A Year in the Life, Week 31 – Your Perfect Opposite

This week’s prompt referenced the Griffin and Sabine books, which I meant to read once upon a time but which kind of fell of my radar. In particular, it talks about how the symbolism in Griffin’s letters implies that he is searching for his “perfect opposite” so he can live a balanced life. The starting prompt actually wasn’t about opposites at all — it asked instead to take three items and make them into symbols of something. The extension exercises delved more into the opposites theme, but I didn’t do any of the extensions.

A Year in the Life, Week 29 – A Recipe

The prompt from A Year in the Life for this weekend was “a recipe” — that is, how do you put together something you know how to create well? It was ironic because I got this prompt when I sat down to write the night I finished my Once a Month Cooking for November. My husband was away at a workshop that weekend, so I spent one of my first weekends alone since I got married. Luckily, I used to be an expert in this field.

How to Spend a Weekend Alone

Ingredients

48 hrs solituide
DVDs
Internet connection/computer
Books
Journal
Protein bars and other quick or non-meals

If you find yourself alone for the weekend, don’t despair! This can be an opportunity for reflection, personal growth, and rejuvenation.

It’s best if you know in advance that you will be spending the weekend alone. This gives you some time to mentally prepare. Think of all the things you might do when your partner, family, or room-mates are away. You might watch the romantic movie that’s too cheesy for everyone else’s tastes, or watch all your favorite “shipping” moments fro your favorite couple without having to explain why you’re watching just 5 minutes of a dozen X-Files episodes.

Still, even if you look forward to some aspects of your weekend alone, all that time to yourself might feel overwhelming. This tentative schedule can help you get started.

Friday Night

The weekend is here at last! Give yourself some downtime — eat leftovers or order takeout, and settle in for a movie you’ve wanted to watch. If you like to stay up late when you’re home alone, watch a series marathon, or make the movie a double feature.

Saturday

Sleep in as long as you like — no one will judge! But this is the day when you’ll feel better about yourself if you’re a little bit productive. Clean the house or run some errands in the first half of the day. Consider using the second half of the day for creativity. Write in your journal, bust out the magnetic poetry, play an instrument, or make homemade gifts. Feel the bliss of “losing yourself” in a creative endeavor.

As the evening rolls in, give yourself the chance to relax again. Curl up with a good book, or plunk yourself down in front of the TV. At this point, a little junk food might help you round off the night.

Sunday

Go to a different church than usual — maybe one you’re curious about, or one you’ve drifted away from that you’re starting to miss. This gives you a new experience, and you don’t have to answer questions about why you’re alone at your regular place of worship.

This is a good day to get outside. Take a walk or a bike ride, and bring a book so you can stop in a pretty area, perhaps a park, to read. Reflect on and enjoy your last few hours of solitude.

Sunday is a good day for making something special to get you through the week ahead — a mixx CD to listen to in your car, or a batch of cookies to pack in your work lunches.

Before you know it, that door will open and the people you share your life with will return. Hopefully your time alone has given you a new appreciation for them — and, of course, for yourself!

A Year in the Life, Week 27: Own a Place

This week’s A Year in the Life exercise was about “owning” a place. I wrote it while taking the Amtrak from Minnesota to Milwaukee for the Call To Action retreat.

How strange that I always get these prompts that are very place specific when I am traveling.

As I write this, our seven-hour-late train is bumping gently along, as the hostess announces a complimentary beef stew dinner. Perhaps I’ve been on this train before, and perhaps I haven’t. I rode this train to, or this line, at least, when I was 19, heading to Chicago and then to Memphis. I found Peter* in Chicago, and tried to be eager about it, and all I remember about it is that he picked up my bag for me, put it in a locker, held up his hand to dismiss the hawkers on the street, then took me out for Chicago-style pizza. And I don’t remember whether the pizza was good, only that he ogled the waitress, and I felt as though he was trying to make me jealous or insecure, but all he made me was disgusted.

I don’t think I met him again on the return trip.

Strangely enough, our conductor on this trip reminds me of him–a similar look to his face, a similar friendly demeanor that is easily distracted and not willing to go deeper, even if he likes to give the impression of it. I learned a lot about Amtrak from him, though. I guess I learned a fair amount from Peter, too.

I never imagined being on this trip back then, 13 years ago, with my husband beside me who never ogles waitresses when he’s having dinner with me, and who spent hours messing with his phone and his computer so I could have Internet access for the ten minutes I need it to approve my sub’s report.

Some things haven’t changed. The train is still full of Amish people and people complaining on their cell phones. It is a place both ever and never changing, a place that sees its sunsets and its sunrises in different cities, states, with different people. It is one place and it is many places, and I write this now that the view outside the window is dark because it is the only time I can tear my eyes away from the orange and yellow fire leaves, the width of the Mississippi, the graffiti under bridges and the forgotten scrap metal yards. Now that darkness has fallen, there are moments when we can’t tell we’re moving at all, when the track is so smooth, and the sound of the world going by is a strange lulling hum that could be coming from outer space.

