Monthly Archives: May 2012

Task Pile-Up on the Productivity Expressway

This morning I woke up, opened my eyes, and a thought occurred to me – I SUCK at multi-tasking.

You wouldn’t think this would be such an epiphany but it was. Because I spend my days trying to do many things at once and when I don’t fail miserably I think “Hey, yeah, I got this multi-tasking thing down. Productivity Superstar!” But that’s not the case at all.

So there I was this morning, thinking about last night – how I should have started my thesis but didn’t – and looking at my alarm clock – and how I said I was going to get up to go to the gym and didn’t – and deciding whether I should snooze my alarm even though I was awake – I did – that it really sunk in. I’ve always known I was a commit everything, all or nothing kind of person, I just didn’t realize it extended to the mundane task of tasks.

On Saturday I finished writing my novel (yeah, go me!) and I was hoping this would pave the way for me to focus on my final project for grad school (which I now only have about 6 weeks to complete – eek!) On some level I knew that I couldn’t hold room in my head for both of them. But then I got another idea for a book and the project gets pushed farther and farther away every time I think of them. Curses!

But this happens around my house too – yes I need to clean but I don’t have enough time to do the whole thing so why even start. Yes I should pay those bills but I haven’t organized the office yet so I don’t know where my mail is supposed to go so why bother. What, my car needs to be washed – don’t even get me STARTED on how much my care needs to be washed – but the car wash I have the gift certificate for is in another city and I should really be taking the time to clean my house . . . See, the excuses and being pulled 20 different ways is endless.

How did I THINK I was good at multi-tasking for so long? Simple – I’m organized. Not like OCD, I can tell you how many paper clips are in the cup organized but your basic bland organized. Except with pretty colored pens and bright file folders – I like to color code. And I make lists – lots of lists – that help remind me what I have to do. When I don’t have the lists I rely on my memory which is not a good way to remember EVERYTHING so I list. I list and I feel better. And then I stare at the list and get overwhelmed. There seems to be a pattern here.

But now that I’ve recognized it, let’s see if I can beat it. Today at work I will make a list of everything I want to get done and when I’m working on something, I’m working on it. No changes mid-shift, no stopping to get three other things done, just concentrate on the task at hand and then move on. Hopefully it works because, seriously, my car really is dirty, my house needs to be cleaned and that Thesis of 120 hours of work? It ain’t gonna research itself.

Creativity Kills

Creativity is awesome, stellar, tubular, rad (really dating myself with this list, huh?), magnificent, great, and wonderful. It’s also a huge pain in the ass.

Don’t get me wrong – sometimes I think about what life would be like if I didn’t have it sitting in my Mary Poppins bag of tricks (other items in that bag: chapstick) and it’s not a pretty thought. My life has stories to tell and they’d be infinitely more boring if I didn’t have it. I’d be that droning uncle at family reunions and none of us want that, really.

But right now, part of me really wants to strangle creativity’s neck. Not because it isn’t nice and pretty and helpful – nope, it’s all those things. But because it just won’t leave me alone! I’ve fallen into a creativity bubble – forgetting to eat dinner, only getting four hours of sleep, wanting to spend every moment reading and rereading and vacillating between “I just have” or “I have just.” Truthfully it isn’t such a bad place to be . . .

. . . except for the fact that I really have some other things I have to do. I have a job – getting four hours of sleep doesn’t really help me stay awake at it. I’m supposed to be researching and writing my thesis paper – sadly the romantic entanglements of fictional royalty does not have much bearing on my graduating. I have a house that’s still packed in boxes – being creative won’t help me find the missing Tupperware or my cheese graters.

But I’m also way too selfish to walk away from it now. I spent almost two years training myself to be creative when I sit in a restaurant with my notebook in hand – don’t I owe this to her, Lady Creativity, to let her come over when she wants to? When I stopped having time for restaurants she stopped coming round and that about broke my heart. Now she wants to catch up on lost time and what kind of friend would I be to say no? A rude one, that’s for sure – and who wants to be rude nowadays (politicians and political pundits are taking care of that for the rest of us)?

So I’m both happy and sad that creativity came a knockin’. I’m tired and cranky, rejuvenated and in need of buckets of caffeine, overwhelmed and startlingly at peace about it. Heck, but what else is new – I’m a writer.

Voices In My Head

Everyone needs people in their life – mine just happen to be fictional.

Don’t get me wrong – there’s a lot of “real” people in my life too (well, not ‘a lot’ but that’s a subject for another day). I do have coworkers that I see daily. I can’t go a week without talking to my BFF (that’s Best Friend Forever people, see I’m hip on the young lingo) or looking at a picture of my adorable nephew. There are plenty of “real” people around, the variety that have driver’s licenses and house payments and spend too much time staring at that cell phone when they get text messages.

