Progress.

Fireworks were good; food was great; company was better. Back to work today.

I did make some serious progress with writing projects this week. I have two essays I've been polishing and I am sending them out to markets. I picked up two magazine writing assignments this week and I am sending some book ideas to an editor at a major publisher to present to her editorial board. Fingers crossed that I get some positive feedback.

I've determined to short-circuit some processes. I believe a writing process should encompass the shortest distance from here (idea) to there (publication/payment). Thus I've decided that I will move quickly to get to the next stage of feedback. The point is that if I'm stuck and it's not at a feedback stage, I need to push it forward as quickly as possible. The only time I'm waiting is when someone else is making a decision and those waiting times should be spent concocting new ideas.

Good stuff. And it's working, because I'm making progress.

Keep moving forward.

Happy Fourth!

I'm really late with this blog post today. It's odd to not have to be on a conference call or have a zillion things to do on a Wednesday. This day is usually one of my most productive.

I am listening to DJ Tiesto all day. He remixes classical pieces and to me, these feel so patriotic and pensive. Very appropriate for today's celebration of freedom. I saw on a sign yesterday "Home of the free, BECAUSE of the brave."

Hear, hear.

Thank you, men and women of our armed forces. Thank you, families of these brave souls. Thank you all for your sacrifice. You are beloved and prayed for constantly. Come home soon!

Have a wonderful and safe holiday today. And for those in the Pacific Northwest, drink plenty of water. It's gonna be a scorcher. 95 here. Woohoo. I'm off to sit in the sprinkler for a while before we head off to our buffet of parties.

Have a great 4th!

Marie Antoinette and the iPhone

Two things on my mind.

I watched Marie Antoinette for the third time. Yes, a bit obsessive, I know. But if you haven't seen it yet, read Antonia Fraser's book too. Start reading the book and then watch the corresponding parts of the movie. The story comes alive. Marie Antoinette lives and breathes in our world, and I, for one, really (finally) grasped the raw power of revolution and its dangerous "slippery slope." Marie Antoinette was a tragic figure, raised for one purpose, and not even considered until just before her marriage as a probable queen. Her life was sacrificed for Austria and then for France.

The iPhone reviews are starting to show up on the Apple forum. A technology writer I know has a compendium of the problem areas on his blog: Erik Sherman

I will definitely be waiting for the second or third model of the phone. Thank goodness for my Blackberry, which does everything except play music and locate the closest smoothie place. Using it does make waiting for a usable iPhone much easier.

Two hours of conference calls today so far and it's only 9 am. Learning a lot and really excited once again to be in this spot.

Finished five books over the weekend and last night. I am making progress on my reading list.

Keep Moving Forward.

Accomplished

We reformatted the iTunes computer over the weekend. What a task. I vacuumed out the garage on Saturday and then started to paint lawn furniture, but that turned into a bigger task than expected because really we needed to sand off the four other layers of paint and give it a new base coat. So, the chairs are sanded and clean and tonight I'll prime them and tomorrow night I'll paint them. They'll be ready for the big 4th of July party, I hope!

In writing news, I came up with multiple essay topics and began to work on the first of them. I came up with two very good book proposal topics and began to work on one of those. I also finished Ferriss' 4-Hour Workweek in a record two hours and feel so much better about moving to Texas in the fall. We can do this. I'm almost done with Annie Dillard's On Writing and Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies. Really enjoying both of those books.

We went through a neighbor's open house yesterday, only 200 square feet larger than our home, same age, almost identical house plan, just as private and large of a backyard. The price is fair (but a great indicator for our possible selling price) and they will get it, but it may take a bit of time. Housing prices have not dropped, but rather than 65% of homes selling here, just 30% sell now.

So different from when we were in the market trying to buy. What a circus that was. We put an offer in just 7 hours after the house was on the market. We were the first ones to see it. They accepted our offer (full price) and signed an agreement on Friday about noon and we set off to an out-of-town wedding that weekend. Monday we returned to find out that a bidding war had begun for our home and people were offering thousands more on top of the full price to get it away from us. Our sellers were loyal and stayed with us. We're very grateful. We still just really love this home and if we do have to sell, it will be with a bit of regret and sadness. We've really customized several things to just how we like it, and while of course, we'll just do similar things to the next house, this is our first home.

Off to study work style guides and AMA today. An important editorial meeting discussing them is tomorrow and I want to be on my toes!

