I was in the process of uploading this when I got a call that Lowe’s was coming to deliver my stove to my new place. They weren’t supposed to come until afternoon! Anyway, for some reason my wireless didn’t work at the new place (another to-do for my ever-growing list) and I couldn’t finish uploading. I apologize . . . but here it is now.

          I’m moving on Saturday and am in the midst of packing. I was afraid that I wouldn’t have a blog this week. I’ve been so busy, Tuesday slipped up on me again. In the middle of packing, though, I experienced an object lesson that just begged to be told.

          I have a set of drawers where I keep office supplies. Usually the supplies just get tossed in the drawers any which way. It’s really not that important. I have them there so that I’ll have clips and post-it notes and stamps and such at my fingertips when I’m sitting at my desk. Today, though, I was packing up those drawers, getting the container they are in ready to move. It occurred to me that if I straightened them up, I’d be able to fit a lot more into the drawer. So I did. And I was right. It freed up a lot more room.

          As I continued packing, I mused about how that actually applies to almost everything in life. Sometimes my .schedule gets packed full with activities but little reason behind them. I say yes to commitments that don’t hold my passion or I take too many spontaneous breaks throughout the week. I get excited about starting new projects, joining new clubs and suddenly my schedule is too full, I feel overwhelmed and pulled in too many directions.

          Many times, though, it is not that I need to cut out all those things I’m doing. I just need to “straighten up” my schedule. When I intentionally choose my daily activities, scheduling them at times when they most easily fit, I have more control over my schedule and am able to do those things that matter to me. And often a lot more. In fact, I can be non-stop busy for days and not feel overwhelmed. Which is another danger. When the schedule is cleared up in that way, there is a temptation add even more to the days. Just like I did with this drawer. That’s fine temporarily, as for my move. After the move, though, I need to remove anything that isn’t notepaper. Just as some activities need to be removed from the schedule instead of prolonged.

          The topic of how to choose what to include in your schedule needs to be tackled in another post. It is way too big for just a paragraph or two in this blog. I’ll leave you to contemplate if and how your schedule needs streamlining and straightening. Me? I’m off to pack some more . . . or maybe sleep?

I (Shonna) just got an email from Kitty letting me know that she is taking a short hiatus from blogging so she can spend all the time she can with her mom. She’ll be back with us at the end of May.

Please keep them in your prayers.

I just finished my one millionth revision of my current WIP. I side-loaded it onto my Nook and took it to the dentist’s office with me for one last read-through. My hygienist asked me what I was reading. Oh, Uh. I. Um….

Is that a Nook or a Kindle? Ok, now that I can answer!

One day I’ll be able to say, “I’m reading my latest manuscript!” And perhaps hand out bookmarks of my published books. But right now I’m in that weird place where I don’t want to talk about my writing with non-writers because there is too much no man’s land to explain. (And people’s eyes glaze over after a few minutes.)

This is the longest I have ever spent working on a single story. I have parts of it memorized, I’ve read the words so often. So how (why?) do I keep working on it?

1. It might be THE ONE. If you think your WIP has a shot, would you work on it another month? If you knew it would get published, would you work on it another six months? A year? Two years? (eek!) Then get to it.
2. Take breaks. A while back I went on vacation and spent a lot of that precious free writing time reading other books and thinking. And plotting. And marinating. An amazing thing happened. My brain relaxed. I felt less tense about the writing.
3. Get encouragement from other writers. Yesterday I heard from an old critique friend. I don’t think we’ve exchanged work for over a year now. It was so good to hear an update about some good things happening for her. It’s happening slowly for her too, but there is progress! It’s nice to exchange war stories. And she encouraged me to keep plugging along.
4. Blog about it. One of the best benefits of blogging for me has been the accountability factor. If I’m going to blog about various aspects of writing, I need to be doing those things I’m blogging about!

Oh, and the dentist’s office today? Simple cleaning. No extra work done. Did you hear me singing the doxology on the way to my car? Praise God from whom all blessings flow!

          Many months ago I downloaded a book to my Kindle (I still love my Kindle!)

