writing

Not Ready to Start

My writing focus for February has been developing a new book concept. I’ve had an idea lurking for a long time, even tried writing it years ago but didn’t like the result, then recently came up with a new way to approach the concept that I think will work better (and be marketable), so I want to write it. And that means doing all the work to flesh out the concept so it starts looking more like a book. A concept is just a general idea — I had a vague sense of the main character and the plot and setting, but not much else.

As often happens, I felt like I had a full book ready to go until I started writing down what I know about it and realized how vague it was. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve developed the main characters and I have a lot of backstory, so I thought I was ready to work on plot, but then I realized that the world is really vague, and that will affect the plot. So now I need to figure out more about this world and society.

This kind of work is basically a cycle of fleshing out and sharpening what I have. I get a clearer character, which gives me more ideas for the plot, which gives me ideas for the world, which also affects the plot, and that then affects the characters. I guess it’s like sculpting, where you start with a block of marble roughly the size of the piece you’re making, and then you start taking off chunks until it’s sort of the right shape, and then from there you use different tools to get closer to the shape you want until you’re finally doing the fine detail and polishing it.

It’s been a few years since I last created an entirely new concept and new world, so I forgot how involved it can get, especially when the story deals with a big-picture world instead of one focused location. I tend to get impatient to start writing, but I’ve learned the hard way that the more thought I put in ahead of time, the better the book is. If the ideas are still vague when I start writing and I figure that I’ll get more specific as I go along, I seldom get specific enough and the book falls apart at the end.

I’d planned to start writing at the beginning of March to get enough of a very rough draft to see if the concept works, but I may have to delay that a bit. I have to remind myself that it’s better to get it right, and that will end up saving me time in the long run because I won’t spend months trying to figure out an ending after I’ve written the book. At the same time, this kind of brainstorming before I start writing is my favorite part of the writing process, so the temptation is to drag it out and put off the scary step of writing the first words, so I have to be honest with myself about which impulse is ruling me at the moment — is it the impatience to get going on a book that really isn’t ready, or am I lingering too long in my favorite phase? Or is the book truly ready to start?

Right now, I have no doubts. The book isn’t ready to start. I have a lot of work to do, and I don’t know if that will all happen in the next week.

Meanwhile, I saw yesterday that a big-name author has a book coming out with a similar concept. I think what I’m doing with it is going to be very, very different and even will be aimed at a different audience, but you could probably use the same sentence to describe the basic concept for both books. As wacky as publishing is, I don’t know how publishers would react (and I am hoping to at least make a go of traditional publishing with this). They could be in “this is hot, so we want lots more like it” mode so they’d welcome something that’s similar but still different. Or they could be at the point of “we’ve already done a book with that premise” even if the execution is very different.

I guess all I can do is write it and see what happens, and if a publisher doesn’t want it I can always publish it myself.

Life

Moving With Purpose

As I watch the Winter Olympics, I find myself in awe of the physical condition of the athletes. They have strength, endurance, and flexibility. They’re so fit, which is the exact opposite of me. I’d love to be in even half that shape, but I have this one little problem: I hate to exercise. By that I mean exercising just for the point of exercising or getting fit — lifting weights just to move heavy things, walking just for exercise or, worse, using a treadmill of stationary bicycle. It’s just so boring, and it takes a long time to feel the benefits from exercise. When I try to start a fitness program, I get bored with it and give up before I start seeing the kind of results that would encourage me to continue. Even with yoga, where I feel better immediately after doing it, I have to force myself to do it, and then I can’t wait for it to be over.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t like activity. When I was spending days shoveling snow, I found that I was actually enjoying myself. There was a great sense of accomplishment from seeing the results, and I felt myself getting stronger. I get bored with walking for the sake of walking, like walking laps or going on a regular route purely for fitness purposes, but I love walking when there’s a purpose to it. I enjoy walking as a form of transportation. One of my favorite things about where I live now is the fact that I can walk to so many things. I walk to church when the weather allows it, and I walk to events downtown. I can walk to concerts in the park or to the community garden market. I also love hiking and being in the woods and I enjoy walking when I’m exploring.

