Creativity Redux

So for like the 8th time in recent history I've started The Artist's Way again.  Clearly there's something in this creativity program for me if I keep doing it.  I think one of the signs for me is that, since I now sort of work on the fringes of publishing, I see all these mom&pop publishers putting out 3-5 eBooks a month on random topics, and somehow they're making it.  They're not millionaires, but I'm buying books from them, and I know others are too because they have employees, and book designers, etc.  They seem to be making enough to be comfortable, and I think to myself, "well I could do that."  

So why don't I?

I mean, I know eBook publishing as well as anybody else out there doing it (probably a lot better than anyone else out there doing it).  I already have a market in place with libraries.  I know good writing.  I've even done some good writing.

So what the hell is my problem???

I have a gazillion excuses - time, energy, job, yada fucking yada.  But I still have 24 hours in the day, just like Gandhi did.  He managed to win independence for an entire subcontinent.  And I can't put out a few eBooks?  Seriously?

I hit a fork in the road recently with my bipolar diagnosis, and then the summer was spent rehoming the cats and tearing down the home office J built me, but I'm starting to get into a groove now that Hannah is settling into a schedule that gives me at least 2 hours in the evening, and an hour in the morning (if I'm lucky) in which to do some creative work and still get a decent night's sleep.  I'm adjusting to my meds so that I don't feel like I got hit by a truck upon waking up every day.  

And the best part is that next year I'm not going to be working as much.  We have decided to move back to Pennsylvania and I'm going to take on contract jobs, hopefully staying with my current organization, and then maybe picking up some other projects along the way.  So I will have time in which to pursue some of these other goals I have around writing and creativity.

Every morning these days I get up around 5:30 or so to write.  I do my Morning Pages, and I'm working on actually finishing a damn NaNoWriMo book.  Which is good, because every day I get more book ideas.  But I actually have to finish one first.  So that's a goal for me, before the next NaNoWriMo in October.  Lots of editing and rewriting.

I have several friends who have had books published this year, and I'm hella jealous.  One has become quite a big deal - I see her books in Barnes & Noble, and I'm so proud of her - and she's an amazing writer.  But I'm tired of being on the fringes of that world.  I want to get in there and create and publish my own stuff, and stuff I've chosen.  I want to have a say over what gets created and published, too.  Life is too short, and I don't want to have some kind of crazy midlife crisis in 10 years because I never followed my dreams when I had the chance.

So here we go using the tools of The Artist's Way again.  Stay tuned to see what comes of it :)

50 Things

So there's a gap in my life right now:

For the first time in four years, since having a baby and not needing to be obsessed with fertility/clomid/shots/ovulation/peeing on sticks, I have a lot of energy and a lot of creative thoughts, and, more than anything, I have the drive to actually complete my creative ideas and take these things that I've been thinking about for years to the next level.

And...

My time is not my own.  I can sit down to a blank page and five minutes later there is crying, and someone is teething and needs to be comforted, or hungry and needs to be fed.

So here I am, with all this energy and ideas, and a complete inability to plan things out.  For a while I said I was going to get up at 6 every day to do my creative projects.  Then Hannah started sleeping like crap, and then she started waking up at 6, too, and really there's a limit to what I can do with this level of sleep deprivation.

When I was in New Zealand I reconnected with a very dear friend of mine who has her own business doing creative work.  I knew her when I lived in London; in fact, I was her intern.  She's about 10 years older than me, and we are ridiculously similar.  We both self sabotage the crap out of ourselves, and we also have grand ambitions that we'll probably never be able to meet.

I spent a lot of time with her, hashing out ideas for the businesses I want to run, the books I want to write, etc.

We came up with an idea.  The 50 Things idea.  It's based on the thought that if you do something every day on your creative idea, even if it's just five minutes, you can accomplish a huge amount.  If you do one Thing over 50 days, you have 50 Things.  If you do one Thing every day for a year, you have 365 Things.  A year seemed a little daunting to get started, so we decided 50 days was doable, and then we could reconsider.

