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.