When I’m on an airplane, the distance between and the method of crossing it is a necessary evil. But on the train, with the man I love beside me and a world I love outside the window, it is the most beautiful part of the journey.

* Name has been changed

A Year in the Life, Week 26: Self-Reflection Week

Can you believe it? I feel like I Just posted my quarterly review yesterday, and it’s already time for my six-month review. It went all right, although I think I may have gotten a little too snarky to my boss near the end. Think she’ll keep me around? 😉

A Year in the Life, Week 24: This is a Story About …

Although I’ve been keeping up with my Year in the Life journaling, the last two exercises, which I wrote while on my trip to Puerto Rico, were not especially inspiring. Now that I’m home, today’s exercise helped me crystallize the experience in Puerto Rico. I find I often can’t or don’t write about trips while I’m on them. I know people who hardly ever write except to keep “trip journals,” who need something to shake them up a little to inspire them to write. While I’m traveling, I’m too immersed and overwhelmed by the experience itself to write about it — but that doesn’t bother me anymore, because now I know that the memories and meanings will continue to surface for the rest of my life in “ordinary time,” and that there will be many more opportunities to write about it, from a place that understands more.

This week’s prompt was to begin (and to repeat) your writing with the words, “This is a story about …” So, without further ado, my story about Puerto Rico.

This is a story about an airplane shaking over an ocean, and not knowing what I would find when it landed. It’s about the white-haired cabby who picked us up but conversed very little, and the way seeing Walgreen’s comforted me. It’s about my misgivings when I saw balconies and windows enclosed with iron bars, and how soon I was so used to it that it meant very little.

This is a story about driving around Ponce for hours looking for non-existent laundromats, and finally finding one manned by a teenager in Arecibo. It’s about saving chicken from Burger King to give to a frightened stray dog, and leaving our hotel room ate night hoping to find the resident cat. It’s about Church doors wide open, and how you were hesitant to go inside. This is a story about a world that smelled strange — fish and seaweed and garbage and sand and sun. It’s about huge metallic structures I never did understand, and some that I kind of did. It’s about being with you 24/7, and how hard being apart again was when we returned. It’s about fights while washing laundry in the sink, and the anger that propelled me all the way up to the Arecibo Observatory.

Arecibo Observatory, the largest radio telescope in the world.

This is a story about the beauty and terror of unexpected, narrow mountain roads, and the queasy mix of sadness and relief when it was over. It’s about people who buried their chiefs two thousand years ago, and the hurricane that revealed them. It’s about getting lost on public transportation, eating too much Mofongo, watching too much reality TV and Juno three times in one day. It’s about not remembering my Spanish until the very end.

It’s about the way I held your hand during the explosions in Iron Man, and how we cried watching a movie with English subtitles. It’s about how we couldn’t spend all our arcade tokens in time, and how I came home with a folder full of tickets and itineraries I can’t bring myself to throw away.

A Year in the Life, Week 19: Before and After

Yesterday’s A Year in the Life exercise was to write about a “before and after” experience. I wrote about getting married, which is the most recent dividing line in my life.

Writing and the Immeasurable Payout

Recently, I subscribed to Holly Lisle’s e-newsletter on a recommendation from Publishing E-books for Dummies, which I’m reading as part of my Rumpled ebook project. Although my inbox is full with newsletters and updates that I often don’t have time to read, I’m glad I took a look at Holly’s post about whether writing is worth the price. I recommend that not just writers, but anyone who wonders about the “price” of their dreams, take a look.

As a freelancer who juggles work for a variety of clients, as well as a part-time job with fluctuating hours, I often find myself weighing costs and benefits in my head before I accept any project, knowing that to do so means I may have to give up others. Questions include …

1. How long will the work take me, and how much does the project pay? In other words, what will be my approximate “per hour” rate?
2. How enjoyable is the work? Or, conversely, how boring, difficult, or frustrating is it?
3. How reliable is this client at paying on time, or how long will I have to wait to get paid?
4. If the pay-rate is low, are there other benefits — such as building up my portfolio, reaching a certain audience, or bringing me closer to something I want?

The best projects, of course, are the ones that are enjoyable and that pay well. But I will sometimes sacrifice higher pay for work that I find more enjoyable. Ultimately, though, my goal as a freelance writer is to get higher pay for fewer hours of work … so that more of my time is freed up for my own writing. In fact, being able to make my own writing a priority was largely the impetus that pushed me to transition from work as a full-time staff person to a freelancer. The reality of making money as a freelancer means that I don’t have significantly more time to write than I did when I worked for a company full time; what I do have is greater flexibility, which means I can work my other commitments around my writing. And that is worth a lot.

