Research, Balance, and Fish

Research could have made this easierAs regular readers of the blog know, we got a small fish tank over Christmas. Fish were supposed to be easy pets. How hard could they be? Throw some water in a tank, plop in some fish, feed them, they’re good. Very few things in life are as easy as they appear. If we had done a little more research, we would have been more prepared for what happened next.

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?

Research might have saved Seashell 1

RIP Seashell 1

Research might have saved Sparkleshine

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.

Research may keep Seashell 2 alive

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.

Research may keep Gem alive

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?

Research may keep Flower alive

Flower

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Spinning Plates…on a Rollercoaster

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?

A New Paradigm (Again)

I have talked often of finding a balance between my writing and my life. I have told of new ideas, new routines I’ve made to find that balance, only to share the frustration that comes with life’s interference with those plans.

But I have a new plan.

Seriously.

I’ve been doing the catch-as-catch-can thing for about 2 years now. Coincidentally, that is about how old my daughter is. And I am here to tell you that putting out fires for 2 years is exhausting and spiritually unfulfilling. Certainly I have enjoyed much of what has gone on in the past two years, but the harried, never-get-to-quite-focus mentality has left me feeling both incompetent and fractured. So I sat down to reassess everything.

I found that the greatest issue fueling my frustration was not being able to move all facets of my life forward at once.

I consider that I have 4 major facets in my life: Baby, Husband, Household, and Writing. Baby moves on her own rocket trajectory and moves ahead at warp speed. I try to stuff the other three facets into whatever time and energy I have left over. I found that one always outweighed the other two. When I focused on Writing, the Household and Husband suffered neglect. When I caught up on Household, Writing and Husband stagnated. When I actually pay attention to my long-suffering Husband, very little Writing or Household gets accomplished.

So I always ended up playing catch-up with 2 facets, frustrated that they had slipped in the first place, and then returning to the putting-out-fires method of living. This is not conducive to writing, at least not for me. I need at least an hour to really write. Editing I can do in smaller chunks, but for writing I need time.

My new plan? Move everything forward at once. Set tiny daily goals in each area and meet or exceed them. If I feel like I nothing is stagnating, perhaps I won’t feel the intense pressure of everything I’m NOT doing while I am trying to concentrate on what I AM doing.

It helps that I can now do more things when baby girl is awake. She’s old enough now to want to help or to entertain herself for a while. I can actually do housework, make (short) phone calls, and do email and social media when she is awake. That helps immensely. If I can move most of the Household and some of the Writing into the daytime hours, that will leave her nap and the nighttime for me to have some concentrated Writing time (and time with Husband, too, when he is not working crazy night shift hours!).

Circumstances keep changing, especially as my baby girl keeps changing. So it is smart to sit back once and a while and see what’s holding me back and how I can adjust things to overcome that. I’m hoping that by pinpointing my largest frustration, I can now make a plan that will be successful.

How about you? Do you re-evaluate your writing routine every so often to see if it can be improved? Or have you found a writing design that works for you?

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Happy 2011!

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you and yours had a safe and joyful holiday season. Mine was predictably hectic, but ultimately merry.

I spoke a lot last year about finding balance between motherhood and writing. As you can see from my blog entries (or lack thereof), I have not been as successful at the balancing act as I had hoped!

It’s a new year, and a new start. I am planning to come at 2011 with new content, new plans, and a new resolve to find that balance. So stay tuned!

To start the year off on a fun note, a letter to the editor that I wrote appears in the February 2011 issue of Writer’s Digest. Not really a publishing cred, but it’s nice to see my name in print!

What are your writing resolutions for the New Year?

My Lost Week

Last week, I spent four long, exhausting days in a small hospital room with my 10-month-old. I didn’t get a word written. And I started to wonder what on Earth I could blog about this week, since I hadn’t done any writing. It was a lost week.

Until I realized that writing about not writing was the blog topic.

My blog’s subtitle is “The journey toward publishing while parenting.” Sometimes the parenting comes first. I can’t tell my 10-month-old to stop babbling so loudly or to stop pulling up on everything she sees or to stop wanting to play with me. I can’t postpone testing until it is convenient for me. I can’t tell my baby not to be sick, or not to cry, or not to need me. I’m her mother. Period.

I have talked before about finding a balance between my writing life and my mommy life. Mostly, I have maintained it, but this last week I fell off the balance beam. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say I was pushed off by events beyond my control.

So I spent 72 hours in a hospital room, playing with my baby girl. She was getting an EEG, so she looked like a cyborg mummy – gauze wrapped around her head, wires trailing wherever she moved. And I played with her, smiled with her, laughed with her, read books to her, and walked her around and around in circles.

I got no writing done. I got no social networking done. I got no blogging done.

But I realize now it was not a lost week. How could it be when I spent it cocooned with my baby girl? Getting to know this amazing little person she is quickly becoming?

Best of all, the EEG showed everything normal—my baby girl is healthy. Which means I can look forward to many more years of occasionally being knocked off the balance beam. I’ve learned my lesson, though:

I may not write a word, but time spent with my daughter is never “lost.”

A New Balance

As anyone reading this blog can see, I have been away from it a long time. I had a good reason – the complicated 3rd trimester of a pregnancy, and the insanity of a newborn. But the fog of sleep deprivation is lifting, and my little one is starting to nap during the day, so I can squeeze in the obligations of writing here and there. It is time to restore the balance in my life.

Writing and motherhood can both dominate a person’s life. The writing Muse calls to me constantly, no matter where I am or what I’m doing. Stories are always floating just behind whatever I’m trying to concentrate on, whether it be work, spouse, family or friend. Characters speak to me in dreams (and when awake, but I don’t like to admit to that), and are more real to me than some of the real people I meet. Then there’s motherhood. As soon as that baby was born, my life was not my own. November, for me, was one very looooong day. December was better – it was a couple of days long. The world revolves around the baby, and I can very easily cease to exist as an individual. I am simply Mom.

Such a loss of identity is dangerous, whether I lose myself in my child or in a story. I believe fulfillment should make me more of who I am, not less. Therefore, holding on to my self, and finding the balance between all the parts of my life is essential.

And so begins the new balancing act of my life. Three years ago, I was balancing a day job with my writing passion. Then I quit the day job, and began balancing paying work with my own as-yet-unpublished writing. I had to find a new balance when I married two years ago (which enabled me to quit my day job), between spending time with my husband and giving in to the temptation of the Muse. Luckily for me, my husband likes some quiet time to himself after work, so I could wrap up my day’s writing while he was reading.

But now there is the baby. She’s a little over 2 months now, and life is settling into a new “normal.” As that happens, and I have some time each day to breathe, I feel my creative juices flowing again, pushing to get loose. They never stopped working, of course – even in the hospital I was planning stories and editing in my head. They simply had no chance to get free before now. Not with round-the-clock feedings and little sleep.

Now, balance is returning, slowly, fitfully. I returned to my peer critique group this month, and it fired me up. I will return to writing workshops this month as well. The two all-consuming passions of writer and mother have collided, but instead of one annihilating the other, they are finding co-existence. The details still need to be worked out, but I will be able to do both. Fulfilling my writing passion will make me a happier and more content mother, and motherhood will bring new perspectives and depth to my writing. It’s a win-win.

Balance is a wonderful thing.

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