Natasha Fondren

That’s the writing life. And yes, this is at least the third time I’ve stolen the phrase, “wildly sedentary,” from Mark Terry. It’s such a perfect phrase and a perfect description. (Sorry!)

I am tired of sitting on my butt.

It’s not like I don’t do yoga nearly every day. Only about 20 minutes, though. And I do water aerobics for at least four hours a week. And then I hike for about six hours a week.

That sounds like a lot, but it’s not. In my old life, I did a lot of standing and pacing. Moving from place to place, walking from the car to the parking lot, etc. Here? I get up and write. Sometimes I write before I get up! My camper has a fifteen foot “hallway” to walk, and that’s it. Okay, it’s a good thirty yards to the bathroom, but still.

I am crawling out of my skin.

An hour of working out is NOTHING to fourteen hours of sitting.

I desperately want a treadmill desk, but that won’t happen until we upgrade.

So what’s a girl to do? I’m not sure. Maybe I need to start taking two-hour walks every day, like Thomas Jefferson or something. I don’t know.

Watching this guy just makes my body twitch to MOVE.

So how do you deal with the sedentary nature of writing? Do you find yourself crawling out of your skin, too?

Edie noticed that my year has been inspired by Frank. Why yes, it has, what with “Not in a Shy Way” and “Regrets: I’ve Had a Few” and now “It Was A Very Good Year.”

I need a song for next year. Any suggestions?

About Last Year

I love Arizona. Oh. My. God. I love it here. I can’t get enough of the lizards. I stop and exclaim at every one, even though I’m pretty sure this drives the people who I hike with crazy. Also I love desert flowers, cacti, cracked mud in dried riverbeds, insects (even when they scare the bejeezuz out of me), animals, birds, toads, spiders (see above parenthetical statement) and… well, everything. Water now fascinates me, because it is such a rare sight. I can’t get enough of the desert and the mountains and the washes and the canyons.

Living Outside

The weather is BIG in my world. With paper-thin walls and a camper that has plenty of gaps where the various fold-up walls meet, weather is big. So when the 60 mph wind gusts come and I’m getting seasick from the rocking and I’m afraid my camper is going to blow over and then I won’t have a house… um, my world revolves around the weather.

Totally not like living in a house or an apartment. There’s very little barrier between me and nature.

I have no bathroom in the camper, so I walk to the clubhouse in the middle of the night and I treasure my time looking at the moon and the stars. I always have fresh air. I like being subject to the weather. I feel like I’m part of the earth, part of the natural world.

In fact, upgrading? I don’t know. Being enclosed in a sturdier camper with luxuries and a bathroom and thick walls and no fresh air? Um, well… I don’t know. When my bed is sopping wet from a leak, okay, I can’t wait. I would like to have my piano with me. But 90% of the time, I dread leaving my little camper. It’s a step away from nature. The thought makes me restless and nervous.

Surprises

Travel isn’t high on my list. I’m shocked. In fact, I appear to just want to write. I, um, have a tendency to get annoyed when anything interrupts my writing. I will procrastinate the whole world in order to write. I force myself on an adventure every couple weeks, and I push myself out of the house to volunteer one day a week hiking the desert.

Part of it is also that I haven’t yet sucked up everything this area has to offer. There’s just so much to explore!

I was also surprised to find myself teaching a water aerobics class twice a week. I love it and miss it (I only do it during the snowbird season), but I never had the thought, “I’d like to teach a water aerobics class someday!” It just happened and it was fun.

Not Surprised

I still hate things. I am perfectly happy to have a bed to sleep in. Even when it leaks. When humidity gives me an asthma attack, yes, I’m ready to do anything to make it stop. But in normal, every day life, I am happy. The less things, the better. When it comes to working, I am not motivated by money or the accumulation of things.

Unless it’s a computer to write on. Or a Kindle. Or books and movies (as long as they’re in digital form).

I remember when I walked in a friend’s pantry and realized she had more things in her pantry than I owned altogether. Okay, maybe as much. Still, there are two seats that have storage that I haven’t opened in ages. I’m definitely feeling the itch to get rid of more of my stuff. Don’t need it. Why keep it? It feels like a burden.