I'm picking two areas to work on (ie two Things a day).  One is creative, one is admin.  I need to get rid of some cats.  One of the major holdups to us moving back to Pennsylvania is the amount of cats we have.  If I did one Thing a day on the cats, for 50 days, I'm pretty certain we'd have found a home for at least a few of them (anybody want a cat?).  The creative area is going to be my book.  I have a NaNoWriMo book I've been working on for years.  I want to complete it.  I'm not sure whether I'm going to publish it on Smashwords or not - I'm not sure that it's quite to the level I'd like it to be.  But I need to finish it, because it's lingering with me.  Every new thing I start to write has the story woven in somehow.  So I need to complete it so I can start new things.

Our 50 Things start on May 10.  

In the meantime, I'm taking a lot of inspiration from this Ira Glass quote on the creative process.

Happy New Year's!

Well, I guess you all thought I disappeared off the face of the earth there for a while, huh?  Nope, I'm still here. And, in Reproductive News, I'm still not pregnant.

But on to other topics.

First, November was NaNoWriMo, which necessitated me spending all my writing time on my novel, which, incidentally, I really love.  I've taken a month away from it now, but I'm going to go back to it with a fresh view this month to start the editing process.  This is the fourth year I've done NaNoWriMo, and this is the first time I have really loved my book.

Then came Thanksgiving, with maternal visits, and lots of turkey.  Same thing you did, probably.

THEN I was up in San Francisco for a week.

And FINALLY the good stuff:  we've been in London since mid December.  Back in September my boss agreed to let me try out working here during a slow time of year, so that I could potentially spend a lot more time here, in the land that tickles my soul.  I work California hours, I transferred my phones over, and thanks to Skype, I see my boss more often now than I do when I'm at home.

With my work schedule I start work at about 4pm, which gives me my days to go exploring, wander on the Hampstead Heath, etc.  I had Christmas here, which was brilliant, and of course, New Year's.  The last time I celebrated Christmas in the UK was ten years ago.  It feels lovely to be back, with mince pies, and a full celebration of the 12 Days of Christmas (attention Target: if you're going to put up Christmas decorations on November 1, at least have the decency to leave them up the full Twelve Days of Christmas!  Oh, that's right, that interferes with your desire to start selling Valentine's.  Grrrr.).

I've been so busy living this amazing life, I haven't had much time to think about it, journal, blog, etc.  But I will try to do better, if for no other reason than to document the awesomeness that is my life right now.  I don't have a baby, but I do have England, so, you know, small victories.

Have you made any New Year's Resolutions?

I'm still working on mine, but they include:

1) Continuing to lose weight and get healthier.

2) Switch to mostly vegetarian foods.  Mostly because the cruelty to animals in the dairy industry, especially, simply horrifies me.  I feel like a hypocrite, saying I care about animals, and then supporting industries that force female cows to keep having calves so they continue to lactate, and then "dispose" of those calves. It makes me feel dirty when I think about it, and when I do eat dairy, I'm going to research it to make sure it's from a cruelty-free farm.

3) Practice transcendental meditation, which I was taught last week, at least once a day, regularly.

4) Read the entire King James Bible.  I missed doing it on the 400th anniversary year, but anyone who says they care about literature NEEDS to read the King James Bible, if only for the literary influences.  Even Christopher Hitchens (rest in peace) adored the King James Bible.  I'm ashamed that I've not read it completely.

5) Edit and self-publish my book.

Which leaves very little time for Skyrim, but I'm going to try to squeeze that in there, as I can...

And, the usual, complete the Damn Artists Way.

Seriously, I need to do it.  I'm driving myself crazy with my lame excuses for not.  Which leads me to my final one:

Give Up Being Lame.

Happy 2012...

Dating my Inner Artist

So I am finishing up Week 2 in The Artist's Way and stuff is starting to happen.  First, I noticed that I'm really avoiding working on my book, which is funny because I really love it (it involves Henry VIII, boys, time travel, self-discovery, and in-and-out burgers - who wouldn't love working with that?) so I think there must be some kind of fear of really putting myself out there.

But the best thing to happen so far was on Friday, when I took myself out on an Artist Date.  The Artist Dates are where you get to spend time with your inner-artist, nurturing it like you would a child, providing it with inspiration and stimulation. I wasn't sure I'd be able to do an Artist Date because it was Friday night and my in-laws were coming, and there was stuff to do, AND I didn't want to go down the hill to one of the big museums in LA because I was feeling lazy.  But I said to myself, "Self, you promised you would do an Artist Date, so you have to go do one."

