Back from the Brink

Oh, boy, folks, have I had a crazy few weeks. Grab a cuppa coffee/tea/wine/beverage of your choice and let me tell you all about it.

So I needed a mini break of blogging because I hadn't quite figured out how to manage my writing, my "new" job, family, life, and blogging all at the same time. I think I've figured it out now, so we're gonna try a trial of me blogging on Tuesdays and Saturdays for a while, and see how it works. Please bear with me as I reintegrate myself into the blogosphere.

This is your brain on editing.
Any questions?

Then there was the writing. In late October not only was I trying to manage some pretty intense revision on my novel (currently listed on my WIPs page as FIGHTING FATE, though I plan to change the title to IN FLAMES). I wanted to get a full round of revision finished before NaNoWriMo started, while also juggling my NaNo prep. That took a LOT out of me, and I edited until my brains turned into liquid goo. Seriously. It was messy.

My own personal NaNo shield

On November first, having finished that round of editing, I was happy to accept my NaNo fate. I greeted it with a warm, strong handshake. And on the fateful afternoon of November 1st, I had an extra meeting with my boss, wherein he asked me to work overtime in preparation for our display at an upcoming conference (I work for a small, specialty academic publisher). And in my inner ear, I heard my NaNo plans go *squish*. My boss and I negotiated trading the days in early November for days around Thanksgiving, so not all was lost, but it put some stress on my NaNo plans nonetheless.

As of November 12th, one-third of the way through the month, I had only written about 14K over the course of 4 authentic writing days. Ouch.

On the morning on November 13th, as I'm leaving my house to pick up a friend, I grab my phone to let her know I'm coming, and see that I have a missed text message from my boss--who, I might add, never sends me text messages. It said, more or less, that he was in the hospital, post-surgery after having had a heart attack. Everything okay. Call to talk about conference prep. SERIOUSLY. My boss is in the intensive care unit on a Sunday morning and wants to talk about conference prep. Now, granted, the conference started on the 17th. My boss isn't really all that Type-A, but we did still have a lot of work to do, and that essentially took the editorial side of our house from 3 to 2 employees doing the bulk of the work (we have a few work-study students, but regular employees, we are three). So now add more overtime work to my schedule over the next three days, making the first day of the conference (Nov 17th) day 5 for writing. Not a good sign.

See how the Jell-O powder gets all goopy with a little water?

Not to mention that on the 17th and the 18th I was about as worthless a writer as an uncooked box of Jell-O, from working 10hour days three days in a row, and the emotional turmoil of talking to my boss on the phone while he was doped on morphine and falling asleep. Yup, powdery Jell-O.

Somehow, though, I managed to pull a few days writing between 5-6K. Don't ask me how. Perhaps some superhuman feats of strength that even kryptonite couldn't squelch. Who knows? But I have to attribute at least a little of my success to Hart Johnson and her stupendous idea for hour-long sprint-writing sessions. I think those were ultimately my saving grace. Coordinated over Facebook, I would periodically join Hart, among others, on these sprints, and both the time and the community support helped a ton.

And, imagine, through all of that, I actually won!

Granted, according to my word verification, I only have 50,002 words, but I don't care! I'm 2 words over what they need (although, according to my Scrivener file, I have 50,019), and that's what matters.

Anyway, now it's December. A little over two weeks until the holiday break comes, which will entail lots of time with family, friends, and fruitcake. I'm already celebrating by eating too many sweets and listening to Christmas music while I cook and bake. And, dangit all, I am MAKING these cookies if it kills me. I just have to find some sweet rice flour first...

Be seeing you around the blogosphere!

A Pseudo-Hiatus

Hi folks.

This picture will never die
because it says so many things.

You may have noticed my absence last week. I almost wrote a post about the week that swallowed my soul (because, really, it did) and then spit me back out, but I didn't think you wanted to read all about my worries and woes. So I kept it to myself.

Unfortunately, I'm still in recovery. While I love blogging, and miss you all terribly, some things have to give. So I'm taking a pseudo-hiatus for a little while.

What does that mean? Well, it means I will be blogging irregularly—probably once a week—through the end of October. I have a few blog posts promised for various reasons, and those will happen. But I'm not sure I can handle more than that.

To Campaigners in my groups, I owe you an apology. I didn't realize how hectic things were right now, and I probably shouldn't have signed up. I will still come visit you (if I haven't already), but I can't be the active Campaigner that I had hoped to be.

So, the bottom line is that I'll be around, just not as much as I'd like. Here's hoping things settle down a little more by November, so I can NaNoWriMo again!