          “Do the Work” by Steven Pressfield was one of those books whose message slipped into my consciousness almost unnoticed. When I read the book, I was struck by the truths and insights presented. I purposed to utilize some of them in my own life. Soon after reading the book, though, I forgot all about it.

          Or so it seemed. True, the book itself rarely entered my conscious awareness. There were countless times, though, that the truths presented in this book have popped into my mind. It was only recently (as in when I was searching for a topic for this blog) that I even remembered reading this book. (Another reason I love my Kindle. Searching for a book, whose title and author I couldn’t remember, was made much easier because of the list of books in my Kindle’s archive.)

          “Do the Work” is meant to instruct and encourage the reader to Do. It doesn’t matter what that reader wants to do. Just that he do it. That he reaches for the dream, attempts the task, refuses to be diverted or discouraged.

          I don’t remember what is in the entire book. Just that it was good. Looking at the first page, I’m reminded of the forces arrayed against the Doer. Resistance is my focus today. (I might reread this book and talk more about the other enemies and allies of the Doer in the coming weeks.)

          Resistance, according to Steven Pressfield, can be anything which keeps the Doer from Doing. Fear, self-doubt, procrastination, addiction, timidity, and more. Anything that attempts to distract and derail us from our Doing is probably Resistance. As the author points out, whenever we attempt anything that has the potential to change our lives for the good, Resistance goes to work. When we resolve to quit an addiction or start a new project, take a class or paint the house, get married, eat healthy or anything else that will improve our lives, Resistance gets busy. Resistance tries to distract, discourage or derail.

          This truth burrowed itself into my subconscious mind and changed my perceptions. Resistance will occur whenever I attempt to better myself. Just knowing that anything I do to better myself will meet with resistance has helped me to weather those Resistance Winds.

          In addition, knowing this fact has acted as a red warning flag. If an action I’m attempting is met with resistance, I immediately take notice. (Well, okay, maybe not immediately, but almost.). That Resistance is a clue that what I’m attempting is worthwhile. Knowing that gives me the impetus to ignore, push past or all out fight the Resistance.

          So the next time you come up against Resistance, of any kind, take a good look. It just might be the enemy of your Doing.

Hi friends! No writerly news for you this week. I’m spending time with my mom as she approaches perhaps her last days in the hospital. We’ll see what God’s plan is for her. This past week has been more of a blessing to me than I ever expected, and I can see it’s been a blessing for Mom, too. I’ve written a bit more personal note on my Kitty Bucholtz, Author web site if you want to take a look. I’ll write more about this journey over there in the next few weeks.

Meanwhile, I’ll see how much of the Self-Publishers Online Conference (which starts today) that I can attend from the hospital and give you the highlights next week or the week after. I may be late with my post next week for the same reason I’m late this week. We’ll see. I can’t say I’m all too worried about my productivity as a writer this week. But I do wonder if the words will start pouring out geyser-style when this is over.

I try to be professional here and not push people’s buttons by talking too much about God and how very much He impacts my life. But I’m breaking that rule now. I’ve never felt so surrounded by love and mercy the way I have this last week. And that’s why I know God isn’t a figment of our imagination, or an all-powerful but distant higher power. How can people love like this on their own? How can perfect strangers be so full of compassion and mercy by themselves without it coming from somewhere? I don’t believe it’s possible. Even if you don’t believe in God, you can still feel Him all around you if you have felt the love and care of other people for you. Pay attention this week and see if you agree.

All I know is that no matter how great an imagination I have as a novelist, I can’t make up the kind of peace I feel, even as I approach saying goodbye to my mother. It’s coming from outside of myself. And I don’t believe “the world” is capable of giving people this kind of deep peace. It’s God, and the only reason I can imagine He would do it is because He must love us. And that is really, really good news.

I hope you have good news this week. I’ll talk to you again soon!

This week started the Story A Day May challenge. Instead of writing complete stories, I’m working on plot outlines for future novels. This is so fun. Since I’ve only got one day to spend on the idea, there is not much pressure for perfectionism. For one reason, there’s no time to obsess and two, tomorrow is another day, another idea.