So that’s my life, this past year. I wonder what the next year will bring. I think it might be another big change, but such is life, I guess. It’s an adventure, that’s for sure!

So how was your year?

A year ago, I completely changed my life. This year has somehow managed to be the happiest, most relaxing, tumultuous, and terrifying year of my adult life. If I had known how hard the changes were going to be, I’m not sure I would have been brave enough to make them. I changed my life, and not in a shy way.

Leaving Music

In becoming a writer, I lost a lot of self-confidence. Giving up something you’re good at, something you’ve rooted your identity and self-worth and self-confidence in, is incredibly difficult. Since grade school, I was a pianist. For nearly thirty years I actively improved my musical skills every day, and a whole lot of my confidence was built on that foundation of skill and knowledge and training. And fifteen years of teaching piano: I knew exactly what to do and exactly how to teach certain things. It makes one feel good, to do something well, day after day.

Leaving all that was HARD, and I was totally unprepared for what a drastic blow it would be to my self-esteem.

I’m in a good place now, so I can admit that there were periods in this last year when I was depressed and felt like a complete failure and utterly worthless. I was terrified. I felt like I was drowning, like I was trying grab the buoy of music and teaching that had once been my confidence, but I’d thrown it away.

And there was nothing there.

Oh yes, I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I was freaked.

Becoming a Writer

Part of me will always be a musician. I miss it. When I watch my music friends in their careers, my fingers itch to get at the piano. I mourn it often, and it’s still a sore spot that aches, even though I am certain that writing is where my heart truly is.

With writing, I never have to manufacture motivation. Whether I’m motivated or not, I find myself writing. It just happens. I don’t want a life; I never want to “escape” writing or even take a break, unless it’s to go to a movie. Even then, try to get me to a matinee—it won’t happen. I can’t go to a movie until I’ve written.

I love volunteering and hiking the desert once a week, but as much as I love it, I have to “force” myself away from writing. In theory, I want to travel and I want to explore Arizona more, but in reality, I can’t bear to give up the writing days.

Even when I swear-to-God really don’t want to write, I don’t want to do anything else.

No Half-Measures

Up until this last year, I had an absolute, no-idea-where-it-came-from confidence in the fact that I “should” write, that the “universe wants me to write.” This certainty did not come from any belief in my writing abilities; it was just there. And I am not given to faith; I’m really not. But there it was.

That confidence was shaken and tried this year.

(Yay! I finally get to join the club!)

I knew, going into this writing thing, that I wanted to be a very good writer. And I’ve seen what it takes for musicians to be very good musicians. I put zero stock in talent, so I’ve never wondered if I had writing talent. I do, however, know how to learn. I know how to make a living in the arts. I know how to become good at something, and I particularly know how to become good at something creative.

Line up all the best musicians, and I bet not one of them ever had a fall-back career. I knew if I gave myself the luxury of one, I’d never be as good as I want to be. Believe it or not, I’m a security freak, and if I gave myself the option, I’d get comfortable.

I maneuvered myself into the position of having nothing to fall back on; I do realize that. And for me, it was the right decision.

But damn, it was frightening as hell.

It Was a Very Good Year

Yes. Yes, it was. It doesn’t sound it so far, does it? In spite of it all, I wouldn’t change a thing. I don’t regret my regrets for a second.

And now look, I’ve written a whole blog post and I haven’t even gotten to the good bits! And there were more good bits than scary bits, I promise. So I suppose I’m going to have to finish this up in a day or two… after I finish my writing.

Ever have regrets? Or regrets you don’t regret? Ever choose one thing above another, and mourn the loss of it, even while you know you’d make the exact same decision a thousand times over?

My process is always changing, but recently I returned to an old part of my process that I had lost. For a few years, my attention span got so bad that I could not do as much re-reading of my WIP that I did once.

After awhile, I forgot it had ever been my process.

