I’m doing research about Morocco for the novel. I go to Flickr first. Here’s some images I’m using to help me daydream.

Photo by SaffyH

Photo by Peace Correspondent

Photo by marghe00

Photo by marghe00

Photo by atsjebosma

Photo by docman

Photo by fam_nordstrom

Photo by DarkB4Dawn

Photo by OpalMirror

Photo by Agus Susanto 82

Photo by Simon Purdy

Photo by Alessandro Coiro Mas

Happy daydreaming!

Perseverance. We remember seeing this in movies when we kinda already know what’s at stake: winning the game, getting the guy, overcoming evil with good.

In real life, we may be just at the climactic moment of something in our lives, and we give up, sure that if there were going to be anything good for us with this thing, it would have come by now. The audience watching this movie about you gasps and then leaves early, throwing their discarded popcorn boxes at the screen, at your face.

Why not give them the rest of the movie?

Keep on with it then.

This week is particularly volatile for me. I was warned. I’m on week 6 of Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way, the creative recovery program for artists. Julia warned, “This week may be volatile for you.” And I read it, but must have forgot. Good thing the week reminded me. I am writing . . . a lot. Two very big projects, one requested by an agent, another in cahoots with a novelist friend because we want to discover what we’re made of. I didn’t start these projects this week, I started them a few weeks ago, but these are the two things that in a movie, everyone would be holding their breath to see how it turns out. I picture myself on the screen, sitting here in my office in front of hundreds of already written pages, piles of reference books, a very tired laptop who never gets a break, and dozens of empty hot chocolate mugs scattered here, there, and everywhere. This is the moment in a movie when the main character gets a brainstorm, powers through, usually a cluster of scenes showing this set to a nice musical interlude. These are the guts of an overcoming resistance movie.

Can I do it? I don’t know. Am I going to give up? Absolutely not. Am I going to keep powering through, even though the musical interlude is over (or on repeat for the next four months)? Yes. Has God told me to stop? Nope.

And that’s the key. We think those stupid Israelites wandered in a desert with only minimal attention from God. Truth is, they had His complete focus. At the moment they needed water, He had Moses strike a rock and there was water. The moment they needed bread, manna came from heaven. The moment they needed meat to sacrifice, there were birds that actually wanted to be caught. What?

I keep thinking of the desert. Perhaps the movie screen should show me sitting out in a desert (wild, uncombed hair and all), thirsty, and starving, craving sustenance. And I can picture in my mind my God coming to my rescue, giving me just what I need the moment I need it.

Writing in my office this week is my desert. I don’t have comforting things like I had before (“I wanna go back to Egypt!”), but I can survive here. I have what I need the moment I need it.

Keep walking.

There’s a book that I have within easy reach, because sometimes I forget that an introvert life is not bad, it’s just different. I’m also interested in the fact that I sometimes feel like being extroverted these days. Not often, however, and I always need a lot of alone time to recover. This proves Introvert Advantage to be true for me. I have to gear myself up to be an extrovert, which also reveals just how much I am an introvert: I still try to fit in with the crowd and it will never, ever work.

The Introvert Advantage by Marti Olsen Laney explained to me exactly why I can’t fit in with the crowd. (I remember all those miserable years in school when I could never think of anything to say and would just freeze up.) I don’t get energy from the “madding crowd,” I get energy from being alone.

Unless you too are in introvert, that sounds like I may be the Unabomber. Trust me, I’m not. I just enjoy driving alone in the car, going to the gym by myself and not talking to a lot of people, staying home to read books, working as an entrepreneur from home. I am not completely comfortable riding in a car with a lot of people all talking at the same time, going to the gym with a friend (or even a personal trainer), going out every single day for hours just talking to people, or having a typical full-time or part-time job at someone else’s office.

This is not strange. This is an introvert. This isn’t me being crazy; this is what works for me. This is how I am inspired, this is how I get all my books read, how I write thousands of words a day, how I keep up with half a dozen client projects at a time, and how I make more money as a freelancer than as an employee. I like it at home. I like not having to fit in with other people’s plans and ideas.