*hugs*

Lost and Found Blogfest

Today I'm participating in the Lost and Found Blogfest, hosted by Myne Whitman to celebrate her reaching 500 followers. Congratulations, Myne!

As you can see, the task is to write about something you've lost and (re)found. So here's my story. It involves finding two things at different intervals. Two for the price of one :)

WARNING: This story is somewhat personal, discusses dark material, and eludes to violence (though imaginary/from a dream). Please read with caution.


My father and I were very close, especially after I went away to college. So, several years after I graduated, when he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer on July 3, 2008, I broke. Broke down. Completely. I'm the only child and daddy's little girl, and this destroyed my world. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. And when he died on October 1—only a couple of days before my birthday—it all got worse. The walking dead seemed animated in comparison to me. I stared at the TV without any idea what I was watching, and lost close to 40 pounds in about three months.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

That's when my nightmares began. One in particular plagued me night after night. I stand on a beach, my jeans rolled up to my knees as the waves swallow my feet over and over. I'm not prepared, though I know what's coming. And from nowhere, I'm attacked. Literally, from thin air. Over and over. I'll spare you the details, but the pain would continue for what seemed like an eternity before I would wake in a cold sweat, sometimes screaming.

This dream tortured me night after night for at least a month. In late November or early December, I realized that the only way for me to take control of the dream would be to write it down. I needed to own it instead of it owning me. So, I did.

This is my first finding. I began writing again. I hadn't written anything beyond term papers in ten years.

Picture courtesy of http://buffy.wikia.com/

This dream became the climax in my epic Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction—sort of. It involved the Buffy crew but added several new characters of my own creation, including my new MC, Edie (see Season 8 for how I could easily do this). I shared the pieces I wrote with fewer than a handful of close friends, and only the parts that were actually written. I jumped around in writing it—a lot—and my outline grew toward War and Peace-length proportions. It became unmanageable, and while I plugged along at it, it grew difficult and tiring to keep all the subplots straight.

The following July (2009), I had another idea, one that has led me to write Fighting Fate (which is its 72,482nd title). Edie and her beach sacrifice snuggled into the recesses of my Documents folder and started gathering dust.

About a week ago, I woke up thinking about Edie and her sacrifice. As my consciousness gathered strength over my dreaming mind, I realized that this story is worth saving. I can rework it, streamline it, remove the Buffy elements, and make it mine. Truly own it like I had wanted to do 2.5 years ago. I rediscovered my story. Now I think I'm going to spend a few months (re)plotting it, and potentially use it for my NaNoWriMo project in November.


Are you participating in Myne's blogfest? I'll be sure to stop by. 
Not participating? What have you lost and found again?

An Award :)

First, if you haven't heard yet or you're still on the fence, please join me and Charity for the HONE YOUR SKILLS Blogfest on March 16th. It's a chance to try your hand at a short story, get feedback from fellow writer-bloggers, and encouragement to try and publish it. We'd love to have you, so just click the link above or on the sidebar to join.
_____________________________________

Last week, I was given an award from Allan Russell at Publish or Perish AND from Michelle at Perfecting the Craft...

UPDATE: I also just received this award from Kristina at KayKay's Corner. Man, am I feeling the love or WHAT?

Kristina also gave me this award:

Thank you so much, Al, Michelle, and Kristina!

For those of you who don't know Al, he is the author of Veiled in Shadows, the beautiful cover of which is staring at me from the top of my to-read pile. Then again, maybe I'm just a sucker for the big blue eye :)

(On a side note, stop by on Monday for a guest post by Al.)

According to the rules of the award, I should tell you seven things about myself and then pass it on. Here's a random assortment of things you may not yet know about me. I'll limit myself to non-writing things this time. For other random Rosie facts, you can check out these other posts: from here, here (the the truth behind it), here, and one more.