But I’ve picked it up again. I tend to start reading (and editing/tweaking) at the very beginning every morning. And then I add words until my brain starts jumping around and can only write fragments. I take a break, then I start re-reading at the beginning of the chapter I’m on or the previous chapter.

Whew, it’s a lot of re-reading.

I hope it’s making a better story. It is making my daily word count higher. I’m starting to think that lots of reading, whether it’s my WIP or other writers’ books, sorta exercises my own writing muscle.

On another note, I am two days away from the anniversary of my life as a full-time writer on the road (or stopped in the desert, LOL). I suppose that calls for a special post.

Is there anything in particular I should include in my anniversary post? Any questions I should answer? And does your process change? Have you ever forgotten, then returned, to elements of your old process?

I’ve struggled to get my attention span under control this year. It’s improved a lot, mostly because I’ve changed my eating habits and I’ve been feeding my brain lots of oils. (Fish oil and Omegas.) Oils are magic brain food, seriously. Some studies say they’re more effective than Ritalin and the like.

I still yearn for my 5K writing days of old, and I’m not there yet.

Via a blog at Writer Unboxed, “The Internet, Your Brain, Your Writerly Self,” I discovered an article from a recent NPR show, “This Is Your Brain Online.” In it, Nicholas Carr explains how the internet is worsening our attention spans:

"Neuroscientists and psychologists have discovered that, even as adults, our brains are very plastic," Carr explains. "They’re very malleable, they adapt at the cellular level to whatever we happen to be doing. And so the more time we spend surfing, and skimming, and scanning … the more adept we become at that mode of thinking."

Humankind’s natural state is one of distractedness. In the wild, we needed to be constantly shifting our attention in a state of scanning alertness for the many dangers and threats to our daily survival.

Prolonged, solitary thought is not the natural human state, but rather “an aberration in the great sweep of intellectual history that really just emerged with [the] technology of the printed page.”

This was a revelation to me. Granted, I am a little more scatterbrained than normal people, but still. If I view a short attention span as a normal state instead of a deficiency, I can view developing a longer attention span as a practice. If our brains are so adaptable, why can’t I train it to single-task instead of multi-task?

So I’m trying.

I’ve been working on reading for hours. That sounds odd, but in the past few years, it seems I can’t go for a half hour of reading without jumping online. I remember when I used to curl up with a book for hours. Every night.

I’ve found that if I start my writing day by reading for an hour instead of hopping around online, my brain more easily focuses on writing.

I’m trying to do everything in long, single-minded stretches, one thing at a time. Even Facebook. I feel like it’s helping. Yesterday I had my first 4K day in months.

I’ve started meditating, but I’m still at thirty seconds. My brain sorta goes berserk. But hey, even if I add only ten seconds a day, I’ll be up to an hour in a year.

I’m writing first, no matter what. If I don’t produce content, I’ll starve. I’ve been dropping the ball on the little tasks in a writing life, which I regret, but I’m working hard not to let the little emergencies take precedence over writing new words.

Don’t get me wrong: I love Facebook. I love seeing how my friends are doing, I love touching base with them, and I love feeling like there’s a “water cooler” at work. Studies show that distracting yourself for a little bit improves creativity, too.

I just want to keep my distractions as distractions. There are days where writing feels like the distraction from the internet, rather than the other way around.

What was your mind like before Facebook and Twitter and the like? Do you work on stretching and strengthening your attention span? How?

I’ve been torn of late. I’m building three worlds concurrently, as I’m sure you’re sick of hearing about by now, and I’m not sure where to use what.

They’re sort of in a race. One world pulls forward as the most interesting, then the other, then the other. One is for Pseudie, one for Pseudie to self-publish, and one for Natasha to pitch NY. (I believe in diversification of assets. )

The decision of which world to use where is killing me.

There’s always the fear that this will be your last great idea, or your best idea. Sometimes this surfaces as “Why waste this great idea now? Why not wait until I’m a better writer?” Others surface in series, where the temptation is to hold back in one book, for fear you won’t be able to top it in the next book.

