Tag: writers life

Juggling Tasks – and Keeping in Mind What’s Important

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

2_21_13Jackson loves to do everything I do – including laundry. If only I could train him to do it by himself…

I did the laundry yesterday because today we’re hitting the road to visit a sick family member. These things take precedence, of course, but it throws my careful schedule all to hell. With Platinum coming out on Monday, I have all sorts of extra promo tasks on top of my usual writing/day job/keeping the household going in a reasonable fashion tasks.

I’m not the first person to liken this kind of balance to juggling. The point is to keep all the balls in the air. Dropping a ball is a failure.

I’ve realized recently that most of my ideas about juggling are informed by a book I read as a teen, Robert Silverberg’s Lord Valentine’s Castle. I think I’m spoilering nothing when I say that the core of the story is about the rightful heir to the kingdom traveling in disguise with a troupe of carnival performers. He has no useful skills, so they teach him to juggle. The philosophy of juggling infuses the story – and eventually informs his character as a ruler. It’s lovely stuff, about being peaceful and having focus.

And not dropping the balls.

But I think I can get more focused on not dropping balls than the true fun of juggling, which is the interplay of the balls in the air. After all, I’m doing this to create the best life that I can – to serve all the most important things to me – not to be preoccupied with meeting some standard of not-failure.

What this means is, I’m learning to be okay with dropping balls.

I just pick the ones that can be dropped. The dishes? Can wait. The vacuuming? Doesn’t REALLY have to happen today. Getting word count in? Keep that ball in the air and watch it soar, all shining and lovely.

Maybe this approach will inform my character, too. Peaceful and focused sounds like a good place to be.

Grand Opening: My New Treadmill Desk!

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

treadmill desk As promised, the definitive post about my new treadmill desk!

I finally got the desk pieces delivered Tuesday, though I got the treadmill piece quite a while ago. So now I’m all assembled and rocking along. In fact, I’m walking on the treadmill as I write this!

So, I did not go with the cheapie option. Fair warning. There are some great blog posts out there about how to make your own treadmill desk, or how to jury-rig your existing treadmill so you can type while walking. I considered those options but ultimately discarded them. This is why:

  • As you can see, I have a small space. If I did one of the less expensive all-in-one treadmill desks, it would be in addition to my regular desk, and I didn’t want to sacrifice the room.
  • I like being able to look out my window and enjoy the view. There’s not enough window for both kinds of desk.
  • I didn’t already have a treadmill to jury-rig.
  • I’m at my desk about 11 hours a day, sometimes more. I do the the day job from home. So, on top of the writing career, I’m at my desk a good chunk of the time.
  • I wanted a good, long-term solution that would fit my life aesthetically and ergonomically.
  • For me, this is  a health investment. I’d rather spend the money on this now than on health care in the future.
  • It’s tax-deductible, too.

So, being who I am, I did a lot of online shopping and cross-comparisons.

I ended up buying the treadmill itself here. I like that it’s small, highly rated and has a control panel that sits up on the desk. They also sell adjustable height desks, but I found a better deal on the desk elsewhere. My big thing is I wanted this, too.

sitting deskSame desk, with the treadmill slid to the side, so I can sit and work, too. It works via a hydraulic lift that is very smooth and nearly soundless. This way, if I’m sitting and working and get a long phone call from my boss, say, I can raise the desk, slide the treadmill over and walk and talk–and still reference information on my computer.

I bought the desk here. I got the v.3 small frame (space  considerations), even though they’re running 5-7 weeks out for delivery. Treaddesk, where I got the treadmill piece, has a similar desk that’s very pretty, and they sell it as a package. However, by buying these two pieces separately and saved $640. Plus, if Treaddesk ships it as a package (cheaper than doing the pieces separately with them), they have to send it to a loading dock and not your house. Which I just did not want to deal with.

How do I like it? I do! The treadmill goes a max 4 mph and right now I’m walking at 1 mph. The treadmill is a bit heavy to slide, but not awful. The brick floors help. If I were to do this on carpet, I’d likely want one of those plastic aprons they sell at office-supply stores.

Feel free to ask questions!