It doesn’t mean introverts have weak backbones. On the contrary, introverts may be the bravest, most independent people you’ve ever met. Just because we don’t climb mountain peaks and hang out at the club doesn’t mean we aren’t doing something else with our time, or skulking in the corner while the “cool kids” are at REI buying mountain-climbing equipment. We just would rather have a day at home to create, complete our to-do list, and relax. That’s how I’m inspired anyway. And most introverts accomplish quite a bit in a day; way more than extroverts accomplish. But I’m not interested in having a contest (I would win anyway), I just want extroverts to understand how we differ from them (and not in a bad way) and I want introverts to stand up straight.

This book is my field guide to surviving in an extrovert world (which also happens to be the subtitle). If you think you may be an introvert, get it, read it, and thrive. And if you’re an extrovert, could you please live it up for me? You can do what I can’t. (I’m okay with that.)

Grade: A

I finally tackled one more desk surface in my office that was not completely feng shui for my creativity. I asked hubby to change it out to another desk and to take certain things away to his office. He did and what a difference. Each time I walk into my office, I’m staring not at a work space where I feel like pond scum, but I see my goals up on a mounted white board and a desk full of possibilities.

The difference? I can’t stop dancing whenever I turn on any music, no matter what it is. And this is not normal for me, because I’m sick. But sore throat and fever won’t stop me from dancing. So on I go.

And it reminds me that since it’s the Ides of March, I seem to get sick each year around this time, and I also always seem to need a minor spring cleaning to propel me into spring. Now that we’re headed fast to a new season, we’ve even lost an hour of sleep (but so worth it because it’s light in the morning and in the early evenings, which makes me deliriously happy). The consensus: the more I can sparkle up my house (and dance every chance I get), this is going to be a fantastic spring.

True, a year ago I was preparing to leave on my big trip to Italy and Greece, but I am simply thanking God that I got to go and marveling at all the places I got to go to besides Europe (twice). I’m also taking a step of faith and thanking God for the places I will get to go in years to come. My list continues to grow: Fes and Marrakesh, Morocco; Chimba, Malawi (to visit the orphans) and to snorkel at Lake Malawi (that’s where they found Livingstone all those years ago, you know), Sydney’s North Beaches in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and I’ve now added the Bay of Fundy and eastern Canada to the list. Sounds rather dreamy, doesn’t it?

That’s the thing about removing negative inputs in your life. For me, it’s all my failures hung around my shoulders like a heavy backpack. I have too many things coming my way to continue to focus on such things. The failures are not my friend, they are a sign pointing me to something else: what am I allowing to stop me? It’s usually ME stopping myself, not anyone else.

So, I reclaimed my office, I’m dancing, still sickly, aching all over, but oh well.

I win.

A book recommended by Trish Ryan as one of the inspirations for her 2008 memoir, He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not (Trish’s new memoir comes out this June), Schoolgirls, written in 1994, a decade before the “Mean Girls” movie, and light years before anyone else was really writing about this topic, touches on the subject of teenage girls, self-esteem, and the confidence gap.

A compelling read. I couldn’t put it down. Written in story form, it tells the story of countless schoolgirls who struggle with self-image, bad beliefs, rejection, loss, and nowhere to vent those feelings. I was particularly interested to realize that even though I spent a lot of my young adult years learning to submit, that was not actually an event peculiar to our Protestant fundamentalist cult: young women everywhere, whether in public or private school, are often relegated to secondary importance. We’ve had a lot of years of “second sex” status and everywhere I look, I see women willing to subvert their own lives just to be with a boy or to be married or to get a paycheck. I think we can do better.

But I don’t have the answers. I don’t know what should be done. I just want to read widely to learn. And that’s what this book was for.  I learned some things. I recommend it to parents of both boys and girls or any other adult who also wants to learn.

Grade: A (very well-written and insightful)

This collection of short stories about written about real people in history is depressing. I hate these characters. They drive me crazy. I’m not the only one that feels this way, but it’s the craft that matters. The intricate beading of these stories inspires me. This week I’m weaving Act One of a novel together. The key for me as a writer is: what does the main character know, when does she know, and what does she not know. That’s pretty much fiction in a nutshell, even for YA, at least I think.

With my fiction, I tend to write forward motion and dialogue really, really fast. I can propel a story forward at a hundred miles an hour, but my reader is often left wondering what the context is, what’s the point, why should we care? I need to develop a unique interior voice a la Andrea Barrett so that my characters a) clearly don’t know something the audience knows or b) clearly know something that the audience also knows, or c) clearly know something the audience doesn’t yet know.

