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I take a lot of photographs, to get the one I want.

This is something I learned a long time ago, from professional photographers. Back then, I thought, well this is something I’ll never do, because film and developing were expensive and was a kid. Seriously. I remember being disappointed in my photos from Girl Scout camp because I could never really capture how things looked. So, I had no funds to devote to getting the right picture and when I did have funds, I still didn’t care enough.

I’m an impatient person. My greatest flaw perhaps? David thinks so. Or at any rate, if he could change one thing about me, that would be it.

Of course, if I got to pick, I’d probably have him be ready to go on time, so there’s a lesson there. Draw your own conclusions.

Still, I’m just not patient with doing one thing multiple times. If I can get away with doing it right the first time, I will. If I can get away with doing it mostly right, or close enough the first time, I will.

The beauty of the digital camera is, I can take lots of photos and easily review and delete them. The downside is, I’m accumulating images. The sunset pic from last night is one of eight I ended up keeping. I had a hard time deciding which to show you.

I don’t like rewriting, either. It feels like retread to me. Back when I typed my papers for college on my Brother Correctronic, I did just that: composed as I typed. One time through and I was done. In my perfect world, I’d write a novel that way, too — beginning to end, one time through.

I know, I know. It’s not a perfect world and I’m not queen of it. Much to my chagrin, I assure you.

So, the New Novel is coming right along, but I’m feeling aggravated with it from time to time because it keeps wriggling and changing under my hands. I thought I was molding one story and it keeps mutating into other things. This is okay, I know. The other writers keep telling me to go with it, let it be what it wants to be, this is magic and so forth.

But what annoys me is: I’m going to have to revise the beginning. Probably multiple times. Gah!

At least I don’t have to do it on paper. Small mercies for an impatient writer.

The Happiest Person You Know

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An old flame got in touch with me the other day.

I hadn’t seen or talked to him in over 20 years. And neither had anyone else that I asked. Contrary to my fears, he hadn’t self-destructed. He’d done AA, married, had some kids and fishes a lot.

“I’m the happiest person you know,” he said.

Well, you know me — I want to quibble that two Facebook messages after 20 years doesn’t really count as “knowing” someone. And his happiness is self-reported. I have no way of knowing if he is representing his life accurately or if those things truly make him happy.

But I’m happy for him.

Penelope Trunk posted the other day the culmination of her research on happy lives versus interesting ones. She even has a little quiz to rate your own life. I came out -1, which puts me as “suspiciously well balanced.” Or lacking a self-identity. I’ve never had self-identity issues, but I always come out on this stuff as well-balanced. I’m halfway between right-brain and left-brain, halfway between Type A and Type B. It’s why I call myself a fence-sitter — I’m always on the line in-between.

I could never say that I’m the happiest person you know. Though I am a very happy person. I also think I have an interesting life.

Yesterday, David went for his physical exam. This is a new primary care physician, since we moved here only six months ago. He picked her partly because she has a reputation for being friendly to natural medicine approaches. She, like many people involved in natural medicine and new age spirituality, is very much against alcohol consumption. She told David he should give up alcohol since he’s pre-hypertension (his blood pressure was 124/84 and she feels anything over 120 is too high). David says he enjoys our cocktail hour; enjoys having a drink with dinner and he’s unwilling to give that up. She asked if he needs to drink (don’t they always ask that?) and he said no, but he likes it. Then she said that, since David practices Tai Chi, he should understand that you don’t need alcohol and that you can lift your consciousness through Tai Chi and that’s what Tai Chi is all about. And David said, no, Tai Chi is about moderation. It’s about the middle path.

Sure, we knew plenty of people in our years of training in the Taoist arts who gave up alcohol. David gave up alcohol for two years. I gave it up for weeks and months, doing various purifying gigs. People also totally gave up things like refined sugar, meat, sex. Sometimes you have to give stuff up. Sometimes you’re allergic or addicted and it can’t be in your life because it becomes a poison.

But it’s interesting how people gravitate towards the idea that anything that gives you pleasure is somehow interfering with spiritual development. Is simply bad and wrong.

In the long term, though, it’s hard to say what will contribute most to your life. You might give up all the food and liquor that give you pleasure and live into an ascetic extended old age, but what have you really gained? And what if you get hit by a bus?

As I said, I’m a middle path kind of gal. I gravitate to the health choices that make immediate impacts. Eating right and exercising are not only good for my long-term health, but they make me feel good now. Those choices improve my quality of life. I love a good glass of wine and the occasional brownie, too. Those also contribute to my enjoyment of life.

