Reblog: Time for Writing

Greetings, friends! It’s time for another exciting reblog! This week’s article comes from Scott Allan over at Self-Publishing School. Time for Writing: How to Make Time to Write in Your Busy Life lays out the author’s favorite tactics for being a weekend wordsmith. I’m more of a write-every-day kind of gal, but I know that what works for me might not work for everyone. So without further ado, here is Mr. Allan’s Time for Writing!

Time for Writing: How to Make Time to Write in Your Busy Life

POSTED ON AUG 22, 2019

Written by Scott Allan

Carving out the time to write a book requires planning, persistence, and at times, a lot of caffeine. Even with all the right elements in place, making time for writing is a major undertaking, especially when your days are filled with commitments to work, family, and social activities.

So, you have a dream to write that book, but you’re locked into a schedule that’s keeping you from pursuing your dream. I know the routine: Get up, work all day, come home and make dinner, and look after the kids (or unwind in front of the TV) and then you fall into bed, exhausted, before you have to do it all again the next day. When the weekend comes, you just want to kick back, take it easy, and put the week behind you. Then Monday comes around and the rat race starts all over again. Soon you can hear yourself making excuses for all the reasons why you didn’t write:

“I was so busy this week I just didn’t have time…”

“I’ll do it next week when I’m more organized…”

“I’ll start writing when I’m feeling more motivated…”

“I’ll get to it once I quit my day job and have more time…”

But as you know by now, there’s never a perfect time. We’re always busy with something. And if we don’t take action when we can, the excuses will keep coming until we run out of time forever. Don’t let your dream die. I’m going to help you get your book done.

Time for Writing: 8 Steps to Becoming a Weekend Writing Warrior

By becoming a weekend writing warrior, you can get it done. I know because I’ve done it. In this post I’ll share with you my 8 step strategy for writing a book on the weekends even if your week is crazy busy.

1. Start With Intentional Planning

When it comes to getting your writing done, strategy is everything. Without a plan, you drift; and when you drift, you end up back where you started, wasting more time while procrastinating. The key to writing a book on your weekends is to get plan out how you will use your writing time…

Ready to read the full article? Head on over to Self-Publishing School to read all eight steps.

And until next week, happy writing!

Keeping Your Desk as Unusable as Possible

Ohhhh man, I am swamped, my friends. Sorry I missed last week. I didn’t forget. I was perfectly aware. I was just drowning in schoolwork. But it looks like this is just the workload going forward for the next four-ish years, so I’m hoping I’ll find my equilibrium soon and settle into a rhythm.

One thing that isn’t helping me find that rhythm? My desk. My poor desk has become Ground Zero for e v e r y t h i n g. It started out with one neat little To Do pile, that turned into a heap, that turned into my entire desk surface, that spread into little piles leaning against the desk legs and on my seat and is now currently expanding into the walking space around the desk too. Work stuff, school stuff, writing stuff, parenting stuff, all of it, all of it, I say, is tossed in the general vicinity of my desk. I expect my desk to collapse into a black hole somewhere around late April.

Now I’m not one of those people who needs a perfectly tidy space to be able to get work done. (If that were the case, I would never ever get anything done. Manifesting a bubble of sub-catastrophic entropy all around myself is my superpower.) But I do need enough space to either squeeze my butt between piles of stuff on my seat and have my laptop on my knees or a spot to set my laptop on the desk so that I can crouch uncomfortably in front of it. Bare minimum. But even that is a bit too much to ask sometimes.

So since I am a flippin’ legend at making my desk as unusable as possible, I thought I’d share some of my hot tips for keeping things absolutely unworkable.

Digitize Nothing, Save Everything.I… don’t know why I have this compulsion, but I really want to save everything that might even remotely be useful at some point down the line. And since paper doesn’t take up a lot of space, it’s easy for me to justify keeping scads of the stuff around. Because scanning takes time. *pouts* So I have notebooks filled with notes for classes I took over a decade ago. Old bills I have already paid. An expired club membership card. Drawings from my children and students. Mostly used notebooks that have at least three perfectly good pages left in them. Doodles I made that, now that I think about it, I actually have digitized and they exist happily on the web and oh my giddy aunt, why do I keep all this stuff???

