Posted on April 11th, 2012 under Uncategorized. Comments: None

There’s this idiom we use in English when we aren’t going to be able to accomplish something. We say we don’t have time.

If there is a literal time constraint, this may be true. I may not have time to run to the store before writing group starts for example.

But often we use the phrase to mean that there isn’t space in our lives. “I’d love to garden,” I might say, “but I don’t have time.”

This, of course, is not literally true. Some people garden. Everyone has the same number of hours in the day. Therefore the time exists. Gardening is just not a priority right now. (I actually gardened yesterday. But you get the point.)

That’s what an idiom is, of course: a phrase where the understood meaning is different from the literal meaning. But with this particular idiom, sometimes its easy to start believing it is literally true. Whatever it is we don’t have time for, we feel we are incapable of doing it, because more time is not something that any of us can acquire.

In the absence of deadlines and time constraints, we all have the time to do anything we want. But most of us don’t have the time to do everything we want, because there are just too many interesting or important things in the world to do.

Enter priorities. Whether we think about it or not, we all prioritize our lives. If I spend time doing one thing over another, I have prioritized it. I like my life better when I think about my priorities and make sure I’m spending my time accordingly.

In general, my uber-priority list looks like this:
1) Take care of my health. (Because I can’t do anything else if I don’t do that.)
2) Take care of my family.
3) Write.
4-6)Maintain our business. Maintain our house. Maintain my relationships with friends. (The order of these last three rotates.)

Notice that writing is not number one. My life would be horribly out of balance if I put writing before my health or my family. I do put it above everything else, though. This is why it gets done at all.

Last year I realized I needed to cut some things out of my life, because I had too many scheduled weekly events to juggle. I knew I had to cut back, but I didn’t know how much. So I made a list of all the specific events in order of priority, and started hacking at the bottom. I dropped a writing group. I dropped a roleplaying game. When that wasn’t enough I dropped another writing group.

I also dropped to part-time attendance at my bi-weekly social writers event. Fortunately, I did not have to axe that one completely. When I dropped to part-time, I finally found that the balance of scheduled time, work time, and down time felt right. And I stopped cutting.

It hurt. It hurt a lot. But I knew what my priorities were, so I did it. And my life became much happier for it, in the long run. (Who needed three writing groups anyway? I was doing that many because I loved the people in each. But keeping up with friends is not as high a priority as my health, my family, or my writing. So the groups went.)

I kept my list. It still has all the same things on it, some crossed out, some left alone. But if my life becomes calmer or crazier, I know what to cut next. I know what to add back in. I know what I want, and I can make my habits match it.

And that’s a powerful thing.

Posted on April 10th, 2012 under Uncategorized. Comments: 1

Posted on April 5th, 2012 under Uncategorized. Comments: None

I have ARCs! And they are beautiful.

Just look at those spines all lined up together. It’s a real book!

There’s something about looking at the text all laid out like that. Even though I’ve been over the book dozens of times…it feels newer. The most amazing thing to me is that it’s all laid out and pretty–and I didn’t have to do that. Seriously. Someone else paid attention to my words and turned them into a real book. After all these years of making all my own changes…there is nothing quite like that feeling.

I am so excited to share this book with you. Five more months! (We’ll do some giveaways before that, I’m thinking. Stay tuned.)

Posted on April 4th, 2012 under Uncategorized. Comments: 5

Posted on April 3rd, 2012 under Uncategorized. Comments: None

Keeping files consistently backed up is a pain.

I’m pretty good about it–I back up to an external hard drive regularly and to DVD yearly, and I email manuscript files to myself whenever I remember.

But if my computer were to crash randomly, all that wouldn’t realistically keep me from losing days or weeks of writing work, which depending on those days or weeks could be at best painful and at worst disastrous.

I’ve known for a long time I should be using dropbox or a like system.  I swear everyone uses one of these things but me.  But I’m always skeptical of new things that promise to simplify my life.  In my experience, the best way to keep my life simple is to depend on as few devices and services and gadgets as possible, and not to fix things that are not broken.

But my backup system was inadequate, and therefore broken.  Finally fear of data loss motivated me to sign up and try it.

And while I still have no desire for a smart phone or an ipod or an e-reader or a gps, I discovered that dropbox is totally awesome.

All I did was download the thing, and then link my shortcuts to all my important files to pull from my dropbox folder instead of my hard drive.  Now every time I type a sentence (and obsessively hit ctrl-s), that sentence gets saved to a server somewhere.  Better yet, I can access all my work on both our desktop and my laptop, which makes working with our budget and work schedule files much easier.

And I never have to think about it again.  That’s my kind of simplification.

Posted on April 2nd, 2012 under Uncategorized. Comments: 1

Posted on March 29th, 2012 under Uncategorized. Comments: None

Posted on March 27th, 2012 under Uncategorized. Comments: None

One matter that needs to be settled in every writing group is how to decide who to critique first each week.  I once had a group who decided this by a round of rock, paper, scissors.  The game could go on for five or six rounds sometimes, before we had an actual winner.  Some people enjoyed this.  I did not.

Another group critiqued in order of arrival.  That worked well when we weren’t meeting at anyone’s house, because no one was necessarily first.  That same group once chose according to whose birth date was closest to the current date.  A skype group I was in chose based on whose submission was up on a certain group member’s screen when it was time to start.

By far my favorite method, though, is the one used in my current group.  We roll a scatter die.

The arrow points to the first person, and then we proceed clockwise.  Simple, quick, fair and we get to roll a die.  Can’t ask for better than that.

Posted on March 26th, 2012 under Uncategorized. Comments: None