One Year

One year ago today I published the first post on this blog. It seems like decades ago and ten minutes ago at the same time. I can't believe we're one year in and I'm still trying to find my footing here. Truth be told, I miss my old blog and the community we built over there. It's taking time to warm up to this one and gain my readers back. I don't regret the decision to move because the old blog had served its purpose but there are (many) times I wish we could go back.

But, no. Moving forward is the overarching theme of this blog and life. I'm looking forward to the year ahead and capturing here what I experience, learn and achieve. Perhaps if I share more of myself here, I'll begin to feel more at home and the community will follow. That's the goal for year two.

Thank you for reading and supporting me and joining me on my journey to New Endings. You're always welcome.

Tug of Writing War

Whenever I open the file that contains my novel, I have an overwhelming urge to write a blog post. When I come over here to write a blog post, the main characters of my novel dance through my mind and beg for me to continue their story. 

And you now know how I'm spending my morning. 

Find the Beauty Friday

Four years ago I had a little blog called Find the Beauty. I think four of you reading today were reading back then. No, five of you. No, six. Wow, I had forgotten how long some of you have been with me. Awww. Thank you!

Anyway...

I had been reading blogs for a little while at that point and I was noticing that the theme of most of them was depression, despair, and sadness. Every mole hill was a mountain. Every inconvenience, a major setback. It began to hurt my head and then my heart. I could not figure out if people were actually feeling like this all the time or if only the bad things were remembered at the end of the day and therefore ripe for blog fodder.

It bothered me.

So I started Find the Beauty to do exactly that. I wanted to capture the good things that happened in my day for myself and for my readers, to remind us that even our darkest days have bright corners. Do not get me wrong, some days it was incredibly difficult to find the beauty but it did get easier. Once I trained my mind to look for the good things, the good things just started popping out at me. 

I think it would be good for me to get back into that practice. This site, New Endings, was created to document my journey through all the life decisions I am preparing to make so there are times when my posts are going to sound uncertain, anxious, down, and even scared and I am fine with that. I do not want to manufacture false emotions, but spending some time documenting all the great things that are happening along the way would help my mental and emotional state immensely. 

So now and then, I will take a Friday to mention some of the really good things that are happening and spend time being joyful and grateful. I would love to hear about the beautiful things going on in your life, too, so if you choose to share in the comments or write your own Find the Beauty posts, please let me know because I will cheer right along with you. 

 * * * 

Find the Beauty

I found out that the fiction writing contest I entered back in January has completed its first round of judging and I made it through! There were 300 entries and 200 or so were eliminated in the first round. Now the remaining 100 are sent to the guest judge and there will be 25 winners selected, with various honors and prizes. I am excited, not only for the potential of winning, but because the judge is none other than Literary Agent, Elise Capron of the Sandra Dijkstra Agency, which is regarded as the best literary agency on the West Coast. So, yeah, a little exciting. And terrifying. But mostly exciting.

This was my first contest so it would be beyond fantastic if I won but also beyond my wildest expectations. We shall just have to see what happens. Either way, it was fun and I want to do it again so it was a worthwhile experience. I also asked for a critique of my work, so that will be interesting. To learn what a professional thinks of my writing could be painful but could also be one of the best things to happen at this point in my writing. I feel like I have won regardless of the outcome of the contest. 

House Rules, #2

You may forget everything I just rambled on about in the previous post. I meant it at the time I wrote it--last week sometime--but things have changed a bit since then. For the foreseeable future, I do not think I will be spending quite as much time on the Internet (yay me!) so to keep comments from growing dusty in the limbo land they inhabit until I approve them, I decided to remove the approval step. You should not see any difference on your side, other than having your comment appear immediately (yay you!).

There have been only lovely comments/commenters up to now, and we will just hope that continues. If unsavory characters start popping 'round, we may have to change things again, but let's hope for the best. My only request is that if an unknown commenter leaves a nasty comment, please do not engage him/her. I will delete the comment as soon as I am aware and able, and block them from coming back. Trying to reason with or shame a person like that just increases the tension and I do not want that here. 

Calmness. Serenity. Breathe. 

