Ducking Out

I have a deadline to meet, and Tropical Storm Alberto to deal with, so I'm going to unplug for a bit. See you once things settle down.

Multiversing

No matter how skilled you are, building a new universe in any genre is challenging. I've relied heavily on history, sciences and the arts to inspire mine. Music used to be my first jumping-off point, but since I've become hearing impaired that's one I had to let go. Once I get hearing aids that hopefully stop all music from sounding like white noise to me, that may change. Until then I have to draw on other sources of inspiration.

History and its mysteries always rev my imagination's engine. I just finished watching Ken Burns' The Civil War on DVD (I highly recommend for any history buff). I invested when I heard PBS put out a 25th anniversary edition. I loved the documentary series when it first debuted, so I was just revisiting an old favorite. I didn't expect to get flooded with new ideas for an upcoming project (not, as it happens, about the Civil War).

The ideas came anyway. What happens in a conflict where both sides believe God is on their side, and they see their reasons and causes as completely righteous, and the enemy's as deplorable? What motivates people to choose their side? What are the consequences when all the players are fighting for their world's survival -- and it's the same world? What happens when a third party enters the conflict with their own, different motivations and concerns -- also for the same world?

Building essentially three universes in this project, which is also a continuation of an already-established universe with many other sides, factions and conflicts, is when I shift into multiversing. To do that, I have to maintain a strong core universe that doesn't change, which is the hub. Think of it as the center of a spiderweb. That's what you build on, the world and the rules that always remain intact. Your hub can be anything: the city, country, planet, time period, whatever, but it should be able to serve as the foundation for anything you build on it.

As an example, let's imagine multiversing during the Civil War. You have North and South, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, and Jefferson Davis. You know the war lasts for four years. You have two armies: the Union and the Confederacy. You know Succession was the official reason for starting the war, and ending slavery was the finishing of it. That's your hub.

All of the elements of the Civil War make great inspiration for multiversing. You can tell stories from the POV of any player, as long as you remain true to your hub (as in, Robert E. Lee doesn't defect to the Union in year two, unless you're writing Alternate History, in which case you can do whatever you like, as long as you carry the change through the entire conflict.) You can introduce all manner of conflicts behind the scenes of the battles, as long as the battles remain the same. You can even offer different, plausible spins on what did happen during the war, such as why Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain ordered the 20th Maine to fix bayonets and carry out a simultaneous frontal and flanking maneuver when their ammunition was running low at Gettysburg. For his heroism Chamberlain was awarded the Medal of Honor.

Some years later one of Chamberlain's subordinates claimed that he never issued that order. So let's imagine that guy was telling the truth. So, who did give the order? Why? What happened to him? Why did they cover it up by saying Chamberlain gave the order? Answering those questions builds a new universe atop the hub.

Now extend the same logic to other, significant events during the battles. What if one of the commanders of the Union army was a Confederate sympathizer? You can tailor your universes to your genre, too. Mystery writers, what if he was being blackmailed? Paranormal writers, what if he was a vampire, a werewolf, or a seer? Romance writers, what if he was in love with a female Confederate spy? Or a runaway slave who had just been captured by the other side? The possibilities are literally endless.

One final bit of advice: the more universes you layer atop a hub world, the more details you have to carry over into the next installment. So create a universe bible or running timeline to keep track of the details that have to stay true. If in the first universe you make all the soldiers carry silver bayonets to kill werewolf opponents, for example, then silver bayonets have to become standard equipment in every successive universe you build on the same hub. What changes has to be carried through, so consider carefully what you want to alter. If you have Robert E. Lee defect to the Union halfway through the war, then obviously he's not going to lead the Confederacy into any more battles. Unless they send him back to work as a Union spy. See, there's always a way to top a universe with another one.

Quilt Update

In my One Thing post I showed you a pile of fabric that scared me; here's the pieced quilt top I made out of it. I cut all of the pieces on an 18" cutting mat and sewed it freehand on my Singer. I faced the demon and stitched it into submission. It took me almost a week.

And it's lovely, and fulfilling, and looks a lot like Minecraft, am I right? Yeah, that was my first thought, too. Oh well.

