and Sprinkles on Top » writing

In the Vein of Being Public with My Goals

Deb — Sun, 02 May 2010 14:05:26 +0000

It’s Sunday morning. It’s the perfect day for sleeping in thanks to the cloudy skies and the almost-rainy feeling in the air, My body is doing that lanquid pull back to my bed, insisting that the mattress is what Goldilocks would wish for (not too soft but not too hard) and the sheets have that sensual crisp fill and there would be the bliss of surrendering to my dreams.

Instead, I am up and sipping on my second cup of coffee.

I’ve fed the animals, have spent some time in mediation and have caught up on my email and the overnight Twitter feed. I am making some mental lists of tasks to accomplish this week. I am determined that this week will be productive.

I mentioned the WayBack machine recently, and in reviewing some almost decade-old posts, I was amazed at the sheer volume I was writing. I was traveling this past week and though I didn’t have much time to write, I did have some quiet time to think and in questioning myself as to how I was able to be so prolific, I realized that I was doing the bulk of my writing early in the morning. It was also a time before Social Media sights, like Twitter and Facebook. All this thinking led me to a few points to ponder.

When is my mind the freshest? Mornings. In order to accomplish this, I need to get to bed earlier and get up earlier. My second freshest time is right before I go to bed.
What is my true goal: to be a better Social Media person or be a better Writer? To be a better writer. To take these ever-flowing, copious thoughts and put them to paper.
What’s the point of getting up earlier if I’m going to linger? That’s the point. I can’t linger and surf and play. I need to spend a dedicated 15 to 30 minutes writing.
How can I stay caught up on things? Discipline. Focus. Goal Setting. List Making. A trusty egg-timer.

I know I shouldn’t try to add too many habits into my days at one time if I hope for them to stick, but I believe I have a plan.

I need to return to spending an hour on Sundays to review my schedule, updating my task list, and setting mini-goals for the week. If you must know, I still believe in many of the habits I began when I was subscribing to the Covey methods for organization.
I need to spend a small out of time meditating each day.
I need to utilize my mornings better, and spend 15 to 30 minutes doing personal writing.
I need to trade Scrubs re-runs at bedtime for another 30-minutes of writing.
I need to turn distractions off during my writing time, including Tweetdeck and my email window.

The last several months have been more difficult than I could ever express, though I finally wrote a little in my column for All Things Girl. Besides rebuilding my faith in myself, I also need to embrace some other principals, like courage and passion. I am a strong woman with some solid goals. Thing is, there is only one person who can accomplish my goals, and that is me.

I am also a smart woman and know that the best way to help myself is to also allow myself to lean on my friends. I cannot continue to hide the good, the bad, and the ugly from those people who love me. If I allow my friends to hold me to my goals, so if you see that I miss more than a day or two here, please feel free to call me on it. Comment. Email me. It’s all part of me trusting that other people honestly care about me as ME instead of pretending to care because they want something from me.

I am a creative being and know that Life is a journey. I know that my spirit wants to grow and achieve. I know that with each day, I have a little more faith. And it feels right.

Much love to you and yours.

Laundry List

Deb — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 01:58:00 +0000

I was fortunate to spend a portion of my time in one of my favorite places these past few days: the Courtyard of the Hotel Monaco.

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(this photo taken in September 2008; not much has changed since then)

I didn’t get to spend as much time there as I would have liked, but part of traveling over a holiday weekend and having family obligations means less down time. In a typical trip to DC, I would have planned to stay through late Sunday or early Monday. With my mom’s illness, I needed to be home for lunch. But I digress.

The spring air combined with a much needed cocktail got my head wrapped around what needs to be accomplished during the month of April. I set about doing a bit of woolgathering and discovered that my wish list is quite long. Still, I allowed my mind to wander as I sat in the garden and thought about work and wants and needs and the need to reintroduce some creativity back into my daily life. Brief moments aren’t conducive to a real brain dump, so I saved that until my flight home.

After breakfast was served and I was enjoying my 3rd cup of coffee, I sat with pen and paper and begin listing everything that had gathered in my mind. When you end up with a laundry list of to-dos and must-dos, getting a real control over it can be a task so daunting that it’s almost paralyzing. As overwhelming as it can be, the only way to make progress is to break it down into chunks and eat it like you would an elephant: one bite at a time.

