What I Did

Despite the risk of jinxing this, I'm going to tell y'all what I did yesterday.

I wrote words.  1558 of them to be exact.  Which puts Duke Noble #3 at just over 3000 words.  It's a start.  No promises.  No judging.  Just write the words.  Every day.

I also exercised.  Not walked... exercised.  5 minutes dancing (which freaked the cats out... like 'eek! hide! mama's having a spastic fit' or something), 4 minutes doing regular exercises, 4 minutes more dancing and then walking around the house to get my heart rate back to normal*.

I told you all I just needed to give myself a good talking to.

Now, I just have to keep it up.  I'm shooting for 1500 words a day but any words will do.  And I'm aiming at ramping up the exercising until I'm back to my old stamina - walk = 1.6 miles 3 or 4 times a week, exercise = 20/10/20 on the days I'm not walking.

No excuses.  I need this for both my mental and my physical health.  Lord knows, I'm not getting any younger.  If I don't want to end up as an old lady sitting in a chair watching the world go by, or drooling on myself in a corner, I have to do something to make that not happen.  This is it.  

Join me, if you're able.  

*Safer than just stopping on the exercise.  You've got to ease your heart up and then ease it back down again.  

Eat Your Peas

Okay, I think I may have a handle on this thing.  Something occurred to me this morning - I promised myself I wouldn't start anything new until I get some of this backlog of writing into shape to be sent out into the world.  I mean, come on, I have like 13 books in various stages of 'ready' - which is to say not ready because if they were really ready, someone somewhere would've wanted one of them by now.  And starting something new right now just feels like adding to that steaming pile of unfinished.

I spent the better part of the summer whipping a manuscript into shape only to decide I wasn't going to try to publish it. 

Now I'm in the middle of editing the one book that was the hardest for me to edit.

And I hate editing.

I don't know how the rest of you were raised, but I had to clean my plate before I was allowed to get up from the table.  The meat I never had a problem with.  No prob on the starches either.  But the vegetables?  OMG, I did everything possible to not have to eat those.  I would hem and haw.  I would whine.  I resorted to stuffing them along the edge of my plate and then making sure I was the one to clear the table - until I got caught.  I even went so far as to swallow some of them whole with a generous gulp of milk so I wouldn't have to actually taste the loathsome things.  (This worked best with peas because they're really just green pills, and if I could swallow hard aspirin, I could certainly choke down soft peas.)

In order to get to the fun stuff in life - like dessert and playing outside - I had to eat my peas.

In order to get to the fun stuff in writing - like creating new stories - I have to do my editing.

:gag:

So in some immature, foot-stomping, breath-holding, pissy-bitch fashion, I've been refusing to eat my peas which leaves me stuck at the proverbial table, staring down at what are now incredibly cold and nasty veggies, whining about how I want to go play.

Hell, even worse, I already made a deal with myself that if I got this particular manuscript done I could go play with the NaNoWriMo kids.  (Deal making is the scourge of parenting, btw, but that's a subject best left to another day.)

Basically, I have to eat my peas.  Now if I could just find a glass of milk large enough to wash down 300 pages of edits before November 1st.

And don't try to talk me out of it.  I fixed this plate and I'm going to eat it all, even if I have to sit here 'til Christmas.

A Little Self Pep-Talk

My house is a pigsty.  My 'to-do' list is half-forgotten under a pile of other notes and it doesn't have a third of what I really need to do on it.  My story sits on a 5-subject notebook buried in a pile on the edge of the dining room table.  (You should see my dining room table.  Seriously, have you seen it?  Because I haven't seen it in days.)  I don't even want to think about the pork roast I meant to cook three days ago that's sitting in the fridge (hopefully not rotting). 

Today, all that crap stops.  Regardless of what else is going on in my life right now, I need to get my head out of my ass and get to work.  So what if I'm scatterbrained?  So what if things that are happening stall me to the point where I drop on the couch afterwards and embrace the TV coma? 

"Geez Louise, girlfriend, you're pathetic."

Today I will work, regardless of distractions.  I have too much to do and too little time to do it in for all this lollygagging.  And if something does pull my focus elsewhere, I will take care of the immediate issue and then get back to work.  I will not be lured into watching reruns of Grey's Anatomy, or Dr. Phil (my new secret shame), or leftover Frasier and Friends episodes.

And if I'm all done with the stuff on my list for today, if I'm sort of close to getting my daily life in some kind of order - I will sit down with that damn notebook and WRITE.  Because regardless of what else is happening in my right-now life, writing is my forever-life and it doesn't deserve to be shunted aside like the ugly girl at prom.

So there.  =op

Playtime is Over

This morning on Jeffe Kennedy's blog post Doggedness, Stick-to-it-iveness and Perseverance she mentions an encounter with a three year old - Betsy - and something the little girl said that's now stuck in my brain.  “I *was* having fun, but I’m not having fun anymore!”

I think Jeffe talked about it in reference to trying to find the fun when all it feels like you're doing is working, but it hit me a little different.  For me, I keep wondering if I haven't been playing Betsy for months now.

I think I might be sitting around pouting because I'm not having fun anymore.   :stomps one foot in disgust:  And I wanna be having fun.  Dang it.

Oh puleeze.