Or I enjoy activity when it’s something I’m doing for fun, like dancing. I was probably at my most fit when I was taking ballet classes, and ballroom dancing is fun. I can make myself do exercise when I have a specific goal, like when I was in physical therapy and trying to get back full function of a knee or shoulder, or when I’m trying to get better at something I enjoy. One reason I was so fit when taking ballet was because I’d do other exercises during the week to make myself do better in ballet.

What I’ve figured out from this is that I need a purpose to make myself do an activity. Even making exercise a task on my calendar or giving myself points toward rewards for doing it doesn’t motivate me. But having something specific and tangible that I’m trying to accomplish does work. So if I’m not walking because I need to get somewhere, I need to come up with some other purpose, like something I want to explore. In a town full of historic districts, that should be easy enough. I can play tourist and walk the way I did when I visited the town on vacation. When the ice and snow clear out, I’ll have a lot of garden work to do. Then the yoga will work as a way to undo the aches from the garden work and long walks. I may look into some dance classes.

I can’t believe it took me this long to realize that having a purpose might make a big difference. I guess it’s like the way I have a hard time keeping my house clean but can get it in shape if I might have company. I need external motivation for some things.

Now I just need enough ice and snow to clear so I can get out and do more.

TV

A Romantic Adventure

With Valentine’s Day coming tomorrow, I suppose it would be on point to talk about something romantic, so I think I’ll plug one of my favorite romantic TV series that I just finished rewatching yet again: Once Upon a Time in Wonderland. It’s a spin-off of the Once Upon a Time series, but is only slightly connected. Aside from one thing that might be a bit confusing if you’re not familiar with the parent series, this one pretty much stands alone. It’s a self-contained 13-episode story, so it never had the chance to spin out of control in the way the original series did, and I think I may enjoy it more than I enjoyed the main series.

We’ve got two romances that actually work, and one of them is truly healthy and supportive. There’s a good villain redemption that involves the villain realizing that they were doing wrong, knowing where they went wrong, apologizing to the people they wronged, suffering the consequences for their evil actions, and trying to atone for their wrongs. Then there’s also a really satisfying villain comeuppance.

Where the series relates to the parent Once Upon a Time series is in structure. Like the parent series, it involves a mash-up of (Disney versions of) fairy tales and other stories. In this case, it’s an odd mix of Alice in Wonderland and Aladdin that somehow works. Jafar from Aladdin is the Big Bad, and there are genies (though not the Genie). There are also a few bits from Robin Hood, and there’s a suggestion that one of the characters is one of Cinderella’s stepsisters. It’s also told with the present-day story plus flashbacks to things from the backstory that are relevant to the current story (a lot like the structure of Lost).

This is essentially a sequel to Alice in Wonderland. As an adult, Alice goes back to Wonderland to find evidence that Wonderland is real to show her father, who thinks she made up the stories about her adventures. While she’s there, she meets someone and falls in love and decides to stay, but then she loses her love and returns home, grief-stricken. Our story picks up when she gets word that her lost love may still be alive, so she sets off to go back to Wonderland and rescue him, but she finds out that this is all part of a much greater evil scheme.

I really like the romance in this series because it’s so healthy. It involves two people who like and respect each other. They start as friends, then fall in love. All the conflict keeping them apart is external, so there’s no bickering. It probably would have been a boring story if we’d seen it in chronological order, since all the conflict comes after they’re already in love and a couple. But this story starts with the conflict keeping them apart and focuses on their efforts to get back to each other and later to overcome the obstacles to them being able to have peace. We see the early part of their relationship, with them meeting and falling in love, in flashback, so it’s just a highlight reel of the pivotal moments set against their current woes.

Alice makes for a great heroine. She’s good at heart and kind, but without being an idiot about it or a total pushover. She can be steely and ruthless when she has to be. We see her learning how to fight in the flashbacks, so it’s not one of those cases of someone just picking up a sword and miraculously being good at it. She’s also clever and mostly avoids falling for the villains’ traps. She keeps her head in a crisis. I just really find myself liking her.

This series is one of my comfort views. I wouldn’t call it cozy because there’s some serious peril, but I find it oddly reassuring now that I know the outcome. I like spending time with these people. Their version of Wonderland can be a bit campy, but I like it for the most part. There’s a bit of a steampunk esthetic in some of it. My only real quibbles for the series are the “1990s homecoming dress from David’s Bridal” look for the fancy court dresses and the epilogue. I can kind of see some of the reason why they gave that outcome to some of the characters, but it doesn’t ring true to me as something they would have been happy with.

