Never Enough Time

I’ve retired from my day job. I should have plenty of time to do whatever I want, right?

So, how come I don’t?

I think back to when I was working, feeding the family and trying to hold the house together. I managed it. My house didn’t look like any you see in a magazine, because there were always things that hadn’t been put away, and dust accumulated far faster than I could wipe it away. But there was food, usually hot for supper, and I tried to keep the dirty dishes from piling up too deep in the kitchen sink.

In the evenings, I almost always multi-tasked by writing while watching tv. Which is not easy to do; you either miss what’s going on in the tv show because you’re concentrating on the story you’re writing, or you stop writing to follow the tv show. Knitting while watching tv is much easier, as long as the pattern isn’t too difficult. Sometimes, I did that.

On weekends, I ran errands and cleaned house. Seemed like I never had enough time to get everything done.

I don’t work 40 hours a week at a job anymore. I don’t have to spend 45 minutes driving to work every morning and 30 minutes driving home (don’t ask me, it must have been the traffic flow), or ride a bus for an hour each way every day. I should have plenty of time!

Hmm. Yeah. Guess what. I don’t.

The thing is, I dusted off a few hobbies I used to do long ago, added a couple hobbies I never had done before, and... the days are not long enough!

It doesn’t help that the errands have multiplied as well. Because I have diabetes, the doctor wants to see me every 6 months to see how I’m doing. To see how I’m doing, he has to have some lab work done. In Omaha, the lab was in the doctor’s office, so both could be done at the same time. Here in Florida, the medical labs are separate from the doctor’s office, so that’s 2 trips every half year. I have to see a cardiologist, who is not in the same building. I have to see an eye doctor twice a year. And because I’ve had kidney stones (thanks to the mineral-laden water one drinks in Florida), I’ve been seeing a urologist every 3-4 months.

Because I suffer from depression, I visit with a counselor once a week, and see a medications monitor once a month.

Not enough errands for you yet? I go to pick up prescriptions 3-4 times a month. Yeah, I’d get them all ‘synchronized’, except it seems like every couple of months, one of them gets changed. My husband has his prescriptions ‘synchronized’, but every single month, at least one of his ‘hasn’t come in yet.’ Why don’t they know they need to order it a day or 2 earlier so he doesn’t have to make a 2nd (or 3rd) trip?

And because I have diabetes, I’m supposed to exercise 30 minutes a day, 6 days a week.

My tiny business needs tending.

The bills need to be paid, which requires moving money around between credit unions.

The HOA insists we keep the lawn and landscaping in good shape.

The dog wants some attention.

The house still needs to be picked up and chores done from time to time. Thankfully, my husband does quite a bit of this.

I have one day a week assigned for each of my ‘major’ hobbies. (Sunday is my ‘clean office’ day, which is a never-ending battle in and of itself.) Most weeks, I find very little time to devote to hobbies. I try not to beat myself up over that, but... it does get to me.

Of course, it might help if I could get my body straightened out enough that I don’t sleep 12 hours a day. Or take 2-3 hours to ‘wake up’ after I do get up.

Well, now I’m just dreaming!

A Tell of Caution

It’s easy enough to do. But just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should do it. Especially when you are trying to establish yourself as an up-and-coming author.

I’m sure most working mothers know what I’m talking about: Spreading yourself too thin. Most working mothers are still expected to do (most, if not all of) the housework, get the groceries, do the cooking, take care of the kids, AND do their job. Even without adding any hobbies to help them stay sane, they are spread mighty thin. It gets to the point where you have to get sick, just to get some time to yourself.

Been there, done that.

When I took early retirement, I wanted my next ‘career’ to be ‘author’. I had been working at it for years. I had numerous short stories already written and polished, but none had found a home yet. I had a novel ready for submission, one in the polishing stage, and another drafted, besides several started, and many more ‘stewing’ in the back of my mind.

But suddenly finding yourself without a job to go to can leave you floundering. Without thinking about it, I dithered through my days watching tv, surfing the net, half-heartedly doing aspects of house cleaning I had never bothered to do before. (BTW, I hate housekeeping. It never gets done!) I signed up for six or a dozen newsletters on writing, and more on ‘promoting your book’. Anything to keep from actually writing, it seemed.

I even hired myself out as a free-lance editor. I told myself I needed to do that; I no longer belonged to a writing critique group, and editing would give me a chance to recognize ‘problems’ and try to solve them. Yeah, I can find other people’s problem areas, but I’m not sure I’m any better at finding my own.

