Natasha Fondren

It’s not just a writer’s challenge. Plenty of people have desk jobs. But, as Mark Terry once put it, the writing lifestyle can be “wildly sedentary.” (I remember this because I thought those words side-by-side with this meaning were just the coolest way to put it—and extremely apt.)

I’ve just learned that working out doesn’t help. No matter how much you workout, sitting for long periods is unhealthy for you.

No matter how much you workout! The New York Times says so:

Your chair is your enemy.

It doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym. If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home — you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death. In other words, irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you.

This freaks me out. The options are to use a stand-up desk, sit in a rocking chair (and rock), use a treadmill desk, or replace your office chair with a therapeutic ball. (I can attest that the last option rocks. Very comfy and fun. Good if you like to fidget and roll as you work. )

I do my reading while walking around in the pool and doing water aerobics, for two hours a day or so, but that’s only four or five days a week. The sedentary nature of writing does start to drive me crazy. There’s a treadmill, and I’m going to see if I can’t put my laptop on top for part of the day.

The writing is in a “numbers” stage. I need to put in 4,000 words a day until April 30. Rah. Rah. Joy. Joy.

And I read the Vampire Academy series over the weekend. (Book 5 doesn’t come out until May.) WOW! I’m starting it over and reading it again, which is something I’ve never done with a series.

So how do you deal with the sedentary nature of the writing life? What stage are you in with your writing these days: numbers, crafting, editing? Read any good books, lately?

I seem to write much like I keep house. And keeping house isn’t one of my strengths. I make a mess. I move piles around. For days, weeks, years. Or I spend three hours scrubbing the inside of the freezer (See? I can focus sometimes!), while the rest of the kitchen remains a mess. I seem to be the same way in writing, too.

I sometimes find myself reading five things at the same time (I mean within the same minute) or writing seven things at once (I mean within the same day).

I hate clutter on my computer and in my house. All this “stuff” gets to me, and you guys know how much I hate stuff. I’m a freak at throwing out clutter. And I almost deleted all the files to do with my WIP so I could start with a clear mind, but I stopped myself. (I’ve already tried 50K+ of that. It didn’t help, clearly.)

So I set myself to organizing the YA WIP and deleting only what I don’t need. SuperNotecard is awesome, and I have my ten projects tabbed open, and each project sorted and stacked and indexed, etc.

But of course I can’t write with all that clutter, so I have WriteMonkey, FocusWriter, and Q10 all open so I can full-screen focus on what I’m working on. And since I’m focusing on three things today…

(I should clarify that I would write all three in WriteMonkey, but as far as I know, it doesn’t let you open multiple documents at once, like Word does. It’s kinda geared towards focused work, LOL!)

Then there’s Windows Live Writer to write this blog post.

And Microsoft Word to read through an old story and write a blurb for its ebook release. (Make that four things today… blogging doesn’t count, as it’s a fun thing, not a work thing.)

All this drives me so crazy, that I started writing in a notebook to get away from the clutter on my computer, but this only ended up making more unorganized stuff that I had to organize.

I was going to tell you guys that my ADD issues have improved with Fish Oil and No Doz, and I really think they have. Really. I mean it. I swear. A bit. A little bit. Any little bit helps!

But somedays? I seriously drive myself crazy.

How do you deal with the clutter and stuff in your own mind? In your house? In your writing? On your computer?

I am working on seven projects right now, with three simmering in the background. All novel-length. This is insane.

I don’t normally work like this. I’ve never worked like this, and it’s driving me a bit batty, but I find that when I expect myself to write a minimum of 3K-5K a day, I get stuck if I can’t switch to another project.

My word count, at least, has improved. I generally feel guilty and lazy and beat myself up for anything under 3K. This is stupid and irrational because most writers hover in the 1K-2K range, but it is what it is. I have a strong and healthy guilt complex.

And I guess I’ve always felt I need to triple the work of everyone else, just in case I have no talent. Having a lot out there does make a big difference.

Two of my projects will hopefully be an experiment in self-publishing (finally!). Three of my projects are for my current publishers. Two could go either way. And three are targeted for New York.

I’ve learned two things, so far.

First, I seem to need a more exciting idea and bigger challenge with my stories than I have in years past. In the first few years, I’d shrug and make any idea work. I still can do that, but I don’t like it anymore. I need to really LOVE it, in order to write it without much wailing and gnashing of the teeth.

