Cooking

Weekend Cooking

We had a cold, rainy weekend, and it was glorious. I did some cooking and read, did a little book brainstorming, and was delightfully lazy. It was just the kind of time to spend snuggled up under a blanket with a cup of tea and a good book. Lately, it’s seemed like every time we have a cold, rainy weekend, it’s a weekend when I have to go somewhere or do something, and for once I didn’t have to.

I was even so lazy that I decided not to do any baking, as I’d planned, aside from the biscuits I made for breakfast. Not that I needed to bake, given that I have a freezer full of stuff from past baking binges. I have a couple of bags of blueberry mini muffins and a bag of pumpkin mini muffins, plus some shortbread cookies, and I found some chocolate mini cakes in the back of the freezer when I was looking for something else.

I’ve discovered that the whey I get from draining my homemade yogurt can be substituted for buttermilk in baking, and I think the results are even better. It makes for fluffy, flaky biscuits and really fluffy waffles. I didn’t really need to know this. It’s dangerous knowledge.

But I did do some Instant Pot experimentation. I wasn’t totally crazy with my initial attempt at using it to make a pot roast — the meat wasn’t as tender as it is when I make stew, and the vegetables were mushy. I did some more research and tried pressure cooking it for less time (about half an hour less than most of the recipes, since I was using a smaller roast) but letting the pressure release naturally. I roasted the potatoes (white and sweet) in the oven. The meat was just right, fork tender and juicy. But then for Sunday lunch, I thought I’d try something else I’d seen for the vegetables. I scraped the fat off the liquid, put it in the pot and let it heat up on saute, then put in some potatoes, carrots, and green beans (not traditional with this, but I had them, and they were good cooked this way) and cooked for four minutes, then did a quick pressure release and put the roast in with it all to warm up. The vegetables were just right, soft but not mushy, and they tasted like they’d been cooking all day with the roast. So I will have to fine tune this recipe and cook it again. For science.

Oh, and I also made pizza this weekend. I won’t have to cook a meal until later this week, I did so much cooking this weekend.

writing

Thinking Time

One of the things I really enjoy about not having a day job is my ability to have my “thinking time.” For about an hour after I wake up, I like to lie in bed (especially in the winter) and think, usually about whatever I’m writing. This is when I daydream and brainstorm. I may see the movie of scenes playing out. Some of these scenes may end up in the book, while others are about getting to know the characters. I imagine the world and how it works. I may even dig into the history or backstory, all the stuff that happened before the story starts that won’t make it into the story itself but that shapes the situation. Sometimes I pick at plot details. Usually, by the time I get out of bed, I’ve come up with some good things I can use.

The great thing about thinking time is that I’m not entirely awake yet, so I’m much more creative than I’ll be at any other point in the day. Random ideas come and go, sometimes coming from something that has nothing to do with the current story. The critical side of my brain is still mostly asleep, so I can explore these random things without getting critical and telling myself to stop because that doesn’t belong in this book. If I sat down with pen and paper to work these things out, I’d never be as free-flowing as I am first thing in the morning.

But sometimes this lack of criticism means I go down some odd paths and get stuck there. This morning, I was thinking about my heroine’s background. She’s from a clan that makes woolen textiles — they raise the sheep, spin the wool, and knit or weave it into cloth. Their abilities in this area are somewhat supernaturally enhanced, so the cloth they make is particularly fine and in high demand. There are auctions for this cloth, since the supply is so limited. When the heroine gets the opportunity to go study in an elite institution, they make things for her to send her off. Most of it isn’t the super-fine stuff, since they can’t afford to use that for themselves instead of selling it, but since she’ll have to ride and wear riding breeches, her aunt the super knitter makes her some drawers (basically leggings) out of the super-fine yarn her mother spins. This comes into play in the story when the other girls are treating the heroine like she’s a hick, but then they discover that she has this super nice underwear even they can’t get, made from this incredibly soft and fine wool, and knit as one piece, with no seams to chafe. Then the other girls are torn on how to treat her because on the one hand, she’s working class, with her family actually working and making stuff, but on the other hand, they’re the source for this cloth everyone is dying to have, and maybe sucking up to her will give them an inside track.