The series is showing on Disney+, so if you want something in hour-long (a bit less) chunks that wraps up in 13 episodes and has a nice mix of action and romance with a fairytale flair, it’s worth checking out.

exploring

Behind the Organ

Last weekend’s adventure involved a Sunday-afternoon field trip to learn how they make pipe organs. There’s an organ builder in town (well, just outside town), and every so often when they’ve got an organ built and ready to ship, they have an open house to show off their workshop. One of the founders of the company (now retired) is in our choir, as is one of the current owners, along with several employees. The woman who makes the metal pipes often sits next to me in choir, and our assistant organist works there. This company built our church’s current organ, so if something goes wrong with it, we’ve got a lot of people in the choir loft who would know how to fix it.

The workshop is in an old school building just outside town, and it looks like they hollowed it out so that the main room goes all the way to the roof. They need all that space to put the organ together, and even then they don’t have enough room to put the biggest pipes in the proper configuration. They put the organ together as close to the way it will be in its final home to connect all the pipes and rig it all together, do a preliminary tuning and voicing and test it, and then they disassemble the whole thing and transport it to its home, where they assemble it and then do a final voicing and tuning, since the location affects the sound. This company makes mechanical organs, so there are no electronics. They only need electricity to power the fan and bellows. Otherwise, these organs are just like those built hundreds of years ago.

A large wooden pipe organ sits in temporary housing.
The front of the pipe organ in its temporary housing in the workshop.

It was really neat seeing what’s inside the organ from the back, since it’s not in the kind of cabinet it will be in when it’s finally set up. I’ve seen bits and pieces of the inside of our organ, but not the parts that are usually hidden.

The back of the organ console, with thousands of cables connecting keys to pipes.
This is what’s behind the console, with all those cables going to the pipes to open and close them based on what keys are pressed and what stops are open.

This company has its own lumber mill nearby (we saw the outside of this because the person who was driving initially followed the wrong GPS directions, having it take us to the mill instead of the workshop), and most of the wood is hand-carved, though they do use some computer-assisted cutting where precision is important. The woman who makes the pipes does it all by hand, and there are about 3,000 pipes in an organ. She says she goes through a lot of audiobooks while working.

Bits of carved woodwork lie on a workbench. The view through the window behind is of snow-covered hills and mountains in the distance.
This is some of the woodwork that will go on the facade of the organ when it’s installed.

A retired church organist was there playing the organ, so there was a nice soundtrack for exploring the workshop and socializing. Not only did I run into a lot of people from church, but I also saw one of my neighbors there.

And we also got some nice scenery. One of the few good things about the crust of ice on top of the snow was that it keeps it all looking pristine, so we saw rolling snow-covered hills with mountains in the background.

The view through an old square-paned window, with rolling hills covered in snow in the foreground and mountains in the distance.
The view from the workshop was spectacular, and it made for a nice drive to get out there.
Books

Copying Worlds

I recently went down an odd little reading/viewing trail. Before Christmas, I discovered that The Magicians was on the CW app. I never saw the last two seasons because that was when I lost cable, but I didn’t remember what happened in the earlier seasons, so I started rewatching from the beginning (and then, wouldn’t you know, they dropped it from the app right after I got to the parts I hadn’t seen, so I still haven’t seen the final season).

That series is basically Hogwarts meets Narnia, so when I finished the book I was reading on Christmas day, I pulled The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe off the shelf to reread it. And then when I finished rereading the series (mostly, since I generally avoid The Last Battle), I figured I’d reread the book of The Magicians.

I read the first book when it was relatively new and had no interest in continuing the series. It was only after the TV show came on that I read the whole trilogy between seasons, and now rereading the first book right after having reread the Narnia books reminded me of why that book didn’t grab me. Mostly, it’s not original enough to be very interesting.

I think the concept of mashing up the Hogwarts-style magical school and the magical land concept of Narnia has a lot of fun potential. The book’s story is basically about a nerdy guy who was obsessed with a Narnia-like fantasy series who thinks he’s going to a university interview and ends up getting into a magical school. Then after he’s graduated from school and bored with being back in the “real” world, one of his friends finds out that the magical land from those books is real, and they can go there, but it’s nothing like they expected.