Used Once? Out Forever. I used a pair of noise cancelling headphones once two months ago. They are still on my desk. There are two mustard yellow AA batteries and I can’t remember what they are from or if they have any charge. Five pens, three four sticky note pads, a piece of sheet music, and—I kid you not—a dusty talenti ice cream container that I used two years ago to hold my son’s Space Camp money. It is still sitting on my desk, empty save for a bank deposit receipt, just waiting for it’s definitely-going-to-happen-sometime-soon new purpose. Seriously, probably a good third of the stuff on my desk right now could be put into longer-term storage somewhere not on my desk right now and everything would be perfectly fine, but being organized and practical is rookie behavior.

Be Nostalgic About Everything. As I write this, I’m looking at a pile of REI stickers. I will never use them. I don’t remember where I even got them. But they are beautiful. So I guess those are staying on the surface of my desk forever. An unnecessarily large stack of bookmarks—especially the ones that are really just old clothing tags and Dutch Boy brand paint chips—takes up a rather embarrassing amount of space too. Because… I like them? My expired driver’s license, but it has a picture of me back when I was young and adorable; some chaptstick a friend made that I likely never will use because, despite making no effort whatsoever to acquire them, I accumulate chapstick faster than a human could possibly use them; a pile of darling coupons my youngest made me, even though we both knew he was fervently hoping I would never turn them in; my oldest child’s first library card. A weaker person would have these things either weeded through or properly stored in a memory book of some kind by now, but I prefer to keep them out cluttering my desk instead. Makes things cozier.

Desk Drawers Are Vaults of Secrets that Must Never Be Opened. I mean, honestly, I do sometimes show moments of weakness and use things on the top layer of my desk drawers—my drawing tablet or my strangely large collection of rulers, for example—but the deep stuff? I couldn’t even tell you what’s down there anymore.

Never Do Today What Can Be Done at Some Indeterminate Time in the Murky Future. Remember that To Do pile I mentioned earlier? Most of the things in it aren’t time bound. And that is a problem for me, because that it means I don’t have to do it right now, or possibly ever! How liberating! And so the pile grows. Every time a new stack of mail comes in that I should probably look through, but none of it looks immediately important, shows up, my desk is an easy drop site. When it’s bedtime and there’s stuff on my bed and I’m too tired to properly put it away, it gets tossed on my seat.

All this growing clutter makes it easier and easier for me to just avoid my desk altogether. It’s unusable and it makes me feel like a bad person. And avoiding my desk means that I don’t have an ideal work space, which means I’m not working to max capacity, which means I’m falling further behind. Which means I don’t have time for tidying and straightening, so the desk grows ever worse. It’s like a population of cannibal hamsters, feeding on itself.

So if you want to be like me (and who wouldn’t??), be sure to use these awesome tips for curating an awesomely unusable desk. Your future self will wonder what the heck you were thinking when you listened to me!

And until next week (and maybe after I’ve cleaned my desk off and become functional again), happy writing!

PS- Seriously, don’t do this to yourself. Why do I do this to myself?

Writing Retreats for Poorish People

So, I just got back today in the wee hours of the morning from a science educator’s conference (same one as last year). My head is positively swimming with sweet, succulent science and I will tell you all about it next week. But flying away from my children and my job to somewhere warm and beautiful where my only obligation is to work my little brains and have a great time bumming around a hotel I don’t have to clean and eating food I don’t have to cook got me thinking anew about writing retreats.

I’ve been mulling over writing retreats for quite a while at this point. But as someone who can’t even justify the expense of writer’s conferences anymore, writing retreats just seem beyond lavish and bougie. (I am terrified to think of how much money the grant program spent to have my husband and I at the teacher’s conference. It’s not a number of dollars that I could produce on my own.) Googling writers retreats just confirms this notion. And adding to this the fact that I can’t find anybody, in real life or on the internet, who has been to one and will admit it to me, it seems pretty elite and out of reach. (The only content I can seem to find about writer’s retreats is… produced by people running writing retreats. Hm.)

