A Look Back at 2011, The Year of Blessings

1) I learned to set boundaries!

This may sound simple, but I finally decided after a lifetime of not knowing when to stand up for myself that I would change this for my own sake and my daughter’s. I started small, with a passive aggressive frenemy, and moved all the way up to changing the way I interact with family. It wasn’t easy, but this major change was simpler than I thought it would be and already has brought dividends in happiness and much more open relationships with my sisters.

Setting boundaries also meant finally deciding to live in a way that didn’t cause me to burn out every couple years. (This is the final major step to find balance, by the way: it has been a long road to find a workable energy output that doesn’t wreck my body with my ambitious goals.) I not only found myself more in sync with my creativity because I was respecting my instincts, but found my communication with my husband improved as he called me on owning my own decisions and I realized he didn’t need me to make excuses for what I wanted. He wanted to support me in doing what I wanted because he takes my dreams seriously. Seriously awesome discovery there.

2) I finished my first novel & started my second.

Editing my first novel is still in process, delayed by the new job I took as Transportation Editor for Inhabitat in April, but I finished writing all three parts of this 75,000-word novel in August and will start the editing process in two weeks. I promised myself I would push through the whole first project before I started the second novel, but the first scene of my second novel just appeared in my head on vacation in July, when I also wrote an entire section of my first novel. Suddenly I find myself knee deep in fascinating research to prepare myself for writing. This is going to be a busy year, but I hope to get the first novel out to agents in a couple of months and at least have the second novel written in rough form by the end of this year. This is a whopper of a goal with a kid that no longer takes naps and still needs my full attention, but I seem to be speeding up even as things get more challenging, so I think it might just happen.

3) I started a new job and then quit it!

The opportunity to join my favorite green design blog Inhabitat as Transportation Editor in April was too great to pass up. As of this morning I have written 300 articles for Inhabitat, working very part-time between baby girl’s naps and early in the morning. In September my schedule seemed to start collapsing, however, with my husband taking night classes and baby girl giving up all her naps. My schedule was not working for daily paid writing anymore, but it would work for novel writing. Aha! An opportunity not to be passed up. This new setup is a unique opportunity to take my writing seriously and give myself a chance, so this year is going to be very exciting for me as I attempt to prove I really can hack it as a novelist. Maybe this blogging has just been another baby step toward my big goal.

The Year of Blessings

I’m calling 2011 the year of blessings because everything worked out for the good. My husband’s job continued to be stable, our finances worked out so that I could take this leap of faith, and this essential boundary-setting skill I learned allowed me to make space for myself in so many ways. Things were tough, to be sure, because I had to hang in there with a stressful schedule for a few months while I worked out the details of how this transition would work, but I truly couldn’t be happier with how this year has turned out. We have had so many wonderful experiences this year, as well. My husband took his first real vacation in years, I got to take my husband and baby girl for a test drive and photo shoot in a Tesla Roadster in Palo Alto, we got a full week in June in a guest house in Los Gatos, a tony suburb of Silicon Valley, and we just had a wonderful holiday that also worked because I planned ahead to reduce my stress. I am truly blessed to be able to take a stab at such an unlikely career as novelist, but I’m learning how important it is that I participate with these blessings to turn them into the life I want.

Can I manage to slow down enough to do this work well? That’s the challenge facing me now. While some of this acceleration is just me shifting into a lower gear to operate at higher speeds effortlessly, I know some of it is fear. I feel the need to prove I can make this work within a couple years, before I feel the need to go back to daily paid work to contribute to our household. These boundaries I have set have some pressure on them, even from me, so I will need to hold my ground this year and give myself long enough to make this work. I only get one life, and this is something I have wanted to do since I was 8 years old, so I’m working hard to make space for this opportunity. Here goes!

Big Changes Are Afoot…

It's fall, and just like the leaves outside everything inside our home seems to be changing quickly as well.

… and it’s not just me, it seems. The economy is shifting like restless tectonic plates, friends and family are dealing with major health crises, and my life?

Well, it feels like everything is changing.

I normally write about these things on this blog and leave the other stuff for my 29 Diapers green parenting blog, but this time they’re in it with me. If you would like to hear the various and sundry ways my life may change in a big way in the near future, check out my latest post over there, “A New Chapter Begins.” Sorry to do the linky thing to you, but I think once you read the post you’ll understand I’m pretty crunched for time! But, I still want to keep you up to date. I’ll be back soon, when I have career, childcare, housing, health, and other details sorted.