I know that in Lake Arrowhead there is a gallery run as a co-op by the artists, and I figured I could have fun poking around looking at all the stuff there.  So I head to the lake, park my car, and walk to the gallery which is, sadly, closed.  At 5pm on a Friday?  What the heck?

My inner artist wanted to have a tantrum.  "I told you that you should have planned it better," she screamed at me.  "I want an Artist Date, and I want to be inspired, and you're not letting me," she pouted.  So I took her on a walk around the lake where we looked at ducks, swans, and geese.  I walked the long way back to my car, through most of the Village, and noticed another gallery I'd never seen before.  It was next to a bar, and looked empty, but my inner artist got seriously excited and pushed me forward.

And I'm so glad she did, because I got to meet Daniel Gerken, who makes these strikingly beautiful crosses with all kinds of materials including distressed wood from the badlands of South Dakota.  He owns the gallery, and was kind enough to walk me around, showing me his favorite paintings and telling me about the artists.  I told him I was on an Artist Date, and that I was learning how to let out my own inner artist, and he suggested that I hang out at his gallery and write, whenever I want.  I could even be the "Writer-in-Residence," and he'd even make me a plaque, he said.  It was so inspirational to meet someone who followed his dreams, and listened to his own inner artist, and is expressing himself fully.  And now I'm totally inspired to go back and take up my "Writer-in-Residence" duties.

On the way home, my own inner artist gloated.  "I told you that you should take me out to play," she said.  "Look how you got to meet an awesome person by doing that!  How much does life rock when you just listen to me?"

Resolutions and Declarations

I'm thinking about my New Year's Resolutions, and I find that, like most people, I make the same ones every year.  They always involve writing, being more creative, being more self-expressed, doing the things that I really love doing (writing, going to museums, meditating, etc).

This year, I am whittling it all down to one Resolution, which is only a 12-week commitment anyway.  I declare that I will complete The Artist's Way, starting yesterday.  If you don't know The Artist's Way, it's a book/course on "discovering and recovering your creative self," and I've owned this book since my sophomore year in college.  No kidding.  That's like 15 years, I think.  There are exercises, writings, readings, meditations, etc., and at the end of it, you're living a much more created/creative life.  I see the value in it.  I see that there's no way I can do all the exercises over 12 weeks and not lead a more creative life.  And yet I have resisted this book for so long.  I've never gone past page 59, somewhere in the middle of week 3.  I reach a point where things start to happen, I get confronted, and I bottle it all up.  I'm one of those people for whom success is much scarier than sitting on the sidelines, talking about and analyzing why I'm not living the life I want to be living.  Suddenly other things become really unbelievably important, and I close the book, literally, on the course, and go back to talking and analyzing.  

A friend of J's is doing the course.  He mentioned it to me, not knowing what exactly it was, and I just sighed.  "I have the book.  I can't get past page 59," I said.  And so my ever-supportive husband has decided to do the course with me.  At first it was just to support me, and keep me from weaseling my way out of it. But now he sees the value in it for himself, too.  

So here's a story on my creativity.

When I was a kid, I loved to write.  I wrote all the time.  I wrote stories in my Hello Kitty diary.  I wrote books and stapled the pages together.  I love writing instruments.  I love notebooks in which to write things.  I love books.  I love words.  I love the power of stories.  Being an only child, my first best friend was Laura Ingalls.  My second best friend, when I was a little older, was Anne of Green Gables.  Oh, how I longed to be with Anne, and call her Cordelia, and spin stories in the Haunted Wood!  

Nobody ever came out and was really mean to me about a creative career like writing.  But my dad, having lived in refugee camps when he escaped from East Germany (and thus knowing what true hunger was) valued security and always guided me to good stable careers.  Teaching, for example.  To this day, my dad would like nothing more than for me to be a teacher back in Lancaster, Pennsylvania where he could watch over me and take care of me.  

I love my Dad.  But in some ways, he just doesn't get me.  I don't know whether there's a blocked artist living inside of him somewhere who was repressed so that he could be "responsible" and provide for his family (I suspect there is) but he drilled into me the idea that creative careers were for young and irresponsible people, who haven't yet graduated to the Big People Table on which is a spread of mortgages, bills, children, car payments and other Duties Requiring Responsibility.

I never wanted some stable corporate job.  I always wanted to go out and experience the world, and write about the things I saw, and share stories, and be around other storytellers, and read and write and read and write, and generally immerse myself in words.  Words words words, trains, words, planes, words words, nature, words and then more words.  All day, every day. 

