Banishing the Mind Monkeys

Yesterday morning I had a visitation of the mind monkeys.  You know the ones I mean: they drop in unannounced, stomp on all of your shiny new ideas, tear things up and leave slimy banana peels all over your outlook for the day. The fact that they showed up is not surprising.  They used to live here.

I didn’t realize, until they burst on the scene yesterday morning, that they’d actually been out wreaking havoc elsewhere.  In my writer brain over the last week or so there has been mostly contentment, pleasure in the work at hand, inspiration, excitement, and enthusiasm.  Rather than sulking in corners, my muse has been throwing flowers and candy my way.  Mind you, her aim is bad and she often bops me in the nose with something hard or prickly, but she’s been forthcoming and almost cooperative.

When the mind monkeys reappeared, it was immediately clear that absence doesn’t always make the heart grow fonder.  I prefer to write without them.  It’s nice to venture through the door to work with plot ideas simmering or the brain running searches for that perfect but elusive word.  Too much energy gets tied up in trying to mitigate the mind monkey damage.

Check this out:

“ Our minds–made up of our thoughts, beliefs, and self-talk–are always “on.” According to scientists, we have about 60,000 thoughts a day. That’s one thought per second during every waking hour. No wonder we’re so tired at the end of the day!
And what’s even more startling is that of those 60,000 thoughts, 95 percent are the same thoughts you had yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Your mind is like a record player playing the same record over and over again… Talk about being stuck in a rut…
Still, that wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the next statistic: for the average person, 80 percent of those habitual thoughts arenegative. That means that every day most people have more than 45,000 negative thoughts… Dr. Daniel Amen, a world-renowned psychiatrist and brain imaging specialist, calls them automatic negative thoughts, or ANTs.” ~ Marci Shimoff from Happy for No Reason

My goal for this weekend?  Keep out the mind monkeys.  Oh, sure – they can be entertaining – but the writing goes so much better without them.  Somebody, I think it was Joseph Campbell, said “never complete a negative thought.”  I’m trying to create an awareness – catching those thoughts as they are going through my brain and changing them to positive. Optimism and consistent effort, those are the tools for me.

Yes, I’m bound to relapse.  I’m sure I’ll be seen here before too long, whining about this or that rejection, or how the writing isn’t working out.  You have permission to throw banana peels at me.

Friday, and the Water’s Fine

Friday and I’m back to work, with a weekend On Call ahead of me.  I was thinking about my writing goals for this weekend, and how this place I am currently at in my writing is different than – well, anywhere I’ve ever been.

I spent the last three days in a frenzy of preparation for what Em calls Query Road. I’m more inclined to go with the metaphor RA Ballard and I came up with on Twitter the other day. Getting ready to query feels like standing on a cliff, with the sea spread out a mile below, while all of your new writer friends are shouting, “come on, jump in, it’ll be fun.” With a hefty dose of angst and a lot of help from my friends (Tasha and Em, I love you) I got a query letter and synopsis together, and took the plunge.

The water is cold, but refreshing, as I knew it would be.  Frankly, I was mostly afraid I might smash my head on the rocks on my way down. Now that I’m here, I feel more at peace than I have in weeks.  The company is excellent, and I have done what I set out to do.  I have a marketable product, a professional query letter, and a solid synopsis all ready to go.  First rejection is back, but it was personalized and positive.  From here on out, I’m trying to think of this process as the business venture that it is.

And I’m back to writing.  Now that the pressure is off, I’m working on Swimming North once again.  And you know what?  I love this manuscript, with all of its faults and weaknesses and weirdness.  Not to mention the challenges it presents. My brain is humming with possibilities, the muse is dancing around the room singing, and I’m just trying to keep up with her.  Today, while I was driving home from work, she gifted me with a couple of ideas that nearly took my breath away.

My weekend goal for myself is unusual for me.  I’m a ‘pantser’ to the core, but this book requires a firmer hand. I fear that revision will need an outline of some kind, although the usual outline format never works for me.  I’ve begun with the Armature: it is clearly stated on an index card and pinned to my bulletin board at my writing desk.  Also on an index card, in big letters, is my MC’s primary goal.  I’m visualizing a big poster board with a combination of pictures and words.

While I’m busy visualizing, the universe is probably conspiring to present me with a number of really interesting work related challenges that will keep me from writing.  But then again, maybe not.  What about the rest of you?  How’s the writing process these days, and what are you planning for this weekend?

Moving Past What If.

It’s been an interesting day.

Early this morning I took my eldest offspring down to the DMV so he could take his written test.  Yes, I am going to have to cut him loose soon.  There have been moments of panic about this, usually in the middle of the night.  What if he gets in a car wreck?  What if he gets lost, or has a flat tire, or his car breaks down in the middle of nowhere at 1 am? What if?  

