We are (no longer) experiencing technical difficulties

I understand that I’m not the type of hotshot blogger who, when they go missing for a day or two, causes a mad panic amongst the internet crowd. Regardless, I’d like to apologize for my sudden disappearance over the past five days. I’m sure you’ll understand why I had a bit of an unscheduled hiatus when my father-in-law suddenly had a heart attack on Thursday (don’t worry, he’s alright now!), followed by a rush to get myself packed and ready to head back out West for the first shift of my new job. I spent the entire day today on a plane and have only just now arrived in the camp at which I’ll be residing for the next two weeks, so certainly you can see why I missed a few post days. But fear not! This camp has what (so far) appears to be rather excellent wi-fi internet, and my bluetooth keyboard is working just as nicely as it ever has, so I’m all set to continue blogging throughout the following shift.

I’m sure that you are all terribly relieved. 🙂

Stay tuned, because regular posts resume tomorrow! 

Dreams: Windows to the (Aging) Soul

Recently I read an article on Cracked.com that was entitled 5 Warning Signs That You’re Finally Getting Older. It gave me a chuckle, particularly because I agreed with most of it. I guess that means I’m getting old. Crap.

Anyway, as happenstance would have it, that night I had an unusually difficult time sleeping because I was being plagued by nightmares. More than once I woke up in a cold sweat. But when I was finally up in the morning it occurred to me that the dreams I’d been having weren’t the kind that one thinks of upon hearing the word “nightmare”, and I thought to myself “here’s another example of something that changes as you get older”. So let’s have a comparison, shall we?

When I was younger I had nightmares about……monsters. Whether it was enormous, rabid dogs, or poltergeists, or zombies, some of my most prominent nightmares involved running from vicious, evil creatures that wanted to eat me.

A few nights ago I had a nightmare about…
…my daughter running into heavy traffic. For some reason we were walking alongside a busy highway and she let go of my hand and took off into the road. I ran after her, but (illogically) my 29-year-old legs only seemed to be able to move half as fast as her 2-year-old ones, and I barely managed to grab the back of her shirt and send us both hurtling into the ditch before a semi truck struck us both.

When I was younger I had nightmares about…
…weird, creepy things happening to the people around me, like when I dreamed that my aunt Judy’s teeth all began falling out of her head as she was talking to me, or when I dreamed that my mother kept randomly chasing me with a butcher knife and screaming like a maniac.

A few nights ago I had a nightmare about…
…my husband suddenly acting as though he’d never met me. We were hanging around our friends and family, but he completely ignored me and treated me like I was a complete stranger.

When I was younger I had nightmares about…
…my friends and classmates and I engaging in war-like battles with tons of gunfire and explosions and people dying all around me. (Now that I’m writing it, this one sounds awfully intense for a kid…is that weird?)

A few nights ago I had a nightmare about…
…missing my plane home from out West. I dreamed that somehow I had forgotten that it was my day to go home and I hadn’t packed. I was in someone’s house rather than camp, and I was running all over it trying to find all my stuff and pack quickly. My coworkers left and I missed the bus, and I spent the rest of the dream desperately trying to track down another bus or a taxi or something that knew the route through the oil sand access roads to the Albian air strip.

The nightmares I had when I was younger filled me with dread, made me sweat right through my pajamas and my blankets, and usually ended in me waking up in a panic, unsure if it had actually happened or not. The nightmares I had a few nights ago elicited the exact same reactions. I woke up from my daughter running into traffic with my heart pounding so fast I thought I might be having a heart attack. The dream in which my husband ignored me found me awake with a pain in my chest, feeling like I might throw up. And the missed-bus dream had me waking up in a cold sweat, wondering how I was going to get home.  The whole thing represents a shift in priorities, it would seem – which is completely logical when you think about it. It’s also pretty funny though. I’ve gone from dreaming about monsters and teeth falling out and vicious battles, to protecting my daughter, losing my husband, and trying to catch a taxi. And the shift has not changed my reactions in the slightest.

I guess I must be getting older after all. Bugger. 🙂

Balance? Ha! Baby, the world is tilted!

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

97. Finding life/writing balance

I’m going to confess something here: when I first read the words “Finding life/writing balance” I nearly died from the gut-wrenching laughter/hysterical crying that occurred. I may have gone just a tiny bit insane from reading those words. It’s okay now. I had a peppermint-Kahlua-spiked coffee that my husband made me and all was well. But it was touch and go there for a moment.