I’ve just confused half of the Internet. I feel your pain. It’s the difficulty, my writing teacher says, in writing a make believe world. Me as the creator of that world has to create everything, bring the characters to life, and then figure out what to give them and what not to give them.

Barrett’s collection is rich, but quite literary. So, those of you who need uplifting fare, don’t try this at home. The first story I read was The Littoral Zone, a backflash, flashforward waltz through a devastating affair between two scientists away from their families. Very uplifting. Ha! But the interior voice is impeccably strong. I couldn’t use that exact voice in my writing, but I know a fellow writer who lifted the inspiration into her historical novel with much success. However, the outline of this story screams hidden organization. The author must have sat for days thinking: what do these characters know and when and how do they tell each other or the audience? My brain explodes at the thought.

And now we’re working through The Behavior of the Hawkweeds, a short story about Gregor Mendel, but not really about Mendel, but about people around him, and how tragedy can strike at really inopportune moments and how it affects people. Again, the author must have sat for days thinking through this story, building and layering in the response and the theme and the response and the theme. It’s like fine strokes on a masterpiece canvas.

But for me, I’m not a huge fan of Barrett. I mean I admire her skill, her craft, her ingenuity, but I just can’t handle the depressing stories. Art lives in the hidden, the unconscious, the untold. I admit, I just really didn’t want to know any of what these stories told me about these people’s hidden and unconscious lives, but it made me think about what I’m putting into my books. Can the story be beautiful and soaring and still have these layers? I think so. That’s what Andrea Barrett’s book showed me. It doesn’t have to be always about the dark. There are multiple layers of light and I’d like to explore those themes in my writing.

Grade: A for craft, D for depressing

I tend to cluster my failures all up in a bundle and haul them around all day with me. They are the first to pipe up when I begin to doubt what I’m trying to do, if that particular client doesn’t respond to me in a timely manner, or if I generally am having a freak out session when I should be creative and artistic. Oh the failures. They are a lively chorus.

“Told you that wouldn’t work.”
“I always thought you didn’t know enough to do that job.”
“I doubt you remember how to write that piece.”
“It’s too big; you’ll fail. Just stop. Just give up now.”
“Isn’t this how Trish works, barely competent.”

And on and on and on and on. Until my brain is so full of this that I freeze and give up altogether. The threshold to my small creative act for the day is too high, the barrier has been raised, and I’m just not going to succeed. Why try? I usually go looking for chocolate about now.

We all fail. We all have really guilty consciences. We can’t even walk normally because the staggering weight of our conscience keeps yapping and pulling from our amnesia-riddled minds more things that we fail at. More situations when we didn’t treat someone right, we didn’t think good of everyone at that dinner, we did judge, we did try to take shortcuts with that project. We did hurry too fast and not think about what we were saying or doing.

But you know, there’s really nothing else for these failures to do. They can’t get up and help. They can’t erase themselves. They can’t even force us into a better place on their own. They are stuck with us. And I don’t think it’s a mutual arrangement.

I don’t think we’re stuck with them. I don’t agree that we have to carry around these failures all our lives. Sure, they’ll try. They’ll scream like banshees when you try to tear them from you. The screaming is not the tough part. The tough part is when you’re out there trying something new, completely naked without any failures to blame. Then whose fault is it?

Why do we get stuck here? Why can’t we remember what we already know. We’re going to be fine. We can do it. We can conquer, we can get past the barriers. It just takes some faith.

This is the best comfort I have. All my failures are gone and have been gone for some time. There’s no reason for them to be hanging around except to turn me back to faith. There is a God and I am not Him. That’s basically the gospel. No, you don’t have to “get religion,” you just have to believe that every single thing you’ve done wrong in your life is covered. “How is that possible?” I can hear people asking the question.

Our brains can’t comprehend it. There is no scientific method to prove it. That’s why it’s faith. That’s why it’s a relationship between me and God. There was a sacrifice for me. For my failures. That’s how I walk, try again, keep going, and drown out the unpleasant failures that attach themselves to me and will not let go.

There’s no other way around it. Folks try to meditate to clear it from their brains, they use psychedelic drugs to numb it, some even torture and murder innocent children to drown out what they can’t bear to hear. (We talked about that case on Monday.)

