Cleaning House

Posted on June 18, 2013 by

How do you eat?

For me, eating is a constant, 24/7 issue of stress. My mother was crazy (literally, medically) and one of her fixations was body image, so I grew up in a household where losing weight was an obsession — one I inherited, unfortunately. To this day I can correctly guess the number of calories on a plate of food, like some bizarre parlour trick.

This isn’t a health and fitness blog so I won’t bang the drum about my own choices concerning food, but I will say a key component is what is starting to be referred to as “eating clean” which basically means cutting out junk and processed food.

SO. FREAKIN’. HARD!

Well, sort of.

Cutting out starchy food (grains, potatoes) was much easier than I anticipated. I did first did it back in 2010 and immediately felt better. I backslided during the health issues of 2012 but I’m back on it now, being very careful not to eat grains. Sometimes I want a pizza or a bag of potato chips but that’s usually a passing fancy, nothing I get too wrapped up in.

But sugar? Sugar? SUGAR????? Oh sweet heavens full of cinnebons, I’m totally an addict. Literally, a junky for the stuff. Yes, I do know that sugar is naturally occuring in fruits and vegetables; I assure you that when I get a craving, it’s not for an apple. :(

I dismissed the whole “addiction” idea because it just sounded silly. Also, I don’t have an addictive personality (I know, because I’ve tried…long story) so I figured, meh, need more willpower!

It’s not an issue of willpower, not entirely. I’m not going to say I’m a complete victim to my cravings but…close. It’s close. Surprisingly so. It’s the type of situation where suddenly at 8pm at night I want a ice cream or a peanut butter cup and I’m out the door to the little gas mart down the road before I even realized that I put my shoes on. It’s crazy. I’m not impulsive like that…in fact, I’m pretty much the poster child for “Anti-Impulsive.”

Except when it comes to sugar.

I wonder how long it would take to truly break the habit. I’ve gone two weeks without processed sugar in my diet, eating as clean as I can, and then broken on day 15. I don’t binge, not in the sense of eating 10,000 calories in one sitting or something, but I’ll massacre a small pint of ice cream over the course of an evening.

But I keep coming back ’round to trying again to eat healthfully. Work is a trauma for that, it’s hard to do it when you have job(s) that keep you out of the house so much, and that’s one reason I look forward to the day when I hold down a job part time or not at all and can stay home and write, work out, and eat clean.

Work in progress, both my life and my stories. :P

 

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Monday, Monday…this isn’t a song…

Posted on June 17, 2013 by

While Mondays have, in general, a bad reputation, my relationship with the start of the day!jobs workweek is usually humorous: “Oh Monday, you rascal you!”

Not today. Today both day!jobs were irksome and frustrating and too busy and unexpectedly stinky (thanks to fishy trash bin in the staff kitchenette that wasn’t emptied by janitorial crew on Friday. You know, that day that was three days ago? ohmailawd). It was an acme Monday, straight out of the box with no modifications. By 5pm I was quite literally running out the door of the museum.

But despite that, all I could think about was “I finished the rough draft for Broken Goods! It’s off to my beta reader! I did it!” Because that story has been sitting in a frustrated heap since mid-2012. If you read this blog ever then you know that 2012 is “The Year that Shall Not Be Named” and is responsible for putting my writing career into the (drunk) tank. Hauling through finishing up Broken Goods and making it into a good story was hard, because for me it was old news. But I clawed my way through rewrites and wrote expanded scenes and it ended at a 60k words–fairly respectable I’d say!

The reason a “Monday, Monday” brought those thought to the fore was this: life is too short to live without a passion for living.

My day!jobs are okay. They are within my professional field and I dearly love all my co-workers, something not many people can say. But the passion? The drive? The willingness to slog through the drudgery and hack through the stumbling blocks and fight for what is right?

Nope. Not there.

I think the best phrase I’ve ever read is “If you want to know where your heart is, look to where your mind goes when it wanders.”

My mind, it wanders free in stories I create. That’s where it goes, and where it wants to stay. Getting Broken Goods into a “completed draft” form represents to me a return to where my heart is.

So bring it, Monday! Whatever you throw at me, slides off. I’m tired and I’m stressed and I’m broke, but that’s just a phase. I’m working on bigger and better things than a silly old Monday.