Probably work on an essay, the book proposal, and the fiction later today.

Keep moving forward.

Friday Fiver.

1. Off to a late afternoon chat at Starbucks at the Lodge with a fellow writer; although she's much more successful than I am at this writing thing. I've also got a Nordstrom gc and a J.Crew gc burning holes in my pocket.

2. Transition for me to take more responsibility at my job has begun. I'm nervous, but excited. I really love my job. It's more wonderful than even I imagined it would be.

3. I'm totally clearing my brain out with Quicksilver and iGTD. What an amazing set of widgets.

4. M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water was fantastical and yet I have to say "eh." It wasn't my style, although Paul Giamatti was incredible as usual.

5. I like books: reading, planning, and writing them. This is becoming obvious to me. My writing of shorter pieces will only support my book addiction.

Up for this weekend: lots of reading. I have a pile of books that I need to just sit down and read. Probably some weeding in the yard too.

Keep Moving Forward!

More tech talk.

So, I don't have to use what I wrote in Ruby just to use Quicksilver with iGTD, but if I want to back up my iGTD, I need to do so. Fine. For now, my .Mac will back up for me.

Or not, if I continue to figure out how all this works together.

So, for those who wrote to say they were not sure what I was talking about, here's an example of how I'm using my Macbook as my to-do list.

Before, using OmniOutliner and kGTD, I would type a task into the program, but I was in the program and my mind would immediately go blank. Staring at a to-do list that demands lots of organization upfront will make me go blank every time!

Now, I can be typing in another program, Word or Adobe or even checking email and I just press the command key (on a Mac) and my Quicksilver box pops up. I can quickly type @ followed by six custom categories I've picked. I'll use @Fiction as my example. So I type that, then a space and then the task I want to file into my Fiction subfolder. So, @Fiction Prepare a 200-word section of my in-progress novel to send to my writers group--that's it! And then press enter. That task is automatically filed into iGTD into the correct folder and I can forget about it. I have another category @Home and I just added a reminder to myself to call my sister about a paint color. It's one less thing on my mind and I can trust that iGTD will keep it for me. Plus, with Growl, I can assign it a time and start and end date and Growl (as well as iCal) will remind me about it later.

Does that help?

What kind of free programs can you find that will help you streamline your work and to-do lists?

Technology to Write With

The beauty of a Mac is in all the widgets that can do countless things automatically for you. I've just started reading Timothy Ferriss' The 4-Hour Workweek and have downloaded the new (to me, at least) iGTD program to go with Quicksilver, because between David Allen's Getting Things Done and Ferriss' 4-Hour Workweek, I realized yesterday, I waste way too much time in trivial administrative tasks. I also have too much in my head. I need technology to help me. (You can do this too, just go over there . . . see my blog roll? There you go. Now click on 43 Folders!)

I'm even starting to program in Ruby, which astonishes me to no end in order to get Quicksilver, iGTD, and Growl to work together on my Macbook to automate my to-do list. This is going to be great!

But first, some back story: Last week I began putting together a writing notebook to organize my writing life. Well, I quickly found out that I didn't want to write down every single task, because it took too long. I didn't want to record each query on a paper form; again, it took too long. So I figured out how to configure the Mac widgets. If I get it to work right today, I can be in the middle of another project (surfing the web, backing my data up to .Mac, writing), and suddenly, as I remember a task, I can call up the Quicksilver widget, type in the task, and if I did my Ruby programming right, that task will automatically be filed into my iGTD exactly where I want it.

Life is good. I may have to email my Ruby expert over in North Carolina though, because me writing Ruby? This is so not me.

Keep Moving Forward.

Writing and Walking.

I'm thoroughly inspired by Chip Scanlon again this morning. (He's got good stuff!).

Also, get this.

I'm out running a bajillion errands yesterday afternoon after work, in masses of Seattle traffic, trying to not get my brain sucked out by the inane commute radio talk and I get a brainstorm. Something my sister said to me sets me off on this idea for an essay on change. Usually, writing notes while driving is not wise for me, so I kept repeating key phrases to myself and then pulled into the post office parking lot and grabbed the index cards that Anne Lamott suggested writers keep everywhere (cars, bedside tables, back pocket on a walk, etc.) and I was able to capture not just one essay idea, but two. Just from quickly jotting two key phrases down on their respective cards. I literally danced into the post office to mail my Netflix movie (Friends with Money with Jennifer Aniston--skip it--trust me) and to check my po box.