The happiest people I know? They’re not the ones laboring to give up all bad influences, trying to live forever and become wiser than everyone else. And neither are they the most interesting people I know.

The happy and interesting people are the ones savoring every moment of their lives. Pursuing their passions and savoring the pleasures.

I raise a toast to that!

Breathing Water

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This is from Valentine’s Day. Love this dramatic window of sunset. There’s probably better ways of photographing the sun dead on like this, but clearly that knowledge is not mine.

Alas. Still on my list to take a photography class.

Not more important than writing my novel at this time, however.

So, after two days of being full-time writer girl, I haven’t written more than I would on a normal day. I figure if I write about 1,000 words in two hours on a normal day when I also work the day job eight hours, then with six hours of writing time, I should be able to write 5,000 words.

Yes, yes — I know the math comes out to 3,000 words, but I have this dream that the block time will make the word count expand in this glorious exponential way. See, if I could write 5,000 words a day, then a five-day work week would give me 25,000 words, which means I could draft a 100K novel in a month. Give me another month to revise and that would be excellent productivity.

What? You already knew I was a dreamer!

Anyway, I’m not coming close to 3K words, much less 5K. But I am finding that the New Novel is coming together in my head in this most marvelous way.

See, I’ve been bemoaning (mostly to myself) that I haven’t yet written the truly complex novel I want to write. I want to have written Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Avatar (which means I would have written Kushiel’s Dart and Kushiel’s Chosen, too, then brilliantly capped the trilogy with Avatar). I want to have written A.S. Byatt’s Possession or Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye or Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game & Speaker for the Dead.

And I have this idea that, in order to write books like that, you have to be able to dreamthink them for long periods of time. Like diving into the lake and living underwater in the mermaid city until you learn to breathe there.

At any rate, that’s what’s happening for me now. Though I spend a fair amount of time staring at the screen and not typing, I am learning to breathe. And this novel is taking shape.

Deep breath.

Me Time

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I made the mistake of showing my mother my writing schedule last night.

As I mentioned, I’m practicing being full-time writer this week. I have vacation from the day job and need to get the New Novel underway. It’s a good opportunity to see how I’d set up a professional work schedule without co-workers or daily hours expectations.

One of the main things I’m trying to do is make sure I don’t dink on the internet all day. So I’m allowing myself online windows to check email, talk to people on IM, catch-up on Twitter and Facebook, read blogs and articles, etc. Which is why my mom asked, so she’d know when my online windows are. I pasted her my schedule into IM and she freaked.

Now, granted, people are often taken aback by my spreadsheets. I try to explain it’s that little wedge of Virgo peeking through all the Leo. When I was a grad student, there was a blackboard over my desk that I would draw the semester’s calendar on. I filled it in with all of my classes, office hours, and so forth. One professor, glimpsing it, said it looked like displacement activity to him. Some of it might be. But the practice helps me to get my head around what I want to do.

That’s the key to me: this is all about making sure I’m doing what’s most important to me.

One writer friend, Jeri Smith-Ready, announced on twitter recently that she created a screensaver that scrolled the message: “Is what you’re doing right now more important than writing your novel?”

My mom thought my schedule sounded sad, lacked joy and human contact. She wanted me to show it to David, so he could weigh in on whether I’m crazy. He looked at it and said, “She just doesn’t understand what you’re trying to do.”

Which she confirmed this morning, apologizing via IM during my online window.

I suspect a lot of the full-time writers out there would look at this and say I’m still spending too much time online. I wonder if I’d whittle that down over time.

But then, while I told my mom that David counts as human contact, my online time is the bulk of my social life these days. Quite deliberately so. When we moved, I decided not to join any organizations yet. Which I’m wont to do. I love to join. Then I inevitably end up volunteering to be in charge of stuff and suddenly I’m spending my non-work time on planning charity balls and not writing my novel.

When we moved, I sold my sewing machine and all the fabric I’d stored up, because when I’m quilting, I’m not writing my novel.

I can see how this sounds joyless. But for me it’s about making deliberate choices to do everything I can to get to the point of being a full-time writer. Once there, I can judiciously add back in all of those other things.

It’s difficult for people to understand, I think, the need writers have to build fences around the writing time. I suspect it’s because a person writing looks like they’re doing nothing that can’t be interrupted. Just a quick question. Can you do this one thing. The non-writers don’t know how long it takes to get the flow going and how the voice breaking in totally disrupts it. Soon to be published writer Allison Pang is facing this now. She’ll be doing revisions on her current novel, plus outlining and drafting the next two, plus working on a totally different story that she loves. All this while working her full-time job and raising two young children with a husband whose job takes him away from the house a lot. I keep telling her she’s going to have to get mean (not in her nature), carve out that writing time and fence it off. That probably sounds joyless, too.