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Father’s Day…again!

Posted on June 16, 2013 by
Father the USAF helicopter pilot, 1970s

Father the USAF helicopter pilot, 1970s

It’s been about 17 years since I’ve been able to face up to father’s day. That was about the time my father suffered a major stroke (yes, on Father’s Day) and fell into a downward spiral that dragged out for over a year and a half until he died in April, 1996.

I have actively avoided Father’s Day since then, but I never begrudged those who still had father’s to celebrate. Why be mean, right? People should enjoy what they have while they have it.

This year, though, as I watch all my friends posting photos of their fathers to their FB and twitter feeds, I suddenly felt an urge to do more than let the day slide by, unremarked.

I scanned in some photos and posted them. I went through my father’s WWII photo album, a badly deteriorating and mostly mysterious book of people and places that I have no reference for (father was 46 when I was born, and that war was 25+ years in his past by then).

He was a good man and a very interesting person; perhaps not the best father, but I know he always put his best foot forward and tried when he could. Alcoholism robbed me of whatever the lingering PTSD from the war didn’t, so I’m glad I got as much of him as I did.

I think that’s the heart of Father’s Day: gratitude. Fathers make mistakes, they are only human, and if they stayed around instead of running away then they for sure screwed something up at some point. Dismissing the truly terrible fathers (and they are out there, I know), I’d like to think that most fathers want what is best for their children and try to help them along this bumpy road called life with love, affection, pride, and a strong sense of humor.

I know mine did. Miss you, daddy. <3

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Stengthening Up

Posted on June 15, 2013 by

This morning I slept in (oh gloriousness!) which I really needed. Then I got up and strengthened myself.

Life is a constant work-in-progress, something that isn’t news to any of us I suppose. But I spent so many years coasting, getting by, not realizing that I was unconsciously creating a life I did not actually want to live. The day I woke up to that was the day I called to set an appointment with a therapist.

I’ve come a long ways since then and there has been much backsliding, because OMG sitting around reading fanfic all day is just fucking easier, okay? :D   These days, though, I try to get up and get strong.

Part of that is weight lifting. I enjoy it, much more than I do something like jogging/running, and I can do it indoors which is a bonus here in stultifying hot-and-humid Florida (ugh! This place is only fun if you are at a beach resort, near a pool, or visiting Disney). So quite literally, I’m working on getting stronger physically.

But I’m also trying to get strong in other ways: writing, friendships, helping others, eating clean…the list is pretty much everything else in my life.

Strength has to come from the bottom up. If your health, your skills, your motives, are not strong then nothing you do will withstand the stresses of daily living. The life I created for myself by coasting along on my reserves was a disappointing, gray, meaningless thing.

Dreams can be goals if we put in the work, if we get stronger every day and reinforce the foundations of our character.

Sometimes I get tired, but then I sleep a strong sleep and start over again the next day.

Being strong isn’t the end result, it’s the process.

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Persuasion

Posted on June 14, 2013 by

What we tell ourselves is our own persuasion.

It’s the stuff we repeat over and over in the dark, lying in bed, making the decision that tomorrow will be different.

Sometimes it works, but sometimes it doesn’t.

I’m at the point where I have to admit that telling myself over and over “I don’t have time to write” or “I don’t have time to work out” is just the way I convince myself that those statements are true. It’s not that the things we tell ourselves are not factual, because in truth my time is pretty limited by my day job and sleep and eating and, you know, life. However, taking that truth and twisting it into “I don’t have time…” is the act of persuading myself to give up, stop trying, just sleep in.

I want to tell myself other truths — “Time is tight, but I can fit in a 20 minute workout” — but it becomes something like a courtroom battle in my head:

“Let the record show that the defense does have time to work out in the mornings.”

“I object to the prosecution’s attempt to suggest that my client isn’t already giving life 110% of her efforts!”

It’s a double-edged sword, then. I’m so habituated to the negative persuasion, that the positive messages have to fight to be considered. There is a reason that the metaphors here are all about “fighting ourselves” and “my brain is out to kill me” and “I keep telling myself this but I don’t seem to listen.” We are talking to ourselves, persuading ourselves to believe something  that, while factual, may or may not be true.

The messages need to change:

  • I DO have time to work out in the mornings.
  • I DO have time to write every day.
  • I DO have time to get everything done and still go to bed by ten p.m.