1. As a recovering linguist, I'm a language junkie. I'm not fluent in any language (I sometimes contend that I'm not even fluent in English), though my husband likes to argue this point with me. Anyway, over the few decades of my life, I've studied (in no particular order) Spanish, French, German, Russian, Polish, Macedonian, and Welsh officially. If I have a dictionary, I can usually read Czech, Slovak, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian well enough. I also know lots of random syntax facts about Icelandic, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Dogon (my friend is currently working on a Dogon grammar).
2. I'm a graduate student in my last semester of coursework. There exists about a 2% chance that I will write a dissertation (with a 3% margin of error).
3. If I were ever to write a dissertation, I would write it on Polish syntax and the reflexive particle się. (I promise, it's a little more interesting than Wikipedia makes it out to be.) Last summer I got to meet Norbert Hornstein, whose most recent syntactic framework is called MOVE! (yes, with the exclamation point), and talk to him about my ideas using his framework. We argued a lot. We disagreed even more. It was fun and discouraging.
4. My graduate employment consisted of teaching Russian for only one year. I have never worked so hard. I taught in the 2007–2008 school year. Many of my former students were freshmen that year, and so are seniors now. I occasionally run into them on campus, and sometimes they even invite me out for a drink to catch up. :)
5. My current GA employment is working as the Managing Editor of the for Journal of Slavic Linguistics for Slavica Publishers. I prepare journals and books for publication. In addition to the journal, which I have worked on since 2006, I am currently preparing a book on Macedonian. It should be finish in the next month and be published by summer.
6. I have never published anything regarding linguistics. I've only edited other people's work. This doesn't bother me, though my colleagues think it should.
7. I had no intention of this turning into a Rosie's-grad-school-life post. Just to mix it up, I'll tell you that I got new glasses last week. They've got the Transitions lenses, too. I can't begin to tell you how excited they make me :)

Okay, now for passing on the love.

Carol at ArtziCarol Ramblings
Jan at Crazy Jane
Sallee at The Highly Educated Housewife
Medeia at Sharif Writes
Charity at My Writing Journey
Dezmond at Hollywood Spy

Thanks again to Al, Michelle, and Kristina for the award. :) Have a great Wednesday!

ReEdited Again

So I got no reading done this weekend on my stack of novels and memoirs. I printed off my first WIP last Wednesday (11pt font, .5" margins, 1.5 spacing).  I hadn't looked at the thing since before NaNo and had honestly forgotten many things about it.

For reference, especially since a handful of you awesome readers are new after Alex J. Cavanaugh's awesome Top Ten Music Blogfest on Monday (Welcome! And thanks again to Alex for hosting :) I must tell you the brief history of me and this WIP. I started it on 18 July 2009 (don't ask why I know the date; I just do) and worked tirelessly on it and its two sequels until all three were written at close to 450K in March 2010 (don't know this date, though). And then I never let go. And I didn't let go. And I didn't let go. I didn't start anything new...

Well, no, that's not entirely true. I worked on something akin to garbage for about 10 days, which amounted close to 50K of stylistic nonsense. Even the plot was pretty boring. But even so, I couldn't take my mind off of the first WIPx3.

So, like every idealistic new writer, I put my first 250 words on Nathan Bradsford's blog for critique (my entry has not yet been selected), and my first 5 pages up on WriteOnCon.

A. Sobering. Experience.

After only one person critiques my first 5 pages on WriteOnCon, without holding back and essentially telling me the idea had merit but the execution stank like rotten composting roasting on an open fire, I snapped back to reality. I got involved in a critique group, found a fabulous individual critique partner from it, and rewrote the whole thing.

Then it sat. I stopped looking at it in the middle of October. I did NaNo, finished my semester, started another project, and then realized I could finally get back to the original.

On Friday I read 1 chapter. I didn't get any further than that.

That was enough. I realized how all entirely completely utterly horribly wrong some of the basic foundational material was. While the main plot works okay, I have to entirely rework my backstory. I need to make it more relatable.

People had made this suggestion before, but I hadn't been ready to hear it. Three months away from my WIP, and I think I'm ready. We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, for the three of you who might have read a little bit of it, here's a shot of Emma Roberts (courtesy of EmmaRoberts.net), which is how I picture my MC, Anabelle (minus the blowing of the hair, of course, unless Olivia's around).

How do you edit? Have you had any editorial surprises? How long do you wait before you return to your WIP? How much overhaul do you take to your work? (Please don't tell me that it's perfect the first time! I might have a brain spasm.)

The Weekend Calls

This is officially my last weekend of summer before classes begin on Monday.  Many of our friends have returned, and so people are excited to get together before the grind starts in earnest.

In other news, I still have no good formula for balance.  I'm working on it.  Google Reader is helping, but it feels so impersonal without the cool layouts.