April is going to be an interesting month. I already had the beginnings of heavier than usual travel and with the (potential) new contract, that means three days a week on the road. It’s the kind of travel I like: solid contract with the ability to find my way around a new town and make it “mine”. Granted, I’d love that city to be a city like DC, but to be honest, I’m thrilled with wherever work takes me. (I can tell you that there is no Kimpton Hotel in this city – there isn’t even a single Hilton Property in the town!).

Just keep good thoughts headed my way as I break down my laundry list into those manageable bites and set out to conquer the little piece of my world!

Storytelling

Deb — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:20:23 +0000

I have always been fascinated by stories. It’s the basis of what makes up lives, really, the moments that are remembered as so important or humorous that we retell it to our children and our friends. My favorite early stories came from family members and I especially loved listening to stories my grandmother told. Growing up in a family of fourteen children, there were many. Her father was a Baptist Preacher and the family farmed, including the grew both crops and cotton in Ellis County Texas, after trekking there from Tennessee. It’s frustrating to remember pieces of a story, like why my grandmother was crying in a family photo (with 14 children in the family, she was wearing big bows tied upon her feet; she had outgrown her shoes, they couldn’t yet afford another pair, and her sister Lilly was wearing her outgrown ones) and not have the details that make the story richer. I cannot help but long for the details of the child born in the middle of picking season for the cotton or the trek from Tennessee to Texas in the late 1800’s via wagon and mules. Oral story tellers are the foundation of so much of our pasts, and I find that I’ve aged too much to recall than tidbits of the stories I heard before my fifth birthday. I wish I had been old enough to write them down when she told me or disciplined enough to ask for re-tellings years later. It would have been a gift to commit those stories to paper before my grandmother died 17 years ago.

From the first moments that I could sound out words and realized that they formed sentences which in turn formed stories, I was hooked on the written word. I didn’t lessen my love for hearing stories, and to this day I love books on tape (or being read to at the ripe old age of almost-41), but I found that no matter where I was, I could entertain myself. I have been a voracious reader since the first grade.

When I think about it, I realize there was seduction in words even before I knew what the feeling was, I just knew that a few simple words on a page had the ability to send me to another place, make me feel and think and dream. Reading became my number one past time when I learned that I could immerse myself in a story no matter where I was: in my bedroom while the rest of my family slept, in the classroom when my work was finished, in the car on a boring trip, or up in the tree in my grandmother’s front yard. I read Little Women for the first time sitting in that tree. I am constantly finding writers that make me think and writers who make me feel and writers who make me laugh as I explore the worlds that their mind has created.

The desire to be able to do that for others came soon after I learned to read. I wanted to be able to make others feel the way I felt and see the world through my eyes. Finding the words to express the simplicities of the day or the complexities of the heart is a simple part of my being, yet the hardest thing to do at times. At times, I find that I can speak them, the challenge is to be able to also write them.

Through my desire to consume words as well as write them, I find inspiration for writing by reading other writers. Jimmy Buffet, for example, is a musician whose humor I appreciate (though I would never be a “parrot head”) and a quote from his auto-biography, A Pirate Looks at Fifty always comes to my mind when I ruminate on writing:

…I don’t have the talent to compete with the Great Serious Writers. Anyway, writing is not a competition to me. Writing is fun,and I am simply a storyteller. I also really enjoy the self-discipline writing requires. It’s a great challenge, like learning celestial navigation or becoming a seaplane pilot. Anyone bellying up to a bar with a few shots of tequila swimming around the bloodstream can tell a story. The challenge is to wake up the next day and carve through the hangover minefield and a million other excuses and be able to cohesively get it down on paper.

I want to take that tradition of storytelling that meant so much to what makes me, and be able to write in a way that others can see the world from my mind’s eye. The challenge, truly, is to find the discipline to carve through the fear and the other excuses and commit the words to paper.

And on that note, I have plans to watch old movies tonight. I hope you are having a lovely Saturday.

Instead of Sheep

Deb — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 05:36:29 +0000

If you are a lover of old movies, you may recall this from White Christmas….