Which reminds me, I should call about a massage.

House Rules

The commenting functionality on this site bugs me. From what I have been able to ascertain, I have very little control over what goes on in that area, which is odd because there is almost complete flexibility in every other area of the site.

As an example, I can either allow anonymous comments (aka spammers' and trolls' delight) or I must approve each one. I really do not want to have to approve comments but I felt that was the better way to go. (There is a third option of making everyone register with my site and then requiring people to sign in to comment but I thought that was rude. Life is hard enough without one more login name and password to remember.) 

This site also does not allow me to decide if the email field is mandatory or not. Right now all anyone has to do is leave a name (or alias) and comment away. I would prefer to have an email address so I can respond to the comments. Which brings up irritation number, what are we up to now, four? No, three, I think. Okay, irritation number three is that I do not receive that handy email when someone comments, with the subject line filled in and the comment to which I am responding in the body of the email. On my former site, if I wanted to respond to a comment, I only had to hit Reply, type a quick note and click Send. 

Without that 'just hit Reply' email set up for me, my response to you from this site would probably read something like this, "Hi! Thanks for your comment on my post. That sounds exactly like me! Don't tell anyone! :)", which sounds innocuous enough until you think I am responding to the comment you left four hours ago about a serial killer and I was responding to the comment you left two and a half weeks ago about someone tripping over a dandelion. So now you think I am confessing to mass slayings and trying to make you an accomplice, and I was really just admitting to being a klutz.

So. Not. The. Same. Thing.

I have given this much consideration (I guarantee far more than it warranted) and have decided that if I feel the need to respond to anything, I will do so in the comments. If you ask a question you may want to check back there at some point, or not, given how invested you are in the whole thing. No pressure.

But just so we understand each other, none of my emails will be confessions of murder. Especially not with a smiley emoticon attached. That is tackier than a comment from a troll.

The Write Time

One would think that the least difficult part of writing for me would be finding time to do it. It is just me in this house, with no-one for whom I caretake, so having quiet time to write should be a cinch.

One would think.

When I get home from work, which is any time between 2 and 3:30pm, I spend at least an hour, usually two, speaking with the long distance boyfriend (LDBF for future writing) who lives in a time zone six hours ahead. (Yes, 4000 miles were not enough, we threw in a six hour time difference to make this interesting.) Frankly, I do not like that this is the only time we get during the day to talk because I am not at my best. I could use some downtime after work. My job leaves me frazzled at the end of the day and I worry that LDBF only gets that side of me. I try to use the drive home to decompress a little by blasting my favorite tunes and thinking of the weekend or something, but even in traffic the drive only takes about twenty minutes. Some days, trust me, take much longer than that to get over.

It is difficult for him, too, because being six hours ahead and waking almost as early as I do and working just as hard and in his own stressful job, it is late in his day, he is exhausted, and talking with a frazzled me is probably not how he would choose to relax before bed.

We do what we can do.

After we hang up, I have the entire evening in front of me. This is when I should see uninterrupted time for writing and what could be the problem?

I usually make dinner first because I do not get time to eat during the day. By the time I cook (and being a vegetarian who likes to eat healthy meals necessitates cooking), eat, and clean up from dinner and do the few chores that I need to do every day, it is usually about 6 or 7p. Still, plenty of evening ahead.

One would think.

If I do not need to log on and work in the evenings, which has happened often so far in 2010, this is when I try to write. I open my Scrivener application to work on the novel or a new wordprocessing document to write a short story and... 

My brain has hung the Closed sign. I am definitely a morning person when it comes to being able to do anything creative. If I had a particularly good day and it left me feeling energized, or if a blog post or plot point bounced around my mind all day, I can do nighttime writing, but overall, I prefer mornings. On the weekends, if I get started writing early in the morning, I can write the entire day without ever getting tired or getting tired of it. During the week, that just does not happen.