I felt in control of the flow of ideas. This is huge.

I'm working very hard on process over here (with help from Boice and other authors) and this was a major breakthrough for me.

Now off to write those essays! I got a list of essay markets the other day.

Keep Moving Forward.

Oh, To Write All Day

Have you ever color-coded your hours in a day? It's shocking to realize how much time you waste.

So I should have plenty of writing time during the day according to my color codes. It sure doesn't seem like it, after a 40-minute conference call this morning and other phone calls and getting my work ready today.

But, I am reading Boice again.

1. Use brief, daily sessions (even 5-10 minutes in the midst of daily schedules) as times for deliberate exercises of revising, annotating, and reorganizing your notes. This time is not usually meant for entering new notes; it is more for noticing and planning.

2. During these brief sessions, experiment with schemes for organizing ideas into diagrams and themes that can become outlines and/or plot lines for manuscripts. Draw actual designs and maps to see how things fit together; use free writing to find out what themes you can express.

3. Make a conscious effort to delay closure in these sessions. Practice patience by spending more times at playful reconfiguring, particularly at times when patterns and themes seem settled upon. Post a sign, like Kafka's that says "Wait."

4. If you get stuck organizing your ideas, work up a second, related project; the cross-transfer of ideas may help unblock you. Or the experience might convince you that the first project is abandonable.

5. Set deadlines for cutoff points where, ready or not, you will go public with your working materials. While you should caution your friends and colleagues that your ideas are still formative, you can legimately ask for useful feedback about what works and doesn't in your schemes. In particular, solicit coments about what you have done well (compliments are valuable) and about what you might do better: Have you missed something? Are you right in suspecting that some ideas aren't fully developed or interconnected at one point or another? Does the organization seem obvious, or involving?

6. If you want to work at the task of collecting on your computer, find someone knowledgeable about software packages (de.lic.ious for Mac/PC, Quicksilver for Mac only, both are free!) that file materials and ease the task of accessing and rearranging them. But at the same time, set firm limits on time invested per day in learning and practicing computer technologies; both software and journal keeping have remarkable potential for engaging writers in habits that become ends in themselves.

I love this!

Keep Moving Forward.

Monday Morning Blue.

I got to have my 5-mo-old niece (and her mom, my sister, and dad, as well as my other sister) for a weekend visit. We went to the horse races on Friday night and then out shopping on Saturday and it was so fun that Monday morning seems rather blah. I mean, there's no cooing, drooling darling to giggle at this morning.

Today starts the Freelance Success Summer Query Challenge that will run into August. This is when a bunch of professional writers (I think around 40 or so) divide into teams and write blizzards of magazine article or essay queries or letters of introduction (LOIs) to new magazines or corporate writing prospects for points. The most points wins the challenge.

It is usually a heady time, with us writers taking huge risks and sending half-baked query ideas out to as many markets as possible (at least for me). But a lot of writers actually get a lot of writing business from these and end up surpassing monthly or yearly goals.

As for me, I'm concentrating mostly on essays, book reviews, and corporate clients, with the occasional article query thrown in. (I am still not a 30-minute query writer yet.) My natural writing style is the essay and book review, so I hope to sell all those essays I've been working on this spring.

My quick point earner will be the corporate work, however. I intend to contact multiple corporate clients for my bulk points.

I just have to work really hard for the morning and half of the afternoon for my daily work and then the rest of the day I can write. Einstein did this in his patent office job. He was able to complete all his patent work in just two hours in the morning and spent the rest of the day on his own experiments and writing. He won the Nobel prize while still employed at the patent office.

Keep moving forward.

Friday Fiver

1. New query challenge starts Monday and I'm not ready for it. Still working on some research for the queries I intend to send out. Yikes! But I'm on Leah's team. Woohoo!

2. Got to have donuts for breakfast. Love this, but it is really so bad for me. Luckily that's the only sugar I've had this week.

3. No books bought this week. Didn't buy anything as a matter of fact, so put the saved money into my SEP. Woohoo!

4. Found my King Co library card. This is really good news because I will be there a lot in the next eight weeks.

5. Got my passport in record time, which will help reduce the stress this summer as we prepare for London in September.

I may be called upon to go to London on occasion during the next year on business. Fine by me!

