Charlene Teglia

1. I walked through a cobweb on my way to the bathroom this morning. How is that even possible?

2. Frenzied leaping and trying to rid your hair of imaginary spiders when half-awake=better than a triple shot of espresso.

3. Rachel Bloom loves Ray Bradbury. A lot. Click if you dare.

4. Waiting for moving van is a bad past-time for the overly imaginative. I'm distracting myself by reading. Just finished Kresley Cole's Demon from the Dark. Before that, I read Stacia Kane's Megan Chase trilogy.

5. Have taken many fantastic walks and zero pictures since arriving. This is wrong and must change. Today. I'm kicking myself for not having a camera to snap the woman who was spinning (as in making thread) at the farmer's market yesterday.

Travel done, the hobbits are home and waiting for the moving truck. It's kind of interesting living in an empty house; I sort of like the experience. I have a chance to really get to know the space and think about how to use it.

I picked up a headcold on the road, which is like wrapping your brain in cotton batting and doesn't make for brilliant blog posts, but I did read this week's Chapter 6 of the Artist's Way, which has to do with money. Not just money but what abundance and luxury mean by our own individual definitions. 

This is a really good topic for anybody to think about at any time, even through cotton batting. Some of the best things in life really are free, or cost very little. It can be as simple as making a decision to treat ourselves better that makes the difference, not waiting until that raise or that sale happens first.

One of the statements that really resonated with me from this week's chapter:

"Always leave enough time in your life to do something that makes you happy, satisfied, even joyous. That has more of an effect on economic well-being than any other single factor." Paul Hawken

It's Friday the 13th, also known as the release day for
Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World. Yes, today on my schedule, an epic of epic epicness.

It's also the Friday before the impending move so I may not be around much for the next couple of weeks. I've turned off comments during the transition as I won't have time (or connectivity) to monitor spam.

Enjoy the rest of summer!

1. PBW is still on blog-break. I miss her. Have you bought her latest book yet? It has the best last line ever. Terrific conclusion to Stardoc.

2. I'm guesting at Genreality today with many links to cure various forms of writer panic. Go read!

3. If you want to get out of vacuuming, break the roller that turns the belt. You're welcome.

4. We've had to start walking really early to beat the heat, and this means I'm getting right out of bed and walking instead of, er, sitting there drinking coffee and wondering if I'm awake. Turns out this is actually a better way to start the day, so we'll keep it up after the weather turns cooler.

5. It's August, which means one last chance to do all those things on your summer to do list. If you can't think of anything to do, go watch
Phineas and Ferb. They are summer idea pros.

Continuing along with the Artist's Way, this is week four otherwise known as "stop listening to other voices so you can hear your own" week. The actual instructions are no reading, but really, if you want to stop listening to the deluge of outside input so you can hear yourself think, I think that should be extended to include news.

We kind of live in an information ocean with lots and lots of industry specific, state, national, international information coming at us at all times. So while I think a break from reading fiction is good for temporarily resting from outside voices which might influence your own voice, it's not a bad thing to cover nonfiction with this blanket and just take a break from all of it.

Fortunately for me, I'm scheduled to spend this week packing things in boxes so taking a no-reading break is actually pretty easy to do. And there will likely not be much reading at all the whole month of August as we spend time traveling back to the west coast and settling in there.

But taking a break to unplug once in a while is a wonderful thing to do for yourself even if you aren't doing The Artist's Way or moving across the country. When we unplugged last year to go camping, it was amazing how relaxing it was. As we move to a more continually connected life, work intrudes in every waking hour. Portable devices like smart phones make email and text messages ever-present, and the general expectation is that communication can be sent round the clock and replied to either immediately or within a short time period.

It's pretty hard to focus when you know an interruption can come at any time. Efficiency studies have shown that every interruption costs us at least fifteen minutes after the interruption ends to resume a task and that just knowing an interruption can happen is enough of a distraction to prevent concentration on the current task. Writing requires intense concentration, so a little time spent unplugged translates to huge gains in productivity. 

So there are multiple reasons to shut out the outside world periodically. For an extended period like a week to really have some uninterrupted time to think and focus on a project or a change in direction. For a shorter period like an hour or two to make the most of your writing time. And for some authors, any reading at all while writing can either influence your voice or fill up your mental space with words at a time when you need to create a vacuum for the words you're writing to form in.

Getting quiet pays off, so why not plan a quiet break for yourself?

I used to be very goal-oriented. Very. I even wrote a business plan for my writing (and achieved everything on it, and then some) and I used to do annual and semi-annual goal setting and readjusting. And then I had a sort of epiphany.

I wasn't sure goals were the point anymore. Or if any goal-setting approach could be flexible enough to accommodate the rapid changes happening in publishing. The last plan I stuck with, I might have been better off ditching a couple of months after I made it instead of investing 9 months of effort in something that would take that long to see results, before I'd even know if it was the right approach.

So now I'm taking a more flexible approach. I'm no longer sure I should plan on anything beyond "write book, sell book". Life changes too fast and it's very easy for a plan to become a set of blinders instead of a path. And maybe goals should be left to soccer games.

I'm not the only one thinking this way. Check out Zen Habits for a very insightful piece on the shift away from goals.

A few examples of how to make a safe space for creativity: maybe for a while you don't show anybody the thing you're working on and give it space to grow before seeking outside input. This can be especially helpful if you're trying something new.