What else?  Oh!  My totally awesomely amazing friend Rory, who you may remember from the wedding we were in a few weeks ago, sent me a page from her Vanity Fair.  While we were waiting to have our hair and makeup done, she and I flipped through a couple of magazines, chatting about this and that.  She was in mid-sentence, but my enthusiasm got the better of me, and I twisted the magazine around to show her an ad and said, "This looks exactly like one of my characters."  Then, distracted by, oh, the WEDDING, I forgot about it until I got home.  When I tried to find a picture of the same woman online, it was obviously impossible since I didn't know her name or even the ad she was in, only that it was in the Vanity Fair with Lady Gaga on the cover.  In a moment of desperation, I emailed Rory and asked her to mail me the picture.  And she did!!  Thank you, Rory! Rawr! :)

PS—Having the ad in hand doesn't make it any easier to find it online to share with you.  If you care, it's from the Lady Gaga issue.  It's a Banana Republic ad on the left-hand page.  The woman in the ad is holding a black umbrella and is wearing a gray sweater and pink blouse.  She's a beautiful redhead with freckles and blue eyes. If you find an electronic copy of the ad, PLEASE let me know.  I keep my pictures together in a file on my computer for when I'm not at home, and I don't know when I'll be able to use a scanner next.

In other writing-related happenings, I recently joined an online critique group and it's awesome.  I've not only gotten some fabulous feedback, but I've had a chance to review other people's work and learn from their positives and negatives.  The folks are great, balancing the critiques with the good and the needs-improving.  Luck is what I can attribute to it.

One of the "events" from the group is finishing our word-count goals by the end of September.  This should prove interesting.  I have the original MS, which is close to 150K, but I'm changing a few things in the plot and rearranging certain events, and hoping to end up around 90-100K before more editing and cutting.  I'm currently at 34K, but since I'm reusing some of the old MS, I do have less than 66K to go in a month.  I'm thinking about adding a ticker to the sidebar, but I'm not sure where to get one.  Any suggestions?

How about you?  Any great writing news to share?

Return to the Old Life?

My real job started again today.  Well, actually, it never technically stopped.  I just stopped.  That's the beauty of freelance work, right?  If you don't do, it just doesn't get done.  I've promised my boss it will, and it will, just not by the time classes start on, er, Monday.

I suspect, due to a rush job that needs to be completed in the next 6-7 weeks, I won't be here quite as much.  It makes me very sad to admit this because it also means I won't have as much time for my own writing.  And while I'm taking a creative writing class, I don't imagine it will affect my work for NaNoWriMo this year.

I've been saying it all summer, but I need to prioritize.  I have a job with a definite deadline, and another one with a loose deadline.  I'm training a new employee at the publisher today and tomorrow, and I'll be her go-to person when she has questions.  Plus classes.  Plus writing.  Plus husband.  Plus laundry and cleaning and cooking and, oh, I should probably start going to the gym again. 

But not necessarily in that order.

In addition to my entire life that needs order and structure, I think my writing life does, too.  At the moment, I'm trying to follow too many blogs (and I love most of them and don't want to give them up!), have my own blog which I have already let slip over the past couple of days, working on helping out the folks in my new online critique group, putting my work over there, and, oh yeah, keeping up with my editing and planning for NaNoWriMo.  *whew*  Again, not necessarily in that order.  Unfortunately, for the past couple of weeks, other tasks from this list have trumped my own writing, and I'm not thrilled about this.

Oh, and no where in there did I mention reading.  I'm currently reading a memoir—Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bordain—an MG—Princess for Hire by Lindsey Leavitt—and Stephen King's On Writing is calling to me.  Oh, and a novel I won on GoodReads—No Place for Heroes by Laura Restrepo—and the novel I won from a FB contest—The Handbook for Lightening Strike Survivors by Michele Young-Stone.  And The Possessed by Elif Batuman, which I've been yearning to read for months and recently got my hands on.  Ack!

So, my attempt to organize and prioritize continues.  I think in addition to setting a minimum number of hours to work each day on the editing side, plus assuming I might do some school work here and there :) I'm going to set myself weekly goals for reading and writing.  Hopefully this will take the daily pressure off if I need to spend more time on my German, or the formatting on my editing job isn't working and takes twice as long as it should.  The writing will happen—it always does—but motivation to edit the text afterward tends to be elusive, and that's what needs to happen most right now.

Okay, ramble over.  We now return you to your regularly scheduling blogging.

How do you prioritize your life?  How do you fit writing into your (presumably) already hectic schedule?

PS—If you're doing NaNoWriMo this year, feel free to add me as your buddy.  I'm Rosie-C over there :)

The Liar Unveiled

A couple of days ago I offered 7 possible lies/truths for you.  It was up to you to decide which were which.  You've been waiting in anxious anticipation for the big reveal.  Wait no more, my friends!