But then I spent at least half an hour mentally trying to figure out how you’d knit leggings in one piece. There would have to be some grafting, but that would feel different than a seam. I was figuring how to knit the legs separately from the ankle up knitting in the round, then you’d join the legs on a circular needle, but there would be some increases and keeping the crotch area on stitch holders and knitting that separately before grafting it together. I finally snapped out of it as I woke up further and realized that I didn’t have to provide the knitting pattern and the whole point was that there was a magical level of talent involved, so I shouldn’t be able to figure out how to do this. All I needed was to have some really special underwear for the other girls to envy. But just the existence of the underwear and the role it plays in the way the heroine interacts with other girls was a good result from a brainstorming session.

I wouldn’t be able to do thinking time like this with a regular job because I’d need to get up and get to work. In my current situation, this is part of my work and is valuable time. It just happens to take place snuggled in bed rather than sitting at a desk.

writing life

More About Quitting the Day Job

After writing yesterday’s post, I had more thoughts about the do/don’t quit your day job argument and why I have such mixed feelings.

One big thing that I don’t think most people dreaming of being a full-time writer realize is that having more time to write probably won’t result in making more money from writing (with some exceptions). That’s because you’ll be fortunate to get one publishing slot a year, which means that if you can write one book a year while having a full-time job, you’ll be able to write as fast as they can publish you, so writing more won’t do you much good. Maybe, if you’re really lucky/good/successful, you might get two slots a year, like if you do a spinoff series (which requires the initial books to be successful), or if you write two different kinds of books, like adult and YA. The big exception is category romance, where the top writers can get four or more books a year published. And, of course, with self publishing you can publish whatever you write. Otherwise, don’t count on being able to boost your writing income by all that much by quitting your day job and having more time to write.

The main reason to quit your day job is for physical, mental, and emotional health. You may be able to keep up with the publishing pace while having a day job, but once you’re writing for publication, writing-related activities will eat up more time, and that time will have to come out of either your free time or time you previously used for writing. There are editorial revisions, copyedits, galley proofs, reviewing cover copy, researching ideas for covers. When the book comes out, you may be asked to write guest columns or blog posts and do interviews. You may be asked to read books to provide promotional blurbs. At some point, when you’re having to devote most of your waking hours to either your day job or your writing job and you’re even using your vacation days for writing conferences, conventions, travel to booksignings, or writing when you’re on deadline, something’s going to give. Your relationships may suffer. Your health may suffer if you’re not getting enough exercise or sleep.

And your work may suffer. That, I think, is the main argument for quitting a day job. You can’t write well when you’re burned out. If you’re not able to live life, if you don’t get to read for pleasure or do anything that isn’t work-related in some way, your creative well may empty and not be refilled. When you’re pressed for time, it’s harder to dig in as deeply as you probably should. For instance, right now I’m reading an entire book to research the backstory for the heroine of the book I’m plotting. Most of what I learn may not even show up in the book other than in the first few pages (the “ordinary world” part of the story), but I think it will help me get into that mindset and flesh out the character. Writing full time, I can get through this book in two days while also doing other work. If I were fitting this in around a day job, it would be a week’s worth of reading. It probably wouldn’t be worth a week of writing time to read this book. That might not make a huge difference in the finished book, but I think it will be richer from having done this.

Leaving the day job means that you have time for a life in addition to work, and you aren’t as pressed for time to work, so you can dig into your work to make it even better. You can also deal with more of the business stuff without sacrificing writing time.

But you can’t relax and enjoy the benefits of not having a day job if you’re worried about finances, which is why it’s not a step to take lightly. It’s also not an all-or-nothing situation. My last two years of my day job, I worked out a deal with my boss to telecommute and work semi-full time (I still counted as a full-time employee for benefits, but I was working 30 hours a week, and being paid part-time meant I had a hard stop on the number of hours I could work, so it drastically cut my working time). I had reached the point of burnout because my job had become something like 60 hours a week with a lot of travel, and I wasn’t able to get any writing at all done even though I had publishers asking to see something from me. I broke down in tears in a staff meeting when we were allocating client work and it came down to me being scheduled for more than 200 billable hours in a month. I actually tried to quit then, but my boss talked me into staying and worked out a way for me to stay but also have time to write. Something like that is worth a shot. Depending on your commute, just getting to telecommute a few days a week could free up hours of time. If you’re making money from publishing, you may be able to afford to take a pay cut in exchange for cutting a day of work a week or going to part time. There’s also freelancing, temping, and contract work.

