May I Quit My Day Job?

If you're my husband, you're screaming out loud:  No!  No!  Absolutely not!  He figures my royalties need to equal the current income earned at  my day job before I can even THINK about quitting.  (He may have a point.  Maybe...)

If you're my 80-year old father, you're saying in a very controlled, but quite loud voice:  Are you out of your mind?  You see, he's the insurance man who got me into the insurance business (I own and operate two insurance businesses), and he wishes he'd worked for himself instead of a large insurance company.  He thinks my day jobs are nirvana.

If you're Delaney, Charlotte, Max, or Grace, your thinking inside your furry little head:  Yes!  Yes!  Yes!  Do it NOW.  Spend 24 hours a day at home with ME!  My puppies and kitties love me better and more affectionately than most people I've known.  (No one else has ever greeted me at the front door, EVERY DAY, when I come home, wiggly and kissy.)

If you're me, you understand--intellectually--where Stephen and Dad are coming from.  But emotionally, you're right there with the critters.

I'm spending several hours a day at my writing lately.  I'm doing some insurance writing at the office, more of it at home after-hours, and my fiction at home after hours.  Sometimes, it's VERY difficult to drag my mind from my writing to focus on stuff like getting payroll out on time, arriving on time to meet with clients, and going to bed at a reasonable hour.

I've always been a little obsessive-compulsive with my writing, but it's getting worse.  It feels like a good thing (that's the emotional side) but I'm wondering if it really is.

Are you O-C about your writing?  Do you think I'm going nuts?  (Of course, you notice that I've asked you folks, who are mostly other writers, instead of a shrink.  But I figure you'll understand better.  Right?)

How to Get the Creative Juices Flowing

My blogging buddy, Bill, whom I've mentioned before, illustrates a terrific example of creativity in the most recent post on his blog.  (I'll give you the link later, so as not to encourage you to click away from me!)

He yammers on in his post about the way he routinely attributes human qualities to inanimate objects, such as vitamins and toilet tissue.  His blog post is hilarious and brings to mind the way children can take a mundane event and spin a wild tale.

Which, in turn, leads me to think about free-association and how we writers can utilize the same creative skills when the failure to come up with a single good idea plagues us.

Gabriele Lusser Rico wrote a book called Writing the Natural Way, which focuses on right brain/left brain issues and how a method of free-association she calls clustering helps writers access their creativity.  It is possibly one of the best books I've ever read. By using techniques she recommends, or by following Bill's example and pretending to be a pretzel and imagining what will happen when some human's hand reaches into your home (er...bag), you can access creativity you never realized existed.

When my children were very small, the four of us used to climb onto my bed before bedtime, and create stories.  One of us would begin with a premise:  Once upon a time, a gerbil escaped his cage and climbed into a bird cage inhabited by...  Another of us would continue the story and we'd take turns, transforming a silly premise into a wild and hairy adventure.  Much like the story I tried to get going several blogposts ago with the handsome couple sitting on the bus.  The assassin is my son's girlfriend and the handsome guy is--you guessed it--my son.  (Thank goodness they both have good sense of humor and love me!)

What do YOU do to get those creative juices flowing?

P.S.  Here is the link to Bill's funny blogpost and to Gabriele Lusser Rico's website.

Inspiration

See that upside down girl?  Well, she's mine.  And she is truly an inspiration.  She, who is terrified of heights, jumped out of an airplane today as part of Operation Freefall, a fundraiser for the organization Speaking Out Against Rape.  Two of her friends, Michael and Jessica, jumped right along with her to show their support.  (We should all have friends like that!)

We writers are often asked where we find our inspiration, if we pattern our characters after people we know, and where we come up with our ideas.  Thanks to my daughter, her friends, and so many other people, I find inspiration everywhere.  If I choose not to focus on the positive, I can find other characters and behavior about which to write, too...  Life is, after all, made up of endless perspectives, good, and evil.

Today, I am inspired by the brave and courageous souls associated with SOAR.  If you'd like to learn more about Laurie and the many others who raised over $100,000 in the 10th anniversary of Operation Freefall to help victims of sexual assault, click on the link I've provided below. 

FYI, Laurie was the second fundraiser nationwide and I couldn't be prouder of her - not only for helping others but for so courageously sharing her story, as so few rape victims do.

Speaking Out About Rape

The Best Laid Plans...

Life does have a way of interefering with all the things a person wants to do, doesn't it?  This year, I've been deliberately focusing on what I want to do.  Unfortunately, no one else seems to be sharing my passion.

Time management has always been one of my strengths.  And the key part of the previous sentence is its tense:  some version of the past.

So, realizing I need to work on self-improvement in this area, I took a hiatus from my Author Exchange Blog, arranged stuff at my day jobs (I own two businesses) to help me meet my goal (which included a move of location and some rebuilding to include an on-site conference room to save me lots of travel time), and am in the process of getting down and dirty with my schedule to accommodate the time my bank book requires me to attend to my businesses and commercial writing and the time my heart requires me to spend on my fiction.

Your positive thoughts and prayers are most welcome.

Back From Vacation and Looking for Suggestions

Now that my trip is over (to New England to see father, sister, brother, offspring--and their offspring--and my jaunt to the EPIC writer's convention--where I did not win the award), I have returned to real life and realize precisely how much stress my real life involves and how overextended I am.

This 10-day trip was my first vacation in 6 years. That should have been the first indicator of the degree of my out-of-control lifestyle/schedule. The second tip-off was the fact that I did next to no writing and actually forgot to call the office on a couple of days. Since I own two businesses, that probably wasn't a good idea. Fortunately, my staff is quite capable and handled things without me. Thank God I'm not indispensable. (I learned that lesson about 7 years ago. So, okay, I'm a slow learner...)

My youngest daughter and I had a conversation about addictive personalities recently. I mentioned, in all seriousness, that I was fortunate to have escaped my family's genetic predisposition to such a thing. She asked, in equal seriousness, "How would you classify workaholic?" Her point hit home: like a sledgehammer.

So here I am, pondering a number of serious issues, the most important of which involves the fact that each day of my life contains 24 hours and that I have to quit jam-packing a day with 34 hours of stuff to do. The second serious issue is correcting my mistaken understanding that requiring less sleep as a person ages does not equal the actual elimination of sleep in order to secure more hours to do stuff.

I will keep you posted on the results of my new "plan" and welcome your advice and suggestions about how to reduce the number of "important" duties/responsibilities in my life and how to focus more on me (aka being selfish) and less on other people (aka being nice and kind).

NOTE: Picture #1 shows the Mississippi River Bridge in the background. My sister and I were at the Riverwalk in the French Quarter. Picture #2 shows the congratulatory flowers my husband sent me BEFORE the award-winners were announced. He figured I was a winner no matter what the EPIC conference judges said. (He's a keeper.)