I make one big quilt every year, and this will definitely be that. It's huge. At one point I had the whole thing in my lap while adding the last rows because it's too large for my work table, and I was almost buried in fabric. I still worried the whole time I was stitching, but the making of a quilt brings on this calming determination in me that let me get through the nervous jitters.

There's always good and bad in every project. Like too many light- and medium-gray spaces in this, despite my adding some prints. Some of my piecing is off-kilter, for which I have to blame my inability to cut fabric straight. When you're trying to cut a 27-1/2" rectangle on an 18" mat, things get crooked. I also had to fudge some seams. But that's okay. I'm planning to do a little embroidery work in the big blank areas. My piecing is always a little skewed, and my seams are never perfectly matched. I still love all the green, and the fish, wood and stone panels make me very happy. It's not too far from the quilt I saw in my head.

I'm proud of myself for trying. I won't let this quilt go until it's finished, even if it ends up looking like an advertisement for Minecraft, because that's how stubborn I am.

I'm not afraid of this quilt anymore. It actually made me laugh when I spread the finished top out for the first time, and saw nothing but Minecraft. My daughter loves that game, as it happens. And it's funny that it resembles it. If it still does when I finished quilting and binding it, so be it.

I'll enjoy the process. I'll finish what I've started. And I will learn from this quilt, just as I have all the others I've made.

No one can give you creative freedom; you have to pursue it. Fear and doubt will try to stop you from attaining your goals, always. We don't want what we do to end up being a bad joke. But sometimes it does anyway. Nothing ventured etc.

I'll keep you all updated as I continue to work on it, and let you see the end results.

Whatcha Reading

I haven't had much time lately for pleasure reading, but I have knocked out a couple of books by two of my favorite authors this month.

The first is Someone to Care by Mary Balogh, the newest novel in her Westcott series. This one tells the story of Viola Kingsley, the former Countess of Riverdale, who is the mother of many of the characters in the series. Throughout the saga Viola has been the most interesting character to me, as she was the primary victim of her dead husband's bigamy. The revelation of that in the first book instantly made all her kids illegitimate, took away all their titles, ruined their futures, destroyed her and her family's standing among the ton, etc. If anyone should be beyond pissed by the lying bastard's duplicity, it's Viola.

She's managed to hold onto her dignity, but finally breaks at the very beginning of this story and takes off, leaving her troubled family behind to finally get some alone time. I sent up a silent cheer, chapter one. Lord, what this woman has been through in the other books. Soon temporarily stranded at an inn in the middle of nowhere, Viola meets Marcel Lamarr, a cynical and dedicated womanizer who tempted and tried to seduce her two decades ago (she was married and told him to go away, and he went.) As you might guess the flame's still there, but this time Viola has no wedding ring or legit reason to resist it.

I won't spoil things by getting into the nuts and bolts, but it's already my favorite book of the series. I rarely use the term star-crossed lovers to refer to characters, but oy, Viola and Marc are definitely that. It also features older protagonists, which as an older real person I appreciate. Romance in later years is usually more interesting than the young stuff. The first chance at love in what is only very loosely a second chance at love plot is fun, too. There's lots of emotional turmoil, and in that regard I think it's some of her best writing. Highly recommend.

I had to read Heartless by Anne Stuart on the Kindle my guy got for me for free by redeeming some gift points so I could read another, Kindle-only title by Anne Stuart. Actually the only reason I will ever use a Kindle is for Anne Stuart, which should illustrate how devoted I am to her books. Anyone else and I wait for the paperback or read something else.

Heartless is an indy-published continuation of the author's very wicked House of Rohan series. It tells the story of two very damaged characters from those books, Brandon Rohan and Emma Cadbury, whom you might remember as secondaries from the cast of Shameless. They've both been through hell, so it's nice to see them get the chance to heal each other. You don't need to read the other books to follow their story, but you'll want to read them after you do. After I finished Heartless I got out the other four Rohan books and reread them just so I could revisit the old stories.