Mostly, it boils down to what allows you to be both sane and reasonably financially secure. I guess my measure of when to quit the day job would be when you’ve got at least two years of living expenses saved up and when you feel like something has to give — when either your day job doesn’t allow you the time you need to write or you have no life other than work and writing. It’s a very individual thing and will depend on your family situation, your degree of introversion, how much you love (or hate) the day job, whether continuing that career is a viable thing, etc. Don’t let anyone tell you that you have to quit to have a career, but don’t let anyone scare you away from making a move that might save your sanity.

writing life

Quitting the Day Job?

One of the big discussions going on in author Twitter, aside from the editor-turned-author who apparently faked his resume, the deaths of his entire family, and cancer in order to boost his career, is about something another author has said about authors needing to take the leap and quit their day jobs if they want to get ahead or write well, or something like that.

As a writer who hasn’t had a day job for 17 years, I have thoughts about that. My career probably falls into the category of “don’t do it this way” and isn’t at all typical.

In my case, quitting my day job wasn’t really a choice. I got laid off, and since at that time just about everyone in my field was getting laid off, the odds of me being able to get another job were slim. There were a lot of people competing for a very few available positions. One of my colleagues laid off on the same day took a couple of months to get a new job that was a step down from where she’d been and then got laid off from that job and the next job before she had to move to another city to get the next job (I think she’s on about her tenth job since then). I was in a terrible position to try to become a full-time novelist, since I hadn’t sold a book in years and the category line I’d been writing for had folded. I had an agent, but the book she’d submitted hadn’t sold and there had been no response on the follow up book (I later learned that she may not have actually submitted it, since editors she supposedly sent it to had no idea what I was talking about when I met them later, but that’s another story and I have a different agent now). I’d just come up with the idea for the book that became Enchanted, Inc., but hadn’t started writing it and had no idea whether there was even a market for it.

On the other hand, I’d already bought a house and had a relatively new car that I’d paid cash for, so I didn’t have to worry about being able to show employment for a credit check. I had a freelance writing gig that pretty much paid my mortgage. I had no other debts. I’d been saving money all along. I’m generally pretty frugal, so as I got raises, I maintained my old lifestyle and put the extra money in savings. I had my direct deposit set up to automatically put a chunk of my paycheck into savings. All the freelance money and any royalties or book advances went straight into savings. I’d been working for a division of my company that had previously been a company bought out by my company, which meant I got some profit-sharing bonuses as part of the buyout agreement, and all that went into savings. When I factored in my severance payment, I had about three years of living expenses saved up, not even counting my regular freelance gig. The day after I got laid off, before I’d even made any decisions about what to do, I started getting calls from former clients wanting to hire me as a freelancer. I had my first interview for a freelance assignment the Monday after I got laid off on Thursday. So, I didn’t really quit my day job to be a novelist. I got laid off from my day job and decided to freelance as a marketing communications writer to give myself the chance to try to be a novelist.

I did taper off on the freelance work after I started selling books, but I was able to keep that steady gig for the first ten years or so of freelancing. There have been years when I dipped into my savings, and there have been years when I added significantly to my savings. I’m lucky that I got a health insurance plan soon after I got laid off that’s grandfathered. It doesn’t contain all the ACA benefits, but most of those are benefits I don’t need and it’s significantly less expensive. We won’t even get into how ridiculous it is that healthcare is tied to employment. That’s an entirely different discussion.

That’s how I’ve made it work financially. How has it worked creatively? I don’t know that I write significantly more than I did when I had a full-time job. My daily word count when drafting is about double, but I don’t make myself work weekends now, while I did spend most of my weekends writing when I had a full-time job. Mostly what I gained was mental and emotional energy. I’m on the extreme end of the introvert scale, and going to an office where I spent the day around people utterly drained me. I would come home from work and fall asleep on the sofa even before dinner if I wasn’t careful. When I started writing seriously, my social life dwindled to nearly nothing because I didn’t have the energy to see people in my free time and still be able to write. Writing full-time gives me the chance to do something other than work and write. I still don’t have that active a social life, by choice, but I get out a fair amount, just due to choir, church, several social groups I’m involved in, etc. I have time for music, to read for pleasure, to exercise, to cook. I think I’m a lot healthier than when I was working all day in an office, then coming home and sitting at my desk after microwaving something for dinner. Not having a day job means I feel like I can breathe.