So what about morning writing during the week? As you will tell from the timestamp on this post, I am up early. As a rule, I need to be up and going by 4am during the week to be at work by 5:30 or 6am. However, my body is on some sort of sleep revolt and I actually wake up between 12:30 and 1:30am every day, which is another reason my brain is out of commission by 7pm. I try to go back to sleep when I can, or, like today, I write. Maybe my body is shunning sleep in order to give me the time I need to write? Not what I would have requested, but well-intentioned, I suppose. 

So I have that going for me... a two hour block of time to myself in the wee hours. 

It is quiet.

Yawn.

 * * * 

When do you do your best writing or the creative endeavor you like to pursue? Have you had to adjust your schedule to accommodate? How do you fit in what you love with everything you have to do?

Acting as Though

I woke in January with this thought: I am brave in 2010.

I usually set a few goals for the year and choose a new touchstone word, but this year I knew everything I wanted hinged on me being brave. So, in 2010, I am brave.

 * * * 

For me, being brave is an acting job. I do not feel brave. I do not exude confidence in everything I am trying to accomplish. In fact, writing this, I am in tears.

I am so tired of tears.

 * * * 

Thank you, everyone, for the kind and beautiful comments you have made about the new website. I appreciate them and have held each one close. They mean more than you know.

To be completely honest, this website terrifies me. There are times when I cannot remember why I thought this was a good idea. I have been online in the blogging world for over four years now and yet never as 'me.' I have never put my photo, last name, city, or my company name anywhere on the internet. Until now. I know I had good reasons to do this but for the life of me... 

It is more overwhelming than I thought it would be.

I am brave.

 * * * 

I was walking through the office Monday and had this sensation of being fully exposed. I felt as though everyone in the room knew about my website, had read my writing, and was secretly judging me. This was not like that embarrassing dream you have in which you show up to class naked. This was raw. This was skin-peeled-from-my-body exposed. 

It hurts. The lightest breeze touches me and it burns. 

 * * * 

People think I am shy. If you saw me in a crowded room, I would be off to the side, quiet and reserved, watching silently. I would speak to the few people who would approach me, but I probably would never venture into the midst of the throng. 

I am not shy. I am private. To let people in and let them know me has always been the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Trust is incredibly difficult for me. If you know me, you can hurt me. And I have been hurt too often.

 * * * 

I am not brave but I am acting as though I am. That is the best I can do for now.

Writing a Life

In the first fourteen days of November 2009, I wrote a novel. That sounds absurd to me and yet I know it is true. The story was one that had been rattling around my brain for a long time, so while I did go through the exercise of putting all those words into a cohesive form and committing them to the page, I did not feel like I was writing. Not truly writing. There was no suspense, no angst of wondering where the characters may take the plot, no excitement, no frustration. It felt rote and dull and uninspiring. I may have been writing but I was not experiencing being a Writer.

My life, to a point, felt very much like writing that novel. I knew what was expected, what I would do next, what the outcome would most likely be. I was going through the motions of living--going to work, volunteering, spending time with friends--but not having a Life. It was living by rote, dull and uninspiring. 

I am currently working on a second novel. It is a fantasy, which is astounding because until recently I had never been a fan of the genre, and yet works perfectly with my recent craving of the unfamiliar. I am creating a new species of 'people' who live in a world that I am building and yet there is a second thread of the story that takes place in our world, with human characters. How the two worlds meet and interact and face their differences are the questions I am trying to answer. I started with a single scene in my mind and have been building on that and I honestly have no idea where the story will take itself. It is like watching a movie unfold with the clicking of my fingers on the keyboard. It is difficult, exciting, empowering, and at times, overwhelming. Anything could happen and that gives me the sensation of cresting the top of a rollercoaster each time I sit down to write.  To me, that is being a Writer.

My life should be more like that second novel. I want to create a brand new world to explore. I have a vision of what it looks like but have no idea what could happen. I am opening the door to new opportunities and am poised to walk through them but there are no guarantees, no known endings. At times I am sure it will be difficult and overwhelming but I want to pursue it. I cannot exist by rote any longer.

To set a direction or to declare a theme for this site would be to assume that I know what lies ahead so I cannot do that. I will just write what I can, when appropriate, and let things play out as they will. Each day I wake up with the ability to write a new ending. This blog will try to capture them all.