Second, with a lot of things in the pot, it’s interesting to see how much some stories stand out… and others don’t. At some point, I’ll have to start abandoning stories, and I think that’s a good idea. I’ve never done that before. I usually make everything work.

Multiple projects give me a perspective that working on a single project doesn’t.

But I think I still need to write faster. Maybe I should up it to 5K-7K. This is an important year, and I need to “grow” a lot of stuff that I can get money from later.

I feel a lot of pressure to pay bills, to make this career work. I took away my safety nets, which was a good thing for me, but I keep looking at the calendar and watching time pass and getting nervous.

My friend can write 12K-15K of brilliance every day, I kid you not. She does take days off sometimes, so maybe that’s a requisite, but I always feel the pressure to write faster.

How do you handle the pressure? How do you get yourself to write faster? Have you ever tried working on multiple projects? Do you feel pressured to write faster?

When I hit the road, I wanted a slower life. I’d been working pretty much every hour of every day, either teaching or writing. For the last ten years, I took only four or five days off a year, and that’s with a seven-day workweek, not a five-day workweek.

Also, I wanted to have one job.

I never meant for writing to be a job. It just sprung up into my life, and pretty soon it filled every second I wasn’t teaching.

Eight years after I wrote my first story, I hit the road, writing full-time.

Wow. It was something. One job. Working one job has to be the COOLEST. But last month, my time got filled with fun campground stuff, because they have a ton of activities. 99% of the campground residents are retirees, so there’s lots of Texas Hold ‘Em to play (I’m pretty good at it), lots of potlucks, dinners, breakfasts, parties, etc.

I really love it. A lot. I love the people, all of them.

But last week, I realized my life had slowed down too much. I realized I was only working full-time hours on three or four days a week. I got totally derailed when Glenn came back, with all the running to doctors and nurses and such, at the same time when the campground calendar filled with more and more activities.

Oddly, I’ve been thinking back to when I was younger, and how ambitious I was. True, I have goals now, but they are more related to lifestyle than to achievement. Sometimes I worry they are too process-oriented, rather than achievement-oriented.

I know the first is considered more “healthy,” but I think a little of the second is good for us, too.

Do you find that drive and ambition changes in one’s late thirties? Or is it just me? Can that old drive be reactivated, or is it best left in our memory? If yes, then how?

Awesome song for inspiration:

I made the mistake, the one that every freelancer warns about. It’s so hard, isn’t it? You think you have a flexible schedule, and you find yourself giving away an hour here, an hour there. What’s a half-day here? A little time there?

And suddenly, writing full-time has become writing three or four days a week.

Oopsy.

Long story short, I sat down with my schedule tonight. I need to undo some commitments, particularly the non-paying kind. Not my volunteering day. That’s a sacred day. The other sacred day is Glenn day. He didn’t hit the road so he can watch me write; we need to go out and see stuff, once a week. And taking one day off every week won’t kill me.

Right?

So that leaves five days, and I truly need five full days of writing, with no errands, hour-here or hour-there stuff in the middle of the day.

Um, duh, it’s a full-time job.

I know lots of moms run around in between writing snatches. Some thrive while writing amidst chaos. Others, like Nora Roberts, shut their office door, and there better be blood or fire if her kids interrupt her. (Or did: they’re grown now.)

The bit about Nora does give me some relief. In the middle of stressing about this, I did have a moment of panic: if I let life get to my writing with NO kids, how am I going to do it WITH kids?

Still just a little panicky about that, but MILLIONS of moms work full-time jobs while raising kids. And I wouldn’t mind the door being open. What really kills my productivity is running to the store, doing errands, or doing an hour class here or whatnot.

Lastly, all the studies show that for optimum creativity, you need to have the butt in chair at a regular time, so the biorhythms or some such thing know when to show up. And this isn’t exactly a business where you can thrive with sub-optimum creativity.

*sigh*

I’ve been stressing about this for days. Sometimes, you just have to say, “I can’t do that, I’m sorry.”

So what about you? How do you enforce boundaries around your writing? Do you aim for a regular time? Or do you work best with a day-to-day, flexible schedule that changes? And do you stress out about saying no? How do you say no?