The House of Rohan series is not for everyone, especially readers who don't want sex in their romances. I do, but I mainly read Anne Stuart for the characters and the impossible situations she puts them in. She's the master of dark romantic conflict. Also, I like the dark aspects -- it's a nice change to see a terribly flawed protag who generally isn't the stuff of heroes. I get tired of the ones who seem to do nothing but suck up to the heroine. The sweet, loving perfect dude never appears in this author's work, and most definitely not in this series.

So whatcha reading? Let us know in comments.

One Thing

This pile of fabric looks harmless enough, right? Not when I look at it. It's the makings of a quilt I've wanted to create for about a year now, ever since I came across a pattern called Zen Garden. It's not a complicated pattern -- I'd say confident beginner level -- and it requires only skills I already possess to put together. I've practically memorized the pattern by reading it a couple hundred times. I worked it out in my head, and then on paper, and did the math involved and whatnot. Not a problem.

Only the more I looked at it, the more it became a problem. It's not what I thought of as a Zen garden. It was a boxy bunch of plain blocky rocks with a couple squares of color. What I really wanted to do was tweak the pattern, use more color and alter some of the design and fabric choices. I wanted weathered wood in my garden. More green, too, I love green. The fabrics would have to be very specific to what I saw in my head. I'd have to swap out two of the piecing steps and reinterpret the gray fabrics. I came up with major plans for the hand quilting, too -- hundreds of circles, like ripples on the still surface of a pool, instead of the recommended straight line work.

I couldn't leave well enough alone. Everyone else might be happy enough to follow the pattern faithfully; I wanted to take it in different directions. Story of my creative life, really. Where people see instructions, I see the gardens of possibilities just beyond them. And that scares me, and often I put it off because I think on some level I want to be like other people. Or I'm not as brave as I think. Or maybe I envy people who can follow a pattern without a problem. Sometimes I just procrastinate. Other times I end up paralyzed by doubt.

After going through another bout of temporary blindness and being robbed this year I'm tired of being scared of the things I want to do. How long have I got left to do them, anyway? So I've finally gathered the fabric and and started cutting. I've another day or two of that, and then I'll begin piecing.

Now, that little bitch of doubt in my head is already sneering that I've used too much green -- and she thinks it's acid green, not the spring green I see. Also, just FYI, she says the quilt will be a disaster because I suck at cutting precisely with my arthritic hands. Doubt thinks instead I should work on the other kit quilt I bought (and follow the damn directions.)

I don't care what Doubt thinks. If it's more acid than spring green, great. If it ends up crookedly pieced because I cut badly, fine. I'm doing one thing that scares me because I want it more than I want to be scared of it. I'm making this quilt the way I see it in my head. I'm not sewing this quilt for Doubt. I'm creating my vision. I'm doing this for me.

Now apply that to writing, scuplting, painting -- anything creative thing you want to do -- and do it. That's my message today. Do the one thing that scares you, in the exact way you want to do it, because only you can -- and you aren't immortal.

Epiphanies

Aside from getting through a couple of disastrous months, I've been working on refining my writing process. My primary motivation for messing with my methods was to boost my productivity, but I've also clung to some old-school habits that really belong in the bottom of a tar pit, such as sticking strictly to paper for everything but composition.

It's tough to let go of putting everything on paper, and I have seventy-one books' worth of rough draft/edited/final manuscripts, novel notebooks and research materials in my closets to prove it. I love every towering pile of my paper stuff, too, and I will keep some of it for posterity, if only to amuse future generations. But even a dinosaur like me has to admit that keeping electronic files instead of printing out everything is faster, cheaper and more efficient. When I learned a good friend has gone entirely electronic, I decided to do the same. Much, much easier.

Going all-digital led to another epiphany. Since nearly losing eight years of my writing in a computer disaster I've been religious about backing up everything I write to multiple hard drives, CDs, memory sticks and anywhere else I could put it -- daily, and sometimes hourly. Backing up is great at first. Then you begin to accumulate backed up stuff. I now have a lovely collection of about 684 memory sticks, a million CDs, and countless obsolete towers that I'm afraid to erase because I haven't had time to look through every file to assure I did back up all of those. After twenty years as a pro my back-ups are mountainous, and last year Irma really had me worried about what would happen to them if we did lose the house to some disaster.