I do think that writing full-time improved the quality of my work. I feel like I have the time to dig deeper in developing stories and in editing/revision. I don’t think I could have managed what I do now with things like reading the last draft out loud. It would take me about a year or more to write a book like Rebel Mechanics if I had to do it part time because there’s just so much research involved. When I’m doing research for a book like that, I’m spending hours a day just reading. I suspect that if I were having to do it part-time, I would skimp on the amount of research and preparation. I can devote my brain all day to my story and characters, even if I’m not actively writing, and that’s something I couldn’t do when I spent the day at the office.

I don’t know how anyone could do the kind of promotion that’s necessary today with a full-time job. My books published while I was working were category romances, so they were only available for one month. There might have been an intense month of booksignings and message board posting, but then you were done once the book was off the shelf. Now books stay out there, and there’s social media, blogging, and all that. It’s nice not having to take vacation days to go to conventions or to travel for book events. I can accept gigs to speak at schools and libraries without fitting them into a work schedule.

I really don’t think I’d have the writing career I have today if I’d gone looking for — and found — another job instead of deciding to give writing full time a shot. I might never have written the books I’ve written. I’m not sure I’d have actually stuck with writing because I was so discouraged then that I was on the verge of giving up. Realizing that I had to make it work before I ran out of money was wonderfully motivating. I loved my freedom so much that the dread of going back to an office job made me very determined. I think it would have been easier to just give it up, work full-time (if I could have found a job), and use my free time for fun. I’d probably be more financially secure now, but I might also be utterly drained and unfulfilled. And then there’s the issue that there really weren’t jobs in my field and I hated my field. I probably would have had to try to change careers and start over in something else at a lower level and work my way back up.

What it boils down to is what works for you. Every person’s situation is different. Everyone’s tolerance of uncertainty is different. I know of a lot of people who have been far more productive — and successful — than I have while holding down demanding day jobs. But then I’m not sure I’d have managed to keep writing at all, other than maybe as a hobby, if I’d gone looking for a job when I got laid off, so I’d have been even less productive and successful. Then there are things you don’t control that can change your circumstances or alter your decisions. No one can say “you must do this!” and have it apply to everyone. I disagree with the guy saying you must quit your day job, but then I also disagree with all the people saying quitting a day job is a bad idea.

writing

Living in the Past

There’s nothing like researching life in the past to make you appreciate life in the present. I am so glad I’m living in an era (and location) of indoor plumbing, with easily accessible clean water for washing and drinking. And washing machines.

Just reading about laundry day before washing machines makes me want to lie down (on my clean sheets) and take a nap. Hours and hours of fetching water, then boiling it, scrubbing the clothes, rinsing with still more water, and hanging up to dry, then ironing everything. The rich who could hire people to do all that might have been able to stay clean, but for everyone else, it was an ordeal that they didn’t go through too often. They might change the sheets on their beds a few times a year. Some people just wore clothes until they fell apart without ever washing them because they didn’t have access to water or the facilities to do laundry. Yikes!

We won’t even get into the issue of privies, chamber pots, and cess pits. Ew.

As a woman, I’m even more fortunate to be living today because women had so few rights or opportunities a couple of hundred years ago. A “respectable” woman couldn’t do much to earn a living. A woman who did work was paid drastically less than a man (okay, that hasn’t entirely changed). A married woman was considered the property of her husband, as were her children, so even if he was horribly abusive, she really had no recourse. Her only option was to leave her children with him if she left (or, like in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, run away with the kid and hide out, pretending to be a widow).

Transportation was a real issue (something that really comes up in what I’m working on). Before railroads, long-distance travel was slow and uncomfortable. The only options were foot, horseback, or coach, maybe boat, depending on location, but boats didn’t have engines, so even that wasn’t easy. No wonder few people ever went far from where they were born, and you had to be a real adventurer to do much travel at all.