On the Shoulders of Giants

One of my friends recently said something to me about theology and spirituality, and off we went on a deep discussion of religious community. Suddenly we were discussing Calvinism and the purpose of church structure and I had to stop and wonder: how did we come to know so much about these things? Surely most people in their twenties aren’t quite as informed as my friend and I about what the New Testament had to say about community living and the spiritual dynamics involved in church power struggles. That is when I realized just how much my parents’ involvement and my friend’s parents’ involvement in a deeply spiritual Christian community in the 1970s informed my own writing interests.

My writing at the moment heavily focuses on nature and spirituality and the relationship between them. A love of nature seems to have been injected in my veins in vitro, but the spirituality? Maybe I can’t take as much credit for that as I would like to. It surprises many people to learn that my sophisticated, nerdy, middle-class parents were Jesus People, members of the Word of God community in Ann Arbor during the height of the Charismatic Renewal. (Translation: Christian Hippies.) I grew up thinking it was normal to go to church on Sunday morning and then turn around and go to a community prayer meeting in the evening, to have Presbyterians worshiping alongside Catholics, to have mentors who seemed to value spiritual growth above all else. That same spiritual drive in my parents led us to Toronto for the Toronto Blessing revival in 1996, which became a pivotal event in my life and my understanding of spirituality and religion. And even my parents’ decision to leave the church I grew up in, which had grown out of the community life of the Word of God, heavily affected my experience of grief with a dysfunctional religious body in my twenties. And there is the theme of my first novel.

I begin to think that we all stand on the shoulders of giants in one way or another. In watching A Day in the Life yesterday featuring Will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas, I took away not his focus on helping young people who started out with tough beginnings but the influence his mother had on his success. He still thinks about what she would say and if she would approve if he says something on stage. Even coming from east L.A., he stands on the shoulders of his mother, not his circumstances, and that informs his success. How has your life’s work, your passions, and your character been shaped by people who went before you? They say every new invention simply builds on previous inventions, that every work of art is inspired by others that went before. I’m beginning to think we all ARE works of art inspired by the giants on whose shoulders we stand.

Creativity Has No Medium, Artists Do

As I have documented the recovery of my creativity, I have noticed that even though I consider myself a writer, my creativity doesn’t necessarily pay attention to that label. Creativity doesn’t seem to have a medium; artists choose a medium themselves.

For instance, I played the piano in high school and even wrote a little bit of music at a summer camp I attended my sophomore and junior years. So, when musical themes started popping into my head as I finished my novel, I had the paper on hand to write them out. Today, I got them out of my head and on paper, and what started as just three notes turned into two separate little bits of music I could develop in the future if I wanted to. I think my brain is actually composing a soundtrack for the movie my book could become, in order to help me visualize the scenes completely. Pretty cool, huh? Who knew I could write music? Of course I still don’t consider myself a composer, but this it’s fun to expand my horizons this way. I still want to focus on writing the book, so I’m just writing down the notes that come to mind, not fully developing these snippets. Maybe I can really have some fun with these in a few months when I wrap up the novel.

Poetry has also been washing through my mind like waves, but I haven’t had a pencil handy enough or the presence of mind to write it down. I bet that would help me as well if I could get it down on paper and remember it. Again, poetry is something that takes revision after revision to get just right, but the fact that any stanzas are moving through my mind tells me I’m in a pretty good place creatively right now.

What has your experience been with creativity and the medium of your choice? Do you play music to relax and help you write? Do you sculpt to help you paint? I would love to hear about it in comments.

“Are You Able To Handle Shifting Priorities?”

Can I balance being a SAHM and an editor and a writer and a budding novelist? Well, I can do it today.

“Are you able to handle shifting priorities?”

I think of this common interview question often these days. My answer used to be some mixture of examples from previous work experience and B.S. HR managers want to hear. These days my answer would be more like, “Are you kidding me?” In the last 4 months I have taken a new job, lost my daughter’s morning nap, twice shifted which of my three jobs/projects gets most of my available time, and dealt with sleep deprivation due to baby girl’s molars coming in and working with 3 1/2 hours less time per day to work than 4 months ago. It’s not so much shifting priorities as it is a constant sliding scale these days. But that’s okay.