Have I been whining lately? I feel like I should make a point of saying how much I love writing. Even when the words are coming out slow as molasses, when I’m spending all day tilting the bottle just so, when my arms are aching, waiting for the slow, slow, slow descent of the stubborn syrup, I love it.

I’m grateful that right now, knock on wood, I don’t have any looming deadlines. I can plug away, day by day, making progress, no pressure. It’s really nice. Such a relief.

This period should last for at least the next… two or three weeks.

Meanwhile, I’m (as always) struggling with the research. I’m always impatient to get the words on the page, and “just researching” makes me nervous. But onward I trudge.

If I’d just focus on the research and allow the book to come to full boil before trying to write it, I wouldn’t have to delete so much.

Same goes with reading. I want to read a book a day. I need to have a bigger understanding of the YA genre, so I need to read a ton more books. But again, “just reading” makes me nervous. Even though the work is fun, for sure! I think that’s why I feel guilty.

So thank you, universe. I like this time I have. Even if it does make me nervous. I constantly feel the pressure to write faster, to produce more, because I don’t want this opportunity to pass me by.

Do you struggle with patience? With nervousness when you have time to take your time? With guilt over reading, even though it’s part of the job? And how are deadlines treating you, at the moment?

This is what I’ve been, lately. Delete, delete, delete. It’s like my obsession with clutter: I can’t fix until I get rid of all the junk around. I get unhappy with my tone or mood and throw the whole thing out. No, I can’t revise or edit it. I have to erase it from existence.

Since December 2009, I believe I have deleted at least 60,000 words. Not even counting the five blog posts I delete for every one I post. How DID I used to write a post every day?

This has got to stop. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me, because I’ve NEVER done this before.

As for good news, the Year of the Ox is over. The Year of the Metal Tiger is here, which is a finish-everything-you-start kind of year. I’m told.

Cool. I can use some of that energy.

(I do know I’m grasping at straws.)

(But whatever works.)

I fired up  Write or Die yesterday. Have I talked about Write or Die yet? Why yes, I have. It triples my productivity, but I seem to keep forgetting that fact and not using it. It’s free to use online, but I bought the desktop version ($10), which is prettier and has a few more features. (Customizable font color, background color, save feature that appends to a file, word war, and other stuff.)

It turns writing into a game. You enter a word count or time goal, and you have to keep writing. If you stop writing for more than ten or twenty seconds, it either plays an awful screeching violin sound (Normal Mode), or it starts deleting your words (Kamikaze Mode). It’s fun, and I write fast again. And I actually keep my words, fancy that!

You can give Write or Die a quick whirl online, see if it does it for you or not.

The desktop version also has a “Word War” feature that’s in beta, where you hook up with someone else, and a progress bar at the top of your screen tracks you and your war partner, to see who writes the most words in a certain amount of time. (Doesn’t seem to be working at the moment, though…)

It all sounds silly, I know. But whatever gets the words out. It makes writing feel a bit like a video game. And the quicker I write, the better.

It’s odd, but the faster I write, the better I write. What’s up with that?

Do you have any tricks to get the words out when the words are coming too slow? Ever been on a deleting rampage? Ever play with Write or Die?

and it’s here. I’ve had it. I’m tired of struggling to write a non-pseudonym’s genre story. I just reached a point, where… all my issues? Using them. I don’t care if some people I know draw parallels that may or may not be true.

It’s my life and my feelings, so why shouldn’t I use them?

It’s fiction, so of course I’ll fictionalize it. It’s arguable whether or not it will even be recognizable when I’m done with it, if it will be transparent.

Either way, I just. don’t. care. I need all the help I can get. Time to pull out all the stops.

Perhaps it’s the same as stuff I’ve accidentally used, over the years, and was surprised and a little freaked to see the parallels of my life in my stories. Even when you write 100% pure fiction, if you know yourself, you see little bits of yourself. And sometimes, I see threads in my writing, and I step back in horror, thinking: do I really think that?

Hey, some of my experiences sucked, so I may as well make money off those feelings. Make a silver lining. And if it connects with someone else who has those feelings, all the better.

Over the last nine or so years, my writing progress has mostly been a deeper and deeper exploration into who I am and how I feel. There’s mechanics and methods and techniques and skills, but in the end, it always comes down to me going deeper.

