“If you want to make an easy job seem mighty hard, just keep putting off doing it.” ~ Olin Miller

I know the reasons for writing regularly, for being patient through multiple drafts, for just showing up day after day. I haven’t developed a long-term butt glue to keep my fanny fastened to the fiction writer’s chair yet, but I’m trying. I can do discipline; haven’t I held down full-time jobs for the past 26 years, despite longing to stay up late and sleep later every day? So why do I keep permitting roadblocks in my writing path?

Recently, I thought a writing partner would keep me on track. Like diet buddies, we’d check each other’s progress. Then I went through a few weeks of serious illness, he and his family bought a house, my family struggled with making our high school senior study enough to graduate, I fell behind at work, and our fledgling writers’ relationship faded away. And while he was a good writing partner and I feel embarrassed that I failed to be one, I think that maybe a writing buddy wasn’t the right solution for me; self doubt paralyzed me when I showed my early drafts to someone. I need a different way to stay on the path.

After all, I’ve been “writing a murder mystery” for two years now. But real writing time? Maybe a month.

Then I read a RockYourDay blog post last week with a key concept that resonated for me: “Don’t confuse lack of progress in overcoming a habit with the actual difficulty of doing it. If you’re not making progress, it’s likely that it’s because you aren’t deciding up front to anticipate obstacles and so you’re not planning your way around it.” [Emphasis mine.]

Wow. Just … wow. So I’ve been thinking about where my time goes:

• Sleeping, especially long, long naps. I’m taking prescription iron medicine for anemia, and that helps. And for a lingering kidney infection I’m taking a strong new antibiotic that has a powerful drowsiness side effect for me, which doesn’t help. Solution: Get well, and (the hard part) keep more regular hours to help me distinguish between real fatigue and medicine-induced sleepiness I can sometimes push on through. I HATE regular hours, though; I love staying up late or getting up early on my own whim. Still thinking hard about this one.

• Blog surfing. Err, with a blogroll of nearly 300 strong, I definitely need to trim. By AT LEAST one third, and preferably two thirds. I spent the better part of an entire day this weekend just trying (and failing) to catch up on reading a backlog of blog posts. Solution: Trim the blogroll. Again, a solution I dread; I love them all and love to find new ones. I keep thinking that faster skimming will help but it doesn’t. And I’m spending way too much time on reading — or clipping to read in the “later” that never comes. I’ve gotta trim again.

• Obsessing over useless things. When I should be pulling out my story board and tackling one of my mapped-out scenes, I’m instead sorting my sock drawer or alphabetizing my science fiction book shelves by author. Or I’m making lists that are related to my writing, without actually being my writing. Solution: Set aside time to do lower-priority tasks so they don’t crowd my writing time. Every time has a task, and every task has a time.

I’m sure there are more, but those are the ones that loom for me. I’ll tackle them first and then study my action plan again: Where is blocking my free time from flowing to my writing, and how can I avoid the blockage?

What are YOUR fiction-writing obstacles, and how are you planning to overcome every way they manifest for you?

Photo credit: Mozambique - Moments

Technorati Tags: writing, writer’s habits, discipline

Learn more about this post — and this meme — here.

Crazy Aunt Purl was what everyone called her, but she was no one’s aunt. She just arrived one day and became the village witch.

“Purl’s the name, and casting spells is my game,” she said, and she spat in the dust for good luck. “You can buy my help or barter for it, or leave me alone – doesn’t matter. But don’t mess with me.” She shook a bony finger at the wary villagers. “First offenders get a curse of suburban turmoil. Second offenders get thumbscrews. Third offenders …” she shook her head. “Well, I get fussy with them. They end up with crooked brains and must live the rest of their days where the walls are soft.”

A dumb little man muttered, “Yeah, right,” and she flashed her gnarled hands at him. In a puff of purple smoke, he turned into a small rusty pot that a plain-Jane mom rushed up and grabbed, wailing, “She turned him into a pan — Dan! Oh, my Danny!”

After the fearful murmurs died down and the sobbing woman left with the pan clasped to her chest, a sarcastic mom piped up to ask, “What about fourth offenders?”

The old witch’s odd lavender eyes lit up. “Haha, someone of more than ordinary courage. Just my type. Now that’s damn interesting.” She cleared her throat and proclaimed, “There never ARE any fourth offenders.” And with those chilling words still ringing in the air, she parted the crowd to stand in front of the young woman. “What’s YOUR name?”

“Jezebel,” the woman said, sticking out her chin and shifting her baby to her other hip. “What’s it to ya?”

“You’re hired. Come into my den and we’ll make arrangements.”