What it comes down to is, when you want the big prize, you have to sacrifice to get it. Not a lamb or a pound of flesh. What you sacrifice is some of the other things that you decide aren’t as important as writing your novel right now. What will those things be? Individual and carefully chosen.

It’s the question wanna-be writers ask all the time: how do I find the time to write? The short answer is, you don’t. You have to scratch and claw it out of all the other things in your life that compete. You make what other people see as joyless choices.

Fortunately, in the end, the writing itself is a surpassing joy.

Dreamthink

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I like this, when the sun is rising opposite the Sandias and first hits the peaks, highlighting them with gold on snow.

Lately I’ve been doing a new thing in the mornings. Not on purpose. In the last few years, since we started getting up early to exercise, and since we haven’t been exhausted and sleep-deprived, I sometimes awake before the alarm.

This is unusual for me. I mentioned before that I’m not a morning person and really had to train myself to wake up early to write. When I was younger, I’d sleep through the alarm clock. I’d sleep through phone calls. I had to be dragged from sleep and it took forever for my brain to engage.

So, for me to awake before the alarm – sometimes as much as 45 minutes before – is a new experience for me. I lie there in bed savoring the warmth, the comfort, David’s sleeping form next to me, and dreamthink.

This is how I’m thinking of it. My mind wanders through the story I’m working on and I kind of dream about it, kind of fantasize. It’s probably Stage 1 or 2 sleep. I’m betting if we hooked me up to an EEG then, it would show spindle waves. Which is appropos of nothing.

What is neat for me, is this has become plotting time, in a lovely, effortless way.

When I wrote Obsidian, I started kind of from this state. It was a rainy Saturday morning in April. David had gotten up early to attend a seminar I blissfully did not have go to. I slept a long time after he left, as this was back in the exhausted & sleep-deprived days. When I finally awoke, maybe around 10:30, I laid there and thought about the long, vivid dream I had. Then I went upstairs and wrote it down. I wrote for hours while the rain fell on the skylights.

Some think creativity comes from the subconscious, welling up from deep within. And the subconscious can only really be heard when the conscious mind, with all her lists and timetables, is quieted.

Dreamthink.

Wuv. Twue Wuv

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David and I have been talking about the nature of love, lately.

I think I’ve mentioned it, in reference to other conversations. But this, of course, is the WEEKEND OF LOVE, what with Valentine’s Day and all. The mentions of it have become truly relentless.

Two of the gals David goes to school with asked him what he’s doing for me for Valentine’s. Another took him aside to ask what she should get for her guy that he would like. It’s funny: at 50, David is everyone’s father figure. He gave her good advice though. He suggested some things I’d done for him that he liked and she was pleased.

I told David, though, that I don’t really want anything for Valentine’s this year. It just seems silly. (Plus, I hadn’t been thinking about getting him anything!) David said he’d tried to explain that to the gals who asked, that doing something for each other on a particular day seems kind of false after so many years together. Whereas last week I was feeling sad and friendless (woe is me) and had a little crying jag at bedtime. And he was sweet to me and comforted me. That meant the world. More than flowers and candy on the designated day.

It occurs to me that Valentine’s Day meant much more to me when I didn’t have a special someone. I recall the agonies in school, wondering if I would get a carnation from someone besides my best friend. I’d watch the cheerleaders walk around with their buckets of tributes and wonder when someone would love me. Later, in college and grad school, when I was more often single than not, I would be fine with what I was doing, until Valentine’s Day rolled around to remind me that I was alone.

Otherwise I never felt alone.

Now that I have David, who is so central to my life, I don’t find that Valentine’s Day validates anything. In some ways, it’s just for show. Send me flowers so I can prove to the world that I’m loved.

The funny thing is, when you love and are truly loved in return? You don’t have to demonstrate it to anyone.

Playing House

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Kind of a playful sunrise, with all the little swirlies.

It’s the common wisdom that the young of all species learn through play. Right? We know this. Kids play house and doctor. They play war and cops & robbers. You can watch kittens stalk imaginary prey. Puppies nip and wrestle for dominance. All of the developmental types love to do studies on this: how play develops the mental and physical structure we need to be effective in the world.

For the next week, I’m going to play Full-Time Writer.

Believe me, this is the funnest game ever! I hope so, anyway.