Or if you belong to a writing group, ask yourself how supportive it is. Is it the place where you can share great news and be cheered or bad news and get sympathy and a 'next time you'll knock 'em dead' response? Or do you find yourself withholding good news so you won't hurt somebody's feelings? Do you get helpful feedback from the group when you ask for it, or just criticism? Helpful feedback is invaluable. Criticism can be creatively crippling.

Are your friends and family supportive, or is it better for you to be quiet about your creative plans and goals? It's sometimes better to just say "Sorry, I'm busy Saturday afternoon," instead of "I'm going to be working on my novel then" and opening the door to the kind of backlash that could render your valued time-slot useless if you let it.

Creativity thrives with support, but if you haven't got support, you can give it to yourself by just keeping your creative efforts quiet for a little while and protecting the work from outside influences. And eventually you will find support, because I really believe creative action draws it.

There's a black stray cat that lives around here. It's far too wild to come near us, but it likes to hang out in our yard. I used to see it just hiding in the hostas. Then after one storm I saw it come out from under our deck, where it had taken shelter. Another time it took shelter from a thunderstorm in the gazebo under the table.

It drinks out of the birdbath, which I didn't realize until my husband saw it go to get a drink, find it empty, and slink off. (Yes, I immediately went out and refilled it. As much as it's rained lately, it's still so hot that the water evaporates quickly.)

From hiding in the hostas and under the deck, Basement Cat has graduated to laying on the deck when we're inside, and last night when I locked up for the night, I saw the now-familiar black cat curled up on the front porch.

I don't know where the cat came from, how long it's been wild, but it seems to feel like it has a safe place to rest around our house.

Creative people and cats have a lot in common. We all need a place to take shelter and a safe place to rest. A safe space is essential, even Basement Cat knows. It's not possible to keep creating without support. Do you have a trusted safe place for your creativity? If not, find one! It might be right in your neighborhood.

It was a busy weekend. There was the usual mundane stuff like yard care, laundry, grocery shopping. There was the realization that kids have grown and shoes have not since the beginning of summer. So we took them to The Big City to get their feets measured, and lo, it was time for the next size up. They now have bigger shoes and no pinchy toes. We have to watch that like a hawk because they never volunteer the "shoes getting tight" information.

The husband and I also needed shoes; mine filled with dirt from the open holes in the sides on my last trip into the garden, which is when I realized that it was perhaps time to stop putting off that "someday I need to replace these" thought. If you've ever shopped for clothes or shoes for yourself with kids in tow, you understand why I put these things off, but with kids bribed to cooperate we both managed to get everybody happily shod. I'd link to my new shoes but they seem to be the color combination Fila is embarrassed to admit to. I love them for their eye-blinding cheer. And the shoelaces glow in the dark, so I will always be able to find them.

And then we went to fill in other wardrobe gaps for fall, seeking long sleeved tees and sweaters and jeans for small people that had intact knees, and we discovered the wonders of Gymboree. This store is my new favorite for kids' clothes. The styles and quality are wonderful and the sale prices are amazing. Even at full price, not too bad. If you're trying to shop for little girls and asking "where are the nice clothes, the ones that don't make my five year old look like Hannah Montana", I highly recommend Gymboree. I wanted to buy the place out. I know I will be hitting their website when I need to fill future wardrobe gaps.

And then on the way home, on the very busy highway that runs from Chicago to Detroit, the car in front of the car in front of us blew out a tire, spun, and came to a stop facing the oncoming traffic in our lane. It was an absolute miracle of Everybody Reacting Correctly at the same time, as every single car avoided the inevitable collision that never came. Nobody hit the blowout car or the cars surrounding it that had to stop to avoid an accident. The people in the car got out and pushed it off to the side quickly, traffic moved over to the next lane and we all continued on our way. Alive. With our faith in our fellow driving man at a new height. It was miraculous. I want to burst into a rendition of Amazing Grace just thinking about it.

How was your weekend?

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do I, which is why I leave mine in the closet. But if success doesn't form in a vacuum, where does it come from?

Success and failure are part of the same process and it's called growth. Lots of failure happens on the way to success. Success might be the end result, but it only happened after trying lots of things that didn't work, or didn't work quite right. 

Right now there's a big conference going on with lots of advice on how to be a success. Everybody wants to be a success. We're even advised very strongly as writers to only talk about our successes because we wouldn't want to give anybody the impression that we ever *gasp* fail. Because then we would be FAILURES and LOSERS and nobody would ever publish us again. Nobody will ever love us again, either, and we'll die friendless and alone in our unvacuumed hovels.

Or maybe we could just put aside the drama around success and failure and look at it as a process. When a book has a false start, stalls, takes a wrong turn, that's called writing a book. It happens. If it was easy, everybody would do it. The way to get to a successfully completed book is to not give up and keep trying different things until you get to the end.

Careers have false starts, stalls, and wrong turns, too. If you quit there it might be called failure. Or it might be what you needed to push you into discovering your real strengths and going on to greater success. Let's face it, most of us wouldn't ever change if we didn't have to. If something works, we keep doing it. Failure tells us we need to try something else. Failure leads to experimentation, discovery, exploration. You can learn a lot from failure, a lot more than you can by accidentally stumbling on success and then having no idea how to recreate it.