The problem I had with the way the book was executed was that the school may be an American university, but it’s basically Hogwarts on the Hudson. It functions pretty much like a British boarding school, a la Hogwarts (particularly as it’s depicted in the movies). In the book, the students wear uniforms. They’re sorted into Disciplines, which are kind of like majors based on aptitude, but they’re chosen for the students rather than them getting to choose them, so it might as well be a Sorting Hat. The students from each Discipline hang out together in the Discipline’s cottage, so basically a Common Room. There’s a wacky magical sport with complicated rules. The main difference from Hogwarts is that it’s a university (they age it up more in the TV show to a grad school), so we get a lot more drinking, drugs, and sex.

Meanwhile, the magical land of Fillory is basically Narnia. The author didn’t even try to hide this, since a lot of it is about the main character’s relationship with the “Fillory” books, and we’re supposed to relate it to our relationship with the Narnia books to understand his attachment to this world. Like Narnia, Fillory is largely populated by sentient talking animals. There are also all the magical creatures based on Greek mythology, like centaurs, fauns, naiads, dryads, etc. You can get to Fillory through a gateway world with various fountains, each of which leads to a different world, which is right out of The Magician’s Nephew, which had the pools that lead to different worlds. In the Fillory books, there are four siblings who travel there, and there are four kings and queens who have to be from earth, just like in the Narnia books.

I found this frustrating on multiple levels. For one thing, it felt like shallow worldbuilding that started by taking the inspiration and just barely changing it to suit the story. It would have been far more interesting to be inspired by the idea of a magical school and then starting with the idea of an American university and making it magical. Have magical fraternities and sororities that you have to rush. Have students who were recruited mostly to play magical sports that are the basis of serious interscholastic rivalries. Have Homecoming weekends with the alumni coming back.

As for the magical world, I think we can grasp the idea of being attached to the world of a portal fantasy, dreaming of going there, and being shocked to learn that you can, whether or not that world looks exactly like Narnia. The really enraging thing there to me was that after basically ripping off Narnia and expecting us to see Fillory as a non-copyright infringing version of Narnia, the author had the author of the Fillory books be a child molester. If C.S. Lewis were still alive, he might have grounds for a lawsuit because it was so obvious what was meant by Fillory, which meant the author in the book was basically him, and then he was defamed.

There’s also some weird structure to the book, with the first half being their time at school, which was mostly classes, studying, and hanging out, with no real plot, then there’s a whole section where they’re just bored and drunk, and then they finally get to Fillory. I liked the TV series a lot better. The TV series was like the writers had bought a model kit but used the pieces to make something entirely different. You can occasionally recognize a piece from the picture on the model kit box, but it’s in a different place and serving a different purpose. They moved up the action and wove it into the school stuff. The book has them graduate halfway through the book, and then they have their adventures, while the TV series has them discover Fillory and start having adventures while they’re still students, so it weaves together the magical school plot and the magical land plot.

I will confess that the initial germ of the idea that became Enchanted, Inc. was “Bridget Jones meets Harry Potter,” but I never really went back to those things in building my world or my characters. It was more of a concept, adding magic to a chick lit type story, or else moving the secret magical world existing within our world into adulthood, with a magical corporation instead of a school. From there, though, I was drawing on my work in corporate America for ideas, and I was looking at chick lit and rom-coms as a whole rather than actually taking anything specifically from Bridget Jones. That was more of a pitch line to describe the vibes, not the real basis of the book.

Life

Digging out

I finished my draft on Friday, then I got my car shoveled out yesterday, so that’s been my recent accomplishment. I am now allowing myself to rest a bit and do thinking type work. Getting through all that ice was a real challenge.

This is what my car looked like before I was able to dig it out.

A blue Subaru Forester sits surrounded by what looks like fluffy snow but which is actually a thick crust of ice on top of snow. The snow comes up past the bottom of the doors.
My car encased in its icy prison. That’s a Subaru Forester, to give you a sense of how high the ice goes. This car is pretty far off the ground.

