I’ve got interviews upcoming
Mar 17, 2006 Writing
Not for jobs, for my book. I have one tomorrow that I’m really excited about because I liked reading everything she wrote on my interview blog. (Remember, if you had or current have secondary infertile, you should let me interview you! Seriously! Even if you don’t have an “official” diagnosis! You should totally let me interview you! It will be AWESOME!) Anyway, it’s going to be fun to talk to her and hopefully it’ll inspire me to actually, you know, write this thing.
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Today is our busy day
Mar 16, 2006 Writing
I was up last night coughing my insides out and then the terrible baby-toddler-child decided to wake up all bright and perky at 5:30am. My good cheer at this moment is only due to the sunshine and the promise of weather worthy of a park day. (Usually during Noah’s gym class we’re huddling on the linoleum floors of the rec center with the other moms — today we will run free and Madison will nap beautifully!)
I am looking for Brand New Ways of whoring myself out for money because of some craziness on the job front (all will be revealed — I hope — by Monday). For kicks these days I’m lying awake nights plotting budget cuts and quick-cash schemes. It’ll all be fine, don’t you worry your pretty little heads about us! But the uncertainty is wearing on my nerves.
You may remember that I found nifty planning software for my Mac but being lazy as well as cheap, I never did register it and now it sits uselessly in my applications file. Happily I figured out (after how many years using OSX?) how to make iCal do the things I need it to do — namely to give duedates for my to-do list. It’s saving my life. I can color-code everything so it looks like this:
If there’s an essay idea I want to make time for, I put a green to-do there to remind me. If I need to follow-up with a query, I put a light purple note on the day I want to email the editor. It’s saving my life. That is, when I remember to look at it. Trying to make that a habit again — I got out of practice for awhile there.
For those of you with busy lives (i.e, all of you) what tricks do you use to keep your brain and its contents intact?
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Tags: essay, homeschool, Madison, Noah
Madison sez
Mar 15, 2006 Parenting
Me: Madison, do you want to play in your room with me?
Madison: No.
Me: What do you want to do?
Madison: Pay in brudder’s room?
Me: No, brother wouldn’t like that.
Madison: It has chokeables in it?
Me: Yes, it has a lot of chokeables in it, too.
Madison: Mebbe tomoyo?
Me: Probably not tomorrow. Probably not for a long time. Like when you’re eight.
Madison: Eight?
Me: You need to be a really big kid.
Madison: BEEG kid! Uh-kay! Yater then!
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Tags: Madison
Stating the obvious, which somehow I missed
Mar 15, 2006 Writing
Lopate, editor of The Art of the Personal Essay (Anchor Books, 1994), believes that the true essay is never formless. “It follows a track of someone’s thoughts…”
– from The Practical Writer: From Inspiration to Publication
First agent down, second agent interested. Gave me some feedback on which sample chapters to write (and why) so now I feel more confident working on them. Kind of. I was just writing back and forth with Barbara about how we greet good news with tears and/or panic.
I told Brett last night that I realize that all types of crisis feel the same to me. Good crisis or bad crisis — it gets me high while it’s happening and then I crash. I greet acceptances and rejections (not run-of-the-mill rejections but the ones I have hopes pinned to) with the same heady explosion of emotion and then I have to come down from that somehow. I’m not very good at this.
I think this is why freelancing isn’t something I could do for my main income — it’s too up/down for me. Even the good respones feel depressing to me. I have to space all this out.
I keep figuring out what I’m bad at but am not so hot at figuring out what I’m good at. (Perseverance despite my flaws?)