The solution was pretty easy: backing up the entirety to a secure offsite file storage service. For about a hundred bucks a year everything I've ever written now remains backed up in secured storage, away from my house, and accessible only by those I trust. I've also made one master copy that I keep in another place that shall remain nameless. If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, the writing will survive me in my books. But now if my house burns down or gets leveled by a hurricane, I won't lose twenty years of backups.

Another major change I've made to my process is changing when and how I work. Over time I've gradually migrated from being a night writer to an early morning writer. I'd do other things in the morning, too, which sometimes ate into my writing time or distracted me. Now the first thing I do after I wake up and soak my head in a vat of tea is write my daily scheduled quota. I use the Pomodoro Timer to remind me to get up and stretch regularly, and to have breakfast and lunch breaks, but other than that I don't stop writing until I hit quota. The big bonus is that when I am done writing, I have the rest of the day to do whatever I want.

Being an empty nester now it's easier for me to devote mornings and early afternoons to the work. There was also an immediate benefit I didn't count on: without the distractions and multi-tasking I started writing faster and cleaner. Because I'm no longer scattering my household tasks in with my writing I get my chores done quicker and better, too.

Finally (and mainly because my guy retired last month) I made one new, not-to-be-broken rule about my work time. If my home office door is open, anyone can interrupt me at any time. If it's closed, anyone can interrupt me only if there's a major emergency. Major as in the house is about to burn down, there's a burglar on the premises, an asteroid is close to hitting the planet, etc. I leave my door open most of the time, but if I'm in the middle of something that needs all my attention, then I close it for an hour or two. So far my guy has been great about respecting this one rule, too. As I'm now our sole source of unfixed income, and he's home to actually see everything I do all day, he understands my busy schedule better. I think he's realized at last that I do have a real job, and I need to have the time/space/focus to do it well.

Have you had any epiphanies lately that have improved what you do at home or work? Let us know in comments.

Seeing Clearly

Every time I come back to blogging from a hiatus I always feel I must apologize for being absent -- and I am sorry to stay away. This time my excuses are fairly hair-raising, but before you read on know that I am on the mend.

Back in February I started losing the vision in my left eye. Again. You know that saying where someone is walking around in a fog? For a while there I was, literally. Everything I saw out of my left eye seemed engulfed by a white mist that just kept growing more opaque. The right eye seemed fine, but I had a problem there, too. It made it very tough to focus, and by the end of March I'd gone half-blind. My surgeon diagnosed me with PCO, or in layman's terms secondary cataracts, in both eyes. Just before the laser surgery to clear it up I was taping my left eye shut just so I could stop walking into walls, tripping over the dogs, etc.

It was the month before the surgeries that proved more challenging for me. The impairment came out of nowhere, at a time in my life when things have been actually good for a change. Since it's been four years since my last eye operations I didn't think I'd have to go through it again. Thus I had to cope with lots of negative emotions before I went under the laser. My guy was my rock, as always, and he's the main reason I got through it okay.

All my angst turned out to be wasted. Both surgeries were a success, and my doc fully restored my vision.

After the surgeries went so well I joked with my guy that I would probably pay for it in another way -- and I did. A week after my vision was restored and I was cleared to drive again, I went to pick up my guy from work. Without any warning another, non-life-threatening medical condition of mine flared up, and I had to pull off the road. I was in no state to drive for a few hours, which unfortunately stranded me in the middle of nowhere.

I did call my guy to come and get me, but I didn't know exactly where I was, so I had to describe what landmarks I could see. I knew once he arranged another ride it was going to take him a while to find me. While I was waiting for him two Good Samaritans pulled over, and after I explained the situation said they would wait with me until my guy arrived. It was broad daylight, and they seemed very nice, so I wasn't scared. Until they robbed me, which was the real reason they stopped, and left me there.

Honestly, I didn't care about the $26.00 they stole; if they'd asked me for it I would have given the money to them. It was that they robbed me because I was alone and in trouble.