I started new hobbies, took classes on leatherworking, theatrical makeup and making prosthetics, photoshop and illustrator… you get the idea. I volunteered for a position with Broad Universe (broaduniverse.org). And because I was frustrated with my pace in the writing world, I started my own publishing company. Why not? It seems like everybody else is doing it.

Somewhere in there, when I wasn’t paying attention, I got thin. Not physically, although I have lost a few pounds. But in terms of energy, I have none. In terms of organization, that’s pretty sketchy. I start each day with breakfast, doing my Broad Universe chore, and checking through my (main) email account. After that…

I have a loooong list of Things To Do. And unfortunately, ‘writing’ is not very high on that list.

How can I be an author if I don’t write? Why are all these other things coming before ‘writing’? I’m juggling a multitude of activities, but what I really want isn’t even in the mix.

I think it’s time to snap back and not be so thin.

Not Exactly Writing

If you follow me on Facebook, then you know our house has been under renovation for two months. They were supposed to be done this past Sunday, Aug 7. I decided I’d better get busy with the outside work that we didn’t contract for them to do.

 Our lawn has lots of deep shade, so we have large swaths where nothing grows. Oh, an occasional weed might stick its head up, but not many. All summer, my husband and I argued whether we could get any grass to grow in these places. One of the workers recently suggested we cover these naked spots with mulch, which we thought was a great idea.

 So I measured these bare spots to figure out how much mulch we need, including in the front yard. Putting mulch in the one bare spot in front would provide a more ‘uniform’ look as a whole. As I measured, I couldn’t help but notice the terraces where bushes had once lived. “I’ve got to pull these weeds, too! They make the place look so… sloppy.” And that led my eyes to the house foundation, where the paint was cracked and peeling.

 So the chore of putting down mulch suddenly became the chore of ‘pulling weeds, scraping the foundation, painting the foundation, and putting down mulch.’ And in some areas, I also get to ‘find’ the sidewalk because dirt and grass have grown over the edges.

 I know a writer who puts out a newsletter every week. And it seems like almost every week, whatever chore she’s done could be compared to writing; whether she weeded her garden, fed the chickens, adopted a dog or played Guitar Hero with her son, it always bore a striking resemblance to writing.

 So as I’ve been doing this yardwork, I’ve wondered how it would compare to writing, if I were to adopt her perspective. And actually, I think it bears more resemblance to RE-writing. Once I have my rough draft, and I’m ready to make it ‘the best it can be’, I follow similar steps to this yard work. Let me explain:

 Weeding – Weeds make your garden or lawn look jumbled and keep your eyes from understanding what you are looking at. For me, draft 2 is when I go back and put in every explanation, every adjective and adverb and description I think a reader might need or want. Adding in all these things is different than pulling out weeds, but pulling weeds allows the reader’s eyes and mind to see what you intended for them to envision, and that’s what I’m trying to do with draft 2.

 Scraping the foundation – Scraping off loose paint lets you get down to a solid surface so that the final result is pleasing to the eye. In draft 3, I look at every word, phrase, sentence and paragraph with one thought in my mind; ‘Do I really need this? If yes, is there any way to shorten it without warping what I’m trying to say?’ Kind of like scraping off the paint that doesn’t want to adhere any more. I’m getting my story down to the basic core – the foundation.

 Painting & mulching – A coat of paint on a house’s foundation and some mulch can make the whole yard look prettier, cared for and cohesive. I call my 4^th draft ‘making it pretty’. I check the grammar and punctuation, my use of pronouns, keep an eye out to make sure I haven’t overused some word or phrase.

 And finding the sidewalk? I prefer a clean, broad sidewalk, rather than one with dirt and grass covering half of it. In writing, this does not take yet another rewrite; it is incorporated into all my rewriting efforts. I try to find tired clichés (dirt & grass) and replace them with what I hope are new phrases that will get the thought across to the reader (more sidewalk.)

 No, I won’t say the 9 very hot hours I spent last week doing this yardwork was the same as if I’d spent those 9 hours writing. I will say that if you use some imagination, you can find similarities between them. And, since most of this yardwork is fairly mindless, I did get some thinking done about the next scene I needed to write.

Rumors of My Death…

 …if you’ve heard any, have been premature and greatly exaggerated. I am alive, and (relatively) well, but life has been… complicated.