Seven Things to Remember about Finishing a Novel

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

1_29The waxing moon was setting into an oncoming blizzard just at sunrise this morning. Amazing, swirls of cloud and color. I wish you all could have seen it.

Last week, B.E. Sanderson, frequent commenter here, had a post on her blog about finishing manuscripts. She’s been doing a lot of interesting posts lately aimed at aspiring writers. This one caught my attention because, hello! Star Trek and science references. I ended up commenting, too, which I don’t seem to do all that much of anymore. 

I’ve become the blog-lurker your marketing-advisor warned you about.

At any rate, the discussion was about what to do when you hit that point in your novel where you just don’t want to write it anymore. Every writer has a place where this tends to happen – and for a lot of writers, it’s somewhere around the 30K mark. Worse, it’s very likely that you’ll be tempted at this point to pursue the New Shiny. You’ll get this Fabulous Idea for an even better novel. The temptation to ditch that 30K brick and write the New Shiny will be extreme.

And, if you do this, the New Shiny will be all kinds of rewarding. Until, oh, around the 30K mark. Then guess what?

Exactly. This is why so many hopeful authors have half-finished novels lurking on their hard drives.

I make this distinction, between a hopeful author and a publishing author, because – and I know this is simple logic, but here it is, just to be clear – in order to be a published author YOU MUST FINISH THE BOOK.

Yes, yes, yes – there’s a whole lot more to getting published than that. But we all know this is the first step. Nothing else happens without it.

So, here’s a little list of things to remember about finishing the book.

  1. The New Shiny is an illusion. That idea is the greener grass on the other side of the fence. It’s the nubile young girlfriend. In the end, it won’t make you any happier than the manuscript you’ve been married to. Write it down and save it for later.
  2. Apropos of that? Ideas will keep. It may not feel like it, in the rush of inspiration, but once it comes to you, it’s yours. Write down whatever you need to so that you can reconnect with it again in the future. You know what they say about True Love – if he really loves you, he’ll wait.
  3. There’s a reason why it’s always the same place for you. It comes out of you and how you deal with the world. This is like the guy who always dates women who need rescuing or the gal who ends up in dead-end jobs where she’s treated like a doormat. Growing as a person means solving this problem. So if you have trouble getting started, look at what else in your life you have trouble starting. Other people can never finish stuff. Then practice overcoming this barrier – your own personal three-minute mile. Train, persevere – know that you can do it.
  4. There’s also a reason why it’s so often the 25-30K mark for so many writers. If you figure a typical novel is 80-120K, then 20-30K is the first 25%. In story structure, even if you think you’re not using it, the first 25% is Act I. In the classic Boy-Meets-Girl/Boy-Loses-Girl/Boy-Gets-Girl-Back scenario, you’ve finished the meeting. In the hero’s journey (get your hero up a tree, throw rocks at him, get him down again), you will have gotten your characters into a major predicament. It’s a natural ending spot. Intermission. Now what?
  5. There’s the rub. The “now what?” part is one of the hardest parts. Thus the oft-referenced “sagging middle” of many stories. See, in classic story structure, Act II takes up a full half. It stretches from about the first 25% up to around 75%. It is the bulk of your story. That’s a lot of rock-throwing. We’ve all read those books that start out great and then, somewhere in the middle, we get bored. We might put it down and never finish. We kind of wonder where the whole thing is going. But then (hopefully!) it starts to pick up again and it gallops on to a rollicking finish. This is why.
  6. So, what do you do? Reference #3. Practice. Keep going. Yes, it’s a slog. Complain to your writer friends and they will nod in sympathy and offer you cookies. Then get back to work. For me, if I understand why I want to stop, that makes it easier to keep going.
  7. Now here’s a cookie for you: once you get through the long slog, you will start to have fun again. All that promise and joy the New Shiny offered? This is EVEN BETTER. The ride to the end will feel like that last downhill swoop on the log ride with a huge splash of water at the end. So much so that, as you hit that final save, you’ll want to get right back on and do it again.

Now, get back to it!

How Breaking Old Habits Brings New Excitement

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

new office 2 new officeI reorganized my office over the weekend.