When I’m reading these reference books, I find myself feeling gratitude for so many little things as I go through my day — clean water from a tap, light at the flip of a switch, hot water for tea by turning on an electric kettle, a refrigerator keeping my food fresh, a washing machine and dryer for clean clothes and sheets, a car to allow me to travel easily beyond my neighborhood. We romanticize the past in fiction, but the truth is that life wasn’t easy. I think we enjoy reading about the past or about worlds that resemble our past because it’s so different, but we tend to shy away from the things that were so different because they’re rather disgusting. I’m certainly not going to be delving into how seldom anyone did laundry. On the other hand, things like the transportation and communication issues give us plot opportunities that don’t exist in today’s world. There are so many things that can be solved with a cell phone call but that become real problems if it takes a week to send a letter, and that’s the fastest way to communicate.

And then there are the clothes — so pretty to imagine, but I wouldn’t want to wear them every day. That’s what fiction is for, dipping your toe into another life for a little while.

writing

Dealing with Dialect

As I continue research for a book, I’ve come across something that may require me to deal with something new for a book: dialect. I’ve had Sam the gargoyle’s hint of a Brooklyn accent and the occasional “y’all” for some of my southern characters, but I may have to take it further than that with this story.

In the time period I’m emulating — and in the world I’m building — it’s before there was easy long-distance travel, so most people never went more than a hundred miles from home in their lifetime. That meant that regional dialects were quite pronounced and distinct. The exception might be people whose work required a lot of travel (merchants, sailors, military, etc.) and the upper crust. The elite sent their sons to boarding schools, where they met people from other regions and they visited London and went to each other’s homes for house parties. They ended up having their own dialect that was distinct from the regional dialects where they lived. Otherwise, different parts of the country had different ways of talking that could sometimes almost be other languages. These regional differences have blurred over time as people have become more mobile and as there’s mass media, where there’s a “standard” way to speak.

In the story I’m developing, the heroine comes from a remote region that’s not visited by many outsiders. In a sense, they’re the “hillbillies” of this world, though more sophisticated and educated than that. At the beginning of the story, the heroine has barely interacted with anyone outside her family, let alone from outside her region. It would make sense that she would speak a different dialect than the upper-crust people from the empire’s capital city.

That means I need to figure out what her dialect is and how to depict it. Dialect in text can be really annoying and distracting to read, and it would be even worse if it’s a made-up dialect that doesn’t map directly to anything readers will be familiar with. I, personally, hate it when a book is so heavy on dialect that I have to read it out loud to try to sound out the words and figure out what they’re saying. I think the heroine will adapt pretty quickly once she realizes that the people around her talk a different way, so it will mostly be a factor early in the book to show that she’s different from the other characters and then later maybe when she gets excited and forgets herself. I just need to figure out a few speech patterns and wording changes that will indicate her home “tongue.” I think I’m going to try to avoid anything that will require funny phonetic spellings.

Meanwhile, I’m seeing more and more of the “movie” in my head (and in my sleep). Unfortunately, so far it’s all set-up stuff, so I’m not getting a lot of hint at what the plot will be, just how the characters get into the position for the plot to kick in and affect them.

writing

Building a New World

I finished my proofreading! In the future, I really need to avoid doing two books back-to-back like that. I need to do other kind of work in between, not just for my brain but for my voice. I proofread by reading out loud — the best way to make sure you’re reading what’s there rather than what you think should be there, as well as a great way to spot awkward phrasing, repeated words, etc. Reading entire novels out loud for weeks at a stretch when I’m used to not talking much on a normal day really seems to have strained me because my throat’s a bit sore (though some of that may be due to high mountain cedar levels). I may have to give myself vocal rest this weekend (and remember not to talk to myself out loud).

I let myself sleep late and have a lazy morning today because wrapping up a book should be celebrated, and then this afternoon I have to dive into planning my next projects.

One thing I have to figure out is what my heroine wants. That’s such a basic part of fiction, but I realized once I got started thinking about it that although I have what felt like a fleshed-out character, I have no idea what she might want, aside from the story goal (which I’m also not entirely clear on). The one thing I can think of feels like it’s overused and a bit of a cliche, but being different and doing the opposite thing means the story has no drive. People wanting something bigger or more than where they are is such a standard thing (“Somewhere Over the Rainbow”) but content people make terrible protagonists, unless something absolutely forces them out of their contentment. I don’t want to blow up her world, and I don’t want to make her hate having to do the thing she has to do, which means I have to make her something less than content. This is going to take some thought.