Keep moving forward. Off to work on my research.

New book highlighted by Chip Scanlon

Great post today on developing a theme for a piece and it highlights a new book that is getting raves in the press.

Sons of Mississippi

Also, a writer friend has started a frugal living blog.

Leah Ingram

Yes, busy day. Still writing, but my thoughts are so scattered because I am working out a writing schedule for my summer.

Did finally get to watch Marie Antoinette from Netflix and absolutely LOVED it. I read multiple books about her this past winter, so seeing her come to life (even if I cannot stand Kirsten Dunst) was fantastic and Versailles is gorgeous. Kirsten did a good job, but I still can't stand it when she talks. She is a perfect image of Marie Antoinette though, and I did like Sofia Coppola's approach. Very good.

Keep Moving Forward.

More from Boice.

Busy today. So I'll give you a great quote found at the start of Boice's chapter 2.

To capture what you experience and sort it out . . . you must set up a file. . . . Whenever you feel strongly about events or ideas you must try not to let them pass from your mind, but instead to formulate them for your files and in so doing draw out their implication, show yourself how foolish these feelings or ideas are, or how they might be articulated into productive shape. The file also helps you build up the habit of writing. You cannot "keep your hand in" if you do not write something at least every week.

(C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination [2])

Which will serve as a great segue into the persuasive writing thoughts I wanted to write about.

Keep Moving Forward.

The Roots of Marketing

All hail Cicero.

In How the Irish Saved Civilization, author Thomas Cahill outlines how the great literature was passed on to us by Irish monks who acted as scribes, but his discussion on Cicero caught my eye.

But we are made uncomfortable and bored by Cicero's elaborately coaching us in all the tricks of his trade--the many techniques for convincing others to act the way we want them to. For Cicero, "to speak from the heart" would be the rashest foolishness; one must always speak from calculation: What do I want to see happen here? What are the desire of my audience? How can I motivate them to do my will? How shall I disguise my weakest arguments? How [shall I] dazzle my listeners to they are no longer able to reason matters through independently?

Cahill continues,

The techniques of the successful politician, the methods of modern advertising--the whole panoply of persuasion is to be found in Cicero. The figure closest to him in our own age might be Dale Carnegie, who advised that every single word and gesture be calculated to "win" and "influence." However squeamish such advice may make us, to the ancients it made perfect sense.

What does this mean for writers?

More on Cahill tomorrow.

Write Before You're Ready

Okay, so this is harder than it sounds. And I overwrite by hundreds of words. Four pages of crap later, I think I hear something in the writing that could serve as a lead.

Other writers struggle with this: Susan Wise Bauer (see blogroll) wrote a million words for her first book in her four-book series, cutting about half of them; Anne Lamott writes page after page after page of sardonic comments for a single restaurant review, and then cuts it all out mercilessly in her next draft. It's that flinging of the spaghetti onto the cupboards in order to see what sticks.

For me, it's anal retentiveness. What comes out is what I suppose people expect me to say and then once that's out, I realize what I truly wanted to say.

For example, hubby is filling out an application for this training program and must answer five questions. The first of the questions are strained, forced, and generic. Then he gets going on question three and I'm impressed (and I already knew all the information anyway).

It's just how humans download, fling, and crap all over the page until the real deal shows up and connects, sticks, or is washed in the gentle cycle, leaving the gold nugget of expression that actually says something.

So go and write. Even if you scrape all that gunk off eventually, you will begin to see a glimmer of gold in there. I promise.

Keep moving forward.

Writing A Bit At A Time

So am reading for 15 minutes this morning out of my Anne Lamott book (current inspiration book) and just relaxing and letting my brain wander and I remembered something from ten years ago that was pivotal to the essay I'm writing (this essay will be developed into a book, so I really needed to remember these events).

I captured the idea with a quick 100-word section into the word document I've set up for this essay.

I am now sitting here grinning from ear to ear.

This is how it is done, folks. This is how Anne L writes, how every single writer I know gets the beef that is their writing.

And today there are donuts and I cleaned my office last night. So I'm feeling great.

Happy Friday. I'm off to work on a paper for my job and after work meeting a fellow writer buddy to talk shop

Have a great weekend.

More About Writing

Loving this book by Boice. Between he and Anne Lamott, I actually wrote yesterday (and it wasn't bad) and I am ready to write more today.