Although I’ve been routinely collecting story sparks—newspaper articles, book titles, odd characters–they’ve stayed in my idea box for weeks and months and years. I’ve never taken the time to develop the ideas because I’ve always been in WIP or Revision mode. (Except when NaNoWriMo comes along and then it’s a mad dash to pick an idea!)

We talk about having “margin” a lot in my household. When we go to the airport we like to leave early in case there is a road detour (been there, done that) or surprisingly extra long lines (been there, done that). Having 31 plots outlines to choose from will give me a comfortable amount of margin when I’m ready to go on to my next “first draft.”

So, thinking about this idea of having a routine for brainstorming, here are seven different ways to add this new routine into your basic writing routines.

1. Story A Day May challenge. This one is nice because you are not alone, you can get a little bit of that NaNoWriMo synergy going. Also, you knock out a bunch of ideas in a short amount of time, get it done and move on!
2. One day a Month. Pick your day. Say the 15^th of every month. Or your birthday number, or the first day, or the last day…you get the idea. A day that you will remember to develop ideas.
3. Every Monday. Develop a new story idea every Monday. Start your week off with a little extra creativity.
4. Every Friday. Reward yourself for a week of good writing with a little play time.
5. Weekends. Weekends are different from weekdays, use that change of pace to change your writing pace.
6. Holidays/Vacations. If it’s a holiday/vacation, it’s a brainstorming day/week!
7. After every completed draft. You’ve finished that first, second, or xx draft. Yay! Play with some new ideas while that other one sits for a bit.

Whatever method you settle on, be consistent. Be routine. You’ll have more ideas than you’ll know what to do with. Then you pick the best to work on.

          Last week I had a major miss-step. An “Ooops” that still makes me cringe. In the aftermath of that, I’ve been blasted with some major negative voices. “Why did you wait til the last minute?” “How could you not realize it was Wednesday?” “You should have thought of this Tuesday night.” “How can you be so ditzy? “That was so irresponsible!” Falling into old, familiar thought patterns, I find myself agreeing with all that negativity. It was irresponsible. I shouldn’t wait to the last minute. Remembering days shouldn’t be hard. Why do I do such stupid things?

          I think I’ve shared on this blog . . . if not, I am now . . . I am combating those negative voices in my head. I stare down each and every thought; I subject it to truth and reality; I adjust or discard the thought based on that reality. In the process, I am coming to know myself in a much more conscious way. I’m seeing that many of my weaknesses are really just the flip side of a strength.

          My tendency to believe and accept people makes me gullible, but it also build trust and true friendship. I’m laid back and easy to get along with, but that also means I don’t always recognize the seriousness of situations. I usually can see the big picture pretty well, but I don’t always remember the details. That one manifests in so many ways in my life. For example, I do great at rearranging a room or getting it organized. Keeping in clean and uncluttered, though, is often a struggle.

          The fact is,those negative voices are so devastating because is that there is a grain of truth in each one. I do procrastinate. Forgetting to write/post the blog did seem ditzy, or even irresponsible. How could I not mentally connect having to post the blog with the day of the week? Many times that truth needs to be put in perspective, confronted with the reality. Yes, I procrastinate, but that is part of my creative process. This week, as I scrutinized all those negative voices, I made an interesting observation. This time, instead of the weakness, or in this case the miss-step, being the flip side of a strength, it’s a side effect. And not necessarily one one I want to discard.

          This semester, I’m reconnecting to my creativity. I’m relearning how I create. I have to draw for hours in and out of class. I have made multiple projects (I’ll include some pictures here soon) in another art class. My desire and my creativity has increased. As my artsy, creative, right-brain part of me grows, my logical, analytical, time-bound left-brain loses just a bit of control. Result? A ditzy mistake like last week, where I forget to finish my blog.

          In order to be creative, I need a lot of “right-brained” time. That means time that is random, not clock-watching, time to make connections and dwell on them. Time to play with the “materials” be they words, colors or physical objects. When I have that time, I surprise myself sometimes at what emerges.