But that doesn’t mean I can’t ever go on a writing retreat! Or at least, something like one. Some friends and I volleyed some ideas back and forth about how an intrepid writer could scrape together their own writer’s retreat experience(ish) that is a little more financially manageable. This list is not perfect, and there are a lot of reasons why an actual writer’s retreat would be noticeably better, but setting up your own little retreat—whether for a week or just a few days or whatever length of time works best for you—could be the jump start that your brain needs to kick the writing into high gear without breaking the bank.

So without further ado, here are five ideas for ways you can create a little homegrown writer’s retreat on the cheap if you find yourself in need:

Leave your house. This is imperative. Go to a park if the weather is nice. A coffee shop that won’t mind you lingering for hours on end. A library with study nooks. Anywhere that you cannot get sucked into housework or work-work. One of the things I get the most out of trips is the break from my usual routine; it makes anything seem possible. If your usual routine isn’t doing writerly things all day, break it.

Use noise cancelling headphones. These are nice if you’re going to be somewhere that might be noisy, and especially if, for some reason, you need to stay home. As a person who can get pretty distracted and even overwhelmed by even the smallest of noises (which is why historically my writing can only happen late at night or when everyone else is out of the house), it was a happy, happy day when my husband first dropped a headset in my lap and a kiss on my head and told me to write. (He’s a keeper.) It was a game changer.

Get some buddies. This one is—in my opinion—optional, but I’ve been told it’s not a writer’s retreat if you’re the only one there. And it’s true that I am at my literary peak game when I’m writing with friends. So find some local(ish) writerly friends to share your literary adventures with. Go through writing warm-ups and sprints together. Bounce ideas off one another. If you can’t get together in person, meet up online for a portion of your day, if only to swap tales of your accomplishments.

YouTube fabulous speakers/coaches/teachers. Or podcast or whatever. Spend a part of your day learning from the masters. Download every episode of Writing Excuses. Read portions of Bird by Bird or Save the Cat! Shell out some dollars on Masterclass or some other expertise subscription. Watch lectures by famous authors on the internet. Anything that gives you the chance to listen to those who are excellent at writing.

Make food easy. Vast amounts of my day to day free time get sucked into food. I like to cook, but it’s also a daily necessity. If you have other people who are counting on you for food, you can’t exactly just drop everything and live off of microwave pizzas. (And even if you don’t, maybe don’t do this anyway.) But prepare yourself in advance so that food is quick and easy. Frozen lasagna and prepped salads. Sandwich supplies. Maybe you’re a food prepper. Maybe you have a partner you can make a deal with so that they’ll do the catering during your retreat. Whatever you need to do to make food a snap before your retreat starts, do it.

My writing pals and I are making big plans! (You know, when we’re not all busy having babies and jobs and whatnot.) Hopefully someday soon, we’ll manage to bring the coven together for some creativity and mayhem. It’s been a while.

How about you, fine readers? Have you thought of anything that I’ve missed that could enhance the homemade writer’s retreat? Let me know in the comments below!

And until next week, happy writing!

Blogiversary the Ninth

Shakin’ things up! Enjoy the house and desk that I refused to tidy even one bit.

PS- Apologies for the finger over the camera. I am not good at this.

Writing! In! Spaaaaace!

“Stupid folding desk. Why is this so hard, gravity? Geez, where are those instructions…?”

Okay, so I’ve never really written in space. Or been in space. (Outer space, anyway.  I’m pretty good at taking up space.) But! Like many other writers, I’ve found that location makes a difference in productivity, even room to room within my own house. I’m not sure what the psychology of it is, but there are certain places where my muse, that fickle beast, is more likely to hang out with me.

So what makes for a good writing space? Writing spaces are as varied as the writers who use them. For some people, the noise and movement of a subway station is inspiring and energetic; to others, distracting and hectic. Some like a cozy library nook in a back room of their cabin retreat, while others like the open air and sunshine of a public garden. But personal differences aside, there are a few universals when choosing your own writing space.

