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.

From Where You Dream

From Where You Dream, by Robert Olen Butler lays out the dream process writing technique.

Well, I’m still plugging away on that novel, and on vacation I found a book called From Where You Dream, written by a Pulitzer-winning author, Robert Olen Butler, who describes the best way to write as being from the same place you dream. If you can tap into your unconscious, everything will “thrum,” according to Butler, or in other words you avoid writing that sounds contrived. Everything will resonate with everything else because you have imagined it instead of willed it into being, which is essential for good literature.

The book is laid out like a transcript from a lecture series, which I love because it’s like taking the class on fiction writing I never got to take in college. Butler covered ways to avoid common problems in your writing by critiquing stories students in the class had written. I was having problems with most of these issues and needed help articulating what was wrong, so I loved this aspect of the book. Here are two writing problems he covered that really stuck out to me:

1) Summary–I needed to zoom in and give one specific example of what I was describing instead of trying to sum it all up, which is boring.

2) Interpretation–This creeps into a lot of writing actually, but the best literature seems to avoid too much of it. If I can just tell the reader what happened rather than what it means, they can figure out the meaning for themselves and are more engaged in the story.

I went back and completely reworked the whole story I was writing, and THEN I went back and started to re-imagine each scene, reorder them, and then rewrite each one. It was a big job, but I knew it was necessary, and fortunately it wasn’t too discouraging. I knew that every step was helping my story come through more as I wanted to tell it.

If you’re feeling stuck writing a similar piece of work, I would encourage you to pick up a copy of this book. It may be just the ticket to getting you unstuck.