from lack of imagination, that’s for sure.

So maybe it’s time to call myself a writer too. And to start a practice of writing music like I already have established a practice of writing stories without noticing it.

Technorati Tags: NaNoWriMo, song writing, writing

That’s what I did on Saturday. But we didn’t have eighty people over for dinner. What we did was prepare lunch for the next month or two.

I’ve tried, no, we’ve tried to make the holidays less stressful for years. Flylady and her “Cruising through the Holidays“-program helps, but I’m always looking for ways to streamline everyday home maintenance so that the important things in life get more room. So I decided to try out the Mega Menu-Mailer. It’s a variation of the freezer dinners obviously available in the US where you go to a place and assemble a couple of dinners to freeze. I thought it would be marvelous if we had everything for dinner for the whole month in the freezer.

Well, in the instructions it says, “Shopping may take one to two hours”. Yeah. I thought about this for days, made the list one week before, pre-ordered meat at health-food store on Monday, they phoned me with questions, had to go to the store again the day after, pre-ordered the fish on Wednesday, went shopping at the regular grocery store on Thursday (one hour, this time taking the car), went shopping again on Saturday for the fish, the meat, vegetables that I wanted to buy at the farmer’s market and to the regular store again for things they hadn’t had on Thursday. Already exhausted from reading? Look at what my kitchen looked like on Saturday afternoon:

I wish I had thought of taking pictures of the meat. Heaps of meat. And my poor husband washed it all. We started preparing at half past three. The manual says that it took people two to three hours to assemble the menus. Well, maybe the assembling only. We spent about six hours washing, cutting, grinding, assembling, mixing, labeling freezer bags, washing up. Maybe it took a little more time because our son “helped”. But he was really sweet. We got a little panicky when we realized that our son’s bedtime drew near and he hadn’t even eaten dinner. He helped himself to a yoghurt. I was beyond feeling hunger since I was the “brain” of the whole enterprise. The only one who was able to read and understand all the instructions. Though my husband’s english is very good, he’d have needed a dictionary. You don’t learn names of spices and vegetables in school. It also took us longer because we had to convert all the measurements.

So, with the whining and the grumbling out of the way, I’m really pleased. We started this to prepare a month of food in advance and then realized that it will last us much longer. You see, we’re not four people in this household. We’re two and a half or so. So, if everything goes right (and the freezer doesn’t roll over and die), we’ll be having delicious fresh meals every day until Christmas. And they will take only little time to prepare. I’m already dreaming of the yumminess.

And I’m really relieved that my husband (though grumbling a lot on Saturday, “I wouldn’t have agreed to this if I had known that it would take that long.”) said things like, “You know, maybe we should do this every year to de-stress the holidays.”

So, what have I learned so far?

• It always takes about twice the time to prepare Leanne’s meals than everybody else says it does. (Maybe I’m a household snail…)
• When you have that much onions to chop, take the time to prepare your big blender. Don’t chop by hand if you don’t have to.
• When you’re preparing that much American receipts convert measurements in advance.
• When you need to mix your own seasonings (just try to find Cajun seasoning in Germany), do it in advance.
• It’s a good idea to check if the freezer needs cleaning before you open it to store all those meals in it.
• You better start the whole preparation thing a little earlier so that you might be finished before bedtime.

What kinds of things do you do to prepare for stress-free holidays? And do they tend to work?

Technorati Tags: FlyLady, Leanne Ely, Mega Menu-Mailer, Saving Dinner