Today is a look forward, back, and side-wise. It is a speculation on a future as yet unformed. All of the past ceased to exist when the present moment came into existence, and all of tomorrow can never exist for this moment in time is all that can exist. Embracing this truth means knowing that everything before this breath reaches the bottom of my lungs has faded as fog to the morning sun, and all that I can be, have, do, think, and will must be chosen within the space of that breath. That knowledge is mighty and terrifying in its entirety, for I must choose well or continue to hide from disturbing consequences that greet me each moment of the rest of my life.

5 Steps to Beginning New Chapters

A life is a personal book of experience. Just as a larch cone waits to drop to earth to begin a new life cycle by birthing a new tree, new life chapters begin all the time. You’re born, cut your first tooth, leave home for nursery school, attend first grade, start middle school, move on to high school, then college or a job. You see what I mean? All of these mentioned qualify as new chapters in your life.

The birthing process in any activity is both a beginning and an end. Recently this has been one of the most critical things for me to recognize and take into account. I’m always beginning things, while putting others on the back burner until later. Engaging in this behavior leads me into frustration, near-panic states, and little efficiency in time spent working.

Since taking on the challenges presented to me during the past few months, I’ve developed my own method for dealing with my writer’s life chapter beginnings. The steps I use are done every day. They take little time to complete, but save much time later. That’s one thing above all that I’ve learned from taking Robert Lee Brewer’s Author Platform Challenge this month.

Here’s how you prepare for each day’s slim chapter in your writing life.

1.    Take inventory of those daily goals that went unfinished from yesterday and get them out of the way. Otherwise, they’d hang around your neck, dragging you down. If a previous daily goal cannot be finished due to the length of time necessary, devote one hour of active work on it to reduce its size for the next day. This step needn’t take more than an hour and a half.

2.    Determine this day’s goals now that yesterday’s have been attended to. Begin with those items which are routine each day—i.e. email, social media updates, check out at least three blogs/websites and comment as needed, and any writing challenges underway. Devote no more than three hours to this activity. This is also the time to do your own new blog posts for the day.

Also, do a quick scan of your week’s goals, month’s goals, and year’s goals.           Can you cross off anything on those?

3.    Pull up one larger project—book, short story, essay, etc.—that has been sitting on the hard drive for at least six months and give it one hour of your time. Do a rewrite, complete edit, additional research; whatever is needed to get the piece closer to submission quality. If possible, have a market picked out and write a query/cover letter and submit it that day.

4.    Take at least one hour to work on the latest project in your arsenal. If the rough draft hasn’t been completed, then finish it if possible. The first revision can wait until tomorrow's goals. (For book-length projects, an hour could get you up to ten pages of material, if you’re working NaNoWriMo style.)

5.    Take a break to get up and walk around once every two hours. Get something to drink. Talk to a neighbor, family member, make a phone call; whatever you need to do that has nothing to do with writing. This short break of fifteen to thirty minutes will help refresh your thinking and help your body get the circulation flowing again.

Here are some no-brainers as well. Eat, get some exercise. Nobody says you have to sit in that desk chair for hours on end, grinding away at the keyboard. I’ve learned the hard way that that isn’t healthy. You can just as easily run through mental brainstorming while doing the dishes as you can at the computer, if you must keep thinking about words.

Do a fifteen minute workout during a break; a few standing push-ups, stretches, leg lifts, standing crunches, anything you want. Crank up the stereo and break out into dance moves. Salsa is excellent for circulation.

Do an errand. Getting away from the computer will help stimulate flagging senses. New sights and sounds help generate new ideas. Enjoy yourself.

Try out these steps. See if they help you through the day. The main thing I’ve discovered, though, is that I must allow myself time to relax, more than anything else.

The world won’t come to an end if I can’t finish something today and must attend to it tomorrow. That doesn’t apply to deadlines. Those are rigid, but everything else is on a temporary sliding scale. When you begin a new chapter, see it as a personal adventure in professionalism. Realize that you learned one new aspect of writing yesterday, and you can build on it today.

© Claudette J. Young 2012
Photo Courtesy of BJ Jones Photography

Communication—Have We Killed It?

How many times do you text instead of call? You use the same keys on the phone for both purposes. You allow for much the same time and concentration for the action. What’s the real difference here?

Is the difference that with texting you can abbreviate nearly every word in order to avoid actually explaining yourself to a live human being? Is this avoidance merely a manufactured stratagem to keep people at a distance rather than to allow them into your life? Have you ever really thought about why you do it? I’m not talking time savings, either.

Texting, for me, is a tedious thing. On the flip side, I no longer care for talking on the phone, either. Some may say that I’m isolating myself from others, including family. But is that true?

Looking at it under the microscope, I see that in one respect the accusation is true. I really detest solicitation calls, harassment-type calls, and those that interrupt my writing activities. As a result, I keep my phone turned off most of the time. Ask my friends and family if you don’t believe me.

Allowing for that quirk of mine, I can say that I also don’t like voicemail. I try to avoid that like a bad case of bird flu. I will return text messages once a day or so if I have them waiting.

Those who know me also know that this is how I deal with things from outside my office and home. As I’ve gotten older, I don’t particularly want interruptions to what I’m doing. I have enough of a juggling act going without that.

I talk to hundreds of people each week on the computer, some frequently, and have no difficulty dealing with the volume, most of the time. Although, there are days when one more email could have me dropping off the cliff called “Not Enough Time.”