This morning I had a great time at the lake near our house, talking with some mommy friends of mine about work and balancing career with kids. From our conversations I gathered we all deal with this, and the more kids you have the more often you shift priorities or shift plans on how to balance it all. Because I’m a nerd, I wrote down (again) everything I’m dealing with and some possible solutions to the current unsustainable schedule. I’m happy to say I’m heading back into a phase of focusing my efforts on fewer things as well as starting new phases of current projects. I’m excited about it, and for those of you who follow my posts about my journey to becoming a full-time writer/editor, here is a break-down of the new phase that is taking me one step closer to becoming a full-time novelist.

Inhabitat

This hasn’t turned out as planned, with less pay coming in for more work than I had planned. But, I’m working on ways to offer Inhabitat more value for the limited time I can offer them, so I can hopefully keep bumping the income up while getting that “Transportation Editor” credit on my resume. I’m working on doing more car review features and interviews, plus I’m thinking up other ways I could lend more of my expertise to the blog, rather than running on the treadmill of regurgitating press releases for the morning news feed.

29 Diapers

I was feeling stuck on where to take 29 Diapers for a bit, mostly due to exhaustion. Now I’m planning a new phase of the blog in which I will test homemade natural personal care and cleaning product recipes and not only post them on the blog for my readers but also compile them into a new book. Publishing a new book is just the sort of thing to give me more energy to keep this project going until I know I have exhausted every avenue I want to explore for monetizing my little micro start-up.

The Novel

I wrote 22,000 words in July, woohoo! All it took was shifting 5 hours of work per week from Inhabitat and 29 Diapers to my novel, and I quickly wrote the rough draft to part 3 of my novel. Now I need to polish up the whole thing, adding atmosphere and polishing characterization and plot in part 3 and sprucing up the whole manuscript. Then, I’m off to one Christian fiction writers conference and one mainstream fiction writers conference to meet agents. This WILL happen. Everything else is a hobby compared to my goal of transitioning to literary/spiritual fiction writing as soon as it is workable. And my husband and I have recently defined what workable means in terms of the income I need to bring in. I love boundaries. Thanks, Punkins.

… And Another Project

Okay, so this probably doesn’t sound focused, but I decided to contact a church that has been very formative in my spiritual growth and propose they launch a new online magazine and social media outreach to replace a print magazine they use to publish that I loved and miss since they stopped publishing it two years ago. Turns out they were planning just such a project and may hire me to write some articles and interviews, as well as do some editorial work for them in the future, if the project takes off after launch. I would have to shift some work hours from another project to this, as I literally have no extra time left to give (unless I worked from 2 am-4 am, hmm) but spiritual writing and editing work would fill out my current theme of heading towards work that focuses on eco-friendly living and spirituality. I would love love love it if I could use the green living and spirituality genres of non-fiction to finance my transition into writing fiction about nature and spirituality. How perfect would that be? And just like that, things are coming into focus for the next few years down the road.

A Sneaky Book Marketing Experiment

I did something a little sneaky two weeks ago, as Borders announced it was going out of business for good and closing all its stores–including my hometown original Ann Arbor Borders. I went to the liquidation sale on the first day and took advantage of my last chance to see my book on my hometown bookstore chain’s shelves. Yup, I snuck three copies of my book EcoFrugal Baby onto the shelves of Borders to see if the copies would move, to see if anyone would notice, to see if something as small as having the book on display in one bookstore during a high-traffic week could impact the book’s sales. (Please note that I placed the book in an empty slot on the shelf, so it wouldn’t displace anyone else’s book. This sneaky marketing experiment wasn’t about competing with anyone else’s title.)

Today, I went back to Borders to see if my books were still there. If they sold, I knew I wouldn’t gain any profits, since the books weren’t in Borders’ system. I just wanted to see if they were there, how they had fared compared to books in the same location.

The result?

Nowhere to be found. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the liquidation sale, the whole display was gone. I went in search of the books in other parts of the store, finally locating the pregnancy and childbirth section with the help of a staffer and still not seeing my book reshelved there. Were they sold? I hope so. Were they noticed? Someone I know called me and told me they saw my book on the display the first day I placed it on the shelf. I guess we’ll never know. But it was a fun little sneaky experiment, and I do hope those books found good homes.

How is Borders doing 2 weeks into their liquidation sale?