I never thought I could actually be a writer.  So I majored in history, and did writing projects on the side.  I created a kickass website on Colonial America, for example - over 150 html pages of information on food, clothes, church, music; basically everything you could want to know about Colonial America.  You can still find it on the web archive if you search for colonialamerica.org and look at the site from around 1999.  Man, it was some kind of wonderful for the early web, and won some awards too.  Go html!  Go geocities!  (Remember Geocities?  What the heck happened to Geocities?)

My senior year in college I had a wonderful semester with a creative writing professor who really nurtured my dream of writing.  He told me I had talent.  He told me I could totally make a living as a writer.  He told me to write write write all the time.  

In December that year, I tagged along on a field trip that my boyfriend's economics club was taking to the NY Stock Exchange.  I had been on an Enya kick for about 2 years, and considered myself pretty hip to the new-age music scene, and spent the entire drive up listening to The Memory of Trees on my discman, and thinking about what I wanted to do when I graduated.  I had received my creative writing portfolio back the day before, with my final grade, and the professor had made some kind of comment to the effect of, "if you don't give it a try, you'll regret it forever."  So I was thinking a lot about how one "became" a writer while listening to "Book of Days".

The bus dropped us off near Central Park, and boyfriend and I were walking through the park when a girl handed us a  flyer for a CD signing at Borders that very afternoon.  The person signing the CD's was Enya - her greatest hits CD, Paint the Sky with Stars.  I knew from having read countless websites about Enya that she rarely did CD signings.  Like, hardly ever.  

I knew it was a sign.  

I grabbed boyfriend and ran to Borders where I waited in line for three hours while he patiently read motorcycle magazines.  When I finally got to go up and meet Enya, I was like Ralphie from A Christmas Story when he meets Santa.  "I want to be a writer, and I think that I could be a writer, and my professor says I should try, but I don't know because I think that I should do something secure so I'm not broke, but I also think that you don't have to be broke to be a writer because there are writers who make a living writing, and I was thinking about it on the drive up here today and I don't come to NY very often, so this is so weird, and this girl was handing out flyers, and I really love your music and I think that I should try to be a writer, and if you say I should, then I definitely will.  What do you say?"  

To which, the lovely ethereal Oracle of Eithne (that's how you spell her name in Celtic, I'm told), replied, "Who should I make the CD out to?"  And gave me a heavenly smile. 

The next semester I took a paralegal certificate course so that I could have something "practical" to do after graduating with my Humanities degree.  I did buy a Writer's Market, but found the whole thing so overwhelming, I didn't know where to start.  If you ever want to get me to stop something, just overwhelm me.  Overwhelm is my thing. 

There was another period when I lived in London when I was officially "freelance" for about a month.  I woke up and meditated.  Then I went to Bar Italia in Soho and drank a hot chocolate, sitting on the silver metal chairs and looking up at Soho Square and the BT Tower, and thinking how grand and bohemian I was.  I would be like Henry Miller!  I couldn't wait!  

Then I would walk up to the internet cafe on Frith Street, I think, plug in my laptop, and get to work.  The internet cafe where I went was also a coffee bar, and they allowed smoking.  I would smoke Silk Cut (because that was the brand that Bridget Jones smoked, and I didn't know any other brands, not being a smoker), and drink cappuccino, and feel very bohemian and liberated.  "Ahh, this is the life," I thought.  And I would wonder, "why can't I live like this all the time?  Where is it written that I have to work in an office?  Where is it written that I can't create beautiful words and stories and somehow make a living from that?"  

But then my UK visa expired, I went home and spent the next year working in a law firm, thus killing the whole Henry Miller mystique.

I started blogging, I do NaNoWriMo, I journal, I am a Vine Voice on Amazon (which means I write good reviews and get free books - yay!); I hover at the sidelines of writing, looking at the people actually doing it and wondering how they figured it out.  

People look at my situation and think I have it made - I work largely from home, I require little supervision from my boss, I am pretty much in charge of my time and what I do with it.  I am fairly compensated.  And I am very lucky.  I really am.  I'm not knocking it.  I'm very grateful for it, in fact.

But losing Baby Teysko has made me rethink everything, and one thing I'm thinking about is that life is too short to not try.  My professor was right - I am kicking myself for not trying sooner.  