It all started getting messed up when my husband came home one day and said, “I’m going to retire.” Well, yes, eventually I expected he would, possibly even this year, so I didn’t think it was anything to worry about, because his 62^nd birthday was still 5 months away. And then, a few days later, he added, “I can apply for social security 3 months before I turn 62. Let’s get the house ready to go on the market.”

In a nutshell, that pretty much turned our world upside down.

We knew we had to remove a lot of the personal stuff from our home, so we packed our book collection, our art collection, our video collection… We hired some young helpers to put these heavy boxes in our storage unit. He packed up everything in his office except his computer. I packed or threw out a lot of stuff from my office until I ran out of time.

We had a vacation scheduled for most of May. The paperwork for retiring was signed, and the day husband flew down to Orlando for that vacation was his last day of work. We spent a couple days in the parks and visiting friends while he tried to get his head around his new status. We checked out a few houses that were for sale while we were down there, and started the process of getting pre-approved for a mortgage.

And then… that infamous ‘hurry up and wait’ segment settled in. For the past 3 weeks (and probably for at least another week), the 2 of us have been living in 1 room while all the rest of the house gets fixed up and painted. While we are in that room, the only computer we have access to is the laptop we had in Florida, which I perch on a folding chair while I sit in an easy chair. Is it any wonder my neck, shoulders and back almost constantly ache?

It doesn’t help that I was surprised by a rush editing job just before leaving Florida; the 4^th manuscript in a 5-book series. I got that one done and back to the publisher, but I’m wondering when #5 will appear in my mailbox.

At first, we spent a lot of time in that room, watching various tv shows. By now, we have opted to spend our mornings at dospace (If you live in Omaha and haven’t checked out dospace at 72^nd & Dodge, you should – dospace.com); several afternoons of the week we go to the gym and work out; and at least once a week, we go see a movie – or 3.

Being confined to 1 room is mind-numbing. Most of the time, I just can’t concentrate. Oh, and if you are waiting impatiently for me to add another episode to MacOnFireball.blogspot.com, don’t hold your breath. I will get back to it, but guess what? The notebook holding the original story got packed when I wasn’t looking. Actually, I found the notebook, but the 10-20 pages I had out, next to my desk-top computer, to be typed in and tweaked… also got packed, and has proven to be elusive.

Eventually, the work on the house will be done. Eventually, our Omaha house will sell. Eventually, we will buy a new house in central Florida (we’ve been told it takes a minimum of 6 weeks from bid acceptance to document signing/closing) and can get the household belongings shipped down there. But right now, as the days grind by at a snail’s pace, ‘eventually’ seems a terribly long time from now.

Life Gets In The Way

My apologies to everyone who may be a reader of this blog. However, every so often, for most of us, Life Gets In The Way, and that has definitely happened this winter. (And it isn't even winter yet!)

On top of holidays, cleaning my office and constructing a new website, several assignments landed on my desk at the same time; one manuscript to proofread and 2 to edit. And just to make things 'interesting', Winter Depression moved in with my Chronic Depression.

It became obvious - even with my brain drowning in depression chemistry - that something had to give, and I'm afraid Trudy’s Universe is one thing I'm putting on the back burner for a while. Check back for more of my musings around Feb 3, 2016. By then, these edit jobs will be done, the holidays over, the website mostly done, and I should be able to find my office. Best of all, all the things I’ve started to do to augment my antidepressant meds will have me back on an even keel.

In the meantime, entertain yourself with a good book. I could make suggestions, if you want, but... I’m probably biased.

I will be back. I hope you’ll rejoin me then.

Old Dog

You know that ancient saying, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks?” I am here to tell you that either a) it isn’t true, or b) I’m not old yet. I have been painting walls since I was 10, or thereabouts, but painting my office has managed to teach me a few things I hadn’t thought about. It’s also kept me too occupied and distracted to do any research into science things to talk about, so that will be next week, I hope.

1. Since my family was poor, I was instructed to “make that paint go as far as you can!” That means there are always streaks in my first coat to show where the paint brush went back and forth. Try as I might, I could not stop doing that, probably because I was trying to paint the entire room with 2 pints of different colors of paint, not a gallon of 1 color. A 2nd coat was absolutely necessary. And when I looked at my finished 1st wall, the streaks were not horribly noticeable, but in the proper light, I could still see some. The 2nd coat needs to be applied with the paint brush going at an angle to the strokes of the 1st coat. Those streaks disappear so much easier! Lesson learned: If your first attempt at a project doesn’t produce the result you want, try approaching it from a different angle.