Things are slow at work. Predictably slow. as we’re in the doldrums between the crashing waves of last year’s projects winding up and just before the long voyage that will be this year’s projects. One advantage of my super-busyness last Fall is I’ve got a fair amount of vacation and unused holidays built up. Our company is really great that way — you can work on a holiday if you’re pressed and save it for another time.

This is that time.

Don’t worry — I’ll go on real vacation later this Spring, when David gets his two-week break from school and we’ll go to VIRGIN GORDA! Did I mention we’re going to VIRGIN GORDA?? Well, we are. (Thanks to Guavaberry Spring Bay for the pic!)

But for now, I want to use the uninterrupted time to get the scaffolding up on the new novel I’ve been noodling on. I need to think up a way to refer to it. I don’t really have a title. I know how *I* think of it, but I don’t want to put it out there in the world just yet. I’m feeling protective of her young and tender self. And you know I hate the term “WIP.”

Hell, I guess it’ll just have to be New Novel.

Once I did a writers retreat, at Ucross Foundation. An incredible experience that went a long way toward making me feel like a “real” writer in my early days. For two solid weeks I had a room, a writing studio and an actual staff that fed me. (And some other artists, too.) At midday they would creep up and leave a gourmet sack lunch outside your studio door, so they wouldn’t disturb the incredibly important work going on inside.

Of course, being a writer, I would long for the interruption. Listening for the lunch elves so I could quit agonizing and have a legitimate reason to stop writing. I don’t know what it is about writing that, once you have large blocks of time to do it, it becomes overwhelming. But, over the two weeks, I got better at it. There was no clock in my room and I didn’t bring one, so I tended to wake when the sun hit my pillow, around 7. The only scheduled event in my day was dinner with the other artists every night.

When I returned, a friend asked me if I’d found my “perfect calendar.” After a moment of thought, I said yes. Yes, that was a perfect schedule for me.

I’ve done the “at home” writers retreat once or twice before. But at those times, my writing habits were less solidified and my life was crazier. I ended up spending that time writing very little and napping a lot. Or catching up on other stuff.

This time though, I want to really test out what it’s like. I want to set up my perfect calendar as a full-time writer and practice for when it’s real.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

The Great Backyard Bird and Coyote Watch

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All the animals are out and about now.

Spring may not begin until March — which I quibbled about previously, so I won’t reiterate my arguments, much as I enjoy reiterating my favorite peeves — but the wildlife around Santa Fe is gearing up for warm weather.

Tuesday evening, as dusk fell, a couple of bunnies came out to hit up the game bird block out front. And a jumping mouse hopped by. Then, yesterday morning, I awoke to fog outside the window — and a coyote walking by. Last night, a bobcat came up on the porch to nose around. And sniff around the game bird block.

Predators following prey in the eternal cycle.

The flickers have been diligently hammering on the house. If you’ve never heard a woodpecker at work on your house, well it sounds like the roofing crew showed up again. Maybe just the finish crew. But you could swear someone’s out there pounding nails. If you look behind the suet feeder in this photo, you can see the fresh hole in the portal post that this selfsame bird drilled into it.

I assume that’s her, anyway. She refused to give her name.

Being a woman, I decided food was the answer. The gal at the local Wild Birds Unlimited was dubious.

“Are you sure they’re not looking to carve out a nest?”

“It’s about the size of a quarter,” I say. “If so, they’ve got a ways to go.”

I’d walked in and asked for the Woodpecker’s Friend. Which makes sense to me, but I apparently live in my own delusional world. I’m at peace with that. At any rate, the thing I thought I saw at Christmastime wasn’t what I thought it was and it wasn’t called that anyway. The upshot? I have to be my own woodpecker’s friend. So I got the basic suet frame and the recommended suet and made David install it all over the hole, so the flickers would eat the suet and not the portal.

Right, he thought I was nuts, too.

And for a while, all we got on there were the bushtits. Which turned out to be really neat because they hadn’t visited us other wise.

Then, a couple of days ago: the flickers found the suet. They’ve been happily cracking away on it — and no other part of the house — ever since. I know. I am totally vindicated. I *am* the Woodpecker’s Friend. One day all you people learn not to scoff.


The Great Backyard Bird Count starts on Saturday. No qualifications required to participate. This year, if you tweet, you can use the hashtag #gbbc to report bird sightings. Hey, it does NOT get more fun than that people!

Nobody seems to sponsor the Great Backyard Coyote Count. But we caught one on the night-vision camera last night. It’s actually an amusing sequence as he and the bunnies visit throughout the night. Tonight we’ll see if we can’t snap one of the bobcat and maybe I’ll post the whole sequence tomorrow.