Meanwhile this is a “secondary world” story, so it’s not based in our world, and that’s rather liberating. I’m somewhat basing it on a particular period of our history (clothing, technology level, society), but I can change things I don’t like. For instance, I can have lovely late 18th century-inspired dresses but skip the powdered wigs on men and women. In my world, they don’t do wigs. I can also have less sexism, so girls can do things they wouldn’t have been allowed to do in our world’s history. I just have to decide how much their world follows ours — we moved into the Directoire style that morphed into Empire, with the kinds of dresses you see in Jane Austen movies, in part because of the French Revolution and looking back at Greece as a model democratic society, so women tried to dress like they were Greek statues. In a world without a Greece or a France, would the same kind of transition have happened? Or would it have happened for a different reason — some fashion leader is seen outside in her nightgown, and soon everyone’s dressing that way? Or maybe there were still statues in flowing robes for another reason, and people start emulating that style. That style change was so drastic that it makes a lovely visual shorthand to separate those who are on the leading edge of fashion from those who are more provincial, like the latest season of Poldark, in which the women who’d been to London dressed very differently from those who’d stayed in Cornwall, and once a Cornwall woman had been to London, she returned home wearing very different clothes. Cornwall was still in Georgian style, with a tight bodice and full skirt, while London was in Regency style, with the column silhouette and high waist.

And, no, thinking of setting a book in a world that emulates this era is not merely an excuse to watch a bunch of Jane Austen movies. Really. (Though it may have been influenced by the fact that my PBS station is rerunning the Pride and Prejudice miniseries.)

Life

Walking

I mentioned the other day that I’ve been forced to admit that I feel better and am more productive when I exercise first thing in the morning. This time of year, the weather isn’t always conducive to that, so I’ve dragged out my exercise trampoline and walk or jog in place in the comfort of my living room. I’ve found that the best way to do this isn’t to watch exercise videos (though there are some designed for the mini trampoline that I’ll have to try). Instead, it’s travel videos, and my favorite thing is a series I found on Amazon Prime called Walks Around Britain.

Basically, it’s about all the walks you can take on public footpaths throughout Britain. A camera follows the host for a walk as the various highlights are pointed out, so you kind of feel like you’re doing the walk, too. Each episode is about 24 minutes and contains two walks (they only hit the high points, so it’s not in real time, unlike the Slow TV Norwegian train rides, which can be fun, too). A full episode is just enough for a morning walk/jog, or if I know I’m going to be walking somewhere later in the day, one of the walks in an episode is enough to get the day started.

Hohenecken Castle, site of Sunday walks (Photo from Wikipedia Commons, by Ulli1105 – Own work, CC BY 3.0)

This show makes me miss living in Europe. They have a similar network of public walking paths in Germany, and when we lived there, we’d often load up backpacks with drinks and a picnic lunch and head out on a weekend for a day’s walking. In one home, we lived right next to a forest with a lot of good trails, so we didn’t even have to get in the car to go for a long walk in the woods. At another home, we lived near a hill with a ruined castle on top, so one of our standard walks was to go up the hill to the castle.

We don’t have anything really like that here, not on that scale. There are some walking paths through parks, and there’s one I can walk to on the edge of the neighborhood. Unfortunately, most of those paths are near a river or lake and tend to flood. And our country is so much bigger that there are fewer opportunities to make an easy day trip to go walking and see the country that way.

I got really nostalgic during this morning’s “walk” when the host was walking up a hill to a ruined castle (in Wales) with his daughters and dog. It was so much like those Sunday afternoons when we’d decide to just walk up to the castle, or when we’d drive to a place where the footpath would lead to or past a castle.

I was already into reading fantasy books, but I suspect that being able to just take a walk to a castle on an average day helped fuel that interest. A castle became something concrete, not just something out of books.

When I visited England, I got a map of some walks and spent a day walking from village to village in the Cotswolds. This show is making me want to go again to do more walking like that, since I love walking as a way of touring. I entertain the occasional dream of selling my house, getting a longer-term tourist visa, renting a cottage somewhere, and spending months exploring thoroughly while writing a book.

