In Absentia

I've been absent from this blog for long months, but for good reason. Here are some of the trials and tribulations that have kept me away.

- I spent a week helping my grandparents move from their house to an apartment. Goodbye only home I've had an attachment to all my life!

- My boyfriend lost his job for stupid political reasons. Oh the joy of being a teacher one year away from tenure.

- Both of us being unemployed, finding a job became my number one priority. Eventually, I was offered two jobs on the same day. I picked a gig as a math tutor in the local school system (for a truly terrific program: http://www.sps.springfield.ma.us/forward5/) as my boyfriend landed a job that was half a state away. He had to get an apartment for during the week so, you know, fun sort of long distance relationship stuff.

- BF got laid off from his new job right before Thanksgiving, no reasons given as it was within his 90 day probationary period. I'm still furious about this.

- All kinds of stress and relationship strain from all of the above.

- Now trying to reinvent our lives together and also both looking for more work again. No easy feat.

So that's what I've been up to. I hope everyone else I know in the blogosphere is doing well because I feel like life has been in shambles and it's be nice to come somewhere with some stability.

Soon I'll update with some exciting news on the writing front. This is the one really good things going for me right now, so if this post was a bit depressing, stay tuned! Things will get better.

Weekday Work Schedule

March is the month of being awesome, so I am trying to do a new thing every week in that vein. Last week I created my goals for the month and started in on all of them - with mixed success. But my overall effort pleased me (no burning out so far!) so I'm not going to detail the failures.

This week I am implementing a structured weekday work schedule. It's something I've tried in the past, but I always ended up taking a day where I said "fuck it" and spent the whole day watching TV and eating cereal straight from a box. Ugly, I know. But I think I've set myself up for a relatively painless segue into a structured workday this time because for the past month or so I've been good about working every day and - much more importantly - treating it like work.

("Work" has always motivated me. Ask any boss or teacher I've ever had; I was one of their best employees/students and they never had to wonder if I'd have something done on time or if they'd find me idly not working whenever they stopped by.)   

Here is the schedule I am striving to maintain, starting today:

Wake up at 0700 - doable since this is when the boy's alarm goes off.

0700 - 0800: Make breakfast (COFFEE) and read a book.

0800 - 0900: Blog stuff / social media stuff.

0900 - 1100: Work on Holyoak Five.

1100 - 1200: Pick something in the house to clean. (I use Unfuck Your Habitat for motivation and you should too.)

1200 - 1300: Make lunch and read some more of that book.

1300 - 1500: Work on current WIP novel. (For now, Grave of the Goddess.)

1500 until the boy gets home or until I'm done: Clean the kitchen.

Wish me luck! I'm confident in my abilities to focus, but I have the worst time forming habits. I have actually put an alarm into my phone for every single one of these time frames just to keep me on task. Or, you know, cause guilt if I'm backsliding.

How's everyone else in the Write Motivation community doing with their goals? This week I hope to start making the blog rounds during my social media hour in the morning to do some cheerleading. :)

So far...

I swear, I am the worst at keeping resolutions. Just the worst. I keep telling myself to blog as much as I write, and it just never happens. Ugh.

Here are my goals for 2014 - because isn't that pretty much everyone's first blog post of a new year?

1 - Finish the first draft of Grave of the Goddess and start working on the second.

2 - Find a job. Yeah, I was laid off from my job the same day we closed on our house in late July. Yeah, I'm still unemployed. Yeah, it's a problem.

3 - Walk more. As Michael Moore and many many others say...

4 - Revive my science blog. More on this to come.

That's all for now. Because I'm trying to be practical, and not set myself up for failure. And also because these are all things that I'd be trying to do anyway - it's just nice to set them down in words with a reasonable expectation of being held to their standards.

New year! Yippee!

The Random Mind of Rachel

Here's something about me:

I prefer to keep most aspects of my life ordered in a logical manner. I understand that this is a losing battle - for instance, how does one keep ones thoughts from straying every which way with each passing whim? It doesn't matter. I strive for logic in all circumstances - it is the nature of my personality. In the past, I've given up this pursuit for various periods of time and it always ends in existential disaster, denial of emotion, and whiplash-inducing mood swings. (Tell me how that makes any sense and you win all of my undying devotion.)

To that end, I write. In physical words - be they on paper or in electronic format - I can find order in chaos. So when I am feeling particularly out of control, I try to bring myself back in line with writing.