Oh, in this photo? I’m pretty sure he’s looking at Isabel in the window.

She’s hiding in the laundry basket today.

In Flight Again!

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I think I’ve mentioned before that, when I’m not sure what I’m going to write about here, I look on my camera to see what might be on there.

It’s frequently a complete surprise what images I find there, which really shouldn’t be the case, since most of the time it’s only been a day or two since I snapped the pictures.

Short attention span much?

Except that’s not really true. While my attention can be diverted, usually my problem is getting too wrapped up in stuff so that I lose track of time and forget stuff. Like, say, the tea water boiling on the stove. I wish I could say that’s only happened once or twice, but I bet I’ve done it, oh, two dozen times at least. Now I actually set a reminder on my computer to go check it. Pitiful, I know.

In this way, the photos on the camera are like little notes to myself, to remind me of what I was thinking of or found interesting at that moment. Otherwise, I’m not one of those writers who writes notes to herself.

I saw a bit of advice the other day saying that writers should make notes with every idea or you’ll forget it and lose it forever. I just don’t think it’s true.

Admittedly, last night, David and I were talking about something and I thought, oh, I should blog about that in the morning and now I don’t remember what it was. But I’m not bothered about it because I truly believe that the thought will surface eventually, at the right time. If not, well, in the immortal words of Steve Martin, “It must not have been very important then!”

If you’re radioactive, you’ll remember eventually.

One thing that I do when I’m editing is I’ll think, oh, I really meant to add in this phrase or this idea or feeling. I’ll type it in and, two lines later? I’ll find that exact phrase. One day I’ll learn to read ahead and check to see if the past me already did what the present me thinks is so brilliant. One day I’ll also learn to trust myself.

Rarely do I find that I left something out of a story, mostly I’m refocusing the reader’s eye.

It’s funny to me, to look at these photos I took the other day. On Saturday we went to the mall to find the glassblower’s booth I spotted at Christmastime. Remember how I said malls didn’t have them anymore? Well ours does!

And they totally fixed my glass fairy, whose broken wings I bemoaned in that same post. The guy only charged me a dollar to do it. (I gave him $5 — not all miracles are costly.)

So, I snapped commemorative photos of the repaired fairy, for the triumphant return to flight blog post, since several people said the Broken Wings post made them sad. Witness my contract with the reader here: I’m providing you with a happy ending to the sad, sad tale of the broken fairy.

You can see, however, that I had issues with focus.

The camera kept “looking” out the window instead of at our main character, fairy reincarnated.

Some lovely nature shots there — not to mention the fabulous rain chain! — but the heroine is an unfortunate blur.

I finally figured out that I was too close to her and backed off. But then the secondary characters took over. Not that they each don’t have their own story. Just not this story.

At any rate, I’ve extended this analogy until it’s creaking, and you can see her at the top, in all her clarity and flightfulness.

That’s my take-away today: trust yourself, things can always be fixed, and sometimes all it needs is a little refocusing.

When I’m Down and Feeling Blue

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Sometimes I feel like I’m speaking to an empty room.

Maybe this is a writer thing. You write the words, they go out there and sometimes someone answers, but most of the time, not. Most of the time there’s this vast silence.

Or, maybe people who become writers are people who feel like they’re talking to an empty room already and writing the words down is a way to at least make them visible, if not heard.

It’s a funny thing, because the reader doesn’t experience this. The reader feels like they’ve participated in this whole conversation with the writer. You’ve whispered in their ear, they listened and thought about it, ordered their responses and perhaps revisited what you wrote in their minds over the course of the day. This is the part the writer never gets to hear.

And, of course, we all seem to be this chemically unstable combination of insecurity and raging egomania. Perhaps it’s one of those things like running for President of the US, where only egomaniacs stand a chance of surviving the process. But, for writers, our marching melody seems necessarily threaded through with this minor harmony of doubt. I don’t know — maybe the President feels that, too, but doesn’t dare show fear to the lurking wolves.

This morning, two nice things happened. A wonderful friend, who happens to be a Nebula Award-winning author and who offered to read my book to see if she could help expedite it past the slush piles, sent me a note on FaceBook, saying: “Wow! I was hooked on Obsidian by page one. You write really well.”

And an email came from one of my oldest friends, saying: “I managed to get caught up on all of your blog entries that I didn’t get to while I was convalescing. They were full of lovely writing, touching sentiments, and pretty images.”

Those two things? They’re enough to make that empty room suddenly full of people.