Something out of nothing

I finally got around to watching this TED Talk by Amy Tan about where creativity lies.  She makes some great points about the serendipitous nature of creativity that really resonated with me so I thought I would share.  If you have 20 minutes and are so inclined:

Life is good right now.  In fact, life is great.  I feel awesome, am back in a schedule doing so many things I love: writing lots, teaching yoga, practicing yoga, hanging out with friends and my best friend and life-mate, good old Mr. Peters.  I'm just really grateful to be right here.

I'm feeling really good about the revisions I'm going through in this next draft of my book and confident that I'll be done with this draft very soon.  Then...(duh, duh, duh) it will truly be time to send it out!  It's taken me a LONG TIME to get even close to this stage (much longer than most writers I think, from what I read in the blogosphere), but I haven't given up!  It's been a good 10 years since I committed to the idea of writing stuff for people to read and I'm really thrilled I've kept at it.

Yesterday I was in a bathroom and I cam across this:

Thoreau's quote made me smile because, after all this time, I can't believe that's still the direction I'm going in. I've had a lot of help and a lot of love from people to keep me on track, but reading this I'm reminded that patience really pays off.  I haven't realized a lot of my dreams yet, but because I'm going in their direction I feel like I'm living them.  And when I'm out of my head and in my body, when I'm breathing in the present moment, I realize that if you're living any stage of your dream, in some facet you're already there.

So, my dear ones, GO CONFIDENTLY! You may just end up realizing the life you've imagined for yourself is happening right now.

Throw up the dirt

Perhaps the title of this post seems rather strange, but I was talking to a friend earlier today and explaining how I feel like someone has stuck their huge hands into the earth of my life and thrown all the soil up into the air.  Now I'm just waiting for all of it to fall back to the ground.

Gosh there's so much I want to write about — so much on my heart, but since my blogging has been so sporadic these past few months I thought perhaps just writing about writing would be a good place to start.

I read the draft of the novel I finished last July. The time away from it has been invaluable.  Because of it, I was able to see so many things that I wasn't able to before.  I wouldn't say I was able to read it just as any third-party reader, but I was removed enough that I could SEE IT.  I could see the story underneath the places where I was getting in the way.

Maybe to some seeing all those obstructions would be discouraging — but I feel relieved.  Why? Because now I have an idea of what I need to do to make it better.

And more than anything, more than absolutely anything, I want this book to be the best that it can be.

Sure, perhaps it will never make it into the world and find readers all its own, but at least I will have done it the honour of chipping away at its dirt.  Then hopefully it can be what its truly meant to be, and I can take the lessons and begin all over again.

Making the final check-in

Wait! #ROW80...I'm here.  Out of breath and panting but I'm here to deliver my final check-in.

I've been off the blogging grid for almost three weeks now....first because I had a number of visitors and then because I opted for working on my writing goals instead of blogging about them in the last hours of the first round of #ROW80.

But before this round ends I wanted to just put in how far I made it with my goals, and to send so much gratitude out to Kait Nolan and this writing challenge and as well to the sponsors and every other ROWer who came to encourage and visit my blog.  It was also fun getting to visit some of yours!

So, for a recap of my goals:

Through Kait's advice, I started out by chopping my original goal in half.  I know I can write between 2,000 and 3,000 words when I'm trying, so doing as Kait said, I made my #ROW80 goal to write 1,000/day, five days a week, and have this also translate into 5,000 words/week.

It didn't take me long to realize that this was the best goal I ever set for myself.  Through the first two months of #ROW80 I was meeting or surpassing this goal every week — and sometimes only writing four days instead of five.

It's been SUCH an eye-opener for me.  Before this, I would set these massive goals for myself and I would never accomplish them and there would be a lot of self-hate involved and defeatism.  Then, along came #ROW80 to show me that I can actually set smaller goals for myself (and this was MUCH smaller by my standards) and then...I would actually end up getting MORE done than with any of the big goals I've ever set for myself!