Not so hot. If my books did sell, I take it as a huge compliment as nearly every other book I would have purchased for the mere 10% off the chain offered the first week of its liquidation sale is now gone, with prices only slashed to 20% in most sections of the store. I picked up some lit and poetry that first day as well, more for the sake of nostalgia than any cost savings. After all, anyone can save 10% off a book by purchasing it on Amazon. But as I browsed through the store today, I could see the quality stuff was gone. And so was my book. I hope that’s a sign that it means something to someone.

As you can see above, the poetry section in particular was gutted. I think I may have some kindred spirits around this lit-loving town of Ann Arbor who had the same idea I did: pull the last quality literature and poetry out of the wreckage while there was still time. But did anyone else sneak a book in?

I wonder….

Do You Have Regrets?

How we were. (In my case, pale, bloated and sick with terrible migraines. Some things are best left in the past.)

For some reason, I found myself on the New England Literature Program website today, a camp where University of Michigan students can pay eye-watering amounts of money to earn academic credit while studying New England writers in their native habitat and climb a few mountains into the bargain. It sounds like heaven to a writing buff like me, actually. Poetry, rain, typewriters, mountains, literature, and quiet. mmmm My English professor (ironically the one who told me NOT to write fiction, which is what I’m doing now) strongly recommended that I attend NELP after my freshman year as an English major at the University of Michigan. He was disappointed when I told him I couldn’t because I was getting married.

Best.

Decision.

Ever.

And yet, this feels like a regret. Not a big one. Not as big as blowing my chance to work for Automobile Magazine early in my career, which then took several detours before heading back to automotive media in a less glamorous way; and not as big as letting bullying stop me from writing fiction between the ages of twelve and twenty-five. Those are big and bigger regrets.

I’m in a phase of moving on, moving forward, stepping off a new cliff. I’m nearly done writing my first novel, an accomplishment in itself and a huge step for someone once publicly ridiculed for months on end for writing that she wished people could love her the way she was. Yes, that really happened. People suck sometimes–a lot of the time, if I’m honest. And that’s the cliff in front of me. Risking relationship again, when every time I open up the emotional barbs come and take a chunk of flesh out of me.

Do you have regrets? Are you standing at the edge of a new cliff? Tell me about the path that led you to where you are, and where you think you’re headed next. I’ll believe with you for the next step forward. Believe with me, too. We can overcome regrets. After all, I wouldn’t trade where I am today for anything. I hope you feel the same.

Pulling Survivors from the Borders Mothership Wreckage

This Friday, Borders will begin liquidating its 400 remaining stores and then close for good. It’s a painful reminder that bankruptcy isn’t always a get out of jail free card for corporations. There are many reasons why this happened–years of bad decision making that drove the company into the red where it couldn’t afford to innovate as the publishing industry went digital, a harsh economic environment, and so on and so forth–but what really concerns me is that the spring from which all Borders stores sprung is closing in my hometown Ann Arbor. If you haven’t been to the mothership Borders, which is right around the corner from the location the Borders brothers founded the bookstore chain 40 years ago, you really should go. Problem is, you only have days left.

I will be visiting the original Borders, my childhood neighborhood bookstore, this Friday as the sales begin, during the Ann Arbor Art Fairs. The idea of the original Borders, which anchors the most expensive real estate in Ann Arbor, going away is really unthinkable to me, but I want to see if I can pull some of the little remaining literature or poetry or reference books out of the wreckage before the store closes. This is the place I went to browse for foreign language books and poetry when I was an English major and Russian minor at the University of Michigan. Only 8 years ago when I was in school Borders was still pulling a profit and still stocked the shelves with a wide variety of quality books you could discover by quietly browsing for hours on end.

Then the CEO changed, the merchandizing changed, the company began to slide more and more quickly into the abyss as it ignored e-readers and sold its soul to Amazon to fulfill online book sales (a decision that is being credited as the catalyst for the company’s downfall). Now all you see even on a good day is political and chick lit bestsellers packing tables up front, young adult bestsellers packing the shelves behind that, bestselling literature packing the shelves in the back, and so on in the Christian fiction section, poetry, sci-fi, and on upstairs to the cookbooks and music. They still sell rows of CDs, by the way. What is wrong with booksellers? This is not 1995, which is about the last time I purchased a CD at all, back when Tower Records was still a viable company. Nevertheless, the original Borders store is the best one out there, so I hope you’ll join me in trying to discover some final gems amid the wreckage this Friday. After that they sell the bookshelves and lighting, and the lights wink out on Borders for good. I need a drink.

I’m “Owning My Sh*t”

Even my crazy busy life feels like sand castles and sunsets when I prioritize everything properly.