There is no secret here; no wild, wishful thinking. It’s all about persuasion.

 

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Don’t eat at your desk

Posted on June 11, 2013 by

OMG I really need to break this habit of eating at my work desk.

I think this is a hangover from the pre-divorce days. I pretty much holed up in my bedroom and lived there. Husband and I still lived together through the whole thing, just with separate bedrooms, and that was my way of coping. A year later we were divorced and he moved out proper, but I still kept to one room, even with a whole apartment at my disposal. I had one room, and one room only:

My studio.

It’s like the rest of the apartment is just arms of convenience for the studio. The bedroom for sleeping, the kitchen for cooking, the bathroom for bathing, etc.; it all feeds back to the studio.

But then I got the chair. And now I’m realizing, things need to change.

Eating in front of my computer monitor is not necessarily a terrible thing, but it’s habit, a way to focus on something that isn’t my life: fix dinner, sit at the desk, scroll tumblr, stuff face.

The chair has shown me a life outside of the studio, namely, my living room. That big open space that has some bookshelves in it — that’s a nice place to curl up on the Chair and read a book! Who knew!

This evening as I sat at my desk in the studio, eating dinner, I thought: don’t I have a table in the kitchen for this? A nice table, with chairs? Why NOT sit there and eat? Like a real grown up, eating a meal slowly with myself for company in a part of my house that is not the Studio?

I’m going to try that next time. I’m a g’damn adult and I’m going to eat at my mini-dining table. Yeah, take that, maturity!

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A chair makes all the difference

Posted on June 10, 2013 by

I know that’s a really weird post title, but it’s also true. I got a new chair, and I think it’s changed my life.

It’s not, actually a new chair. It’s a little beat up and scratched up hand-me-down from a friend who is downsizing in preparation to move. I love it.

It’s an upholstered club lounge chair with a large ottoman. My cat does not trust it, although he’s advanced to napping on the ottoman. It’s a comfortable chair, which is the important part. It’s not like I need to worry about whether it matches my starving-artist décor. :/

It’s changed my life because it has redirected my “leisure time” away from my computer. I can download ebooks and fanfic onto my nookoid and curl up in the chair to read them, instead of trapping myself at my computer to do so. Well, honestly I could have just set up in bed to read that way, but that never felt comfortable to me. I don’t enjoy bed-lounging, I enjoy sleeping in my bed, so between the bed and my desk, I always ended up at my desk.

You know, my desk: where I WORK.

It’s hard to draw that line, as a writer, between working and goofing off. Even a writer who clears 3,000+ words a day can’t write all day. Creativity doesn’t work like that. It’s easy to get too distracted and not write at all, though, which is the other side of the coin. It’s all about the balance.

In my head, my computer desk had somehow morphed from a place of work to a place of leisure. It’s okay if it is a little of both — it always will be, by necessity — but somehow over time my mentality drifted away from “this is a place where I mostly work and sometimes goof off” to “this is a place where I drown in tumblr, twitter, and fanfic.”

Perspective is all in our heads, I know that, but when it gets set it is hard to change.

My new chair has made the change for me, I am surprised to find. Now when I want a break I think about my chair. (Yes, if you read between the lines you’ll realize that this is the first piece of actual lounging furniture I’ve owned in years. Buying something like a couch or comfy chair just always went to the bottom of my priority list.) When I get antsy about working/writing, I get up and go back to my desk.

I’m actually being MORE productive, now. It’s kind of awesome.

I love my chair.

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The Appeal of Poly Stories

Posted on June 9, 2013 by

I was recently talking by email with my friend and fellow author Sarah Madison about current projects and upcoming releases. She has gotten some fantastic reviews for her excellent book Boys of Summer, which she self-published, and she’s busy working on new M/M stories, a never-ending cycle we were companionably complaining about.

(I mean, as much as we love writing our stories and enjoy our characters, it still gets to be “a job” sometimes, when you are bogged down in difficult scenes or drowning in boring but necessary edits.)

I mentioned my own future venture into self-publishing, which will be some books in the “poly” or “ménage” category of male/female/male. It is a type of romance story I love reading and I love writing.