And this was the end of my driveway Monday, after I’d been shoveling at it for days. I was using a garden hoe to hack the ice into blocks. And then my neighbor brought over a tool he’d been using. It’s designed for breaking up tile flooring, and it works amazingly on ice. There’s a narrow blade on the bottom and it’s heavy. You just let it drop onto the surface, and it shatters it. I went from clearing maybe a foot or two a day to getting the rest of the driveway and my car freed on Monday afternoon. Tuesday morning I finished a good path to my driveway and cleared space around the car so I could get to the door and open it, plus cleared a path to the mailbox and freed the trash bin. It was easier work with this tool, but still tiring because you have to keep lifting this heavy thing, and you still have to move all the blocks of ice. That’s why I’m resting today.

A cliff of ice shows a steep drop-off from the ice to the gravel driveway below.
The end of the glacier that was my driveway. I’d managed to cut about three feet into it at this point.

This is just part of the piles of ice blocks I moved from my driveway. I’ll have to track to see how long it takes to melt. We actually got above freezing yesterday, and that actually made it a bit harder to move more ice because when it got slushy, the tool no longer worked and I couldn’t just move chunks at a time. I had to actually shovel.

A pile of ice blocks.
This is about half of what was covering my driveway. There’s another pile on the other side and more piled up beside the driveway.

After a day of rest, I may do a little more work on paths. The path I dug from the porch to the driveway doesn’t follow the actual walkway (I’ve been thinking of moving the walkway, which is stepping stones, and this path might be a good option because it’s what made sense at the time, especially because the snow/ice drifted deeper on the real path). I may try to dig out the walkway. And I may move some of the slush from my deck so it doesn’t melt and flow toward my basement. Plus, this is a great workout and I’d like to maintain and maybe even build on some of the fitness I’ve developed from doing all this, so I need to keep working instead of just sitting now.

Once I freed my car, I was able to restock on groceries and run by the library. The city streets are somewhat cleared, but side streets are mostly one-lane. They had crews out loading chunks of ice into dump trucks because clearing the streets had created walls of ice around the town. I don’t know when all of this will melt.

 

writing life

The End is in Sight

I’m almost at the end of the draft I’ve been working on, which I’m pretty proud of, given all the distractions this week. You’d think that being iced in would be good for productivity, but I’m spending a couple of hours a day chipping away at the iceberg that is my driveway. They got the street cleared yesterday, using a front-end loader to break up the ice, scoop it up, and carry it away, but that left about an eight-inch high cliff from my driveway to the street, and there’s ice/snow up to the bottom of my car, all the way around it. I generally gear up and run outside just before lunchtime, chip away at the ice while it’s in direct sunlight (though still well below freezing), then run inside when my hands start to hurt from the cold and warm up with hot soup. I do another session in the afternoon. I’ll make hot tea and put it in a thermos, then go outside and chip away at some ice until my hands hurt, then come inside and have hot tea. I have a pathway from my door to the mailbox, a good chunk off the iceberg at the foot of my driveway (where the loader left edges that give me some leverage for breaking it up), and most of the slabs of ice off the top of my car.

I normally don’t get a lot else done when I’m on a first draft. I know it’s always like this, and yet I never seem to take it into consideration when I’m planning. I always think I can spend an hour or so a day on promotion and take care of little projects to organize my house because it’s not as though I spend all day writing. And yet nothing else seems to get done. After this draft is done, I need to do some serious house organizing work because I never finished setting up the basement after I moved in and I need to do that to get the rest of the downstairs in shape. I also had some marketing projects I wanted to work on, and those haven’t happened. So, that’s February’s work. For the next month I spend working on a draft, I’m going to plan better and just admit that the bare minimum of everything other than writing will happen that month.

Now I have about two more scenes to write, and then I’m going to let myself collapse, other than doing more shoveling, if it’s not snowing again.

Life

Iced In

When I was living in Texas, I noticed that whenever we got hit by an ice storm (and it was usually ice rather than snow), people in more northern climates mocked us because it paralyzed the city for days. They didn’t seem to understand that we didn’t have the infrastructure for dealing with that kind of weather (and it wasn’t cost-effective to develop the infrastructure when it was something that happened once every few years) and that you really can’t do a lot about ice other than wait for it to melt.