I know, I know – this is hardly earth-shattering news. But you all know how it is. I spend in the neighborhood of half my day in this room, between my day job and the writing career. To rework it after several years has a profound effect on my life. Plus, I like the change much better than I’d expected to.

See, the day after Christmas, I went online and bought myself a treadmill desk. All of you out there looking for those great articles about the DIY treadmill desk or the cheapie alternative? You will not find it here. Yes, I looked at all of those articles and people gave me great advice. But, in the end, I wanted a long-term solution that I could live with for my roughly half a day that I’d spend with it. I’ll do a post on my solution when it all arrives (not for several weeks), but the short version is that I’m getting a hydraulic desk that I can raise and lower, so I can either sit or stand or walk while working at it.

The new desk is significantly bigger than my current desk, so I knew I’d need to rearrange. Especially if I wanted to keep my window view, which was a high priority for me. Since I couldn’t have my new treadmill desk yet, I could displace that excitement into a bit of New Year’s new office energy.

Basically all I had to do was flip the furniture from one side to the other. Here’s how it looked before:

Storyboard 2My story board was propped on a little table to the left of my desk.

Writing deskAnd – well, it turns out I don’t have a good picture of the other side, but all my computer/day-job related stuff (printers, scanners, files) were to the right. When we moved in, I set it up that way because there’s a handy-dandy power strip along that west wall. It seemed logical to put all the plug-in stuff next to it. But the problem with that kind of thing is the power strip location drove everything else. Which turns out to have been not the best choice.

Part of this comes from changes in technology, but all that STUFF is now to the left of my desk, which you can see in the very top pic. The equipment is all smaller, combined, with fewer cords. I also like the serendipity of how the painting of the view out a window to the ocean kind of carries over from my real window with the desert view.

Now the corner is much more all about my writing face. I love how my story board is now right there – and I can swivel in my chair to see it and contemplate. (It’s set up for the Phantom e-serial now, so if the act structure looks different now – for those alert blog readers who notice such things – that’s why.)

I don’t know if it shows in the pictures, but the difference in the feel of the space, the feng shui, if you will, is startling. More, I find the change has stimulated me. See, habits can be good things. The terrific thing about habits is they carry us through tasks that don’t require thinking. Like learning to drive. At first it felt like ten-thousand things to think about – clutches, accelerators, brakes, steering wheels, turn signals, wipers, lights, fifteen-million other drivers in a mad whirl – but over time that becomes automatic. We can drive our entire commute without really thinking about it, which lets us pay attention to things like audiobooks. But this energy-saving feature of our natures comes with a cost – it’s easy to miss stuff this way. Who among us has not been driving down the highway and suddenly realized half an hour has gone by that we don’t remember? What did we miss?

Deliberately breaking a habit can bring new awareness and stimulation. Just being in my reversed space makes me have to think about where the phone is, where something is now kept. I feel excited and ready for new things.

Plus? Treadmill desk!

What Does “Writer’s Life” Really Mean?

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Dealing with blog post tags is an ongoing part of my life.

I know, I know – it doesn’t count as an actual problem. Still, the labels I choose to index the various things I’m writing and talking about, provide a certain insight into how I see things at different points in my life.

See, the thing about blog post tags is that I don’t have a good system for assigning them. I’ve tried a few things, but it’s still a semi-random and more-than-a-little subjective. WordPress will suggest labels from my existing ones as I type them into a box, but it’s kind of like looking a word up in the dictionary – you have to have kind of an idea of how to start it before you can get close. It becomes a problem for me, because I sometimes want to look up an old blog post – something I know I wrote about before – and I have to play this guessing game with myself to figure out how I might have tagged it at the time. I’m right less than half the time.

So when I label current posts, I try to strategize what my future self will think of to look it up under. This means I’m playing this eternal guessing game with my past and future selves, which probably does not speak well for my long-term sanity.

I have this fantasy, you see, that I would be incredibly organized and *always* tag the same concept with the same tags. This would make the scientist in me happy.

However, I’ve recently realized part of the problem: concepts for me drift over time. They don’t get the same tags because I don’t think of them in the same way.