So this New Year's I am doing The Artist's Way, and I'm pretty sure that doing it, finishing it, declaring myself the creator of my life, and living out the the things I learn from it will set into motion a whole new life that I can't imagine yet.  

Here goes...

Out of Hibernation

So I've been blogging almost exclusively about my miscarriage for almost 7 weeks, and I'm getting tired of it.  I'm getting tired of being consumed by my miscarriage.  It's bad enough that I'm going to have to live with this hole in my heart for the rest of my life.  I don't need to blog about it exclusively forever as well.  I'm not, believe it or not, Miscarriage Girl.  Oh, I'm sure it will come up from time to time - there's no way it can't, and I'm not going to hide it.  I'm going to continue to talk about it and share with others who are going through it because the alternative is to keep it all hush-hush, which I hate, but I'm not going to start off every blog entry with something about my miscarriage.  It just doesn't work like that.

I've been hibernating, but I'm starting to come out of the cave.  I'm a different person now, that's for sure.  There's more grit, less giddy trusting in life, and I'm pretty much not hip with putting up with anything anymore.  I have less patience for some things that have always bothered me, but I've always stayed quiet about because I'm a Nice Girl.  But in other ways I'm more understanding, and in awe of the human spirit because people go through so much, and they are so resilient, and I'm amazed at that.  

In celebration of my shedding of the hibernatory cave, and entering the springtime (albeit in December), I'm making some early resolutions.  I will spend time doing the things I like to do, and not doing the things I think I ought to be doing because it will make somebody else happy (and my job does count as something that makes me happy, so that can stay).

1.  I will do a Renaissance English History podcast at least once every 6 weeks, starting this weekend.  Like, no kidding.  It's on my calendar.  I'm getting back on that train.

2.  I will figure out how to work my new d60 camera which I've had for nearly 6 months.

3.  I will also figure out how to photoshop my photos to make them look even more awesome.

4.  I will not be ashamed of the amount of Peter Cetera I listen to.

5.  I will really (and I mean really) read all the classics I've never read but always meant to.  At least one a month. 

6.  I will do NaNoWriMo in December.  It won't be the same as doing it in November, but I'm not going to wait until next November to write my book.

7.  I will not feel guilty because I don't send out Christmas cards.  Seriously, Christmas cards were only invented to get people to use the new Penny Post in Victorian England, so it's a bit of consumerism that I don't need to feel guilty for not being part of.  

8.  I will also not feel guilty about the fact that I listen to Christmas music all year long.  And I don't just mean classical Christmas music like the Messiah, but rather, I listen to schmaltzy stuff all year long.  And I don't care.  

9.  I will unsubscribe to my RSS feed of the New Yorker because I never read it, and it just makes me feel guilty for all of the intelligent conversation I'm missing out on.  Vanity Fair can stay, though.  It doesn't make me feel as guilty.

10.  I will listen to the Harmonia Early Music Podcast every week because it is awesome.

11.  I will drink more water and less soda.

And finally, I will figure out a way to do something with my grief that is productive.  Whether it's my camp/retreat idea, or something else, Baby Teysko will be honored, and his little life will have more meaning than he could ever imagine.   

So that's what you can count on me for ongoingly.  I might break down and lose it from time to time - that's to be expected - but I'm coming back into the world.  

The theory of relativity in being ok

Before getting into anything deep, here's another sunrise picture.  I've got to photoshop that little green blurb out of it - this is untouched.  But when I do that, I think it'll look super-pretty.  I like the tips of the grasses having the light shine behind them.

And also, the composer of the day is John Rutter.  I've been listening to his Requiem for much of the day, but most of that is pretty depressing.  True story: once I spent All Soul's Day in Cambridge and was at King's College listening to the choir perform the Rutter Requiem.  It was getting dark at 4pm, and was a cold and dreary day anyway, and there we were, Sandor and I, in this cold, damp, 800 year old building with bad lighting, listening to this moving requiem by candlelight, and smack dab in the middle of the Agnus Dei some old man sitting in the choir stalls passes out.  There was much huffing and puffing and asking if a doctor was in the house, and carrying of the man through the center of the chapel out the back door.  All the while, the choir kept singing as if nothing was happening.  It was so surreal.