More from Boice,

[There are] two common ways of motivating ourselves to write, waiting and then working under deadlines, [which] speak volumes about writing problems. The first way, waiting for inspiration and mood, symptomizes the most innocent understanding about finding motivation: the belief that good writing must be spontaneous. And so writers wait, passively, for the inspiration that would suddenly make them want to write. The most common result of passive waiting is barrenness. Tillie Olsen, author of Silences, provides an unusually memorable description of waiting and not writing:

“These are not natural silences—what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)—that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot. In the old, the obvious parallels: when the seed strikes stone; the soil will not sustain; the spring is false; the time is drought or blight or infestation; the frost comes premature."

Olsen also hints at origins. What begins as a natural silence often becomes an unnatural silence because passive waiting invites blocking. The longer we wait without readying and motivating ourselves, the greater the tendency to lose ideas, momentum, and confidence. And as unfruitful delays grow, so does dependence on tense, impatient, and unrealiable spurts of motivation that foster eventual barrenness and disappointment.

Doesn't that feel horribly familiar? The waiting and passive sitting as you think about the huge process of writing or think you have "to be ready" to write.

Boice's rule #2: Begin before feeling fully ready or inspired (because motivation comes most reliably in the wake of involvement).

I am so at rule #2.

Keep writing.

Writing calm.

I love how Robert Boice opens his book, How Writers Journey From Comfort and Fluency,

It was such an environment--a comfortable home, a fragrant garden, an evening walk with gay sisters, an encouraging word from a father who praised and peddled her manuscripts--that put into Jane Austen's novels a fresh air of peace, health, and goodwill, and that gives to her unhurried readers a quiet satisfaction hardly to be found in any other novels. She had learned that the day itself is blessing enough.

(Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon)

And then Boice continues,

When we write with both calm and confidence at hand, we work in an ideal state of motivation, one marked by patience and enthusiasm much like Jane Austen's. Without this combination, writers too seldom find their work appealing and comforting; instead, they force writing with a hurried pace, a lagging confidence, and a lingering malaise. As a rule, poorly motivated writers remain ambivalent about writing and inconsistent at turning intentions into actions. The result is misery, silence, or both.

I find even this first paragraph a breath of fresh air. I hear endless stories about scrambling writers working their last nerve trying to finish a book, essay, story, or copy project. They talk about sweating blood and they delight in being miserable. I always wonder about those kind of reports, similar to what ran in the New York Observer a few weeks ago: My Book Deal Ruined My Life.

I read the piece, but was a bit disgusted at these authors' myopic egotistical blatherings.

I kept saying, "yes, but you are writing a book!" and wondered if they truly hated it that much.

I get a lot of comments on this blog that I choose not to publish and a few came in yesterday scoffing at my claims that people should take a few moments from each day to write rather than holing themselves up in a room for months at a time (similar to the writers featured in the Observer story).

I'm only chronicling my journey through writing. If you need to be more miserable than me, go for it. But don't try to convince me how to write a book, go write one.

More writing talk tomorrow.

A Writer Can Change?

So I'm reading Robert Boice's How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency: A Psychological Adventure and low and behold, a writer can change how they approach writing.

In the words of my British colleagues, brilliant.

Everything I've been spouting about on this blog in the past three months is certifiably true. You don't get an uninterrupted stretch of time to be a genius. Genius is snatching time from other things. You don't suddenly sit down and create a masterpiece; you work solidly on a masterpiece for an extended period of time (think J.R.R. Tolkien). You don't change the world by talking about the writing you intend to do; you only do anything substantial for the world by actually writing it.

So with that, I am off to write.

Keep Moving Forward.

Exciting Weekend

So, is Tony Soprano still alive? Is Paris Hilton still in jail, or secretly staying at her mansion under police supervision?

What a great way to sum up the weekend.

I don't care.

I drove out of state to visit my niece (and her mom and dad, my sister and her hubby). It was a great visit and my niece is growing up too fast. I made great time getting home last night, which was a wonderful improvement over Friday's solid traffic jam.

Chip Scanlon highlights his summer reads here from 2004. I'm still inspired.

I'm reading a lot of books right now. Probably one of my biggest lists this year so far. But this month I will have a ton of reading time, so I'm looking forward to making steady progress.

Writing update tomorrow!