Failures are not really your friend. Sure, they remind you that you are human, they spur you on to bigger and better things, but they can also numb you to real life. They remind us that we are not God. It’s what “Know thyself” actually means. Know your boundaries, know that you are but mere mortal. But don’t hide in your failures. Get strong.

Have faith.

Believe.

Get up and try again.

 

Often it doesn’t come from simply studying and practice, but from having the right attitude going in. Most athletes rely heavily on mindset; we saw evidence of this in the recent Olympic Games as incredible feats of skill and style were displayed. It’s not just about practicing those styles and skills over and over. That’s actually the work.

The attitude comes first. If I believe that I can’t do something, my studying and practice won’t help me much. I will be studying and practicing but still putting off the tough decisions: actually rewriting, actually painting the blank canvas, actually turning on the digital camera and focusing on something.

A quick reminder today that what you focus on will stalk you. Are you focusing on how you can’t rather than how you can? And lest this sounds a bit woo-woo, I’m talking about things you already know you should be doing, not things you are still deciding if you should be doing. You took a new job, started a new business, put everything on the line, and suddenly find yourself withering on the vine.

Be constant. You can move forward while you ask for guidance from God, the universe (whatever works for you), but you have to do the nitty gritty with the mindset that you are going to succeed. It’s a fine line.

For me this spring, I’m attempting to rewrite a novel, something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time, but always found myself to be not constant with the nitty-gritty of it. I’ve tried it a half a dozen times in the last decades, but always fell short. I always had an excuse for it not working out: not enough time, too much work, too many distractions, office wasn’t clean, too much laundry, but recently, it has been made quite apparent to me that what’s blocking this effort is my constancy. My decision not to give it the mindset it deserves.

It’s back to that fine line. How many other folks decide to write a novel and put everything they have into it and it doesn’t work out? A lot. I know many of them. But I know more folks who actually did the nitty gritty and it worked. They sold their first book, their second book, and and just sold their ninth or tenth book. They had the same decision as I do to make. “Is this what I want?” And then for me, I check to see if it’s what God wants. And then there is nothing left in the way.

Many novelists wrote their first novels early in the morning or late at night on their own time while working full-time jobs. Many novelists wrote their first novels multiple times, shelved their first novels, and then started new novels and sold those instead. My first three novels are still sitting on shelves. My fourth novel I am going to do something with this year. And then I may go back to those first three and see what I can do. Oh and finish the fifth and sixth novels I started in 2008. Yes, I really have started and stopped.

That ends right now. With the help of a novelist buddy also revising her first draft (not her first novel either; she just sold it last week to Random House), I’m going to be constant. No more excuses.

So, what do you really want to do that you have started and stopped and still find yourself longing to return to? Is there really anything in your way or is it you? Could you trust yourself with this dream and just commit to seeing it through?

Photo by kevenrushforth

Surprisingly, the reading deprivation experiment is over and I am not cowering in a dark hole muttering to myself. I actually feel really good. Really REAL. I had a great week without books. I can’t believe I’m saying that, but wait, let me tell you what I got to do instead!

1. Went to the beach for the afternoon and didn’t do anything but watch the water, watch Todd out on the sand as the tide rolled out and watched Todd run as fast as he could back to the car as the tide rolled in. Watched people, dogs, babies, felt the sun warming my face and neck. That was fabulous. The weather was so nice in Seattle that everyone was out and about washing cars and mowing lawns and bbqing dinner.

2. Watched fabulous storytelling on dvd. Finished the 14 episodes of Firefly, that 2002 cult classic that everyone talks about and I had never watched. It was fantastic! The writing was so strong (good for Jane Espenson; she’s just so talented and Joss Whedon, who thought the whole thing up). And started season 5 of Entourage, which has so many twists and turns I can’t keep up. And then watched the Academy Awards (hoping both Sandra Bullock and Meryl Streep would win; Bullock took it and I’m really happy for her). LOVED Michael Giacchino (composer from the movie UP) and his exhortations to kids (I include myself in that) around the world watching to trust that “you’re not wasting time being creative.” LOVED that. Took it for myself. I’ll be using that a lot in the upcoming months.