I noticed this on Tuesday, when I tagged my post on How Having Your Book Rejected Makes You a Better Person with the label “Writer’s Life.” Because that is absolutely a topic that is core to living the life of a writer to me. I talked about how my friend is dealing with disappointment in her writing career and compared it to recovering from heartbreak and becoming a stronger person because of it. Yes, “Writer’s Life” is the perfect tag for that.

It struck me then that this not how I used to think of “Writer’s Life.” I started writing in a more academic and literary environment and discussions about “writer’s life” were much more about art and philosophy and mindfulness. A lot of it can be encapsulated by the critical praise for Annie Dillard’s “The Writing Life.” (Yes, I have that book on my shelf.)

A kind of spiritual Strunk & White, a small and brilliant guidebook to the landscape of a writer’s task.

…a glimpse into the trials and satisfactions of a life spent with words.

Gracefully and simply told, these little stories illuminate the writing life…

Anyone hoping to see inside the process of literary artistry is unlikely to find a more lucid, sensitive or poetic view.

…as slim and potent as the Tao Te Ching, that ancient Chinese manual on the art of living…

And so on.

This is how I used to view this concept – probably heavily informed by this book. I look back to when I began my blogging life over at lovepowerandfairytaleendings.blogspot.com, where I used the “Writers Life” tag 102 times in the two-year, eight-month life of that blog, making it my most frequently used tag. I look back at those early posts and see I did a lot of angsting over things like selling out and balancing writing projects and order vs. chaos (I linked to it because that one is kind of amusing).

At any rate – I can see how I’ve changed in my understanding of the Writer’s Life. I moved from thinking about my writing process to recognizing how my day job had made me a better writer and what the corporate environment had taught me about dealing with personnel issues.

I think this is a natural progression: as we become professional writers, our lives become less about the philosophy and more about the reality.

And that’s a good thing.

Now to select some tags for this besides “Writers Life.”

How Having Your Book Rejected Makes You a Better Person

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Our first snow fell on Sunday – also Jackson’s first-ever snow. He lasted about two minutes before dashing back inside to furiously clean between his toes.

When I was in my early twenties, I used to argue that everyone needed to have their heart broken at least once. Not only was this a great way to soothe a friend who’d just had his or her heart broken – hey! this will make you a stronger person! – but I also believe it to be very true.

Falling in love is a fabulous, giddy and wonderful thing. Loving relationships are what sustain us through life. Most of us want to find that special someone (or someones) and find our own happily ever after. But that quest can be a trial. With each busted relationship, we lose not only that person, but also the dream of what could have been.

I’ve been there – the sense of failure, the certainty that I would never love again and would be alone for the rest of my life.

Simply awful.

But, over time, your heart begins to heal and you discover that you learned some things. Thinking about a new relationship changes – it’s no longer a laundry list of “wants.” After a shattering break-up, you get a a really good idea of what you do NOT want. The new Dealbreakers List is usually short, but it’s backed by experience. It provides you with a much better compass for knowing what is likely to work for you.

Heartbreak also teaches the very valuable lesson that nothing is easy. Even if the falling in love part was, the maintaining of it can be damn hard work. If you take the relationship for granted, fail to nourish it, it can fall apart in the blink of an eye.

Finally, that rejection, the sense of failure – from those things grows resolve to do better. To be better. Hope grounded on this kind of foundation is a powerful force.

Then, when you love again – you’re better at it. Wiser. More careful with what you’ve been handed.

I think career-heartbreak can be just like this.

A friend of mine recently had her option book rejected. In most contracts with publishers, they say they’ll publish two or three books in a series and then have right of first refusal to see the next book in the series. This means you have to show it to them first, before you try to sell it to someone else. The rub, however, is that very few publishers want to buy the third or fourth book in a series. To them the series has been done already. So, when her option book was refused, she knows that’s the end of those characters and that world.

(And yes – she can self-publish more books in the series, and she might, but that’s a different kind of effort.)

This kind of thing happens All The Time. Of my three crit partners, all three have had their option books refused after the first two in a series. They grieved, wailed and gnashed their teeth – and moved on.