Here are some things going on in my life right:

I was finally hired for full time work in customer service. This is a good job for me. I derive a lot of satisfaction from the day to day problem solving that comes with this kind of work. So far none of it is beyond me, and the levels of human stupidity I end up dealing with are relatively easy to handle.

Dylan and I are closing on the house I posted about previously in a month and a half. A lot of drama went into obtaining this house (and it's hardly over). When we tried to negotiate with the seller for roof and other damage repair, they refused to do anything. We made the difficult decision to walk away and ended up embroiled in an interesting bidding war for another house in foreclosure. The same day that we heard our offer had been accepted for this new house, the seller from our original house came back to us with an offer to re-roof if we could match our original offer price. Spoiled for choice, we came back and said yes. (The foreclosed house was beautiful with a ton of character and a huge yard, but we were also going to lose our ability to make money on selling it again in the future - not the case with this first house.) I am beyond excited about getting this house; I think I've moved into the exhausted phase of simply being impatient to move.

I have considering making myself a one year plan to make myself into a healthier person with better habits than I have right now. Mostly I want to do this to prove to myself that I can. I have tried and failed so many times. This is because I am constantly warring between feeling put-upon by strange standards of society to do these things and feeling that I am idiot and need to do them because they are actually good for me. Can you see me rolling my eyes at myself right now? I swear, for someone who tries so hard to live by her own rules of logic, I am truly terrible at it.

Anyway, here's a picture of my cat because she is my baby and what mama doesn't like showing off her pretty little girl? She greeted me with a lot of unusual purring on Mother's Day last weekend.

Something else I've been thinking about...
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Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"

Novel Roulette

I don't presume to know how many other novelists out there are like me and constantly playing roulette with their projects.

I figure I've got seven fiction novels that I've created detailed worlds for and written large portions of their plots. Seven. And I am not the most productive wordsmith in the world by a long shot. So I end up focusing on maybe two of these projects at a time, only one if I'm either extremely inspired or if I'm being perversely focused, but usually two so I can world build for one (which is fun and relaxing) when I'm stuck in actually writing the other one.

For example, here's how the past five months of my writing life have gone:

October: got wicked excited about plotting Grave of the Goddess and decided to write that while waiting for NaNoWriMo to start. Pretty much focused exclusively on this world even while nominally working on some kind of plot and characters for my planned NaNo, Solemn Vow. Also spent a ton if time in the NaNo forums soaking up all things writing.

November: ditched the chick lit idea immediately to write Grave of the Goddess for NaNo. Worked only on this all month. Wildly successful except for one week where I got bogged down by a slow part of the plot and the presence of relatives.

December: relative crash and burn. Set everything aside for several weeks. Wrote nothing, not even journal entries. I still can't decide if I did this to recover from NaNo or if the bad effects of unemployment were starting to gnaw at my creativity.

January: slow slow slow. Set Grave aside entirely. Instead, spent all my creative time invested in rereading and thinking about how to restructure A Hunter's Fire, and also creating ridiculously detailed history for my Stormwatch series.

February: got a freaking job! Also completely lucked out as the job has copious amounts of free time where no one cares if I'm reading or writing my own stuff. I've finally come back to Grave of the Goddess, just as enthused as November. But Face the Flames and Stormwatch are at my fingertips too.

I don't know if there's something wrong with me that I operate like this - with a writing backup, waiting to see where the ball lands today. But that's how it seems to be.

There's a story waiting for me -

I know there's a story waiting for me in this place - with its cloth-covered metal walls low enough for me to comfortably see over when I'm standing and its terribly dull wallpaper in the restroom. So dull it's a little offensive; you know, even cheap Chinese restaurants have better wallpaper in their one stall bathrooms than that. Offensive that we're all expected to just take all this dumb mediocrity like it's our jobs... Oh wait.

This morning there was a huge bank of deep purple cloud cover hanging down on the point of collapsing onto the southwestern horizon. I drove toward it, watching the little strips of softly glowing pinks and yellows straining to show up behind it, around it, above it - anywhere they could. And everywhere else things were a soft dove grey slowly turning bluer and bluer.

Maybe it's time to face the inevitability of blogging seriously. Every time I attempt to do it though, I fail miserably. Kind of like finishing my novels. I need a noveling buddy / someone to hold me accountable when I start falling off the bandwagon. Just means I need someone willing to be stronger at this than I am. Fuck.

Here's the plan: between now and April, finish the first draft of Grave of the Goddess. Get the second draft done by August, and in the meantime desperately seek agents and publishers.