Of course it could have been much worse, and I'm blessed that all they stole from me was a little cash. It's the unfairness of it that still needles me. I can't tell you how many people I've helped in similar situations. Accident victims, homeless folks, lost kids, elderly people needing assistance, people whose car batteries had died -- when someone is in trouble I always stop and try to be a Good Samaritan. We all do, don't we? Because it's just the decent thing to do. Yet the very first time I'm in need of one, I get robbed.

I do learn from my mistakes, and that won't happen to me again. After this I won't trust in the kindness of strangers. It's sad, especially because I've always believed people to be decent enough to do the right thing in bad situations. Not going to automatically assume that anymore.

That's all the hair-raising/depressing stuff. I feel a bit like I'm been repeatedly kicked in the teeth, but also very, very lucky, which is a weird combination. Throughout everything I've been able to keep working. Writing for me is the most healing thing I do. I've also immersed myself in a lot of other creative ventures that helped me cope, starting with making this quilt:



It's the first one I've ever made from a kit (available at Craftsy.com), and while I made some mistakes I think it came out well. I learned a lot from working on it, such as never to cut fabric when I'm half-blind.

I've been cooking quite a bit, too, and trying new recipes. The online cooking community is awesome when it comes to sharing simple, delicious dishes. At Domesticate-Me.com I found a pretty fabulous one-layer chocolate cake recipe that has no butter or eggs, and is topped with whipped cream and fresh berries (as you can see I cheated a little and added some mini chocolate chips with the fresh strawberries I put on top.) I served it as our Easter dinner dessert, and my crew went wild over it.



It has been a tough couple of months, but I can see clearly now, and that's what matters. Giving up has never been my thing anyway, and I'm not about to start. I've got so many other, better things to do.

So what have you all been up to? Let me know in comments.

Wishing You

Happy Mother's Day from Paperback Writer.

Checking In

Just a note to let everyone know I'm fine. Now that it's over I can tell you that my laser surgery on both eyes also went very well, and restored the vision I had lost again in my left eye. After I got my sight back I joked to my guy that I wasn't entirely in the clear. I never have anything great happen without something bad coming right after it.

Sure enough, a week after my surgery I was robbed. All they took was the $26.00 in cash I had in my wallet, and they didn't hurt me, so I consider myself very lucky. It could have been a lot worse. Thank you, Universe.

I'm going to take a little more time away from the internet to process everything, do some sewing and get back to my regular work schedule. Thanks to everyone who has been e-mailing; I really appreciate you checking up on me. I will be working on replies this week.

See you when I'm fully recovered.

On Hiatus

The bird and I are going to take some time off and unplug to deal with that personal stuff, catch up on work and otherwise get things sorted. No worries now, I'll be fine. See you in a few weeks.

Work Time Ten

Ten Things to Help You Time Your Work Sessions

This aquarium timer from Onlineclock.net provides a nice fish tank backdrop. The alarm when the coundown ends is like a digital alarm clock.

For a guided, one-minute exercise workout, try e.gg.timer.com's morning warm-up timer (always check with your doctor first if you have a condition that could be aggravated by exercise.)

Want to use Google Search as an online timer? Here's how.

OnlineMeditationTimer.com provides a timed sessions with a nice background chime for your contemplation.

You can set the Online Stopwatch to countdown any time interval you'd like. It ends with a ringing bell sound like an old alarm clock. The site also offers a bunch of different timers.

Onlinetimers.com has a variety of pre-programmed times you can use in addition to customizing your own; the alarm sounds like a low-volume digital alarm clock.

Pomodoro is what I personally use during my writing sessions to remind me to stop, get up, stretch, etc. It silently runs for 25 minutes, then sounds a alarm (I use the Brrrrrrring option) to remind you to take a five minute break. After four such intervals gives you a 15 minute break.

Want a little fun with your timer? This robot-race timer is cute.

For the multitaskers, Timer-tab.com offers countdown, alarm clock and stopwatch timers

Set the Vclock timer to countdown your session and pick your own alarm sound (I liked the wind chimes.)