Every time I shift my focus, the one I’m working on gets better and more interesting. The more practice I have, the better things go.

Ideas and books don’t improve in a steady line. Some will sell well and some won’t. (There is nothing like watching one of your worst books outsell your best book by far…) Each idea and book won’t be better than the last, although we hope it’s more skilled and better crafted.

At some point, you just have to believe in the law of statistics. Keep building, keep writing, keep creating, and eventually, if you write enough, you’ll hit the right idea in the right place at the right time.

If not, there’s always the next idea.

There is an anguish worse than that of a good idea: How I wish I could write faster! Much faster! I think I could be happy with 10K a day…

Do you ever feel torn about what to do with your ideas? Which one to write next? Which one to save?

Writing is a relationship. I’m a little afraid to jinx it, but writing is going well, lately. I’m definitely all over it, trying to figure out why it’s going well so that I can replicate the situation, environment, and mindset for the next time writing becomes challenging.

I’m not sure if it was like this for all my schoolmates, but during my time in conservatory and thereafter, I was rather… down-to-earth and business-like in making a career and making money from music. In other words, keeping the passion and love alive was definitely not on my priority list.

Being “professional” was sorta drilled into your skull at all costs. (I am a rare bird in that I remember my time in conservatory fondly. The majority of my friends spent about a decade “getting over” the experience. When I was there, they hired a full-time psychiatrist to help students deal.)

I remember one friend being rather proud of herself for being down-to-earth enough to realize that “it’s a job, just like any other.”

It worked, honestly. I think C.I.M. boasts that 90% (around there) of their alumni make their living in music. But personally, I got burnt out. That was my fault, not C.I.M.’s. I sometimes cut corners out of what I loved about being a musician and teacher in order to make money.

Bad idea. It kills your enthusiasm, stresses you out, and burns you out, which, long-term, gives you less profit.

With writing, I’ve been careful to take the opposite approach: I protect the writing at all costs. I am trying to nurture my enthusiasm. I refuse to settle. Sure, what I’ve learned about making money in the arts is up there in my head, and I can’t completely turn it off (and perhaps my approach only works because of this), but my focus is on having fun and loving story and giving fiction everything I’ve got.

So I’m very careful to monitor what motivates me and what does not. Writing is going awesome at the moment. It’s erotica, though. I’ve got to figure out how to apply that to a NY-able genre.

Another big difference is that I have a lot more on my plate to write. And people already want it. That makes a big difference for my motivation.

Oddly, I have some deadlines coming up, but I’m writing as if I have none—and writing faster because of it. I’m just spending every second I can writing because I can’t wait to get back to my world and my characters.

I forgot what this was like.

I’ve been going to the movies a lot. That’s important for me. I love story, and in a movie I can disappear in it. When I read, it’s a little like working. I analyze too much while reading, so movies help me disappear in story.

I’m trying to remember these things, so I can keep the love alive.

How do you keep the love alive in your relationship with writing? What motivates you the most?

Writing is going much better. I’m back to fiction, exclusively, at least for the next two months or so. (Although I’ll probably put my Kindle project on the Kindle. Why not? I’ll continue that series in a day or two.) Nothing like doing something you don’t like to remind you how much love what you do like.

I’ve noticed, over the years, that I have a tendency to write a ton in summer and fall, and dry up a bit in the spring. Isn’t that weird? Maybe it’s because the summer solstice has been approaching, but I’ve been feeling much better.

Whenever I go through a dry spell, and I really go through about one a year (even if I’m still writing during it), I always fear this is how it will be forever.

But this time, I have a few new rules for myself.

No more grind. When I grind words out and write things that aren’t who I am or what aligns with the universe’s plan for me, everything dries up and writing becomes a chore. If I can’t bring a little enthusiasm and spirit to the table, forget it.

No more practical ideas. I used to believe that I could write any idea. Probably I can, but that quickly turns into the grind. From now on, I refuse to waste my time on projects that don’t capture my heart and imagination. My imagination has to want escape to the world I’m writing in.