As a girl/young woman, I always got frustrated with the traditional romantic triangle where a girl has to choose between two awesome guys. For me it was always a question of why can’t she have it all? Never made sense to me, and on many occasions I felt the endings of those stories were forced in order to comply with what is, to me, a rather arbitrary rule about romantic relationships being composed of only two people.

I mean, I get that the one-on-one version of romance is what most people want. I’m not saying that’s wrong, in any way shape or form. But for some people, like me, it’s more of a restriction than an ideal. I could never find the stories that represented me and my desires, though.

In fact, it’s still hard to dig up those stories. The epublishing phenomenon has made it possible, but the category is very small and limited. Which means, of course, that my audience is probably pretty small. *sigh*

Well, this is more a labor of love type of project anyway! Ten to fifteen years ago, I would not have even had a hope in hell of getting my stories published, at all. Now I have that opportunity, and I’m going to grab it!

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Conflictions

Posted on June 6, 2013 by

Right now I’ve got several stories in stages of “almost done”, where they’ve been for a while. I’ll spare you my writer’s block woes and instead talk about direction.

I’m branching out, at last, into a category near and dear to my heart: M/F/M (male/female/male) polyamorous stories. I’m hoping I have an audience — yeah, from a business perspective, one should know they have an audience lined up, but this is more a work of love for me. Of course I want these stories to be successful and popular, but if they only get a few readers, I’ll be happy with that too.

The fact is that the “new” world of publishing allows for greater leeway in experimenting with categories and genres, and it would be a shame not to explore those options because of old rules about what writers are supposed to do. So I’m starting up a couple of series in the M/F/M category, both paranormal (a little…no vampires, though) and self-publishing them.

The reason for the title of this post, “conflictions”, is that I’ve spent a lot of time deciding and considering and re-deciding how to publish these stories. I’ve thought about submitting them to publishers, publishing them on Wattpad as serials, and finally going indie and publshing them myself. Sometimes a plethora of choices leads to a big ball of indecision!

I’ve decided to go the indie route. It’s a little more work with formatting and making covers — I cannot afford to outsource this stuff, at this time — but I like having the control over them that self-publishing brings. Dreamspinner has done very well by me, I love what they have done to package and market my M/M romances, so it’s not about a sense of displeasure with that particular system.

It’s more about diversifying my portfolio, you might say. Heck, I’m even looking at starting publishing non-romance SF under my legal name. Eventually. ;)

In the meantime: keeping writing!

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Worlds Away: IM3 and STID

Posted on June 2, 2013 by

In the space of a few days I’ve spent money I don’t have on going to the movie theater to watch Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness.

No spoilers here, just me flailing a little at the awesome!

Not that either movie is perfect, but then kind of like most romance novels these stories are not about being stark, ruthless reflections of life. They are supposed to be fun, with varying levels of believability and internal logic.

Frankly, STID doesn’t have much logic at all on its side, but then I look at that as a reflection of the series itself. Kind of like continuing the tradition of utterly absurd storylines, you know?

There is a whole controversy about the character Benedict Cumberbatch plays, which I can’t discuss without revealing an important plot point to the movie. Let my contribution be this: the questions being raised by fans are totally, 100% valid and I’m disappointed in the choices JJ Abrams made with the role, but I think Cumberbatch did a phenomenal job portraying the character. His contribution to the movie, however poorly handled by Abrams, is mind-blowing and memorable. Cumberbatch’s voice, his delivery, his expressions, the physicality with which he plays his character took my breath away!

Iron Man 3 is, I think, the better movie over all. The script catered to RDJ’s strengths in both drama and comedic timing, and also (gratefully) treated Pepper Potts and James Rhodes as more than mere sidekicks/love interests (read that as you will!). Of course Ben Kingsley as the Mandarin was almost a show stealing performance, and while (again) I cannot discuss his role without giving away a major plot point, suffice to say I’m not convinced any other actor could have pulled off what he did with such aplomb. *claps wildly*

Watching these two latest entries into well-established franchises just fired up my creativity. I want to build worlds like these, where fans love the characters and write fanfic and cosplay and re-read and re-watch over and over again. Honestly, I’ve never really wanted to be a superhero; I have always wanted to be the storyteller. For me, the dream has always been about being the next Stan Lee, or Gene Rodenberry, or (one of my fave sf authors) CJ Cherryh.

Making it happen!

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