While I see my friend going through the stages of grief over this, I also see her wrestling with the heartbreak and healing from it. She now knows what she does not want in a new publisher, a new book contract. She was lucky to begin with – a Cinderella story of many offers and a very nice deal. The courtship was great but working under contract was crushing. She knows now what she needs to maintain a creative and productive writing pattern.

Best of all, when we discuss her options – like self-publishing – she shows an increased resolve. She’s working on a new story and she’s going to focus on that. She’s stronger and wiser now.

It’s funny to me, that in my 20s the conversations were about busted relationships and now, in my 40s, they’re about busted careers.

We know now what we learned then – there’s always another one, just around the corner.

Before You Weep Over that Review…

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

I made a mistake when I took this photo. Apparently I moved the camera at precisely the right moment to create a shadow image. I had no idea I’d done it at the time. Only when I looked through the backlog of images on my camera this morning did I see it. I kind of like it.

It’s a good reminder.

The hoopla over “bad” reviews and various author reactions seems to be growing worse, not better. I put this down to several factors. Mainly, there are a lot of people who eat up this drama and love it when a new fight breaks out. These are the people who run around yelling “Fight! Fight!” while rounding up everyone they can find to scream from the sidelines. This is the reality TV of the interwebs. And, to follow up that analogy, the book reviewers and authors have discovered that this kind of fame is still fame. It’s all, as I’ve mentioned before, the chocolate-covered heroin of attention. A hit is a hit, after all. It might be the poisonous grade, but it’s better than jonesing.

At any rate, I don’t read all of my reviews. I read some, here and there. Especially if the reviewer calls my attention to it. But I’m fragile enough that I often skip the low-star reviews. I know, I know. Toughen up, sweetheart.

Eh, I’m not much for pain, outside certain contexts.

Then, the other day, I saw a book blogger on Twitter mentioning my name along with several other authors, saying she was doing a giveaway of some of her new favorite authors. I tweeted her back with a thank you and she replied that she was happy to, that she’d loved Sapphire. Surprised I’d missed a “loved” mention on a book blog – and, ok, maybe ready for a little hit of heroin – I looked at the review. Now I remembered seeing it. I hadn’t read it before, because she only gave it three stars.

Turns out, she uses a scale of zero to four stars. And she rated it low because she thought it was too short. (It’s amazing how many reviewers will do this. Feeding the Vampire gets low stars all the time for being too short. It’s one of the great drawbacks of digital presentation, I think. Had Feeding the Vampire been in a short story collection, for instance, no one would have felt betrayed by its brevity. But, because readers don’t necessarily pay attention to length when they buy and download, they settle in to read a novella or novel, only to have it end when they expect the story to be ramping up. I don’t blame them a bit – I’d likely feel the same way.)

Still, the point is, you never really know what you’re going to get and who will turn out to be a supporter. She didn’t have to include me in this special giveaway with these well-established authors. I didn’t expect such enthusiasm from that quarter.

Sometimes you look again, and see something you didn’t before.

Best Writing Retreat Ever

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

You all know the saw – writing is a lonely gig. And that’s why having friends and critique partners can be so very important.

This last weekend, Laura and Marcella came to Santa Fe to visit me. We had a lovely time. We toured around the countryside – I’m sure they’ll share some of the adventures – soaked in the hot waters at Ten Thousand Waves and did some major shopping. We each managed to buy a few special somethings, to reward ourselves for hard work and to provide inspiration in the next year.

Over our last lunch, Laura made us get down to business and set goals and plans for the coming year. She’s the accountability girl.

We’d been talking writing all weekend, of course. Chewing over plot ideas, sympathizing over business annoyances, coming up with great book ideas and insisting that the others write it. The goal setting was the culmination of all those winding conversations. We probably wouldn’t have come up with the same things that first day. But after all those hours of working things through, everything seemed much more clear for what needs to happen in the coming year.

It wasn’t a writing retreat, because none of us really wrote. (Except for Marcella who was dutifully marking down ideas in her notebook.) I kind of think that if we’d formalized it, the energy wouldn’t have worked so well. No lectures, workshops, official brainstorm sessions. Instead the ideas ebbed and flowed in a natural way.

We’re thinking about doing it every year.

Thanks ladies!