3. Decided on two major goals in the next two months. The “not reading” thing cleared my brain until I knew exactly what I wanted to do the MOST. Cleaned out my office, got my taxes assembled and sent to the CPA, hired a new CPA for 2010, and wrote and wrote and wrote.

4. During the week of “no read, just listen” as I like to call it, my pastors preached two amazing sermons about just that. Since it’s Lent, and the Upper Room message in John that Jesus gave to the disciples has been reviewed over and over, they’ve come up with different themes to focus on that represent the many rooms of that Upper Room: belief, love, growth. It was exactly what I needed to hear. I was so glad I had not filled up my brain with anything else so I could hear it. Pastor George talked about unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence and that this is what Christ brings us to over and over through our lives. You can see a video of Pastor George and Pastor Renee talking about it or listen to a podcast of the sermon here.

5. I have become more real. In case some of you aren’t aware, real is my word for 2010. It’s an Ali Edwards idea to pick a word for the year and I found it really interesting that she reprinted her post today on the subject of being real (a republished article from her AEzine newsletter from April 2008). It has to do with scrapbooking, but I found it particularly relevant. Read it here. I feel different than I did a week ago (probably the relief that I’m done not reading or the relief that I made it seven days without reading) and I feel stronger, better enabled to handle the creative goals I have in front of me. I feel good.

If you’re wondering what I’m talking about (lots of new visitors coming in from other places today), I am working my way through Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way, a 12-week creative recovery program. Last week, week 4, requires the recovering creative to not read so as to open up other areas of life that might be buried under other people’s words. If you’re curious about Artist’s Way, check it out on Amazon here.

On deck for this week, some more book reviews, as I’m completely behind on my 48 books for 2010 updates. And some discussion on bad beliefs about failure and being artistic that I’ve been thinking about over the past month or so.

A lot of fundy religious survivors describe being numb. I liken it to PTSD a bit. Others say it’s emotional trauma, spiritual abuse, emotional manipulation, but I’m not here to argue semantics. I want to describe how me not reading for a week has helped me wake up from numb.

We all go numb whether we’ve been in a fundamentalist patriarchal cult or not. Life numbs us because, well, life is hard. I don’t care if you’re living in Africa or North America. Life is hard. Each of us has things we face that make it so. So we go numb. We don’t let things touch us. We dive deep into our denial by reading too much (me!), working too much, focusing on redecorating and redecorating our homes, entertaining, becoming the perfect hostess, becoming the perfect mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend. The list goes on and on and on. I’m not impugning anyone here. I’m stating facts. This is how we stay numb. We focus on something so hard that we forget about other things.

Religious fundy folk do this with perceived sin. Just as Michael Pearl laughs at his critics when one of his followers tortures and murders their seven-year-old daughter for mispronouncing a word during homeschooling (read here), fundy folks focus in on what other people do to such a degree that they can be numb. And not usually strangers, but usually ones they love. Their own daughters, their sons, their siblings, their parents, their neighbors, their churches. This disturbing trend only comes from life being hard and them not wanting to pay attention to some of that. It’s a human thing, too. Look at Rwanda, look at the Balkans. Look at history.

Well, I’m waking up this week just a little bit more from numb and I tell ya, I can picture myself burrowing back down into denial again really fast. Thank goodness God only allows me to wake up as much as I need to. If I woke up all the way in a day, I would harm myself. That’s the issue I have with the New Age movement. They don’t temper it. They throw their arms wide to whatever comes and people frequently exchange the old numb for a new numb.

I am not interested in exchanging anything for anything, except peace where there was unrest, truth where there were lies, and constant where there were hits and misses. I want to be awake with God. I want to listen to His voice and I want to follow Him. For those who are really not comfortable with my semantics, I’m talking about a force that LOVES us. I want to wake up to that force, I want to be with it, listen to its message, and do what it tells me. That force to me is God. I’m sorry to use such grating terms. I know even that hurts a lot of people. Exchange whatever words you need, but listen: God, the universe, LOVE, that force can contain your awakening so that you will survive it. I believe that.

I have walked a different way this week than usual because I didn’t read. Just think of what wonders we’ll see when there is no more death! Ponder that!

What are you awakening to? Does it hurt? Can you allow LOVE, the universe, God to contain that pain for you so that you are safe? Trust a bit, don’t just hide in a book.