In all seriousness, this is something that I’ve been struggling with for years, and to this day I haven’t figured out how to manage it. Additionally, over the past year of blogging I’ve come to follow quite a few very talented bloggers/authors and it doesn’t really seem as though they’ve figured it out either. I’ve even Tweeted with writers – published and otherwise – who seem to react to the topic with the same mad hysteria/life-crushing misery as myself. It just doesn’t seem to be a subject that many find they have been able to work their minds around It’s one of those things…like trying to get a moment’s peace with 20+ members of immediate and extended family having a shouting match in your home. Possible? Maybe. Likely? Not really.

Finding a balance between life and writing is one of those mysterious things that most people don’t believe is possible…like leprechauns. Or unicorns. You’d like to believe, you really would, but in your heart you know it’s a pipe dream.

Okay, so maybe I’m being over-dramatic. Perhaps it is possible to find a balance, but I personally don’t know anyone who has managed it.

The problem is that most writers have a heck of a lot of responsibilities aside from writing. Many writers will tell you that the only way to truly become a successful author is to suck it up, grit your teeth, and focus 100% on your writing, even if that means that you’ll be destitute for a while during the interim. And while part of me agrees with that, it’s not exactly as simple as being willing to make life hard on yourself in the short-term for the hope of long-term gain. After all, people have important responsibilities. They have families, children, mortgages, car payments, other assorted debts, and any other number of things that require them to have an income that stems from something more stable.

So immediately we have that disconnect. We have the day-job life, and the writing life. Now add in a couple of other aspects of life that many writers have to deal with… In addition to the day-job life and the writing life you might have the mommy/daddy life, the (ever elusive) social life, the household-chores-and-errands life, the “I desperately need to lose some weight before I die of a heart attack” life, and so on and so on.

Personally, the only way I’ve been able to “balance” life and writing is by sneakily combining the two. When I’m at my day job I write between tasks and during breaks. When I’m in mommy mode I’ll pluck out a blog post (sometimes a sentence at a time) whilst braiding ponies’ hair and making Leonardo beat up Michelangelo. Sometimes I’ll pluck out a few words whilst keeping an eye on supper, or I’ll save a couple of sentences on my iPhone while waiting in line at the supermarket. And since it’s pretty much impossible to write while exercising, I’ll use that time to mull over a scene in my mind, which doubles as a way to distract myself from the burning pain all throughout my body.

(I’m not going to comment on my social life. It’s silly to comment on things that don’t exist.)

And that’s my two cents on that. If any of you other writers out there ever find a better way to “balance”, I submit to you that it is your duty to share it with the writer community (in the form of a comment on this post). 🙂

Stressors of the Digital Age

I’ve done NaNoWriMo for the past four years in a row because I love the challenge of it. While I’m not competing for a physical prize (though you do get a couple of treats for completing the challenge), feeling like I’m racing against the other participants is great motivation for me. I don’t think I would be remiss in saying that I’ve been known to write more during NaNoWriMo than during the rest of the year combined.

But aside from the challenge, the motivation, the little treats at the end, and the overall fun of the event, there is one majorly important thing that NaNoWriMo does for me each year. That is, it reminds me to back up my damn writing. Along with regular gentle reminders from the people behind NaNoWriMo as well as fellow writers on the forums, we also celebrate “National Back Up Your Novel Day” on November 15th. The constant theme of throughout the entire month is “For the love of God, don’t lose your novel!!!”

It was this theme that I was thinking of this morning when I opened up my zombie novel to plunk out a few words, and found myself confronted with a window that claimed my file needed to be “recovered”. I’d never seen that window before…I’ve been using Open Office for a little while now and had never had an issue with it before. The window was nothing like anything I’d seen in any other program when files crash or become corrupted. It simply showed my file’s name, stated that recovery had not yet begun, and gave me the options of attempting recovery, or closing the program. I just about had a heart attack. After a quick mental calculation I estimated that my last real backup was approximately 14,000 words ago. 14,000 words that I’m confident I would not be able to recreate with any semblance of similarity. For those of you who are trying to picture 14,000 words right now, only know that it took me about three months to write.

It was with a violently thrumming heart that I hit the “attempt recovery” button. My daughter could probably feel the anxiousness from all the way over on the couch where she was watching Sesame Street. Thankfully, a few moments later the window announced that my file was “Recovered!” and I breathed a sigh of relief. If any other outcome had occurred, this post would be nothing but page-long list of every profanity and expletive I could think of.

So what I’m trying to say, what I’m getting at here, is to back up your work. Whether it be writing, art of some kind, power point presentations, or whatever-the-hell, just make sure you keep it backed up!

Today’s Public Service Announcement was brought to you by Tracey’s mini-heart-attack/aneurism.