Alas, for the time being, I’ll have to make do with the nearby park (if it’s not flooded) when I get the itch to walk in the woods.

writing life

Learning

I’m getting close to the end of my week of proofreading, and my voice is getting tired from all that reading out loud. I think this may have to be a quiet weekend, and fortunately the choir isn’t singing Sunday, other than the usual hymn-type stuff. Then I’ll be done with editing for a while and can be creative again.

There’s nothing like having something tedious to do to really spark creativity. It’s like your brain is tempting you away from what you need to do. But I will prevail!

I’m already seeing the movie of the next thing I want to work on in my head. I’ve got the opening scenes more or less mentally written. I have a lot more to figure out, though, before I’m ready to start work. I suspect I’ll really fall into a research rabbit hole because there’s a lot of stuff I have to learn about to make this work, and the trick is to be honest with myself about what I really need to know for the book and what it’s just fun to learn about. I may be on the verge of developing a new hobby I don’t really need.

That’s one of my favorite things about this line of work. There’s always something new to learn about and explore. For my books, I’ve learned about business, about the history of various locations, lots of folklore, a number of areas of history where school barely scratched the surface, clothing, technology, philosophies, various historical figures, etc. I’ve read a wide variety of novels that I might not have read otherwise. It’s almost like each book is a new advanced degree.

And that’s not counting the stuff I try to learn in general, like psychology (for character development), personality (ditto), writing craft, business practices, marketing, etc. I’m currently trying to figure out Excel. I’ve been doing my bookkeeping using tables in Word, which you can use like spreadsheets and wondered if I’d get more function in Excel, but then I discovered that Excel is a big battery hog. My laptop was draining a lot faster, and a diagnostic pointed to Excel (and battery life went back to normal after I shut down Excel). So maybe that’s not something I want to spend a lot of time learning. It’s probably overkill for my needs.

I do think that a certain degree of natural curiosity is essential to being a good novelist. If you don’t like looking things up and learning, you’re either not going to write something vivid and realistic or you’re going to hate doing what it takes to flesh out your characters and your world.

Life

Annoying Realizations

In my ongoing quest to optimize my life, I’ve come to one annoying realization: Exercise is key.

I’m essentially a sedentary person. Most of the things I enjoy doing involve sitting — reading, writing, watching TV, knitting. My most active hobby is cooking. I do like taking long walks and going on hikes, but it hasn’t generally been a daily habit.

I had to change that in the last couple of years. I’d been taking a ballet class and injured my knee during that, then ended up in physical therapy. The therapy required daily exercise, and my knee feeling better meant I started walking more often. I was doing well until winter hit, and I slacked off. Then the whole blood pressure/thyroid thing hit, and I was out of commission until I started feeling better, and then I was motivated to exercise more regularly. Alas, the winter slack-off thing happened again. It was too cold to comfortably walk in the morning, so I said I’d do it later, but then I’d get busy and not get around to it.

This time, though, I started to feel the effects. The double whammy of the thyroid issues and the medication I’m on for the blood pressure means I’m extra sensitive to cold, so I tend to sit at home wrapped up in blankets, but then that made me even more sensitive to cold, and I just generally didn’t feel great. When there was a warm day and I took a walk, I felt so much better, so I’ve tried to get back in the habit. If it’s too cold to walk in the morning, I get out the jogging trampoline and walk/jog while I watch something (travel programs are good for that because I feel like I’m walking through some interesting place).

What I’m finding is that if I exercise in the morning, I’m less cold, so I’m able to be more active throughout the day instead of sitting huddled in a blanket the whole time. I have more energy, and I’m more productive, getting more work done. If I want to stay healthy and functional, I need to make a habit of this.

And I really kind of hate that. I like easing into my day, lazing around in pajamas instead of getting dressed and going for a walk. But I can feel such a difference that it makes no sense not to do it. Maybe after a long enough time of feeling that difference, I’ll look forward to it instead of having to force myself. In the meantime, I have to remind myself of how icky I started feeling when I was slacking off.

This is right up there with the advice to write first thing in the morning instead of easing into the day. The difference it makes is too huge to ignore, but in a way, I hate that it works because I don’t particularly like arranging my day that way.