Nobody said any of this was going to be fun.  And I'm way too old to throw a pout-fest when it's not so much fun.  This is my frickin' job.  Sure, I'd like if it was fun all the time, but the reality of it is that it's work - sometimes damn hard work.  If I wanted it to be fun all the time, I'd just sit here writing and never bother to edit.  I'd never bother to try and get my work into some publishable shape.  I'd just write and write, like I did when I was a little girl.

Heh, maybe that's why I have so many manuscripts I never really finished.  I wasn't willing to put forth the effort, and now I've got so much work to do it seems insurmountable.  (But that's a theory for another day.)

Needless to say, my inner Betsy needs to take a nap.  Or sit in a time-out for a few weeks so I can get some genuine, totally un-fun work done.  Playtime is over, little girl.

So, regardless of whether this is supposed to be my day to relax or whether I have other more fun things to do, I need to spend some serious time doing serious things.

What do you have planned for the weekend?

Sustained Effort

As you may or may not know, my daughter had a rough go of her first semester at college.  She started out fine, but mid-semester it all went to hell.  This semester, she's starting out even better than she did last semester, but I'm trying not to get my hopes up.  Like I told both my husband and my mother, we need to see if she can keep this up.

And thinking about my conversations on this topic made me realize something.  The kid comes by it honestly.  I have a real problem with sustained effort myself.

Take my crocheting for example.  If I can keep my head down and just work, I can knock a blanket out in a month.  But they usually take me far longer.  I start out great, but after a while, the work level drops off.  This one I've got in my work bag was mostly finished back in December, but I haven't touched it in weeks.

It's the same thing with exercising.  I start out with the goal of exercising regularly, and I do that for a week or two.  This time, I've been doing it for three weeks so far.  I'm at the point when I usually get distracted or discouraged or just plain bored and stop.

What about cleaning?  Same thing.  Three years ago, I made a cleaning schedule for this behemoth of a house.  Each weekday had its own chore.  That lasted a couple months.  Now I rush around attacking the things that most need doing when I can no longer stand looking at the gathering dust bunnies.

And my writing?  Okay, so I can put my head down and write a book in two months.  That's awesome.  Yay.  But what happens after?  I sit down to edit and do that in dribs and drabs until it's eventually done.  (Or not, depending on the book and my commitment level.)

That's no way to succeed.  If I want to accomplish these goals of mine, I need to be serious about it.  I need to reach some kind of sustained effort.  Get up to speed and stay there until the work is done, or if the work is never done (like exercising or writing), then I need to maintain that level of effort for the rest of my life.

I believe acknowledging the problem helps defeat it.  So, now that I know I have a problem with sustained effort, I fully expect to conquer it.  I will exercise today.  I will sit my ass down and work through this hard copy edit of chapter one.  Monday, my cleaning schedule will resume.  And when I need a break from all that, I'll finish that damn blanket.  Because hey, I can't expect my daughter to conquer her problem if I'm just sitting here on my ever-widening ass letting my own problem fester.

What about you?  How are you with sustained effort?  What trips you up - distraction, discouragement, boredom...?  If nothing trips you up, how do you manage sustained effort?

Choices and Excuses

Daughter and I were having a discussion over Christmas break.  It all pertained to her less-than-stellar showing for her first semester and my 'No Excuses' commitment for 2012.  She asked me "When does something stop being a reason and start being an excuse?"

Basically, where do you draw the line?

Yesterday I took the Kid back to school.  We left at 7am and I got home around 3pm.  Three hours up, three hours back with lunch in between.  (And some hefting of her things from the parking lot to her dorm room on the 7th floor - thank goodness for elevators.)  As I've bitched about before, the whole trip wipes me out.  I felt pretty good at 1pm, driving down the road listening to various better  radio stations the city offers.  By 2:30, I was feeling like dog doo.  About ten minutes out of town, my leg started cramping.  So yeah, once I got inside the house, I became one with the couch.

My back hurt.  My legs hurt.  Even my stomach hurt from being in one position for most of three hours.  I didn't even eat dinner - I was so dragged out.

And as I lay there, watching whatever crap was on the toob*, I went back to that discussion with the kid.  Cripped up on the couch?  Is that a reason to not write or was that an excuse?  Where was the line?

This morning the whole thing is still on my mind.  Could I have written last night?  Hell, I sat here for at least a half hour answering emails and checking blogs.  And therein lies the answer to that particular instance.  If I felt good enough to be at the computer doing other things, then I sure as hell felt good enough to sit here and write.  Sure, it might not have been more than a few hundred words, but it would've been better than the zero I put on paper yesterday.

I think the line has to be evaluated on a case by case basis (which was basically the answer I gave Kidlet).  The hard part is making yourself do the evaluation and then acting on the result you come up with.  I knew last night that I could've been writing.  I chose not to and I used my own body as an excuse instead of just saying 'It's been a long day and I choose not to write', I told myself 'I hurt, so I can't write today.'

Choosing not to write is one thing and it can be totally acceptable.  Making up excuses is a whole nother thing and I'm not going to tolerate it. If I let myself get away with it today, it'll just lead to other excuses and other excuses, until I'm right back where I was when I started. 

I never said this whole 'No Excuse' thing was going to be easy.  It takes work not to tell myself I have reasons for my laziness instead of just accepting that I was being lazy.  And now today?  I have work to do.  And I choose not to make excuses if that work doesn't get done.

*toob = my new word for the TV.  Basically a smushing together of boob tube.