But there’s a lot of made-up people hanging out as well. It has to come with the territory – writing a novel – that people just start yelling at you, clamoring to be heard and ready to spill all their secrets, until you just give in and listen (I don’t have children but I imagine it’s similar, everyone wanting all of your attention). And sometimes, when you need it, they’ll listen to you as well.

The blank page is both terrifying and cathartic it has been said. Sometimes the words are too. Need a good cry? Write that emotionally wrenching death you’ve been putting off. Angry? There was that character that deserved telling off, somewhere, I’m sure of it. Wistful? There are many more ‘might have beens’ than even I could write down. A story, like a life, can be anything you want it to be.

But the fictional people are more than that – they’re not puppets that you trot out like Very Special Episodes of GLEE to badger the reader over the head with. In fact, if you’re doing it right, no one should know that Sophie told off Amber because you were in a bad mood or that throwaway line made it in because something similar just happened twenty minutes ago. Characters are people too. And sometimes they can give good advice, or help you find the way, even when you didn’t think you needed it.

What most people don’t realize is that characters that stick with you, they write themselves. People are surprised when I say that I’m excited to figure out what will happen next. “You don’t know?!” they ask. “But you’re the writer?!?!” Yes, I’m the writer. But I let Sophie and Amber tell me what they want to do. Sometimes they need a little prodding and sometimes they take me on exciting adventures. Sometimes characters that were meant to be seen and not heard won’t stay silent and, just like in life, change things in ways you couldn’t even imagine. And sometimes characters need to be cut because they refuse to hold up their end of the bargain.

And that’s why I like hanging around with the fictional people. I can be whoever I want to be when I’m staring at the blank page. I can do things I’m afraid of and I can work through problems I don’t want to give voice to and I can go to fabulous parties without ever changing into heels. And if it doesn’t sound right – if the decision we made was wrong or I gave them what they wanted but not what they needed or deserved, I can just come back again tomorrow and try it again. Life seldom gives you second chances but I’m full of thirds and fourths and fifths.

Sometimes I’m curious about how other people live. So when you close your eyes scenes don’t suddenly start up like movies that you’ve put on pause? And snippets of dialogue, they don’t run on repeat when you’re driving your car until they’re just so? So when you say you’re ‘doing nothing’ you actually mean it and aren’t obsessing on how you convince Sophie that Brett, not Marco, is the man of her dreams. Really . . . . huh.

My life may be solitary but it’s never lonely. Can’t be when everything I imagine can come true, if only for the moment it takes to scrawl the words across the page. And my imagination? Not something to be trifled with . . .

The Edge of Denial

I find myself operating in that weird, teenage place of hope and denial recently.

So last month was a month of chances for me as a writer. I did one of the most nerve-wracking things I could believe – I gave my book, randomly, to someone I knew to read. Doesn’t sound too revolutionary, I know, but the only people who had read my stuff so far were hand-picked to love it – and me! Not that I bemoan their truthfulness or opinions but, well, they weren’t about to crush any of my dreams, no matter how much they needed to be stepped on.

Lo and behold, the impossible happened – she loved it. She loved everything about it! And my heart grew two sizes (not that I’m a Grinch, I just have a really big heart now, you know, cause who likes economy sized). So then I did something even more impressive – I participated in a charity auction for a 20 page critique from an agent I liked. And, after spending WAY too much money – for a very worthy cause though, Water for Crits, look it up – I sent my first three chapters spiriting through the ether.

How, you may be asking, is this anything like high school. Stop being impatient, I’m getting to that . . .

So I sent the words away and was told that I would hear something within the next 45 days. It’s been about 30 and I’m starting to think about it too often, every time my phone shows the email icon in the corner, wondering if it’s from her and if it’s anything that I want to hear.

When I was a teenager I knew I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t have the courage to admit it and I didn’t have the dedication to pursue it, but I still knew it. Have probably always known it. And I remember being a senior in high school and one of our projects for English was to write a college admissions essay. I spent an endless number of nights figuring out what I wanted to say and when I turned in that essay I was as confident as I could be in it. Throughout the week our teacher would read bits and pieces of essays that were good but it was never mine. I started to doubt myself, to think that I had been wrong, maybe I hadn’t succeeded. Until Friday when we came into the class and the teacher sat down and read my essay in entirety.

And that’s what I’m hoping for now – that the best is last. And then the denial hits – when I realize that I didn’t send in my chapters to be critiqued, I sent them in to be validated. I LOVE my novel, I love 100% absolutely everything about it. I can take advice and suggestions and criticism – what I can’t take is if I find out that everything I did is just unintentionally wrong.

I’ve been told that after the first two chapters of my book, you’re hooked. And I sent in three. I’m holding onto some possibly childish, probably foolish, hope that the sky will open up and the heavens will sing and it will all work out beautifully.

But life has a tendency to get messy . . . .