Author: Linda M. Au

Those of you who have known me for any length of time know that each November I participate in National Novel Writing Month. Fifty thousand words of new fiction in thirty days. Or, in my case, since I will be out of town from November 26–29, fifty thousand words in about twenty-five days. So, instead of the usual 1,667 words per day, I will be aiming for about 2,000. No pressure, though.

This will be my sixth year of literary abandon—starting in half an hour here in the Pittsburgh area. I’ve got my Moleskine notebook open, pages covered with scribbles … character sketches, random plot thoughts, theme information, etc.
I’ve got OneNote open—which is where I keep all my writing notes for all projects. I ingested my second cup of coffee about two hours ago, something I NEVER do because I get heart palpitations from too much caffeine–and even with
the impending time change at 2 a.m., I’ll still be up till Tuesday. I’m watching AMC’s back-to-back airings of “Night of the Living Dead” on the TV here in my office.

Even Murray, my office guinea pig and personal mascot, has been giddy and wide awake all evening here in his large enclosure behind me. The excitement in the air is that palpable.

Until about fifteen minutes ago, though, I had absolutely no clue where to start this piece of craziness. It hadn’t really sunk in yet that, at midnight, when I can officially begin writing, I would need to know what the opening scene was likely going to be. I had been so busy doing weird bits of research into the Knights Templar (don’t ask!) that I had forgotten to jot down a few ideas on where to start when I start. So now I have the opening scene outlined sparsely … and have no clue what comes after that scene.

This is why I love National Novel Writing Month. It’s so good for my blood pressure.

And, as I post my inner feelings of angst and euphoria throughout the month (often in the same paragraph), get used to this little guy. He’ll be helping you visually oriented readers get a quick idea of how I am doing on my word count.

T-minus 15 minutes! Just enough time to take a bathroom break, take a blood pressure pill, and take a handful of leftover Halloween candy….

BRING IT!

A friend recently mentioned doing a little freelance work indexing books, which, she said casually, would couple her love of English and data entry. I chuckled at this, but only because I share her enthusiasm for the mindless drilling of a keyboard.

When I sit down to write, I often dawdle at first by opening up my journal program and type-type-typing some pointless entry cataloguing a day’s minutiae, as if anyone on the planet would ever want to read such drivel, even a hundred years from now as part of a badly funded sociology project. It feels good to type, therapeutic to hit the keys with bullet-speed rapidity while my eyes and mind wander to more interesting tidbits around the room.

It’s more than simply a warm-up exercise, though it is surely that. It’s as if I am freeing my mind of all the detritus of the day—exfoliating my brain, as it were, of the dead skin of unneeded thoughts and concerns. I’ll spare you any more icky analogies; you get the idea. By the time I’m done with the journal entry, I can more easily move to the fiction, the deadline-oriented work, the magazine article—or, as it is to me, the stuff of life.

While working at my last day job, my favorite parts of the work day (not counting staff meetings and lunch with one of the bosses) were when I had raw data to input: articles to type, photos to scan. You know, grunt work. I loved the grunt work best. I still do. Give me a few hours of scanning documents or doing other secretarial or administrative tasks, and I’m a happy camper indeed. I like the feeling of accomplishment that comes with churning out a finished product. And that sort of
work requires less creative brain space than creating a world of characters and places and making them do interesting things and remembering everyone’s eye color for 75,000 words.

Give me a good, solid keyboard and I can type mindlessly for hours. If it’s my AlphaSmart Neo, I’m in heaven. Or my desktop ergonomic keyboard, which has just the right tactile feel to it. Or even now my 10” netbook, with its amazingly comfortable keyboard and size (where I am writing this entry). Gone are the days of my childhood, banging out words at half the speed on my portable manual Smith-Corona or on the gargantuan, very non-portable gray manual Underwood in Mr. Loughlin’s ninth grade typing class.

With newfangled equipment such as this, no wonder my friend and I enjoy mind-numbing data entry work. It’s an emotional therapy all its own. Perhaps we both missed out on promising careers in some company’s accounting department. . .
.

Two weeks ago I was scurrying around the house with a packing list and a to-do list, getting ready to leave for my seventh year at the week-long St. Davids Christian Writers’ Conference. This year was special for me. This year I had been given Responsibilities. This year I had been entrusted with Important Tasks. And, by the last three days prior to the conference, I was feeling the burden. When I wanted to prepare for my class on Social Networking by teaching myself PowerPoint (a long overdue task), I instead had to finish up a few loads of laundry and make sure the fridge and pantry were well-stocked for family members left to fend for themselves while I was away.

I also had to finalize the layout of a template for the daily newsletter, for which I was primarily responsible this year for the first time. I had to be sure my new netbook was going to behave with my multifunction laser printer/copier, and I was continually debating the pros and cons of packing my 19” monitor to supplement the netbook’s cute but layout-challenged 10” screen. Add onto this being responsible to get a faculty member to the airport on the last morning of the conference—in my 11-year-old Lumina with known stalling issues and no air-conditioning—and moderating a panel discussion on the Writing Life with five faculty members (none of whom I knew personally before the conference started), and you’ve got the fixin’s for a mighty nervous, panic-stricken writer.

