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For Christmas, I bought Drew a video game on Xbox Live Arcade.  Then the game was unexpectedly on sale, so we had some Xbox points left over, so we browsed the indie games.  And that’s how we found Sequence.

Sequence is a rhythm RPG, which means that it’s an RPG whose battle system consists of a series of rhythm games.  I’m not a fan of rhythm games or party games in general, so I was skeptical.

But Sequence completely won me over.  It has all the elements of an awesome RPG–great characters, excellent voice acting, beautiful art,  a cool story, and snappy dialogue.  (I haven’t laughed that hard at video game dialogue…maybe ever.  It was the dialogue in the demo that first sold us on the game.)  And the combat both complex and fun, while still being one of the most innovative games I have ever played.  (As a plus, the difficulty settings make the game customizable, in case you’re bad at rhythm games, like me.  The system did a fantastic job of teaching me to play and then leveling with me.  If it doesn’t for you, you can change the difficulty at any time.)  It even landed the ending, which is always a worry with mystery-driven games.

I hear this game hasn’t been the smashing success I think it should have been, and I can only imagine that’s because it’s lingering in obscurity.  (I have no connection to this game–I just want to spread the word.)  It’s recently become available on Steam, and I hope that helps it out.  It’s also five bucks, so it’s hard to go wrong.

My backyard tulips are coming up.  I haven’t thought about them since last year.  Flowers without effort=magic.

I’ve decided to do an ongoing series about how I get work done while taking care of a child. There are a few reasons for this. I’ve gotten good feedback on the few things I’ve said about this in the past. Also, I could really have used a series like this leading up to when my daughter was born, to give me hope that this working and parenting simultaneously thing was possible, when many, many voices told me that it wasn’t.   (I do recommend John Scalzi’s treatment of the subject. I know I’m not the first person to tackle it.)  I’ve talked about what I don’t do, now it’s time to talk about what I do.

I still don’t want to talk about my daughter online much, but I do feel like this subject is important, and is more about me than her, anyway. And no, my blog is not going to become all-baby all the time. But I think this subject is an important one to cover, periodically.

The situation: I have to say, I’m not sure any parenting experience can be generalized to fit other families, because what I do may only be useful in getting work done while parenting mychild. I’m also aware I have some advantages that many other working moms don’t have. I have a husband who works at home full time, who views taking care of our child as his responsibility every bit as much as it is mine. We’re bottle feeding, which wasn’t motivated by work, but has the nice side effect of making him every bit as capable of taking care of her as I am. And he does, about half the time. However, during his work day (he works 9-6), I really do need to let him just get work done, or we both start to feel stressed. (He does far more evening and night feeding than I do, so it balances out.) Also, I have something of a mellow baby, who doesn’t cry much, and as long as she is fed and changed and smiled at, doesn’t need much else from me at this time. The biggest challenge by far is the feeding; for a while I was spending eight hours a day holding a baby and a bottle.

*whew* Now that the disclosures are out of the way, how do I get work done?

In the first five weeks of my daughter’s life I had three revisions and a copy edit all bounce onto my desk. It wasn’t great timing, but it all needed to be done.

So I did it in very small pieces. It would be easy not to do any work at all, because from the moment I put my daughter down (asleep or otherwise), I have somewhere between five seconds and three hours before she will require my attention again. I never know which times will be which. Those first few seconds are almost always filled with immediate biological needs–prepping her food, feeding me, etc. The next few seconds after that I have to fill with the next most important thing. And often, that needs to be writing.

I was advised by many people never to try to write while my daughter is awake, but I do, and often. I write in 200 word snatches a lot of the time, but if I do that several times a day, I can etch out a decent word count. I also write while my daughter sleeps, even if it’s only for five minutes. I’ve totally ignored the advice to sleep when she sleeps. I don’t nap. I work instead. Whatever sleep I get at night is what I get. (I’ve been blessed with a good sleeper. If she wasn’t, this probably wouldn’t work out.)

Much of the time, my work looks like this:

If all that fails, when Drew gets off work, I ask for an hour or so to get some work done, and he kindly takes care of our daughter while I do that. Without his support, this would all be much, much harder. Our daughter also spends part of her day in a baby swing next to his desk, where he can talk to her and smile at her and I can get other things done. Sometimes this means dishes and laundry and such, but sometimes it means writing.

I also give myself permission not to work every day. If I haven’t gotten enough sleep, if I feel exhausted, if I’m having a hard time balancing everything, I give myself permission not to get work done. I take care of her; I take care of me. I try again tomorrow. Everyone needs permission to have a bad day, including my baby.

What helps me the most at this stage is being flexible. I get done what gets done. I view work as the interruption to my life, rather than life as the interruption to my work. I also make sure I’m not over-committed to other things.
I have to make writing the first priority after my family, or it won’t happen at all.

Overall, I’m amazed what I can get done a little bit at a time. (If this post is fragmented, it’s because I have written it, too, in tiny pieces.) This gives me hope that I’ll be able to continue to get work done, even as she grows and the shape of our family needs change over time.

Every once in a while I read a story and I think, I wish I’d written that. This usually happens when an author has accomplished something wonderful. Most recently, I felt this way reading “Movement,” by Nancy Fulda.

The point of view in this story is so beautiful. It’s stuck with me long after I stopped reading. And, luckily, it’s available on Nancy’s website right now. The story’s been nominated for a Nebula award, and the nomination is well-deserved.

And here it is!

I’m completely thrilled with it.  I especially love the handcuff and the key.  When I saw the finished image, I had this surreal moment where I realized that this is going to be an actual book, with an actual cover, in print on shelves and read by people.  Of course, I knew that before, but every step makes it a little more real.