Still, I learned long ago that I cannot apply this cost/benefit model to my writing. Doing so would utterly depress me. Ultimately, I want to publish a novel with a major publishing house — that’s my most desired tangible outcome of the investment I make in writing. But even if that happened, there’s no way that the advance would ever compensate for the years that I put into getting me to that point. If it takes approximately 10,000 hours to attain true mastery, and you secure a $10,000 advance (a fairly generous sum, and unlikely from small presses), that translates into $1 per hour for your work. As a freelancer, I won’t work for those rates, and neither should anyone else.

But I’m not writing this post as a freelancer. I’m not writing my novels or my journal entries as a freelancer, either. I’m writing them for something else, something that is not easily quantified, and that has meaning even if they never bring any money in. I don’t write with hopes of payment and recognition; but I think these things would be mighty nice perks, since I’m going to be writing anyway.

And I am going to be writing anyway. I appreciate a “break” from writing between big projects, but after a month or so I start to feel “off” without a writing project threading through my life. I still get excited for new ideas and for old ones; I still feel as though there may never be enough time in the world for me to do all the writing I want to do, to tell all the stories I want to tell. This both daunts me and inspires me. I expect that my writing will take different forms throughout my life, but I know that to stop writing would be to lose a part of myself — perhaps even a crucial one, without which the other parts of myself might crumble apart. And who could put a price on that?

A Year in the Life, Week Eleven: Prescience

This week’s exercise in A Year in the Life was to write about a word we’d learned from someone else, and the context in which we’d learned it. I wrote about the word prescient, which I learned from my best friend, Katrina.

A Year in the Life, Week 9: My Motto

Today’s “Year in the Life” exercise asked me to write a “motto” for my life right now. I went for the first thing that came to my mind (because these exercises are supposed to be about writing, right, and not sitting there thinking of what to write?)

Writing: My Difficult Task Done Well

When I was taking the Know Thyself course through Coursera earlier this spring, one thing that stuck with me was the finding that lottery winners are not happier than the general population. I had heard this before, of course, and, as someone who doesn’t find a lot of happiness in money or in stuff, it always made sense to me. But Timothy Wilson, one of the researchers who has studied the phenomenon, suggested that one of the causes of stagnating or even declining happiness in lottery winners was the fact that many of them quit work.

He reflects that, although many people don’t take much note of it, much of our happiness comes from the feeling of satisfaction we get for “a difficult job done well,” something that most people encounter in their work lives at one time or another. Removing work therefore removes that particular, possibly significant, source of satisfaction.

My first thought was, “But I could get that from my writing!” (So yes, I think that I could be quite happy as a lottery winner. ;)).

In the past year, I’ve really reframed the way I think about writing so that I don’t see its purpose as being a means toward achieving my dream of publishing a book, but so that I take value from the journey itself — the satisfaction I get from untangling a thorny plot issue, creating a beautiful sentence, or understanding my own experiences more deeply when I journal. Writing has essentially become a spiritual practice, something that threads a layer of meaning throughout my whole life, regardless of whether it brings outward success or not. And I certainly get the satisfaction of “a difficult job done well” when I manage to do it (and the satisfaction of at least trying when a difficult job is not done well). On most days, writing is the hardest thing I do, which is why I try to do it before 10 am — after that, the rest of the day feels easy.

I don’t think I need paid work to have a sense of satisfaction with my life, although the external validation of being recognized for it is a perk. Still, I think my own interests and compulsion to work on them without pay would be enough to keep me feeling productive and satisfied while a windfall took care of the details like food and housing. As it stands, my marriage has given me the chance to relax a bit about finances — my husband and I live simply, but I’m able to do things now that were very difficult for me to swing financially when I was single, such as home improvement, more upgraded technology, and travel. I’m grateful for that. But at the bottom of it all, we live below our means because what we both want most of all is time. We want time to devote to our personal “difficult tasks” done well — writing and learning for me, and coding for him. All money is to us is the means to take care of the necessities of life so that we can put as much time and energy as possible into the things we’re truly passionate about.

Although I’m more financially secure now than I have been in the past, I’m also more passionate about finding ways to “do more with less,” with the hope that someday that will allow us to be less beholden to our paid work. We’ve discussed that if we somehow came into a large sum of money, we’d put it away and give ourselves a yearly allowance and use the opportunity to work full-time toward our creative goals. We think we could live on 1 million dollars for twenty years — and perhaps after all that time devoted to our passions, they would have finally started reaping some financial rewards! Until then, we keep our day jobs, dependent on them for the cost of living, while we reap the majority of our satisfaction from our jobs that offer that very satisfaction as their only reward.