But here’s what I know, learned the hard way by experience: you can’t live life by the ‘what ifs,’ because what actually happens is usually something you didn’t even think to worry about.  And there’s really no control over what happens anyway.  If you locked your kid up forever in their room in order to keep them safe, there would probably be some ironic tree that would fall on your house and take them out while they slept.  Or a prince might come a long and scale the wall, by means of the princesses’ long, long hair.  My point is, life is what it is, and both the the probable and improbable will happen despite your best efforts at control. 

As I write this, people are stomping so loudly on my roof that the windows are rattling. Normally this would be cause for alarm, but since there is a roofing project in progress, I’m trying to ignore what would normally send me out the door shrieking, “are you okay?”  This was another one of those ‘sometimes you just have to do it’ projects.  There is a long story here,  involving shoddy construction by the original owner and the unfortunate consequences thereof, and the project requires literally taking off a section of the roof and replacing it.  We were going to tackle this bit of fun and excitement on Monday, but the weather was oppositional.  It sulked, it stormed, it precipitated. Consequently, the weather for today was a topic of concern and debate.  There was angst, there was hesitation.  Should we do it now, or should we wait?  The contractor won’t be available again until the end of the summer.  What if, what if, what if?  And finally the decision was reached to boldly roof, a process which has been going on all day.

As for me, weaving in and out of the kid driving, the alarming roof noises, and rescue runs to the hardware store for roofing supplies, I’ve been working on a query letter.  If you’ve been following my blog for awhile, you’ll know that this is not my first query letter, nor is it the first time this novel has ventured out into the world.

But this time there is an important difference.  The extensive and painful revision and restructuring process I undertook has paid off.  I love this book.  There used to be a little niggling doubt, a reluctance to let people read the manuscript.  Now I can’t wait to show it off.  I want to run around accosting total strangers and saying, “hey, you want to read what I just wrote?”  Consequently, when it comes to writing the query letter, the fear is deep and laced with a sense of responsibility.

There is so much to lose this time.  Don’t get me wrong: last time around I sent the novel out in good faith.  I truly believed it was ready to go. The novel wasn’t bad, the query was good enough to garner a partial read and some invaluable feedback.  But part of me really didn’t want to succeed because subconsciously I knew the novel wasn’t as good as I could make it.

Now I’m in a different place altogether.  I feel responsible to this novel – I owe it the best possible chance of making its way in the world.  Which means that so much more is at stake.  And I find myself lying in bed in the middle of the night, asking “what if, what if, what if?”

But there is no what if.  There is only what is.  Along with taking risks, and living life to the fullest, and writing the best story that is in me.

So that is what I intend to do.  (Once I get a green light from my absolutely fabulous query consultant – you know who you are.  I know you don’t want my firstborn child, or I’d be tempted to offer…)  When the query is ready, off it goes.  And I go back to writing, which means tackling Swimming North again.  Frankly, I’m looking forward to it.

Please feel free to share your ‘what ifs’ here in the comments.  Writing them for all to see kinda takes the energy out of them, I think, and opens the way for accepting both ‘what is’ and ‘what could be.’

The EWG and What is a Writer To Do About It?

“All experience is an arch where through gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades forever and forever as I move.”  Tennyson, from Ulysses

I’m sitting at the desk in my fully customized mudroom, reflecting on the nature of the Elusive Writing Goal.  This mysterious creature, the EWG, flits across every town in every country across the face of the planet.  It is a chameleon creature, ever shifting, ever changing, and has beckoned many a weary writer onward to an untimely death.  Some have ignored its enticements completely, enduring the consequences of  a bleak and unsatisfying life.  Others have quested to the ends of reality and beyond, losing themselves and their sanity in a never ending pursuit of perfection.

A problem, then, for the conscious writer.  What is the safest way to deal with the EWG?

Ha! Safe? If you consider yourself to be a writer, abandon the concept of safety at once.  Myth, my friends, pure myth.  We are risk takers, venturing off of the established paths.  We delve into the nature of human emotions, one of the most dangerous pursuits known to man.  We spin our minds and souls into words and send them into the public domain where anybody might read them. 

All in pursuit of the mysterious EWG.

What does your EWG look like?  Can you even answer that question?   When you think you have captured it at last, it morphs between your very fingers and slips away, hovering in the distance, daring you to catch it one more time.  

At the moment, mine has alighted on my shoulder and is singing promises in my ear.  Almost, it says to me, almost.  A little more polish on this manuscript, just a little more, and then you can send it out to agents.  

Even under the enchantment of the EWG I recognize the hidden dangers in this casual statement.  Agents.  A promise of rejection; a hope of validation.  And always, unspoken between the EWG and me, the hope of a published novel just out of sight around a corner in time.

I know that the instant I believe this MS is done, the sweet little EWG will grow claws and scales and become a dangerous beast.  Foreknowledge is not much protection, however, and so I linger in this phase of the almost done.  I am cherishing a sense of completion before the novel is complete, because when it is I will believe that it is not.

And still, even knowing, I will pursue the EWG into the weekend.  We will polish Filling in the Blanks, one word at a time.  And when this month is done, we will query.  That’s what it says to me now, and I am compliant, complicit, to follow the margin that fades “forever and forever as I move.”