That would be me.

Oh, and did I mention the stress-induced dermatological event that decided to take place all over my face about 36 hours before I left? Yeah, that was fun. It was going to be an annoying exciting week.

And yet, the conference has been over for nearly two weeks, and I look back on it with a wistful fondness. The faculty was unusually diverse and cohesive, covering nearly all aspects of writing among them. I had arrived on the campus of Grove City College that Sunday, moved into my room, and decided that I had too many outside responsibilities this time to enjoy the classes. I’d reconciled myself to this weeks earlier, and seeing the week’s syllabus in my hand didn’t change that decision. I simply had too much to do to indulge in class attendance.

Well, that idea flew right out the window during the opening plenary session, with a keynote speech by Vonda Skelton (www.vondaskelton.com). We got to meet the faculty members briefly that evening, and I knew I’d somehow find time to
get to a class or two. By the end of the week, I realized I’d attended as many classes this year as I attended in previous years. I had somehow added on the relatively new responsibilities of newsletter production, contest judging, class teaching,
panel moderating—and, of course, nightly Farm Town harvesting in Facebook with Mel R. (Nothing says “writing conference responsibilities” like shouting across the dorm hall to Mel, whose room often smelled of her latest Bath & Body
Works discovery, “Hire me so I can harvest your sunflowers!”)

Somehow, in spite of all the added tasks that befell me this year, or perhaps because of them, I came home from the conference feeling ready to tackle the world—well, the writing world. And so I have begun to do. I immediately began
making plans to get up to our little trailer in Slippery Rock for a self-imposed writing retreat … where I am writing this post.

But, the subject of writing retreats is for another post.

I have suffered from what I thought was mere procrastination for much of my life. It’s caused me no end of frustration and self-loathing over the years, since deep down inside I have always wanted nothing more than to write. So why was I never finding time to actually do so?

To be fair, in my earlier adult years I was preoccupied with mundane things such as, well, paying for rent and food and birthing and then raising four children. It’s easy to find real-life excuses for not writing when one’s time is taken up with
diapers, more diapers, bills that can barely be paid, and spousal educations that need to be subsidized. Poverty-stricken parenthood is its own excuse.

But lately I’d begun to wonder why I still wasn’t writing regularly. Don’t get me wrong: I write. And I write really well when on deadline. The unfortunate thing is that I am rarely on deadline for my writing. The proofreading, the copy editing, the
typesetting—all of those time-suckers come with deadlines and I get a lot done in those situations. But writing is still very much a freelance event for me, and therefore there is always another load of laundry I could be doing, another person I could be e-mailing or having lunch with, another part of the house I could be fixing up. And then, the writing gets shoved aside.

It never quite felt like procrastination, though I always called it by that name. And yet, I am intimately familiar with the creeping, sinking feeling of true procrastination, and not writing did not feel like that. So what was it? Why wasn’t I writing more? Why wasn’t I staying up till all hours (which I usually love to do) in order to pen the next great American novel?

Then I picked up Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art. An amazing book. You could say, for me, an epiphany. I sabotage myself. I put up my own walls of resistance and then don’t get anything done. I highly recommend this book to any writer (or artist of any stripe) who struggles to find or make time for his work. It’s a short book—approximately 130 pages—and it can be read in a single sitting if you can afford to procrastinate on the household chores a little longer. And you know you want to.

His premise of self-resistance is simple. His writing is straightforward. It rings true to me. In fact, it rings so damned loud that I nearly had to cover my ears to keep reading.  If you need a kick in the pants to get back to your writing, you can wait a little longer and read Pressfield’s book first. The several hours it will take you to read it will be well spent because the next time you sit at your desk—or at the library or coffee shop or wherever else you write—you will be armed with the knowledge that you’re taking the first step in disarming your own self-sabotage.

Resistance, as they say, is futile.

Christianity Today’s magazine called Today’s Christian has published my article about being part of the online world for the past two decades. It’s called “E-vangelism” and it is their Featured Article this week. You can find it here:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/tc/storiesofhope/sharingthefaith/onlineevangelism.html

The article’s been active since Friday, and I’ve been gratified to receive many e-mails from readers who have expressed appreciation for it. Apparently I’m not the only one who has turned online acquaintances into real-life friends (and more!). I’m so glad my experiences ring true to others.

Drop by the site and have a quick read—and don’t forget to click the link at the bottom of the first page and send a comment along if you enjoy the article. (If you don’t like it, then just slink away quietly, okay? No sense getting us both miffed.)

One minor nitpick of CT’s editing of my article: For some reason, an editor decided that “AOL” shouldn’t be capitalized. In fact, it should have stayed capped, as I originally sent it. Minor issue, but the proofreader in me felt I should mention it before you go read the article. I can’t help it. It’s a curse, I tell ya.

Side Note:  If you like the new logo and look of my site, hit the “Contact” link above and drop me a note. I’d love to know what’s working and what’s not, so I can drive my webmaster crazy with neverending tweaks and complaints. I know that always makes him feel loved.