Even the false statements have elements of truth to them, which I explain below.  Enjoy!

1.  When I was fifteen, I was fortunate enough to go on a vacation... ehem, "student ambassador" program to Europe.  While in London, we took a cruise down the Thames with the British prime minister.  And I fell asleep.  Oops!

False.  The guy on the boat wasn't the prime minister, but someone else from parliament.  I did fall asleep, though.

2.  While studying abroad in Russia in 1999, I twice went on camping trips in the Caucasian mountains with a non-violent Chechan guide.  My parents were none to happy, since this was less than a month after the Chechan war had started (again...).

False.  One of the students on our program who went camping and hiking with us decided to grow out his beard while in Russia, and was frequently mistaken for a Chechan, but was just a fun-loving guy from the Midwest.

3.  Also during my semester in Russia, I had to sort out some banking troubles I was having.  Unfortunately my Russian was *cough* downright atrocious, but I hadn't asked anyone to accompany me.  I spent much too much time trying to convey to the woman at the bank what the problem was, and she treated me like an idiot with the mental capacity of a four-year-old due to my poooooooor Russian.  A woman behind me in line became so incensed by how long it was taking, she began hitting me with her oversized purse, screaming something to the effect of "If this were still the Soviet Union, I wouldn't have to wait behind a..."  You can fill in the rest.  I ran away and returned a few days later with an interpreter.

False.  It was in a post office when the lady started beating me up (yeah, that part's true).  The postal clerk had decided, due to my knotted Slavic tongue, I must be a complete moron, and insisted on putting the stamps on each of my 20 postcards instead of giving the stamps to me.  When the woman started hitting me with her purse, I threw my money at the clerk and blotted.  Two of the postcards made it to their destinations.

4.  Pacifist that I am, I've been kangaroo hunting in New South Wales.  After someone shot a kangaroo that would become our dinner the next night, the kangaroo was tossed into the back of the pick-up with my friend and me, only to discover it wasn't actually dead yet...  It more or less had a seizure while my friend and I screamed.  The man driving got out of the truck and bashed the kangaroo's poor little head until it stopped again.

True.  My twelve-year-old homestay sister shot it.  She had wanted to show off for me and the other US teenage girl staying with them (aka, the other woman in the bed of the truck... who got kicked by the seizing kangaroo).  She had never used a shotgun by herself, and her father thought she had done a pretty decent job until we started screaming a couple of minutes later. 

I was 14 and a staunch vegetarian to boot.

5.  I am a seasoned world traveler (or so I like to tell myself), and at least half of my travel abroad occurred before I turned 18, but the only country I was taken to by my parents was Canada.

False.  My parents have never taken me abroad, even to Canada when it was so close to our Detroit relatives.  By the time I was 18, I had visited New Zealand, Australia, England, Denmark, Germany, France, and, yes, Canada, but with my best friend's family.

6.  When I was a kid, I love wearing my roller skates.  I wore them everywhere (though my mom drew the line at church, but I tried).  While I was outside one day hanging out with the boys down the block, they dared me to climb the tree in one boy's front yard.  Of course I accepted the challenge since I didn't want to look like a wussy girl.  With my roller skates still strapped on tight, I got most of the way up before I fell and broke my arm.  I didn't get to keep my roller skates after that :(

False.  My best friend from high school did this when she was a kid... though I changed a couple of details to account for my own clumsiness.  She never broke anything, and climbed trees in roller skates with her brothers all the time.

7.  My family frequently drove to Lake Catherine in Arkansas when we lived in northern Louisiana.  When I was four, I had a life jacket that said "Little Fishy" on the back.  Strapped into my Little Fishy life jacket, my dad's friend convinced my parents to let me go water skiing on the tyke-sized skis he had for his own kids.  After much enthusiasm on my part, they couldn't possibly say no.  And, might I add, it was AWESOME!  I love water skiing.

False.  I've never been water skiing, even though we had the boat when I was a kid, frequenting both Lake Catherine and later the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay.  I believe that if I had ever learned to water ski, I might not have found snow skiing so terrifying.


Do you have any wild, unbelievable stories?  I would LOVE to hear them!

Redefining Myself

As you know, this weekend I was in Wisconsin for a wedding.  During the treacherous seven hours of hair and makeup before the wedding, I had time to discuss writing with my dear friend Rory (she's with me in the last picture on Sunday's post).  For a few months, Rory's been talking about writing an erotic novella, and I've been encouraging her along the way because, well, it would be fantastic to know someone else who's writing and whose phone number exists in my cell phone.  How great would it be to be able to discuss writing in person, or at least using my own voice?  At the moment, this is a great fantasy of mine, so of COURSE I was going to encourage her.