I have a friend who is refreshingly honest, so unsurprisingly her favorite thing about me is that I “own my sh*t,” or take responsibility for the silly stuff I do and try to figure out how to fix whatever is within my control. Yesterday’s post made it clear to me that even a few minor changes to my priorities could get my life back in balance, so I’m owning the fact that I made this mess and making the tough decision to say no where I need to in order to get my goals back on track. Here is my new order of things:

~ 60 hours per week, watching my daughter when my husband isn’t present: I ask for my mom or mother-in-law to babysit my daughter on a semi-regular basis, but this is split between personal time and speaking engagements. I am deciding to back off the professional gigs for a while to get a little more time for me or me and my husband, or for working on my novel. Even just an hour every other week will make a difference.

~ 15 hours per week as Transportation Editor for Inhabitat AND any other writing I do for Inhabitots or other automotive publications: Inhabitat will shortly be asking me to up this commitment, but that will depend on the amount of compensation offered that I will use to fund my other projects. No more saying yes without a clear purpose in mind. I am also planning to offer to write more technical car reviews for other publications as Inhabitat doesn’t have any use for the hardcore tech details, but this is going to have to come out of the same chunk of time as I can’t let this section of my career balloon into something bigger than its purpose (which is maintaining my career for the time being and offering visibility for my other projects).

~ 10 hours per week on 29 Diapers: I think as I work to replace myself with contributing writers, I can accomplish more with the same amount of time. I still have to get over that hump, though.

~ 10 hours per week on my novel: here’s the kicker. I only need 5 more hours per week to make massive progress on this novel, and I know it. So that time will either come directly from my Inhabitat commitments, or I will more jealously guard other time that I fritter away. Yes, even I fritter away some time in ways that can’t be construed as creative idleness.

Will it work? I’ll let you know. When I Tweeted my previous post yesterday, someone responded by sending me a blog review of a self-help program for balancing your life, and the key takeaway there was that saying yes to everything means saying no to yourself. That’s not okay, as I even gain weight when my life looks like it does right now. Even making the decisions I made yesterday that allow this schedule to be possible made me feel great. Reinforcing the idea once again that this isn’t about money at all.

 

Balance: Why Can’t I Get Away From This Issue?

A lake view plus a window and a table and chair equals writing nirvana for me.

There is a theory that I am a raging workaholic. It is an idea my right brain puts to my left brain on a regular basis to tell it to calm the frick down. Why do I insist on pushing myself to the limit so much? And here I am again. Only 3 months after telling my husband I was happier than I had ever been and felt like I had finally achieved balance after having a baby, I am swimming in busyness and searching once again for the proper balance. Here’s the crazy ride I’m taking myself on, and yes I’m fully aware it is all within my control to stop this crazy thing any time. Am I insane not to?

~ 60 hours per week, I’m watching my daughter without my husband present

~ 15-20 hours per week, working as Transportation Editor for Inhabitat

~ 10 hours per week (and that’s not enough), growing 29 Diapers

~ 5 hours per week, working on writing my first novel

Where does free time come into the picture? It doesn’t anymore. That’s spent on the novel and the blog. And the worst thing is my ultimate goal is to transition to a novel writing career as soon as I can support it with income from other projects. But doesn’t this pyramid look totally upside down? I’m eager to stay home with my daughter as much as possible as she is only young once, but why am I spending the most work hours on the projects that are supposed to be funding the start of the stuff I’m spending the least hours on? Ga. Serves me right for trying so hard to start a career no one wants to pay me for–yet.

The good news is that this last week we went on a real vacation, and every morning I got up to write while the sun rose and had absolute peace about my life. Writing equals peace and balance for me, so more than anything my guiding light is that if I will make time for the writing, this transition will come more quickly and my right brain will feel some respect. But I still think it’s bullshit to say that writers like Hemingway thrived under conflict and wouldn’t have written as well otherwise. Starting a writing career is hard, and having it make no economic sense up front only serves to make me value it more–it certainly doesn’t make my writing thrive under stress. My proof? I gave myself a week’s vacation with no non-fiction work to do and wrote the first few chapters not only of part 3 of my novel, which I have been very excited about starting (and it just flowed out of me looking at the lake pictured here!); the first scene of my next novel also just popped into my head on vaca. Idleness is extremely valuable to the writer’s brain, and I need to make more space for it. /> lecture to my left brain.