Now that I live in a more northern place and in the mountains, I get snow more regularly, and they still shut down. They’re good about getting the streets plowed, but the school buses are too risky on the steep hills until the roads are truly clear. This weekend, though, we got a storm that was more like what Texas gets. It started as snow and turned into sleet. Now we have a crust of about 3 inches of sleet on top of about 4 inches of powdery snow, and the whole city has been shut down for three days. They can’t plow the ice (and broke some snowplows trying). They’re now going out with heavy construction equipment, the kind they use to break up asphalt to resurface roads, to break the ice up so the plows can then go through and move it out of the way. That’s slow going, so my little one-block side street that’s on the bottom of the priority list is still solid ice. One neighbor tried going up and down it with a snow blower, but that did no good.

To make matters worse, it’s getting single-digit cold at night, sunny and in the 20s (F) during the day, so the top layer is melting slightly while in the sun then freezing hard at night, so it’s like a skating rink. If you look at it, it looks like the kind of snow that looks like mounds of fluffy whipped cream, but I can walk across the top of it without leaving footprints. Well, I could on Monday before it slightly melted in the sunlight and refroze to be very slippery. Now I can’t walk on it. I was able to shovel a path to the street Monday by breaking through the top layer and flipping it to the side, but now that top layer is even harder and my shovel does nothing, so I can’t clear the driveway. I may get out the garden hoe to see what I can do today. I can’t do much at any one time because it’s very cold and my gloves aren’t up to the task. I have to come inside when my hands start hurting. I tried to buy some better insulated gloves last week before the storm, but they were clearing out their winter gear and setting out spring gardening stuff, so they didn’t have any heavy gloves that would fit me. I’m going to try knitting some mittens to wear over the gloves I have.

Once you get that top crust of ice off, the rest is light, powdery snow that’s easy to move. I’ve been able to clear much of the ice/sleet off my car, but the area around the car is still pretty solid, and there’s a wall of snow at the end of my driveway from when they tried to get ahead of the storm by plowing during it, which only made matters worse because it shoved the snow aside so the sleet was directly on the street. I don’t think I’ll be driving anywhere anytime soon. Fortunately, I stocked up at the grocery store last week. If I do need something, my neighbor has chains on his car and has been able to get out, and he’s offered to pick up anything I need.

We had a storm kind of like this in Dallas in 2014, and we’ve been paralyzed here just as long as we were in Dallas. The bright side is that I haven’t had to worry about the electrical grid crashing the way it did a few years ago in Texas during a winter storm.

I’ve been able to keep up with writing in spite of the distractions. I should theoretically have more writing time because I can’t go anywhere, but my brain has other plans. I’m close to the end of the draft, though.

writing life

Pottery Research

After just one pottery class, I already have information that will affect the book I’m working on with a character who’s a potter. Last week, we were doing hand building, working without the wheel. We made bowls using molds and “slab clay,” a sheet of clay sent through a wringer-like device to flatten it out. Then we made vases using coils of clay.

One thing I learned was that this takes a lot of upper-body effort. I was more sore the next day from the pottery work than I was from the eight-mile hike I did later in the day. You’re bending over a work bench, so your back gets stiff if you aren’t careful. You have to “wedge” the clay to work out any air pockets and make sure the moisture is evenly distributed. It’s a lot like kneading bread, but the clay is much stiffer than bread dough, so it takes more force and strength. Then there’s a lot of control while doing the shaping.

I also learned that working with clay really dries out your hands. My hands were so rough and dry after the class. I had to keep slathering my hands with lotion the rest of the weekend. They finally started to get back to normal in the middle of the week. It looks like I’ve got a scene with Elwyn I can add, where she comes up with a balm for the potter to use.

I’m having to adjust the timeline of the book based on something else I’ve learned. It’s important to the plot that my potter makes a certain piece that has to be done before the end of the book, but pottery is a slow process. A piece has to be completely dry before it can go into the kiln, and that can take weeks, especially if the piece is thick. The pieces we make during this class won’t be fired until about 2-3 weeks after we made them. We’re doing the glazing in the last class, so they’ll have gone through a preliminary firing by then. If there’s any moisture in the clay when it goes into the kiln, it will boil and make the piece explode. Today’s kilns have some temperature controls, so they can raise the temperature gradually and reduce the risk of explosion, but I’m dealing with a wood or charcoal-fired kiln in the book, so there’s a lot less control. That means I had to find a way to insert at least a week into the timeline so that the item the character makes early in the book is ready by the time it’s needed.

