Month: May 2009

One of the interesting things about keeping a regular blog is that I can play the “one year ago today” game. It gives me a fragmentary look at how my life has changed over the year. Today I decided to take things a little further and I year hopped all the way back to the beginning. Five years ago this month I started this blog. That was back before most people knew what the word “blog” meant. In internet terms my blog is ancient. My life has changed drastically since then.

One year ago today, I was enjoying a visit from my younger sister and her two kids. I was preparing Hold on to Your Horses for print, and frequently terrified that I was going to do something wrong. I was also sorting out how to manage working from home without compromising on the amount of attention I gave to my kids. (I ended up compromising the amount of attention I gave to household chores and resource management instead.) I also stopped writing fiction for a year.

Two years ago today, I had not yet taken on the layout and design work for books. I was helping two kids with a particularly rough school year, one child with difficult learning challenges, and the fourth child with potty training. I’d just sold my first story and recently written Hold on to Your Horses. I was very focused on house and kids.

Three years ago today, we were in the midst of preparing for our first ever Schlock book shipping. I was trying to wrap my head around the logistics of shipping thousands of books at once. I was also chasing a toddler and preschooler constantly. Keeping them safely occupied was a daily challenge. But I didn’t mind the chaos, because we’d just had the first evidence that Howard being a cartoonist could actually pay our bills.

Four years ago today, I was very much focused on making do with very few resources. We were living month to month. We never had more than three months’ worth of bills stashed away, and frequently it was far less than that. Howard was scrambling to take corporate cartooning contracts to make ends meet. I spent lots of time gardening, canning, and figuring out how to entertain/educate the kids without spending any money. I spent most Saturday mornings combing through garage sales trying to find bargains on things that we needed and things that could be stashed away for Christmas.

Five years ago today, I had not even started this blog yet. I started it about a week later. Howard was still working long hours for Novell, then coming home to work even more hours on Schlock Mercenary. He was also traveling for Novell once or twice each month. I managed the kids and the house solo much of the time. I had an infant, a preschooler, a kindergartener, and a third-grader. I did not know that we only had four months before Howard would leave Novell forever.

Five years can make quite a difference.

For the past five weeks I have had to be extremely focused. All of my energy and brain space had to be devoted to getting the XDM project completed on time while not completely neglecting the children. I did not stop thinking other thoughts, but when they occurred, I would shove them away. I can’t think about that right now. For me “shove away” is not the same thing as “dismiss” or “forget.” I’ve spent years training my brain to save ideas for me so that I can use them later. This is the stash from which I draw my blog entries and stories. So for the past five weeks I shoved my ideas away; rather like a child who cleans the room by shoving things in the closet and under the bed. Repeated iterations of this eventually fill the closet. Then things are shoved against the walls or into corners. The edges fill up and the space in the middle gets smaller and smaller.

Yesterday I shipped off the XDM files to the printer. I was done. I finally had time to think about things other than preparing for printing. Hmm. Didn’t there used to be more space than this inside my head? My brain was half full of idea fragments. But they had all been compacted together so tightly that I could not see any of them clearly. My first thought was to wade into the mess and muck it out. I do this by writing what I call a “brain dump” entry. That is when I just write the thoughts in my brain as they surface. Each one pours out my fingers and into the blog. Then I can just let them go. Sometimes braindumps are the ideal way to sort my thoughts, but they are not pretty. Rather than giving each idea full reign of a blog entry where I really explore it, I just shove a bunch of them into a single entry so that I can let them go. I feel like most of my entries of the past few weeks have been of this variety. I finally had time and space to really compose an entry, and I wanted it to be a good one.

So I poked at the jumbled mess of ideas. I was certain that in there somewhere were a dozen possible blog entries. But each time I tried to grab hold of an idea, all I could catch was a fragment. And if I did not grab fast, the fragment would disappear again into the mess. I realized that I had to wait for the ideas to emerge. I had to lurk, like a hunter, trusting that if I was quiet that the ideas would separate themselves from the mess and float across the middle of my brain. Then I could catch them. I catch them by quickly scribbling notes. Pinning them to the page allows me to see them and figure out where they belong. The difficult part is that waiting for thoughts can be boring. I’m bored. Let’s go read. Let’s turn on music. Let’s watch a show. I wonder if there is email. But if I follow the bored voice, I will scare the ideas back into hiding. Not only that, I will be adding to the mess of ideas already there. So I have to let myself be bored. I do the dishes, and fold laundry, and wipe counters, all with nothing but my own thoughts to entertain me. And as sure as carbonation bubbles form and rise to the surface of the soda, the ideas coalesce and percolate out where I can see them. You have time to think about me now. Then I catch them on paper.

After a morning of quiet tasks and catching thoughts, I now have notes for four blog entries of which this was one. I’ve also identified stray business tasks I need to take care of next week and written them down so I will not forget them again. I’ve even made some plans about writing and revising. As a side bonus, my house is cleaner too.