“But I don’t want a job, not with you, and what makes you think I’ll—“

The witch whirled. “Because I said so, and I am bossy. I need someone with spirit.” More quietly, she added, “And because you look like you and that thin baby need the milk money … if you’re not too chicken.” Purl harrumphed and began talking more loudly again. “I need a sturdy wench like you to clean my writing tools, fetch water from the well, dust my bookshelf, help me summon and capture the flying colours of magical smoke, do a little cooking and minding the fire, and come running with the mop when I have an ink spill.”

Jezebel wrinkled her pretty nose. “Argh, ink. You don’t use a good mop for that!”

Purl shrugged. “Do as you like. Just mind my rules of thumb and we’ll get along fine.” She gestured at the tot. “You might as well bring that with you. And don’t worry – unlike some witches, I don’t eat babies.” She strode toward the cottage she had claimed.

The crowd breathed sighs of relief, but only Jezebel heard her add, “Not anymore.”

Jezebel just tossed her red curls and followed the witch. “I’m not afraid of you, and I’ll show you. Come on, Mikey.” She hugged her son. “Milk money or not, here I come.”

Soon they settled into a routine, with Jezebel and Mike coming over every afternoon to cook and clean and help Purl. They eventually became quite fond of the cranky old witch. And although Jezebel was never able to manage a spell on her own, she did learn the witch’s most carefully kept secret — she had a heart as soft as a marshmallow. Purl loaned Jezebel her favorite book of fairy tales, The Chronicles of Rhodester, and only sighed when Jezebel returned the book sheepishly, with the leather edges chewed by Mike’s emerging baby teeth.

Purl was like that — she talked a tough game, but it was mostly talk.

Purl rose at the midnight hour to hand over an infant’s sleeping potion for an exhausted and grateful mother with a colicky baby. When the penniless village bell maker, Jo Leigh, brought her wheezing elderly dog to Purl’s door, the witch just sighed and reached for a small vial of her costly Cures-All elixir, accepting a small set of tinkling wind chimes in return. Purl helped out when a storm threatened the village children’s choral concert, shouting to quiet the thunder, even though she was already hoarse with a cold. (Her awed, quaking neighbors avoided her for a month after that display.) She also dropped a few coins each month into the coffers of each ittybiz shop in the village, supporting their work. Purl even turned Panny Danny (as he was forever after called) back into a grumbling little man at Jane’s urging.

With love potions, healing incantations, and righteously applied curses written in scribbles and words, Purl was soon admired and appreciated for her skills, but most people other than Jezebel and Mike kept their distance. She was, after all, still a witch.

Purl did all things madly, from riding her broom around town to dancing with her guard dogs, the ninja poodles, in the pale moonlight. Daisy, the curly cat, was often perched on her shoulder, whether Purl was stirring her cauldron, chasing an infestation of plot monkeys from the cemetery, or quieting the Friday night pub rants when the menfolk drank too much beer.

“She just walks around with it,” the drunken sots said, gesturing to the dainty, smirking cat. “It ain’t natural.”

And Purl would just tuck her magic wand in her pocket, stroke the purring Daisy, and respond, “You don’t say. It’s not the magic that bothers you – it’s the cat?”

She was never chosen as citizen of the month and she never won the drawing for a free facial at the village’s Me, Myself, and I boutique. She just crumpled the passive-aggressive notes that her neighbors left in her mailbox when they complained about the poodles yapping, and then quietly cast a Yap No More spell that — not so accidentally — spilled over onto the neighbors too. When truly annoyed, Purl would cast an appalling “Gorilla buns” spell on the women or, for rude men, a curse that didn’t allow them to drink deeply of anything but water for a month. Only rarely did she feel shut out enough to say the F word.

But she sputtered three variations — “Oh frick and frack and fudge almighty!” — when she came back from gathering poisonous mushrooms and found Jezebel sitting outside in the afternoon sunshine, playing with baby Mike instead of working. “Look here, girl — I had you working on elements of a major spell. I’m not paying you to do a whole lot of nothing!”

Jezebel just shrugged and gestured to the door. “Hey, there’s a dead guy in the living room. Your mess, not mine.”

“Well, I didn’t leave one in there,” Purl said, storming toward the cottage, ignoring Jezebel’s eye rolling. “After Ellen stopped by for her weekly love potions — during my breakfast as usual, the wretched wench — I headed straight for the forest to forage. Just ask Allison — she saw me, too.”