I did learn from the instructor how clay can be recycled and revived, so my scenario of the person trained as a potter coming across an abandoned workshop and being able to use the clay that’s been dried out is viable (I told her what I was writing and gave her the specific scenario, and she told me how it would work). I have to play with the timeline a bit on that, but I found a way to do what was needed more rapidly.

This week, we’re working on the pottery wheel. I had a toy pottery wheel as a kid that used air-dry clay, and I never managed to make anything viable, so I’m a little anxious about how big of a disaster this can be. I keep telling myself that it’s about the process of learning and getting information and I don’t need to make a pro-level piece my first time. I just don’t want to send any clay flying across the room.

Life

More Weekendy Weekends

I’m trying to be more mindful about how I spend my free time. I especially don’t want my weekends to feel too much like my weekdays, which tends to happen when you work at home. Even if I’m not writing over the weekend, I have a bad habit of spending a lot of time online or otherwise sitting at my computer. So, to encourage myself to spend weekends in a way that feels like a weekend, I came up with three main categories of kinds of Saturday, and I try to plan in advance what I’m going to do, so I don’t get into a round of “What do you want to do? I don’t know, what do you want to do?” with myself.

One category is work. That can include writing if I need to catch up after having other stuff come up during the week. It may also include things like workshops, conferences, conventions, book festivals, etc. It also includes projects around the house or in the yard, like organizing or gardening.

Another category is adventure, which is what I’m calling activities that involve leaving the house. That can include classes, touring and exploring, hiking, museums, and that sort of thing.

And then there’s cozy/creating. This is good for rainy or snowy days and involves things that are good to do on a cozy day at home. I added the “creating” so I’d have to do something other than just read. It may involve baking, cooking (especially trying new recipes), sewing, embroidery, knitting, coloring, music and stuff like jigsaw puzzles.

I pondered a social category, but that usually involves leaving the house, so it could be “adventure,” or else it’s something like a block party that involves work or creating to prep for. A few weeks ago, there was a choir party, so I spent the day baking before the party. Generally, social activities are an add-on to a weekend, and if they’re a focus of a weekend, like the church retreat, then they’re also an adventure.

I imagine I’ll have a lot more cozy/creating Saturdays during the winter, more work in spring and summer when I have yard work and gardening to do, and more adventure in the fall, when there are all the festivals, looking at leaves, hiking trips, and that kind of thing.

I generally try to save Sunday afternoons for rest. I have church and choir in the mornings, and I usually walk there, so that gives me some exercise. In the afternoons I read and maybe cook. Sometimes I have things scheduled that would fit into my other weekend categories. The church does field trips and the pastor leads prayer walks (meditative hikes) once a month.

The Saturday before last was a cozy/creating day because it was rainy. I baked bread and read. But there was also some work because there was an online seminar.

Last weekend was a mix of all of them. I had a pottery class in the morning, which counted as adventure, creating, and work (since it’s research for a book and I asked the teacher questions that have come up in my writing). Then in the afternoon the hiking group did a city walkabout hike. Between walking downtown and back for the class and the hike, my phone says I walked more than 9 miles that day. It’s a good thing I had a restful Sunday afternoon planned because my legs were tired and my upper body got a workout from the pottery.

This coming weekend I have another pottery class on Saturday, then a committee meeting after church Sunday and then one of my neighbors is having a party Sunday evening, but we’re also expecting a big winter storm, so I don’t know how much of it will end up happening. It’ll be really cold Saturday morning but the snow isn’t supposed to start until later, so the pottery class may happen (I’ll drive instead of walking if it’s that cold), but we could get about 10 inches of snow overnight Saturday, so there’s a chance the Sunday stuff won’t happen. I don’t know if the neighbor will cancel the party or just assume we can fight our way through the snow across the street. After the pottery class, I plan on going full cozy. There will be baking, soup, and cocoa. If it’s going to snow, it would be nice if some of it would happen while I can watch it. I’ve found that it tends to snow overnight here. You wake up and there’s snow on the ground but you don’t get to watch it fall very often, and I only really like snow when it’s falling. I love to watch it fall but could do without it once it hits the ground.

The local weather people started off all “don’t buy the hype” about the storm but are now saying to make preparations, so that means grocery shopping today to beat the rush.