Apparently, though, over the course of the weekend, and evidently due to many things I said, Rory has decided to give up the novella.  Of course this saddens me greatly.  I don't write erotica, but it might be fun to live vicariously through her sensual vision. *blush*  But, if it's what's best for her, then of course I support her decision.

The part about the whole situation I find...  Well, I must be a horrible writer since the only words I can think of are "odd", "surprising" and "inspiring", neither of which seems to really capture what I'm feeling.  Anyway, this is what she wrote in a recent blog post:

Though I imagine she'll in no way want to hear this, my friend Rosie played a big part in my half-ass epiphany. While were were hanging around being bridesmaids, she said several things which convinced me, "This is what a writer sounds like—this is someone who writes for lots of reasons, all of them better than mine."

She then mentions my dreaded editing that I had brought with me, and how I picked a model from a magazine and said the woman looked like my vision for one of my characters.  The reason I find this odd is, I find neither of these (or the other examples she mentioned) out of the ordinary.  I had never considered how this might make "a writer".  It surprised me because she's known me for more than a decade, and she's certainly never had cause to consider me "a writer" before. 

The inspiration from all this is to push me to live up to this new label.  Well, it's not new to me, and perhaps it's not new to you since I have introduced myself to cyberspace as a writer.  But Rory is someone who knows me beyond the blog, and has known me through many reinventions of myself. To have her consider me "a writer" makes me want to push myself even more to live up to the expectation.

What makes a writer "a writer"?  It's more than the simple act of putting words on paper.  What is the quintessential trait someone needs to be "a writer"? 


PS—If you somehow don't know about it, WriteOnCon is this week!  Get over there and check it out.  It's an amazing wealth of information right at your fingertips (well, only if you touch the screen...).  I posting my first five pages of The Monarch's Lies in the YA critique section.  If you've also posted something for critique, leave me a comment so I can find it.

Discipline

Over the last few (insert time span of your choice here; it's probably accurate), I've been having a crisis.  No, not a the-world-is-going-to-end! crisis, but more of a who-am-I-what-am-I-doing-here crisis.  I waffle about school, about what I want to do when I grow up, about what color to paint my toenails—everything.  Recently, I've been finding some answers, and feel like my life is moving back onto a paved road (I've never been one to enjoy off-roading).

Oddly enough, this all comes at the same time as I've been reading the Pray part of EPL.  No, this is not a book club post, in case you're worried. :)  Maybe just an extension of yesterday's—tangentially.  Anyway, reading about Liz's life at the ashram was thought provoking.  It made me want to discipline my life more, to find balance—mind/body/spirit—where there isn't any, and to better cultivate my spiritual side, which has been sadly neglected recently.  Yeah, yeah, the physical side has, too...

I'm not good at disciplining myself.  I've never kept a regular exercise routine going (by myself) for more than a couple of months.  I don't have good study habits.  My good eating habits can be attributed to my husband.  And I promise you, you do not want to see my house!

Now, I realize there's only so much I can do, but I can attempt to institute some discipline into my blogger-laden life.  Here are a few of my ideas on where to start.

• Get up a half-hour earlier and do yoga before class.
• Limit the amount of time I spend on blogger (I'll still be around, though, I promise!)
• Do they job I would get paid for doing if I did it (ah, the joy of freelancing...)
• Read something (that I didn't write) for at least one hour per day
• Don't forsake the trees I brought home with printed versions of the first five chapters of my novel!  (I thank them for their sacrifice for the good of YA fantasy)

This is a lot.  I'm going to try instituting one thing at a time.  Starting today, I'm incorporating the reading for at least one hour.  I've been reading, but sporadically and sometimes only for fifteen minutes (before I pass out!).  Saturday and Sunday are dedicated to that freelance book I'm editing.  Monday morning starts the yoga.  I've done yoga before but, like everything else, it was irregular at best.

The last addition to my list:

• Visit the Tibetan monastery on Sundays for their open prayer meetings.

That is the plan for Sunday morning.  Saturday morning=farmers market.  Sunday morning=Buddhist prayer/lesson.  I'm excited.

How do you discipline yourself (or not)?  Do you have a routine that you must stick to?  In the crazy world of jobs and children and spouses and friends and mothers and the whirlpool of chaos, how do you find time to read and write?  There must be disciple in that, right?