If you’re worried and you can’t sleep
just count your blessings instead of sheep
and you’ll fall asleep, counting your blessings..

It’s good advice, even if it came from the mind of Irving Berlin and the lips of Bing Crosby. Over a year ago, I began making a shift to living a little more focused. I wrote about it at All Things Girl, when I created a vision board and the choosing of three little words to live by for the year. One of the things I blogged about was the fact that I had begun keeping a “gratitude journal”. The physical journal has gone by the wayside, but the concept is still one of those full present pieces in my life. The consciousness of being grateful.

Today, I played golf. We were on the 4th hole and I was waiting to take my second shot. It’s February, yet it was 77 degrees and there was a light wind. And I was outside enjoying the golf course in the sunshine. In my silence and waiting, I sent out a silent prayer of thankfulness for the glorious day that I was able to simply be a part of. And that is when it hit me. Being thankful for the blessings in my life has become part of my subconscious existence.

Last week, as is evidenced by my lack of writing, was one of those weeks. But each night, when I put my head on the pillow, I still do nightly prayers. They are not complex, but simple. I am simple in many ways and this is one of those ways. I pray for peace and forgiveness, and I pull out at least two things from my day that I am thankful for. Some days, finding two things in a particular day to be thankful for is a stretch, but those are the rare days. Most days, I am able to pull together a longer list to go through my head. They are fleeting, though, in that by not writing them down on paper, I am not able to look back and remind myself what was especially good about February 18th, for example.

Tonight, when I go to bed, my “sheep” will include:

The beautiful weather and the ability to be a part of it…
My improving golf game, including an 8-foot putt and a nice t-shot on the 7th hole…
The ability to laugh at myself and still enjoy golf on the not so great shots…
The sense of humor of my children…
Inspirational and Creative People in my life…
The lessons of learning patience and trust…
The fact that my youngest is with me all week…
That my oldest had a decent day and wasn’t cranky…
That all my laundry is caught up…
That I came home to a clean house and there are clean sheets on my bed…

And on that note, I do believe it is time to climb into bed, lay my head on my pillow, and get some sleep. I hope that in your life, you are able to find things to be grateful for from your day. Sweet Dreams.

Yeah, On That Creativity Thing

Deb — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 03:03:59 +0000

The Ruminator posted tonight about the “blogging lite” exercise of late he has been involved in. And I full understand many of the things he talked about and it fishtails in some ways with a conversation I had with Melissa today (brainstorming during pedicures is the best). Work overtaking so much of your brain, especially if it is involved with writing, often means less personal writing when you do sit down, because, do you really want to see words, let alone sentences? During this last project, I even cut back on one of my all-time favorite pastimes, and that is reading. I read so much during the day, between emails and reviewing pieces of the document, that I didn’t want to read much more beyond my personal email, favorite blogs and Twitter. And that, when you look at it, isn’t about the words but about the people.

But the other comment he made about being at a “way-station” hit as well. I didn’t lock-stock-and-barrel relocate, but I have literally lived out of suitcases from May2006 until recently, although the heaviest periods of travel were this past year. Not being “settled” is sometimes counteractive to a creative soul. I’ve also wondered about age and it’s contributing factor. And the fact that while I can get the ideas into my head, getting it out onto paper – whether journal or virtual, seems more difficult as it is hard to focus.

These past few weeks, I have written more than I have the previous few months. I’m not just writing here and at All Things Girl, I’m hammering away again on short stories, doodling with some poetry, and doing some free writing that will only make it to my paper journal as it was not for the consumption of an audience, but simply for me. I think the last time I did any writing just for myself, to be honest, was after gong to the Pentagon Memorial. I’m also dreaming more, especially the last week. Dreams that I am remembering, though I haven’t been disciplined enough to write my dreams down, at least in my paper journal, like I should. In the past, my dreams have always been good at guiding me and my muses.

Melissa, she mentioned maybe it was because I was settled in one place for so long. I don’t know. She might be right. I’m just happy to have it back. I have to travel the next two days, so we will see. I used to be very productive on flights and most of my 2006 columns as well as a chunk of work on a novel too place during my sequestered time. We will see that as well since the flight time is about three hours.