Inside, a few minutes later, Jezebel found Purl sitting beside the dead man, patting his cool hands, a crumpled sheet of parchment in her lap. Purl looked up, tears tracking down her wrinkled face. “It’s Zed. The last of my apprentices. He had a letter for me, explaining that he was under a curse that an angry father put on him for, um, a bit of trouble with a certain Swiss miss. There’s not much else in the letter of interest to anyone but me — just a few confessions of an idiosyncratic mind. He … he wanted me to know what happened to him if he didn’t live long enough to ask for my help.” Purl choked up. “If only I’d been here when he arrived. Maybe …”

Jezebel patted her shoulder, and Mike pulled up on Purl’s bony knees. The witch put down Zed’s hand, brushed the letter out of her lap, and picked up the now-chubby little boy. Purl smiled faintly when a plump little hand tweaked her warty nose. “I didn’t even tell Zed when I left the last village,” Purl murmured. “Our working relationship just wasn’t suburban bliss anymore. I got tired of how he’d begun to swagger around, ever since he got his witching license. He was too cocky about his abilities. He’d tell maidens he was going to ‘rock your day,’ and he’d offer them a sip of a smelly love potion, which most were wise enough to refuse. And he was always fighting with writing — you know, ‘pencils at dawn‘ and all that blustery guy talk.”

Jezebel smiled thinly. “Men with pens.”

“Exactly.” Purl dried her eyes. “I wish sometimes they would act out of character and just cultivate Zen habits. I tell you, I am through with trying to teach men anything. There’s not a one of them that can charm me into thinking otherwise. No, when I die, all my knowledge will die with me.” Her face was sad, but resolute.

Then baby Mike struggled to be let down to explore, and Purl placed him on a soft rug with his favorite toys — an enchanted tin pot and spoon that banged loudly to his ears but was only a soft whisper of sound, like fairy bells, to the ears of adults. They both smiled at the little one for a few moments as he crawled around the rug — he was always the cute overload for their lives, even on the saddest of days. Soon, Jezebel left briefly, returning with the parson and a stout man from the village to remove Zed’s body and prepare him for burial. After the men left, the two women were quiet as they gathered their herbs and other ingredients listed in Purl’s spell folio for brewing important potions. They were about to start the afternoon’s brewing when Jezebel realized they hadn’t heard the little boy’s usual fairy bell tinkling. Not once.

They rushed over behind the bench where the tot usually played, and gasped. He was smeared from head to foot with trails of rogue ink, holding a pen that must have fallen from Zed’s pockets. His right hand alone was one big ink blot, like a purplish-black glove. The crumpled parchment was smoothed out and marred with fat little fingerprints, and streaky lines adorned the paper’s once-blank back side.

Purl squinted. The lines looked a little — actually, quite a bit — like a horse. His favorite animal. While she stared, the simple line drawing nickered and then kicked its tiny streaky hooves into the air. Mike clapped, chortling.

“Did you see Mike draw this?” Purl asked, her brow knitted. “It’s more than a picture. It’s a spell. Child-size, to be sure, but still quite good.”

Jezebel, her face white, shook her head.

Purl looked thoughtful, and then a smile began to warm her face. “Say, I have a capital idea.”

Technorati Tags: meme for writers, Once Upon a Bloggy Night, memes

We all loved fairy tales at one time, and many of us still do. (*raising my hand, waving it madly*) I can’t imagine life without a good story tucked away for safekeeping in my heart. Does the story have sidhe, unicorns, witches, or dragons? Plucky heroines or heroes overcoming evil? Magic wands, magic carpets, magic in any form? I’m hooked already — come on, story time.

So I was inspired when I found another blogger’s site, where she regularly writes small, charming “once upon a time” stories for her Tuesday Link Love feature using her favorite blog names or domain names as elements of the story. Click here to see what I mean. Inspiring, isn’t it? I wanted to clap when I first read this clever way of spreading the word about other blogs we enjoy.

So I’m starting a meme for writers:

The rules are dead easy:

• Make a list of blogs you read. You can use either the name of the blog, the domain name (which is sometimes different), or a mix of both.
• Arrange the words into a simple story. Pad as needed to create a real tale. (The story doesn’t need to have anything to do with the topics or theme of the blogs you’re linking to, fyi.)
• Use one of my “Once Upon a Bloggy Night” logos — the large one here or the small one here — whenever you post the story on your blog. (Please host the logo on your own server or your Photobucket/Flickr account — thanks! Email me using my contact form if you need help figuring out the details. I’m glad to help.)
• Include a link back to this post, if you don’t mind.
• Visit the site that inspired me, the Ettarose-edgeofsanity blog and let that author know you enjoyed this idea. Leave a comment on a Tuesday link love story there!
• Then please leave a comment on this post so we’ll have a central place where a list of all of your wonderful stories can be found.
• Help spread the word by emailing each of the bloggers whose sites you mention in your story, inviting them to join the fun.

It’s an interesting discipline for writers because you’ll have a limited set of words to use and a familiar universe — the fairy tale world — as your setting. Enjoy! I’ll publish my own fairy tale in my very next post. :o)

Technorati Tags: meme for writers, Once Upon a Bloggy Night, memes