I’ve written several times before about my quest for balance—balancing my writing life with my mommy life, in particular. I have learned one thing from all this searching:
Balance is a pipe dream.
Balance can’t be found, largely because I don’t control all the variables in my life that I need to balance. Just when I think I’ve got it all figured out, something changes. For instance, I am now used to having 6 hours a week free to write. Then summer will come and that time will vanish like a mirage. Or my kid gets sick. Or I do. Or technical issues stop my progress. Always something unplanned gets in the way.
So my new metaphor is spinning plates. You’ve seen what I’m talking about—the people in circuses who spin plates on top of thin sticks and then run around frantically spinning the ones that are slowing down so the plates don’t fall off.
Yeah, that’s my new life metaphor.
See, I don’t just have two things to balance—work and mommy. Each item has sub-items which become plates of their own. The writing has my fiction work, non-fiction work, blogging, sometimes editing for others, social media, and querying. The mommy has school, play time, dressing, feeding, washing, entertaining the child, among others. Household duties include everything from cleaning the house (that plate falls a lot) to doing the finances. And that doesn’t include other family and friends. Plates everywhere. Lots of running back and forth.
Inevitably, some fall.
Usually just one or two fall, and the crashing is cyclical. The social media will fall for a few days, then I’ll pick that up and the finances will fall. Then the finances are back up and the querying falls, etc. Eventually every plate gets picked back up, but it is rare I can keep them all spinning at once.
As if the plate-spinning wasn’t hard enough, I’m doing it on a roller coaster. It’s no secret that life has its ups and downs. Sometimes everything is going smoothly and I feel like my dreams are within reach. Then, sometimes just days later, I feel like everything is completely out of control and I’m a terrible mom, terrible, wife, and terrible writer. Usually the down time is when many plates have crashed to the floor simultaneously. All that shattered porcelain gets me depressed (did I mention my aversion to cleaning?).
But the thing is, I’m stubborn. Some people prefer the word “determined,” but stubborn fits me better. There’s nothing like life saying, “You can’t.” to get me saying, “I can.” Most successful writers I know are like this.
So, I’m stubborn and I pick up the shattered plate pieces, and I glue them all back together (I’m too cheap to buy new plates) and start them spinning again. I begin slowly, one at a time, and add them back as I can. But eventually, all the plates are back up, all are spinning, and I am once again on the upswing of the roller coaster.
What a wild ride!
What about you? Is stubbornness your key to pushing ahead when things are tough? Or do you have a different secret you can share with us?
Research, Balance, and Fish
We’ve had a total of 5 fish, but are down to 3. We lost one (quite literally lost him) the first night, while the second leaped from the tank about a week later and never recovered. How they got out of the tank through a skinny opening in the dead of night we don’t know. But we have fixed this issue with a new cover. A little research may have saved their lives, but who knows?
RIP Seashell 1
RIP Sparkleshine
What more research WOULD have prepared us for is the difficulty of maintaining the proper chemical balance in our tank. We let the water sit and percolate for a week before adding the first 2 fish. Turns out we should have let it “cycle” for at least a month, maybe more, before adding the fish. Now we are trying to control the ammonia and nitrite cycle while fish are in the tank, which is very stressful, because a spike in either ammonia or nitrite can kill the fish in a mass extinction event (we very nearly had one a week ago).
So here we are with fish and struggling to keep them alive through this natural aquarium cycling process, when a little more research would have saved us the headache. And the same can happen when writing. A little research in the beginning can keep your manuscript from going off the rails.
Seashell 2
Some people do extensive research before writing. Some research as they go along. I am in the middle. I do broad-stroke research before I write, and fill in the details as I need them. But by doing basic research first, I know the broad restrictions I need to work within. This saves me from writing the whole book, then finding out I had a fundamental flaw which now requires me to rewrite an entire plotline. So a little research can save a lot of angst later on.
The other thing about the aquarium is that the ammonia and nitrite need to be kept at 0 ppm, or you end up with stressed and perhaps dead fish. Bacteria are supposed to eat the ammonia and the nitrite, keeping the whole thing in balance. But little things can throw the cycle off and suddenly your water is testing in the danger zone.
Gem
The writing life is like that, too—a delicate balance. Writers juggle writing and daily life, often including family and a day job. It’s not easy to keep the water balanced right. One little thing can send one part of your life spiraling into the danger zone. All we can do is keep testing the water and try to head off any problems we see. One way to do that in an aquarium is partial water changes. We can do that in life, too. If one issue is causing undue stress, can we change it up, change it out? Sometimes a small change can make a huge difference.
Research will save you headaches. Balance will save you heartaches. And fish…well, fish are cool when they’re not jumping out of the tank in the dead of night.
When do you research your manuscript? How do you maintain a healthy balance in your life?
Flower
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