          The down side to that, though, is the diminished “left-brained” abilities . . . like keeping track of time. That’s what happened last week. I have been immersed in getting my art projects finished for the end of the semester (last day . .. yesterday!). As a result, my mind “lost” the connection between it being Tuesday night and the next day being the day my blog was due. So come Wednesday morning, as I prepared for a day that was booked with classes and activity from the moment I woke, I was shocked to realize I’d made that mistake. My left-brain me was appalled. And at first, my right-brain me cringed and accepted the criticism.

          But no more! If I’m going to renew and regrow and nurture my right-brain, creative side, I have to accept that these types of mis-steps will happen. That is not to say I excuse myself and say, “You just have to accept me as I am” and give myself permission to be irresponsible. I do need to own the mis-step. I do need to apologize for the miss-step. More importantly, I need to guard against similar future miss-steps. But I do not need to internalize the vilification of those tendencies, which til now has been a standard reaction..

          An obvious way to do that for this blog would be to give myself a different deadline to post each week’s blog. That will ensure it goes up before time and, if I do miss that deadline, there will still be time to recover. Another change I can make is to take some time to loosely flesh out several post topics at a time, always having 3-4 posts at least partway finished. (getting the idea and finding the angle to present that idea is what takes me the longest time. When that is clear, I can usually polish up short post in a couple of hours or less. Sometimes a lot less.) Making those changes is even more imperative as I look at my coming fall class schedule.

          I am truly sorry I didn’t get my post finished and uploaded last Wednesday. I do apologize. But I am also very glad it happened. What I have learned/realized as a result is invaluable to me. I believe it will prove just as great a thing for our readers. Over the next few months, as I work on getting posts written and uploaded early, the quality and substance of those posts is sure to improve. I will have more time to go revisit my words, refine and refocus them to be even more helpful and inspiring. So forgive me if I am just a bit glad for the miss-step.

          What did your latest miss-step reveal to you?

For the past two years I have been the proud mother of a talkative and rambunctious daughter. Some people ask me how I can take care of her all day and still manage to get so much writing done. For the past two weeks I have also been the mother of a precious and hungry newborn. Some people ask me how I can get back to writing again so quickly. I don’t know if I have an answer to these questions that will work for everyone but I do have an answer that works for me.

Being a mom to two kids under two years old while running a business, running a household and running circles around my dreams means most of my days are spent juggling. While in the middle of making breakfast, I’ll get a phone call, which will lead me to writing something down so I can make another phone call in between flipping eggs and pouring milk into a sippy cup. Then it’s in and out of the shower while I deal with toddler tantrums and try to keep her from tearing the house apart. I brush my teeth as I make the bed. Almost every hour of every day sees a task on each hand while balancing another on one foot.

But I can’t do that with writing.

I’ve tried, trust me. It’s in my nature to try to accomplish as much as possible in the shortest amount of time but writing isn’t something I can rush through and still feel like I’ve accomplished something. Switching back and forth between writing and other tasks leaves my writing feeling flat and me feeling unsatisfied. Writing replenishes me, but not when I don’t give it my all.

The answer for me is focus.

Uninterrupted time is hard to come by as a mom but I work hard to create it when I can. That’s why I work so hard the rest of the day. My other mom friends can’t understand why I live on such a strict schedule but I know what I want out of my days. I want to be a mom and a writer. So I work doubly hard in the morning so that when the afternoon rolls around and my girls go to sleep, I can use that time to write. To focus.

Today, after nineteen days straight without so much as a bathroom break from mom duty, my husband watched the girls while I got out of the house and you know what I used that time for. I parked my Mom-mobile at the park, sat in the passenger seat and typed with abandon on my laptop. And nothing else. I didn’t have to play mommy or clean house, I didn’t hang out online, I didn’t take phone calls. For that hour, I focused on my writing and penned 2,000 words. Talk about replenishing!

It isn’t easy to get the time to dedicate to my writing but hey, that’s life. Just like anything else that’s important, we have to fight for that time and when we get it, we have to take full advantage of it. Set aside all the other “to dos”, all the other worries, all the other distractions…and focus.

That’s what works for me.

Photo by John Loo

Me and My Mom in Sydney

I am about to leave for Michigan to visit my mom. She’s been in ICU since Easter and a very generous friend bought me a plane ticket home to see her! (Thank you, God!) In the rush to leave tomorrow, I thought I’d leave you with some things I’ve been reading about lately.