But like I said, the requiem is pretty depressing.  It's beautifully depressing, but still, I'm trying not to be a complete downer all the time.  So, here is a Gaelic Blessing... deep peace of the gentle night to you, moon and stars pour their healing light on you...



So a lot of people are asking me if I'm ok these days.  What does that mean?  What is ok, anyway?  Because with the world turning upside down on me, I've got a whole new sliding scale of what being ok actually means.  According to Webster's it means "not excellent, and not poor.  Mediocre."  But that still isn't saying much because it's all relative.

A month ago, a day was ok if I got a reasonable amount of work done, didn't eat every piece of chocolate in the house, got to spend some time reading, maybe wrote in my journal and listened to some of my favorite music.  If I worked out, got to spend some time outside, or if Project Runway was on, it was slightly above ok.

These days, I'm doing ok if I only cry three times in a 24 hour period.  I'm doing ok if I can fall asleep on my own without the help of drugs (though with my back issues, I've been getting a lot of help from drugs the past couple of days).  If I don't wake up when it's still dark (I dread the dark.  It's not a good time of year for me to lose a child, what with the way I hate the darkness so much.  Then again, is there ever a good time to lose a child?).

When I stopped bleeding, it was a great day.  It meant that I could start putting this mess behind me, physically at least.  And then I got the back issues, which have put me several steps behind where I've been.

The funeral home called and my son's ashes and death certificate are ready to be picked up.  When we get the strength to go get them, it will not be an ok day.  Picking up the ashes of a baby that you never got to hold, whose tiny fingers you never got to coo over, but whom you loved just the same - that is not the activity of an ok day.

That said, today I didn't feel like cooking, so we ordered pizza.  Pizza is pretty much ok. It's hard to argue with the ok-ness of pizza.  We got a lot of chores done around the house, so that's ok, too.  Wrigley the Cat is being sociable and cuddling with me, which is slightly above ok on the scale.  She's not the most social cat, and when I get attention from her, it makes me feel loved.

I just finished the first book I've read since the Horrible Day, Russell Wiley Is Out to Lunch and it made me laugh.  Now I'm midway through Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked.  These books make me happy because they're the kind of books I loved before I lost my baby, when stupid things were important, and everything didn't have to be dark and heavy for me to think it worthwhile.  Spending a day reading, and catching up on my NaNoWriMo word count is a step above ok because it lets me tap into my creativity, and I can be quiet without feeling tortured.

So who knows what ok means anymore.  If someone asks me whether I'm doing ok, I don't know how to answer that, because I don't know what their frame of reference is.  What is ok to them?  Am I doing ok by their standards?

I think I'm probably just barely holding it together by many people's standards, but for me, every day that I get through is becoming a victory.  Like an addict who is proud of getting through a day without using, I'm proud of getting through a day without collapsing into a lump of moaning sobs in the grocery store.

It's all relative.

It's the Internet's Fault

I know there's such a thing as pregnancy brain, but I think this is something different.  I have been reading (actually, listening to - I love me my audible subscription) The Shallows by Nicholas Carr.  I'm not all the way through with it yet, but frankly, what I've listened to so far is frightening enough.  Now I'm  not a luddite.  I embrace the internet more than your average person.  Heck, I had my first internet relationship in 1994 (he would send me .gif's of roses, which took three hours to download).  I met my husband on Craigslist (yep, seriously).  I learned html in 1998 and started a website which was the number one result on Yahoo for several years (at least, when you searched for Colonial America, that is).  I started blogging in 2002.  I'm not afraid of the internet.  Let me make that abundantly clear.  I'm not afraid of the internet.

Here's what I am afraid of.  I'm afraid of ADD.  I'm afraid that nobody's concentrating on anything anymore.  I'm afraid of this because I share a freeway with these people. 

For example, in The Shallows Carr gives evidence of university students at major Ivy League colleges not having to read entire books any longer.  What's worse is that they're English majors!  Apparently nobody under 25 is reading books any longer.  People are skimming, living life around the edges, never wading in beyond their knees.  Going in, googling, glancing at results, grabbing quotes, and leaving; moving on to the next assignment. 

To me, this means something more than just the idea that there are worlds of literary characters that these kids will never become friends with (Anne of Green Gables was my best friend throughout junior high).  It means that we're losing the ability to think deeply, to get our brains into that place of deep thought and concentration and creativity, being able to examine problems and issues from all angles and really dig into something deep.  This is rewarding on its own because you have a clearer picture of the issue, but it's also necessary for optimal physical health.  Look at all the people doing yoga and meditation.  Deep thought stimulates your brain in ways that floating around on the surface doesn't.