In case you missed it, yes, the title has changed.  It’s also up for pre-order on Amazon, in both print and Kindle editions.  You may notice that the cover there isn’t the finished one.  Hopefully that will get updated soon.

I’ve written nine thousand words.
This amounts to pieces of about thirty different scenes.
The scenes are not in chronological order.
There are no transitions, no setting details, no setups, no conclusions.
Also no action. Just talking. Lots of talking.
But the dialogue is broken. Characters say what they mean too much.
There is no nuance to be found.
None of these sentences are going to get to stay.
They are written in two different tenses.
The tense sometimes changes more than once per phrase.
Character names change at whim, sometimes more than once per fragment.
No one could follow this story but me.

Oh first draft.
It has been too long.
I’ve missed you.
Except for how I haven’t.

Don’t worry. I’ll fix you. But you have to exist to be fixed, first.

I recently read this blog post about giving up things in order to make room for writing.

A few months ago I was talking to some friends about my decision not to quit working once I had a child.  One of these friends made a different decision last year–intentionally putting down her writing to take care of her daughter in her first year.  She told me she knew she couldn’t have written that year.  “But maybe you are superwoman,” she said.

Ha.  I am not superwoman.  I can’t do everything.  In fact, at this point, I’m not doing much of anything, besides taking care of my daughter, keeping my house livable, and writing.  But it’s not as if I started giving up things when she was born.  I’ve long had a list of things that just aren’t going to happen, because doing them would crowd writing out of my life.

As we’ve been transitioning, I’ve been asking myself this question: what else do I have to give up to write?  Because if I fit nothing else in my life, I’m going to fit my family and my writing.  And as I prioritize those things first, lots of other things have to go.

So what don’t I do?

I don’t answer my phone.  I don’t text.  And I don’t return messages often either.  People call me 40 times, but I have limited time with my hands and brain free, and that time needs to go into work.  So the phone rings.  And I ignore it.  It’s not that I wouldn’t love to talk to the people who are calling–and I hope that the time will open up in the future–but right now, if I answered my phone every time it rang, I’d get nothing else done.  It’s not personal.  I’m an equal-opportunity ignorer.

I don’t respond to comments online.   I don’t always return emails.  I don’t read many blogs.  I definitely don’t comment on them.  I don’t tweet very often, and I respond to others’ tweets even less.  And facebook?  Forget it.   It’s not that I don’t love you all.  But if I spend all that time engaging online, I have nothing left to get work done.

I don’t often attend social events that happen outside my house.  We have the space and the good fortune to host a couple weekly social things at home.  But I’ve had to drop everything but those things, plus a LAN party every once in a while–also usually at our house.  I’d love to go to more things…but I just don’t have the time or energy.

All that means I can’t keep up with as many people as I’d like to, as well as I’d like to.  I love my friends.  I am blessed to know so many wonderful people…too many to spend as much time with them as I’d like to.

I also can’t read all my friends’ books.  The list of unpublished books by friends that I wish I had time to critique is long.  The list of published books by friends that I wish I had time to read is longer.  I expect these lists to get longer over the years, not shorter.  That’s certainly been the trend so far.

And as much as I’d love to, I can’t hold a second job.  Medical bills are expensive.  Self-employment is precarious.  I would love to get a job with a paycheck that I didn’t write myself.  But I don’t have room to be a mom and run a business and write, too.  If I had to get another job, one of those things would have to go, and let me tell you, it would certainly be the writing.  I hope that won’t happen, but time will tell.

I’d love to say I gave up TV, but I don’t really like it, so not watching TV is not a sacrifice.  We don’t have Netflix either.  I watch one movie a month, or so.   I still haven’t given up video games, because that’s what I do when my brain is dead, and for spousal bonding time, so that isn’t something I think it would be healthy to give up.

I’m sure there are more things.  But it’s helpful for me to remember that I’m not being lazy when I don’t do all these things.  I’m just intentionally choosing something else for my time.  And whatever our priorities, we could all probably stand to use our time a little more intentionally.

Excuse me, now.  I’m off to go meet a deadline.

Update:  I’ve thought of another thing.  I also don’t cook everyday.  I love to cook.  But I don’t have time to prepare each and every meal we eat.  So Drew and I cook (often together) once or twice a week.  We’ll make a large amount of two or three things that reheat easily, and then we eat that all week.  We only make things we love, and we only make each thing once every few months, so we don’t get sick of our meals.  Saves lots of time, and helps us eat healthy, too.

I’ve been doing a lot of revising lately. There’s a lot of revising in my future, too. I’ve long said that, for me, drafting is only 25% of the work of writing a book–I’m beginning to think it may be more like 10-15%.

The hilarious part is that, as I revise, the book in my head morphs into the new, revised book, rather than the old draft. So by the time I’m finished, I can’t remember what the old draft was like. I can’t remember what changes I made. I feel like the new draft is the way it’s always been.

This is good, because it means I’m catching the vision of what I’m doing, but it’s also very, very bad, because when I’m finished…well…I feel like I haven’t done a thing.

Me: [Despairing] This book hasn’t changed at all! What am I doing with my time?
Drew: [Laughs at me] Remember how it used to be like this?
Me: Oh. I dimly recall that. Maybe it has changed a little.

Ah, well. Back to revising…

Last night, I encountered this.

It appears to be a lich who is very excited about having a christmas tree on his head, which happens to be made from unnecessary skulls. So excited, in fact, that he decided to dress up in christmas colors, to match. Only red and green had been done, so he had to add a flamboyant purple, just cause.

You’re welcome.