First, I just signed up for the Self-Publishers Online Conference! Yay! The last day to get the Early Bird Discount – $50 off – is today! Check it out and see if it’s something you’d be interested in. There is also a free “preview” call on May 2 that you can sign up for on the web site. I’ve listened to both of the other free preview calls and I’ve enjoyed them enough to decide to sign up for the conference.

Interested in learning more about what people are earning from self-publishing? I’ve linked to Debra Holland’s blog several times so you can read about her wild and crazy success. In fact, just last week she made the USA Today bestseller list with an ebook! To get a difference perspective, some of us are still not making much. My book, Little Miss Lovesick, came out the end of September and I only last week sold enough copies on Barnes & Noble to warrant getting paid. (You only have to earn $10.) Here is a blog post from Rhonda Pollero, a writer who is taking the long view on her sales.

Speaking of income, here’s an article from Novelists, Inc. by writer and teacher, Lawrence Block on writers and income. Very level-headed.

Dean Wesley Smith wrote a post comparing how much you might make selling short fiction to a traditional source, like a magazine, versus self-publishing it. I’d been wondering about this myself.

When the whole writing and publishing business gets you down to the point where you aren’t doing anything (writing, for instance  ::waves hand in the air:: ), consider again the power of positive affirmations. Here’s a post on that from the Ruby Slippered Sisterhood.

After you get yourself psyched up from the power of your positive thinking, you may decide to procrastinate just a tiny bit more in the name of research and craft. If so, here is an article from Writers in the Storm with “13 Ways To Show (Rather Than Tell) in Your Love Story.”   And Savvy Authors has an article  on “Writing with Emotion – Yours!” that I enjoyed.

By the way, if you write humorous romantic fiction and still think it’s okay to say “chick lit” in front of other writers, here’s a site for you.  I just found it and haven’t explored it, but I was excited that there are other women out there writing fun stories who aren’t ashamed to admit it.

If you’re interested in writing a nonfiction piece about your self-publishing journey, this might be of interest to you. Flirty Author Bitches have a call for submissions on that topic. Again, haven’t looked into it much yet, but it looks interesting to me. (Maybe something to do in the hospital during the long hours of waiting.)

Finally, do you blog? Do you think having pictures makes your blog more interesting and easier to read? Do you have a heck of a time trying to find such picutures? ::me waving my hand wildly again:: I did a Google search (my husband’s answer to everything) and found this. Happy Kitty.

I hope one or more of these pieces helps you. Remember to look into the Self-Publishers Online Conference today in case you want to register and get the Early Bird Discount. And read that article on affirmations. Figure out what affirmations look like to you. I’m going to read it again and journal on it and come up with a system that works for me. I think I’ll incorporate Bible truths into mine, something that I can believe in easily without having to force myself. “I am a bestselling author” doesn’t work for me. But “All good and perfect gifts come from God, and I use my gifts to encourage and entertain others” is something I already believe to be true. Hmm, I might have to blog more about that!

Happy Writing, Everyone! Thank you to everyone who has been praying for my mom, my family, and me! Keep those prayers coming – they’re working!

Have you heard about this writing challenge?  (The first one was in 2010.)

I only learned about it this week and am already signed up, ready to go. But I have to wait….tick tock, tick tock. My fingers are itching.

What is StoryADay May?

It’s my challenge to you: to challenge YOURSELF to write every day, not “some day”.

Write and finish a story every day this May. That’s it.

-Julie Duffy

A story being a written piece with a beginning, middle, and end? To me, that says a plot outline! So, taking a cue from Debbie Ohi over at InkyGirl. Just Signed Up for the Story a Day May Challenge. I’m jumping in.

It’s been awhile since I’ve participated in a writing challenge and I’m ready for one. What I really like about this challenge is that it will stretch my creativity and at the same time build up a backlog of novel ideas to choose from later.

I’ve got a box filled with story starters that I’ve been collecting. Now’s the time to pull them out and see what plots have been forming in the back of my mind.

Anyone else sign up?

StoryADay.org