So now there's a movement called Slow Reading (this article from the Guardian introduces it).  Like the slow food movement before us (pretty self-explanatory - you need to take the time to really enjoy and digest what you're eating, as opposed to chowing down in your car while sitting on the freeway), the Slow Readers want us to connect to the words again, to really drink things in, to take the time to fully understand the message of the author, our interpretation of it, and any opinions about it that we might have.

Tracy Seeley, a slow-reading blogger, is quoted in the Guardian article, saying that slow reading should not, "just be the province of the intellectuals. Careful and slow reading, and deep attention, is a challenge for all of us." 

There are so many pulls for our attention at any given moment.  I find it ironic that things like yoga and meditation and chanting, etc., are all becoming so popular - like the Eat Pray Love phenomenon - we're all desperate to figure out a way to take time out and slow down, and yet we keep clicking, keep twittering, keep 4squaring, keep doing every new thing that comes around.  Me, I'm not into the 4square thing (I was, and then I got pranked at 7-11, so now I'm over it).  I rarely tweet.  In fact, I'm going to sit at my meditation altar in a second, and have 10 minutes of silence.

But maybe I should read this Wired article first - The Web is Dead.  Long live the Internet.  Perhaps the pendulum is moving back to the middle?

starting to feel a little bit better...

Well, there's my Little Bean. Head at the top, little Flipper Feet at the bottom. I don't want to find out whether it's a boy or a girl until it's born. In the meantime, I'm calling it Hermione, and hubby is calling it Frank.

I had a hard week with travel and a kick-my-ass dr appointment with a three hour glucose test which involved getting prodded and poked with needles 16 times. Ick! I'm happy to be getting back on a normal schedule this week, and no travel until late August.

I can actually get on a writing schedule. Also, I'm learning Beethoven's Pathetique sonata. My mom learned Moonlight Sonata when she was pregnant with me, so it's a bit of a tradition, I guess. I'm feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment - just because I can take off work doesn't mean the work disappears - so I worked 4 hours yesterday and another 2 today - good times allowing me to really concentrate and get caught up on things. I'm feeling a little better now.

Why I just can't get into eBooks (and what Amazon could do to get me as an eBook customer)

I work in the library world, which means that I see a lot of what's going on in the eBook world from a different perspective. I signed my name on behalf of my consortium to this Open Letter to eBook creators. The fact is that libraries pay an enormous role in getting the word out about books, literacy, reading, etc., and any publisher needs to have a very close relationship with libraries if they really want to reach all the audiences out there. People who use libraries read more, and, though I've not actually seen any numbers to support it, I wouldn't be surprised if they bought more books (just like the people who illegally download music actually buy more music as well).

I just saw this article reporting from BEA (Book Expo America) in Wired Magazine about how the publishers all want a universal publishing format and are tired of all this proprietary stuff between kindles and ipads. I didn't realize that when record players first came out, Edison and Victor made records that couldn't be played on each others' machines. And the whole beta/vhs debacle is still fresh in my mind (we were a beta family). So this isn't a new thing. But it is a game-changer for creators of books - authors, publishers, etc.

Since I'm writing a book, I get very excited about the role of eBooks and how, if you're clever at marketing yourself, you really can publish your book yourself online and make some money at it. Companies like Smashwords are making that more of a reality.

The thing is, as much as I love reading (check out my amazon profile for proof), I just can't get into the whole ereader thing. I'm a luddite, I guess. But I love my digital music. Love it. I got my first mp3 player in 2002 and I've hardly bought any cd's since. But here's what I realized... with music, I could load my entire music library onto my hard drive and listen to it on my devices. With books, I can't do that. So now I'm going to have a $300 ereader, AND I'm still going to have my piles and piles of books because there's no easy way to convert them.

The impetus for me to buy an ereader would be space-savings. To start with, when reading on a plane, you have to turn off your ereader during take off and landing, and I find that annoying. I'll take a good old fashioned book that doesn't have electronic parts over that any day. Secondly, my favorite place to read is in the bathtub, and I think I'd be petrified of dropping the reader into the tub, and therefore not read in the tub as much.