Creativity for many can be fickle. It can also be all consuming. And it’s tempermental, much like the people who posess it. I know when I get into a writing groove, I get frustrated at any interruption, be it a text message, the dog, or other such truly non-threatening thing. And on days were I am struggling to hang onto it, every possible distraction is almost welcome, as if to save me from my own muse.

I like reading, by the way, what friends are thinking on creativity. It allows me some perspective into how mine behaves as I see how theirs behaves. And it makes me realize that I am not alone.

writing week: day 1

Deb — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 21:26:06 +0000

I haven’t exactly written anything today, my mind is still going 90 to nothing and jumping topics. It’s Writer’s Block in some ways, but not quite the same. I can’t focus long enough to write much more than a sentence today. I think because I am tired….since I didn’t go to bed until after Midnight and was up at 3:30 this morning. Combine that with the desire for pancakes, and I am running short on sleep overall. I dozed on the flight, but obviously 30 minutes of a nap doesn’t quite make up for two nights of under 4 hours of sleep.

I have faith, though, that tomorrow will be different. After all, tomorrow IS another day.

I am from the South…. channeling Scarlett O’Hara is 2nd Nature.

GTD, Writing, and Courage

Deb — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:44:01 +0000

Earlier this year (or was it last year?), Lor recommended a book by David Allen called “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity”. Since I tend to have spells of too much on my plate….and want to get more done each day, I looked into it. It’s a truly fabulous book with a great system of being more productive.

As typical of me, though, I kind of got out of habit. One of the most productive exercises, though, was the whole core dump thing…..and I have been needing to do it, but simply haven’t taken the time. Yesterday, though, I set my timer and allowed myself 10 minutes to clear my head. Though David recommends full sheets of paper so that you can better file them, I still love my 3×5 cards.

I went through half a pack of cards in ten minutes.

I felt better..just to clear things a bit and figure out what needed to be done in the next day or two. As well as get a handle on those longer term projects. I was feeling inspired, so I downloaded the podcast on procrastination, since that has seemed to be a humongous problem for me. I was doing some de-cluttering of my office closet…and wanted something more inspiring to listen to. Something he said just stuck out to me….

The thing that comes closest to touching your soul is what you procrastinate on the most.

Wow. Now that struck a nerve. I fiddle fart around the house instead of writing a lot. Moreso than I ever used to do. I think it still boils down to the fear thing….is it I am afraid of what other people will think when they read it – or is it that I’m afraid of my own innermost demons? Considering that one of my guiding principals for 2008 is Courage, well….I need to work on overcoming that fear, right?

Even knowing how true it was, I put off writing this morning. I did laundry. Unloaded the dishwasher. Made my bed. Fixed coffee. Read the paper. Talked to Laura when she got here to clean. Surfed blogs. Cleared out the Christmas stuff that was up in the kitchen.

I did get quite a bit done on de-cluttering yesterday (yes, I know it was Christmas, but I had a quiet hour!). I relocated all the photo albums from my office closet, discovered a photo of my grandmother that is going to go above my desk. Organized all the papers that need to be sorted into one box. You can walk into my closet now, which is great, because I need to get some things organized if I am going to get accomplished in 2008 what I truly want to accomplish.

A huge chuck of my 2008, though, revolves around writing and development. I need that solid, uninterrupted writing time again. Among Christine Kane’s 66 Ways to Build your courage post is #56: Wake up at 5 AM and write. Very good advice, I think, especially considering that I’ve always been a bit of a morning person. When I blogged a long time ago, I wrote every morning before going to the gym. When I was doing the erotic blog, I would get up and write.

It’s a successful time for me…..early morning hours when my body is waking…but my mind is still hanging on to the pieces of my dreams. It’s just getting past my fears and doing it.

By the way, I need to pick up a new copy of GTD. It’s nowhere to be found. I spent some time looking everywhere for the book, by the way, this morning, too. Just another way to stay away from my desk. I think I left it in a hotel room somewhere or on a plane. But I think it would be a good thing to put it into my carry on for the next couple of weeks of travel.

I’ve also been putting off getting into suitable clothing and running my errands…..