Oddly, I’ve learned a couple things about myself. I would be very hesitant to say I write fantasy, but my best work has fantasy leanings. I need to embrace that side of me more.

And the other thing, when all my ideas seem to be lackluster and I lose your mojo, it WILL come back. It really will. Eventually. I always fear it won’t.

So what did you learn during your last dry spell? How do you get through them? And what rules do you have to protect the writing?

Sometimes you latch on to stories when there’s nothing else to grab onto. Every time I do the dishes, I listen to the only CD I have on the road with me: the soundtrack of Hope Floats.

When the movie came out, I saw it a million times. I was really sick at the time, two years in and I thought I would never get better. (It took another five years.) It’s the only DVD release date that I knew and waited for and ran to the store the day it came out.

Hope Floats gave me hope at a time when I was out of hope.

So I was surprised, as I was doing the dishes the other day, that the lyrics to one of my favorite songs were so depressing.

Paper Wings
(Gillian Welch / David Rawlings)

Paper wings, all torn and bent
But you made me feel like they were heaven sent.
Paper wings, not real at all
But they took me high enough to really fall.
Your paper kisses, faded too soon
Just like a paper rose, beneath a paper moon.
Paper wings, paper wings
Oh how could I expect to fly with only paper wings.

Angels singing, didn’t you hear?
If only I’d listened close, when they whispered in my ear.
Paper wings, paper wings
Oh how could I expect to fly with only paper wings.
I tried to fly but found that I had only paper wings.

Here’s the song, if you want to listen to it as you read.

The singer strikes me as a little bitter at being inspired by just enough false hope to almost succeed but ultimately fail. At the end, she even seems a little upset with herself for her foolishness at believing she could fly.

I disagree with the song, as much as I love it. Sometimes paper wings can carry you to the next day, give you enough time to grow real ones.

(Paper Art by Helen Musselwhite)

I’ve finished over twenty longer works and I still get scared that I won’t be able to finish the next one. I thought that fear would fade, but it doesn’t. Maybe because I wasn’t able to finish my spy thriller, I’m having a bit of a battle with the fear that I won’t be able to finish this YA.

My readers really inspire and encourage me. At least Pseudie is having a new release in a few weeks, and that usually cheers me up, if I get reader mail. I hope so. It’s one of my favorites.

(Altered book by Brian Dettmer)

As I was checking out paper art to find an image of paper wings, I saw this castle. Isn’t this so beautiful you just want to die? The train tracks you see? They have a train. A train that works. Made of paper. Isn’t that beyond amazing?

(A Castle on the Ocean by Wataru Itou)

It took four years to make, FOUR YEARS!

Sometimes art is a long process filled with doubts. I have too much instant gratification in me. Writing is harder, the slower I write. I should start giving myself stickers or something to get me through, LOL.

I guess you have to hang on to your vision, hang onto any hope you can find, even if it’s paper wings. Or maybe hope doesn’t matter at all. Maybe it only matters that you just sit down and write, hope or not.

“[Momma] says that beginnings are scary, endings are usually sad, but it’s the middle that counts the most. Try to remember that when you find yourself at a new beginning. Just give hope a chance to float up. And it will…”

What gives you hope when you’re staring at your fears? How do you motivate yourself through the long work of writing a novel?

…off to Alaska again. I’ll be here, alone and sweating in the Arizona summer heat. Writing.

Speaking of writing, I’ve set myself to doing a bunch of non-fiction until I meet certain financial goals, and while I still find it interesting, I feel rather blocked when it comes to fiction. I’m not liking that. I’m feeling blocked about blogging, too.

Look at me whine.

*sigh*

Well, if this isn’t the most irritable blog post I’ve written in a long time.

*sits and tries to think of something to say*

You know what I miss? Having fun talking about craft. I used to talk and think about writing and how to write all the time. Now I don’t. What happened? It’s fun to talk shop!

I was looking over some of the stuff I wrote a year or two again, and I question whether I could write that well now. Is that silly? That’s silly. I don’t know what’s gotten into me.

I hope this is a phase that ends tonight.

How goes the writing with you?