I call my dad every day unless I’m prevented by circumstance or timing on a given day. I try to call extended family at least once a month—at least one of them anyway—to touch base and see what the southern group is doing. I also have those family members I connect with on the computer, and as with most families, word always gets around, sooner or later.

Most of the time, I use the phone for business only, with a few exceptions. Friends I don’t get to see in person or family members, who would rather talk on the phone than write, get regular to semi-regular calls from me. The reasons are agreed upon by both parties.

My brother texts me, if he can, instead of calling, mostly because of his schedule and the time zones between us. He hates talking on the phone worse than I do. I think that must come from our upbringing. We weren’t allowed to spend much time on the phone when we were growing up and the call had to have value each time. Telephones weren’t toys back then, and a person didn’t replace them because a new model came out.

Few of us write actual letters anymore. Our personal world pace seems to have gone “a gallopin’” as the old-timers used to say. Our lives are cluttered with so many activities, must-do’s, plans, and expectations that we don’t give ourselves time to stop and think for more than five minutes before we’re off and running again.

Real letters take time to write. Thought is necessary for how and what we write in them. Texting doesn’t require that, only abbreviations and a ten-second window of opportunity. Phone calls require listening to what someone has to say, processing that information, and composing an adequate and appropriate reply.  Emails are faster and less thoughtful most of the time, as is texting.

Is it any wonder that technology has encouraged a withdrawal from the previous methods of communication? Look where the Pony Express got us. The USPS!

Let me know how you feel on this subject. Agree or disagree with what I’ve said. Each communication type has both plus and minus columns.

Until later,

Claudsy

PS—Over at http://claudsy.wordpress.com/ I’ve delved even further into this subject, but with a different slant entirely. Please take a few moments to hop over there and take a gander at the other side of the tracks.

Experiencing Life As A Dream

Sister Jo and I began our sojourn two months ago. It feels like many more months than that, which got me to thinking. I’ve always known that one’s sense of the passage of time is relative to the experiences within the timeframe being referenced. There’s a very valid reason for the phenomenon.

Back in the 1970’s researchers at either the University of Michigan or Michigan State University did a long term study on time perception. They found that there is both “real” time and “mind” time.

Time Differences

The researchers found profound differences between the two types of time.

“Real” time was defined as the passage of time as recorded by a clock. Such time is a man-made measurement of experience. It’s also considered a measurement related to distance, but still a measurement.

“Mind” time was defined as a person’s individual experiential perception. Each person perceives the passage of time differently according to how fast their mind processes information, as well as the emotional investment used during the experience.

Apparently the research was prompted by someone asking why a person can experience hours or days of time passage within the body of a dream. The brain processes information in nanoseconds, which is infinitely faster than clock time. The researchers decided to look for the truth.

The Experiment

The basic experiment was a simple one. Find subjects who’d always wanted to learn to do one thing specifically—compose music, learn a foreign language, etc. Once the subjects were located [all were mature adults], each one was hypnotized for their instruction.

Example: [Not taken from actual study] During hypnosis a subject—let’s say a civil servant--is told that he’s been given two years to learn how to write music, which he’s always dreamed about. He can stay in his room and learn for that two years. He will be provided with everything he needs to learn. All he has to do was ask.

He’s told that someone will come to tell him when his time is up. He’s left to his own devices to use the resources provided to learn his new field. Whatever he asks for, he receives. He spends his time working on a computer, playing with instruments, and learning.

The Results

Are you concerned? Don’t be. The amount of time he’s in the room, as measured in “real” time, is only a few hours.

The result astounds the researchers. Not only can the man compose music but beautiful music and is ecstatic with the results of his new education. He’s also told that only a few hours have passed since he began.

The ultimate reality is that “mind” time runs and processes information incredibly fast. Learning under this process of mind usage is excellent, takes little “real” time, and has lasting effects. (When rechecked several months later, our civil servant is happily writing music for publication.)

Personal Appreciation of “Mind” Time

You might ask what this has to do with anything. Why is it important? It’s important for a couple of reasons.

When I said that our time on the road seemed to have lasted many months, I meant it literally. It seemed as if the calendar should be pushing toward May instead of February.

The reason for that perception is the number of experiences during that near eight weeks on the road. We’d covered 18 states in that “real” time. Within each of those states were individual experiences that had made an impact on our memories, either good or bad. That’s a mighty load of memories in so short a timeframe.

We’d taken a few notes here and there about most of the major experiences, but not the entirety of the road experience. My poor fingers would never have been still if that was the case. Whether I preferred it or not, my poor old mind had to carry the brunt of the load in memory form with scanty notations along the way.

The good thing about experiential memory is that it doesn’t escape when there are two of us on the drive. Each of us have a slightly different perspective, but that’s why it works so well. We can fill in details better that way. We can use her visuals and my audios. It’s according to who was paying the most attention at the time.

Also, have you ever had one of the days when you’ve worked and worked, gotten tons completed, and then looked at the clock only to see that only a couple of hours have passed? That, my friend, is “mind” time in action. Enjoy it while you have it. It usually accompanies those days when clock time seems to drag along and it seems that the day will never be over. Ever have one of those?

If not, I’m sorry. I used to groan each time until I realized how much I could get written during “MIND TIME.” It’s my writer’s best friend come to call.

I can use it for marketing research, which always seems to take forever. I can use it to draw out a plot or rough out an essay. It’s lovely for poetry. I relish those days now.

Take a minute and think about whether you’re using your mind time to its best advantage. Until we talk again,

Claudsy