Wishing You

Image Credit: Designed by Freepik

Stranger Than Fiction

Inspiration for stories come from innumerable sources, but I find most of mine in the real world. I especially love the unsolved mysteries of history, as they can be a wonderful focus for the imagination. Unsolved puzzles and indecipherable relics are my favorites, because there are no answers, only questions. I've talked about my fascination with and theories about The Voynich manuscript and how to use other mysterious finds as story starters; today let's look at another one:



People have been bickering over the origins of the Dighton Rock for centuries. Discovered in the Taunton River in Massachusetts, this big rock has enduring intrigue written all over it. Cotton Mather talked about the mystery it presented back in 1690; others have attributed it to the ancient Spaniards, Phoenicians, and Vikings. It may even date back to 1502 or so. Since it's a forty-ton boulder covered with enigmatic and potentially untranslatable petroglyphs, that debate will likely continue.

Chiseling images in stone is not an easy task. Someone spent considerable time creating the glyphs on this rock. Before you ponder what it means, consider why the artist would go to all that trouble. Does the Dighton Rock offer an ominous warning, such as "Everyone who follows the river beyond this point dies badly" or could it be graffiti along the lines of "For a good time, visit the village around the next bend."

I see a horse, a fish, three people and four X's in the rock's image. It also looks a bit like a map to me. I could easily write a story about seven wandering medieval soldiers in a strange land, four of whom died in a skirmish with the locals. Since the survivors are left with only one horse, the dead are buried by the river along with a fabulous paranormal treasure they were transporting. The other three miss their ship's sailing and are marooned in this new land where their treasure is now worthless. They make friends with the locals and join their tribe (or lose another skirmish), and the treasure is forgotten.

Now fast-forward to modern times: the last descendant of the survivors decides to investigate and comes to examine the glyphs, and discovers the four dead guys didn't stay dead? Competes with another survivor to find the treasure? Finds the treasure and is transformed by it? Lots of possibilities.

What story could this rock help you tell?

Off to Write

I'm unplugging to catch up on some work. See you on Friday.

Image credit: Designed by Freepik

More Freebies

I found these free pics and over 700K more at Freepik.com, which allows you to download any of them without strings. All you're asked to do is provide a photo credit line, which they provide already coded for your web site or blog. There is a daily limit (five images, I think) if you use the site as a guest, but if you register for a free user account you can get at more.

Image Credits:

Roses: Designed by Freepik

Clock: City image created by Www.slon.pics - Freepik.com

Mask: Designed by Freepik

Couple of Freebies

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

The Hemingway Editor is an app to help improve the quality and clarity of your writing; it not only counts your words and grades their readibility, but highlights problem words or phrases that are difficult to read, are written in passive voice, contain adverbs, etc.

Still in development but very interesting, Manuskript writing freeware offers an outliner to help you organize your story ideas and elements, a mode where you can write without distractions, and a novel assistant that uses the Snowflake method of outlining and plotting to tackle story development.

Pic Testing

Ignore me today. I'm playing again with Blogger's photo upload thing.



The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

Or not.

I'm finally getting the hang of it, I think. Thanks for your patience.

Serenity

As I might have mentioned, I bought a Zen wall calendar for my home office. Each month it gives me a word that is supposed to remind me to do things like breathe, slow down, relax and enjoy life. Yeah, that was my first reaction, too. I can't slow down or relax. I already breathe and enjoy my life. I liked the monthly photos, though, so I invested.

Turns out the monthly word has been more inspiring to me than even the pretty pictures -- maybe because January's word was Inspire. I kept looking at that one word and thought a lot about what inspires me, how I might inspire others, the various sources of inspiration and so forth. I reached out to a few of my personal friends and tried to inspire them. It was interesting, in a guided spiritual kinda way. February's word was Love, so I tried to be more loving in various ways toward my family and friends. I'm aware of how much love I am blessed with in my life, too, and tried new ways to show my gratitude for it.

When I saw that March's word is Serenity I felt as if I might not have to do anything differently. I do practice meditation every day, and at that moment my life was very calm and quiet. Seemed like I might be able to skip a month of Zen . . . until a personal issue suddenly cropped up. I'm not going to get into details, but as I'm sure you all know it's not calming or quieting to have a big, unexpected problem drop in your lap.