I had to take a week and a bit off in February to go see family in Vancouver, and then I had some visitors, but by the time I came back to write I looked at how much I had done so far for #ROW80 and saw that I had written 35,000 words in 6 weeks!!  Now, add this to the 5,000 words I'd already had before the writing challenge started and that put me at 40k!

I realized then, that if I worked hard, if I played my cards right, I could actually finish this novel!!!

So I upped my goals.  2,000 words/day, five days a week — translating into 10,000 words per week.

Now, this goal, I learned quickly was much harder for me to achieve.  I felt burnt out by the end of the week and if I missed a day it was much harder to make up the extra word count if I fell behind.  Still, I made it to 9,800 words the first week and 9,000 words the second.

Something I also started doing through this challenge is keeping track of my daily word count on an excel file — and I highly recommend this.

Then I reached 60,000 words and I just said $%^$ it...now I've just go to get through these last chapters and get this thing done.  So I've been writing day and night — as much as I can.

I must say I'm also motivated by the fact I'm going to Toronto for two weeks, leaving April 3.  So the deadline I've given myself for finishing this novel is actually April 2 (after ROW).  So I am still writing away...

But where am I on this last day? 72k baby!  And I've got about five or six chapters left to write....in 6 days.  Can I make it?  Maybe?

I'm not putting too much pressure on myself.  I haven't been feeling that great this last week or so, so even though I'm working, it's not as easily as I would like.....but I'm just going to keep going and hope I make it — if I don't, I don't.  I'll be pretty much done anyways and I'll only have a chapter or two to write when I get back if I don't make it.

All I can say now is how grateful I am that I found this challenge.  Kait Nolan, I am so grateful to you for creating a challenge for writers who have a life. Thank you!  I'm grateful for the lesson you taught me that just doing a bit each day can actually bring me further in the end than going after a huge goal.

Thank you ROWers for all your support and for sharing your own writing challenges and goals with me.  In these past three months I've pretty much written a novel and I'm smiling from ear to ear, looking at the writing world a little differently (in a good way) and so excited for how this challenge will shape my productivity in the future.

Alas, I cannot join #ROW80 for the second round....I'll be travelling too much in April and May.

I leave you then, with IMMENSE gratitude, the possibility of knowing that I may join ROW80 again in the future, and an almost-written-novel I shall now return to.

Good luck everyone participating in the second round, and good luck to all writers, everywhere, near and far.

Finished!!

Made it!  Made it!  Made it!  

Canada Bound and Neil Gaiman

Tonight I am on my way back to Toronto.  I am so excited and already really feeling a little bit overwhelmed but I am mostly very excited.  I haven't seen my mother in almost eight months, which is the longest we've ever gone without seeing each other and has only happened one other time (when I was going to school in Vancouver).

I do not like being away from my family and though the extra time to myself I have in LA may be helping me to get writing done, in a perfect world I would be living in Toronto, getting paid to write what I love, and enough so that I could live comfortably with Tom, and whoever else should come along.  That could still happen.  But for now, it's still a dream.

Neil Gaiman had something fabulous to say about dreams recently, when he addressed the University of the Arts in Philidelphia.  I suggest that you watch this video of his speech.  If you're an artist of any kind, perhaps not even producing but with art in your spirit, then this is for you.  It's nineteen minutes of your life, but well spent when you consider some of the other, more wasteful things you've done with nineteen minutes of your time.  When I'm sad and wish my family were nearer, when I have my "I'm not going fast enough" moments about my novel writing, Gaiman reminds me to use it.  It's something I prescribed to long ago.  For this is how we, as Gaiman puts it, "make good art."

As a side note, I love the bit in here about how he lied about his writing credentials to get his first job in journalism.  I wish I would have had the balls to do something like that when I was starting out!

And speaking about "not going fast enough" with my novel.  I'm eight chapters away from finishing the rewrites of Book One.  When I get back from Toronto I plan to be done them in no more than two weeks.  Then it's off to be read, by people, for the first time all the way through.  I'm both excited an terrified.  For now though, I love this book I'm writing and I just hope I can do right by it.  Maybe one day you'll get to read it and hopefully you'll think I have done.