Comfortable Writing is hard as is. Why compound the difficulty with discomfort? ‘Comfort’ can come in many forms. For me, it’s less about physical comfort (although my whiny spine has lately insisted on extra pillows galore), and more about mental comfort. I have a hard time writing when there are other people in the room with me. And having someone behind me makes it downright impossible. Some people can’t write in a messy room. Some just can’t do it without their pressure stockings. If your butt’s been wedged in a desk all day, a comfortable writing chair can be vital. And kudos to anyone able to write while shivering, or roasting. So whatever it is that makes you most comfortable, physically, mentally, spiritually, whateverally, make sure you have plenty of that in your writing space.

Inspirational Inspiration… not to be confused with distraction. Let’s face it. We writers are a distractible lot. Why write when you can: organize your pencil drawer? assess the rapidly disappearing Oreo* collection? complain about movie castings on Twitter? check the mirror to see how wide you can flare your nostrils? etcetera ad infinitum? Remember that impossible-to-write-in messy room from the previous point? Writing time can definitely feel like the best time to clean it. And wash the dishes. And try that fabulous new yogurt method your sister-in-law told you about. And become Martha Stewart, Rachael Ray, and Jillian Michaels rolled into one. It’s not that writing is boring. It’s just that it can be an elusive state of mind, especially when we have so many other worthy pursuits vying for our time. That’s why it’s so important to have an inspiring writing space. Some like music, others white noise, and others still only silence. Some like a fish tank, a window, a wall covered with magazine clippings of movie stars who look like their main characters. Know your own distinction between inspiration and distraction and lean toward the inspiring end of the spectrum.

Practical Cancun, Mexico would be great for my writing, I’m sure. But if that’s the only place in which I feel I can write, but I live in Fairbanks, Alaska, I’m not going to have much a writing career. Choose a writing spot that you can easily access on a daily basis. For some, this is the corner coffee shop. For others, a corner desk at home. Maybe a study cubby in the library you can sneak off to between classes. Whatever you go with, it should be close, affordable, and easy to deal with, or you risk burning yourself out with unnecessarily expended energy. Pick a place that will minimize your excuses for not visiting. (Note: it doesn’t necessarily have to be a place. Writing on a crowded bus on your iPad en route to work could be your perfect ‘spot’. Like everything else in this post, it’s what works for you.)

Okay, so real quick, I’m going to show you my own writing space and talk about why it works for me. Prepare to be dazzled:

Yep. Gorgeous, isn’t it? This is a million year old rocking chair in the corner of my kids’ bedroom. Sometimes I hurt my feet on legos getting to it. And sometimes it smells like pee. And it’s only really accessible when the kids are sleeping or elsewhere. But here’s why it works for me.

Comfortable Years of rocking, nursing, lullabying, and bedtime storying have perfectly molded this half-broken chair to the discerning contours of my bony butt. As the children’ room, this is the warmest room in our otherwise chilly house. And its location, wedged firmly between a bookshelf and a wall (and, yes, a very full laundry bin), guarantees no shoulder-lurkers. Plus, even if they could sneak out of bed and finagle themselves behind me, the only people in the room are illiterate little ankle biters.

Inspirational I sure hope this doesn’t sound completely creepy, but I find something deeply satisfying in listening to my children sleeping. The deep breathing, coupled with the occasional snuffle and snort and the melodious fountain of the fish filter, make the perfect writing soundtrack for me. Bonus: since my kids are sleeping/falling asleep, I very rarely allow my phone, or any other outside distractions, into the room. Plus, the lights are off, so I can’t see what a mess the place usually is! Huzzah!

Practical In my house. Free. Win.

So that’s it! A rocking chair in a corner. So elegantly simple, yes? Tell me about your writing space- and what makes it work for you!

Endnote:
* Current count is four kinds of Oreos. Yeah. Seriously, were there four kinds of Oreos in existence when I was a kid? Birthday cake Oreos? Mint? Where does this stuff come from? And how does it keep finding its way into my cabinets?