This is the first quilt I finished this year, and it's been my go-to project when I've been upset, sad, nervous or feeling any other negative emotion. Working on it helped me cope by providing me with tasks I find soothing and calming. I always sleep better if I work on a quilt before I go to bed, but this particular project gave me something to think about besides my problem. Also, if I was too upset to write (and yeah, that happens to me now and then when I'm arm-wrestling the universe) I could quilt a couple of seams and get my head back into my work without a lot of fuss. Quilting for me is Serenity.

My resources for finding Serenity aren't limited to sewing. Cooking does the same thing for me. So does doing some housework, painting, going for a long walk or writing in my personal journal. I've worked through countless worries and problems by hauling out the vacuum, trying a new recipe, painting a terrible watercolor, taking the pups out for a stroll or composing a journal entry. I know what works for me, so March wasn't telling me anything new. I think it was more of a reminder to me, to give me a nudge toward doing the things to help me deal with what's ahead. Fortunately I just found out the solution will be pretty easy, so the big unexpected problem has dwindled down to a very manageable thing.

So what are you doing to find Serenity in your life? Let us know in comments.

Image Credit: dtolokonov

Other Than Fiction

Most of us write every day, but we writers tend not to count things other than fiction as writing. Writing for us = story. I admit, I'm guilty of that mindset.

I'm writing this blog post now. After it I have a couple of e-mails to answer, notes to type up for my novel notebook, and then my daily wordcount quota to nail. If I have time, I'll add an entry in my private journal. I don't text -- no smart phone -- but I will jot down a few more tasks on my to-do list. I also have to update the calendar for March with some upcoming events. After I finish my daily edit tonight, I'll probably work on some character sheets and a synopsis in progress.

The truth is most of us write constantly. We pour words into our phones and computers, and scrawl them on our notepads, grocery lists and chalkboards. Some of it may even be fiction, but it's all writing. Everything we write is an opportunity to be creative, too.

Now I feel your skepticism, so let me give you a couple of examples:

Regular e-mail: Sorry, I can't make it tonight. I've got a migraine.

Creative e-mail: Forgive me for not making it tonight. A balloon T-Rex is using a titanium sledgehammer to play Some Like It Hot on the inside of my skull.

They both say the same thing, but the second e-mail is wry and funny. It communicates the same information, but it also pokes a little fun at it. The recipient gets a smile out of the no-show notice. Meanwhile, you're exercising your imagination, never a bad thing.

Taking a little extra effort to be creative with your other-than-fiction writing provides additional benefits. Routine and boring suddenly becomes unique and clever. Sometimes I laugh out loud at the market after I read off a creative entry on my shopping list:

Rebecca Romainehead
Bananarama (4)
Truvia Pursuit
Don't go down the candy aisle
Seed for damn squirrels to steal
Handy Dandy Wipes
No, don't go down the candy aisle. Keeping walking.
Bacchus's favorite snack
Flour au naturale
Brutus's Squeeze
I am Ginger Root
You can't eat candy, you ditz.

It's fun inventing new names for things I need from the market (for those of you who aren't Popeye fans, Brutus's Squeeze = olive oil). It livens up a pretty boring chore, too. More than anything, it's writing practice. I constantly have to think up new ways to describe things in the stories I work on; I think writing a shopping list this way helps me keep my imagination limber and nimble.

Other ways you can practice your creative skills while writing things other than fiction:

If you have a chalkboard or whiteboard in your home, start writing a thought for the day on it.

Put funny or encouraging notes in your kids' lunchboxes.

Buy blank cards and personalize them for every occasion with a hand-written message.

Label storage containers creatively, i.e. Future Blackmail (kids' pictures or schoolwork), Not Lost Library (old manuscripts), and When I Feel Wretched Reads (keeper books).

Take an old white t-shirt (you can buy them cheap at Goodwill) and every day write in indelible ink a meaningful-to-you word or phrase on it. To prevent bleed-through, first place a piece of sturdy cardboard under the area where you want to write. When the t-shirt is completely covered, wash and wear it.

What are some of the ways you get creative with writing other than fiction? Give us some tips in comments.

Off to Finale

The bird and I are locking ourselves in the office today to nail a deadline. See you on Friday.