But even if they made a waterproof version that I could use the entire time I'm on the plane (and not have to turn off for about 15 minutes on either side of the flight), I still wouldn't go for it because I STILL own somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000 books that I still need to cart around.

Now here's something that WOULD get me to invest in a Kindle. If Amazon told me that I'd get a huge discount on any eBook if I already own the physical book. So I wouldn't have to buy all those books again to have them on my ereader. So if amazon said "Ok, so you own the entire Harry Potter series. Type in the ISBN of each book, and the last word on the bottom of page 33 (to check to make sure I had it), and you get to buy each book for 99 cents." That, I would do. I would spend a couple hundred dollars to have all those books on my ereader and not have to pack them up every time I move. Heck, for what it would save in moving costs, it would probably pay for itself.

Or, how about a trade. I sell a lot of my books used on Amazon. What if I sold a book used through the Amazon Marketplace, and then instead of paying me cash for it, you gave me a credit to buy the digital version, if I wanted it instead.

But I'm just not willing to pay $9.99 to have all those titles again when I own them already. So Amazon, give me a way to buy the titles I already own at a discount, ESPECIALLY if I bought them from you in the first place, and I'll buy a Kindle the next day. Really, I will.

Still stewing in nomadchick messiness

Thank you to the comment on yesterday's post about not giving up on my dreams. I'm definitely not going to do that - I guess I'm more just thinking about what my dreams really are these days. I feel like NomadChick has been this anvil around my neck for so long - that was my dream when I was 24, but I don't know whether it is any longer.

And I'm thinking about other dreams that I might have now that I never had before. I've had a lot of people tell me, for example, that I take really good pictures, and I'm always walking around with a camera in my pocket, so now I'm thinking about taking a photography course in the fall. And writing classes. And who knows what else. Considering I'm not that nomadic myself anymore, is nomadchick really the highest expression of my dreams that I can think of? So that's what I'm stewing in at the moment. I still think I'm going to do something with it, but I don't think it's going to be NomadChick.

I hope everyone had a good Memorial Day, and remembered all the service men and women. We had our lovely neighbors over for a cookout and sat around telling stories for hours. They are a retired couple who live in Palm Springs during the winter, and just came back up for the summer, which makes me so happy. It's so nice to see other people in the house, and it not just sitting empty.

Before that, though, I had to clean the deck. There's this really gross yellow powder that starts collecting for about three weeks at this time of year, which is followed by the worms that fall from the trees. Ick. Today I finally got seriously fed up with the powder, and besides, it's done for the season, I think. So I swept, cleaned, and rinsed all the deck furniture and got rid of a lot of it. I wish it would rain and wash it all away but I'm not holding my breath. It probably won't rain until at least late August or early September now, so I had to take matters into my own hands. I got filthy, but it felt good to work hard. I like physical labor on a fairly regular basis. It makes the shower afterwards feel so much more earned.

I was decluttering my space this weekend and found a bunch of half-finished cross stitch projects that it would be good to finish, so I'm going to work on one a bit before bed tonight, and that's really all the excitement I can think of.

Oh, and I am trying to write 1500 words a day, and got in all 1500 words each day this weekend. Now let's see if I can do it on the weekned.

hobbies

I have been having fun making lenses on squidoo. I need more hobbies or something. Check out this one I made on bare minerals. I heart bare minerals.

Sunday morning football in London - and mini self-Pep-Rally

The Saints and Chargers are at Wembley today, and I'm not in London. I'm getting kind of annoyed with myself these days. When I first came back from England in 2002 (where have the last 6 years gone?) I was all committed to getting back there right away. I was completely in action about it. Writing to people, submitting stuff everywhere, going back all the time to make sure people remembered me. In my defense, I was 25, living back at home, didn't have 9 cats, wasn't married, and had a lot more energy. But ok, so I had more energy and time. But so what? Am I still committed to being able to live in London part time? If so, I need to get off my butt and make it happen.

Ok. So that's my pep talk to myself.

It's Sunday, which means laundry, cleaning up, fresh litter boxes, and cooking.

Also, I'm finally participating in National Novel Writing Month, so I need to start brainstorming and working on that a bit. Nothing too exciting. A nice fall day. Maybe a fire in the fireplace later and pumpkin carving. And writing. And working out. And dreaming. Yay for sundays.