2. I was taught to always tape around the wood trim, etc., that you don’t want painted. It doesn’t do me much good to carefully tape up the woodwork when the last person who painted this room didn’t bother. (Now, how am I supposed to get those bits of 25+ year-old splotches of white paint off the dark, dark wood?) Lesson learned: Always do your best, so as not to be ‘That Guy’ that makes more work for someone else.

3. The door of this room sits in a corner, in a small ‘alcove’ that’s barely larger than the door. The section of ‘wall’ to either side of the doorway is narrower than the paint brush I was using. In this case, an artist’s brush reached that area much easier than the brush I used on the rest of the room. Lesson learned: Get the proper tool.

So, even doing mundane things like painting a room can provide you with a few ‘learning’ moments. I love to learn, so I try to make the most of those moments.

How about you? Any tidbits you’ve learned recently while doing something mundane?

Defragging a Story

Have you ever had your computer defrag its files?

I've done it many times. I used to get a kick out of watching little squares disappear from one place on the grid and reappear in a different place, but the defragging  program no longer has that entertainment possibility. But I digress...

On Tuesdays, I post a new scene from 'Mac', a story I've been working on for - oh - about 35 years. Back then, I didn't have a computer. Heck, I didn't even have a typewriter. I wrote my stories in longhand, probably with a pencil, on anything resembling paper; scratch pads, used paper, partially used notebooks, paper grocery sacks, even unused tissues (although those required I use a pen).

When I did get a typewriter, parts of this story got typed up. When I got a computer, parts of this story got typed into that. Over the years, I've had several computers, and almost all of them had some Mac scenes as files.

At one point, I had the foresight to print out what Mac scenes I had in that computer, and boy, am I happy now that I did that. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Technology changes, and when you use a computer until it just won't go anymore, you don't always get to save what you absolutely want from the hard drive. How many times have I had to rewrite important Mac scenes because I couldn't retrieve them? I forget...

I thought I was really being smart about 2 computers ago, when I started saving Mac scenes on external drives. When I had to replace that computer, I made sure the one I got could still read those external files. But when I replaced THAT computer last year, it just wasn't possible to get a slot that would read 3 1/4 inch floppies anymore. So all those dozens of disks holding Mac scenes (and many other stories I've worked on) got thrown out when I was cleaning up from moving my office.

But something else happened when I was cleaning up from that move. I kept finding hand-written versions of Mac scenes; a couple scenes in this notebook, half a scene on a scratch pad, a scene in a steno pad... Lots of scenes, with no clue whether they were included in what I had printed out or not. I already have a 2-inch stack of these bits and pieces to go through, and I've still got a couple boxes of old papers and notebooks to clean out.

So now, I get to defrag this story. I get to type all these scenes into my computer, and then try to arrange the scenes in their correct sequence. That should keep me busy for a while!

Spring Cleaning

Have you ever done spring cleaning? It's not something I grew up with, but every once in a while I just have to give up, shovel out my office, organize what I'm keeping and throw away everything else.

I'm in the middle of that now. We've moved all my office stuff out of the family room into the front room these last 2 days, and now I've got boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff to sort through. When I look at those boxes, I figure it will take months for me to get them all cleaned out. It's such a depressing thought, I can't cope, and I give up.

Happily, the way my desk is currently set up, I actually sit with my back to all those boxes (which are stacked halfway to the ceiling in the corner of the room). So I don't have to look at them, in the normal scheme of things. That helps me keep my mind on an even keel.

What I'm planning to do is pull one box over at a time to the side of my desk and clean out that one box. Then I'll take a break and write a scene or fill the dishwasher before I pull out the next box. And when my shredder gets full, then I'm done cleaning out boxes for the day.

It's not the kind of spring cleaning my grandmother used to do, and I'm not doing it in the spring, but it's a deeper cleaning than I usually do. Why do you think I have so many boxes to sort through? Because my usual way of 'cleaning' is to shove things I don't want to deal with into a box, to be dealt with later. Can't do that with bills, of course, but most everything else gets shoved.

Right up until times like now, when I'm tired of them trying to shove back. And frankly, when my office space is a mess, it also seems to clutter my mind, preventing me from writing. Or getting much of anything done. I really should clean more often, to keep my mind organized and my imagination purring.