And I refuse to give up on writing a non-pseudonym story. It’s just going to happen. Period.

This seems to be my mental hurdle, as I’ve been struggling with it for years. And frankly, I am just sick of it. (I can’t imagine how you guys must feel, although to be honest, I’m having a moment of wow, you guys rock, I can’t believe you still read my blog!)

So what has your writing journey been like? What has your greatest mental hurdle been? How’d you get past it?

Glenn’s coming home! I’ve been sitting by the phone. I probably won’t know which day until he’s flown to Anchorage, given the difficulty of phoning from Dutch Harbor. It could be any day (or really, any hour) now.

Good news: Bernita has a new Lillie St. Claire story in Weirdly: Volume 3. Lillie rocks, I’m telling you, totally rocks.

 Smart Pop Books has released excerpts of Ardeur, an essay anthology about Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series. There are some great essays in there! Mine is “The Domestication of a Vampire Executioner.”

Laurell K. Hamilton guest-edited, and she wrote really awesome and heartfelt intros to each essay. Lots of times, editors write a paragraph, a couple sentences. She wrote a page or two. I have to say, her success is not surprising; the extra mile must be automatic with her.

Speaking of Smart Pop Books, if you’re a fan of Dollhouse, they’re having an essay contest for the Dollhouse anthology.

So I mentioned I’m learning Spanish. The Listen ‘n’ Learn Spanish with the Movies book assigned Eight Below first. Um, YEAH RIGHT. I sobbed the whole way through. And I’m not watching it again, no way no how. I don’t care if I haven’t learned the Spanish I’m supposed to learn from it.

I’m an emotional weakling. The whole time, I knew there was going to be a happy ending for the dogs, but that didn’t help. Nor did the actual happy ending: I sobbed through that, too.

I cry at everything in real life, too. I saw a mean sign a few days ago, and I came home and cried. I was depressed for three days. I felt like running home to a mommy and saying, “He hurt my feelings!”

I have the emotional strength of a five year old. *sigh*

*Addendum: He just called! He’s already to Anchorage; he’ll be here at 11:45 am, Friday morning!

What’s going on with you?

…most of what’s on my mind, I don’t want to blog about yet. So blog thoughts just aren’t coming. These snippet posts seem to be all I can do, lately.

Writing Fast

I’m a little envious of people who both write full-time AND take a year to write a book. Wow. Just think of all the research you could do, and how leisurely you could write! You could feel proud and on track for having written 400 words a day, AND take 65 days off a year! (Or use 65 days for brainstorming or research, etc.)

Or maybe I’m just upset that my novel for “real name” is going slow as freakin’ molasses. And I’m writing it amidst pounding out words for pseudonym.

Honestly, I’m just sick of the pressure to always write faster. But what can you do? Gotta pay the bills. And really, I’m not real fond of that pressure, either. They’re close to the same thing.

Learning Spanish

I’m learning Spanish. It’s hard, as I’ve never worked with a Romance language before (just the barest of Italian). I’ve been dreaming in Spanish, which is encouraging. One of the things I’m using to learn is LiveMocha, which is great. It’s a bit like Rosetta Stone, except it’s online and free.

It’s like learning a language on Facebook, because once you submit an exercise, three or four people will write and tell you that you suck and need to try again. (Okay, not really that bad, LOL!)

What’s funny is that I grade TOEFL tests now and then, since I speak English. And WOW. I’d heard they were… ridiculous, but they really are. The last one I graded was on the study of etymology throughout history, written in unreadable college textbook style. (And NOT the applicable kind of etymology. Just long terms that I’ve NEVER used in my ENTIRE life, used in thick and sludgy prose I had to read three times.)

Real useful. *eye roll*

I’m also using Fluenz and a wonderful book called Listen ‘n’ Learn Spanish with Your Favorite Movies. The last one is definitely my favorite, and my Netflix account is getting a good workout, too. I also dabble with the free courses written by the Foreign Services Institute. Useful, but “hard” learning.

My goal is to be conversing at Intermediate level by the end of February.

Contact Form

Lastly, I’m getting a lot of blank contact forms. Could a couple of you contact me, just so I can see whether spammers are blanking me, or if my contact form isn’t working? Thanks so much!

So what’s up in your world? Any blog ideas for me, LOL?