August Goals in Review

We are into September, ladies and gentlemen, and although I do have a few good things to mention, I’m going to go ahead right now and admit that it has been a stressful, headachy month, so let’s just jump right into it, shall we?

Goal #1. Take good care of myself, specifically by walking 10,000 steps per day and taking at least 15 minutes per day to do something fun/relaxing.

This, right here…just no. This was a really, really bad month for this goal.

Okay, I’ll admit that the steps part wasn’t all that bad. I did manage to have nine 10k step days and about a dozen other days that were extremely close to 10k but just didn’t quite make it. On the average I walked 8509 steps per day, although that number isn’t exact because my FitBit actually crapped out on me and I ended up losing two days, so I had to estimate based on what I remembered seeing those days. (Sidenote: after a long and arduous troubleshooting session with FitBit they did, in fact, send me a replacement tracker).

The other stuff though? Man…I did not take care of myself this month, and to be honest, I was a ball of stress most of the month. I only managed 21 days with “me” time, and most of that was just watching Sailor Moon at the end of the night at camp while half falling asleep. And it wasn’t actually for lack of trying so much as it was completely forgetting to even try. I’ve been so busy, so tired, and so supremely stressed out (have I mentioned that yet?) that on several days I just flat-out forgot to try to have a few minutes to myself. It’s been absolutely ridiculous.

One thing that I’m trying for September is just to write a few paragraphs in a journal every day. It’s not going to be a useful journal with anything that will ever be shared; the whole point is basically just going to be to get stuff off my chest, even if it’s just to my computer, so I can hopefully breath a little afterwards.

So that was that.

Goal #2. Build more readership/viewership by putting more focus and energy into my blog posts, shooting more fun YouTube videos, and putting more effort into self-promotion.

Strangely this was probably the best goal of the month. Jason and I did lots of fun videos, including a Facebook-only live event that we called “Pops & Shots” (spoiler alert: I got really, really drunk). I also began contacting possible sponsors/partners in an attempt to make the YouTube channel more viable and have new content, and I’ve already managed to hook three subscription box companies into sending me a free box to review. One of them is even running a giveaway along with the video, so hopefully that’ll bring me some new views and subscribers.

On the book side of things, I finally got the new cover and summary up for “Nowhere to Hide“. If you’re looking at this blog from the actual blog and not the WordPress Reader, you’ll see that I’ve updated the theme to reflect this fact. I’m not sure I like it, but I wanted to have my one published book be a defining feature of the blog, so feel free to tell me what you think. And, of course, check out the book! I’ve been sharing it on different social media, and several of my lovely Basement Geeks have already picked it up, so that’s pretty awesome, although it looks like sales are stagnating again. I’ve set up my first ever ad campaign through Kindle, so fingers crossed that that goes somewhere.

Goal #3. Write as much as I can, including writing an entire novel from start to finish.

And finally, there’s this goal, which is almost never where I want it to be, but on this particular month it was just absolutely pitiful. There was just no time! I couldn’t find moments to write, never mind genuine chunks of time. All in all I managed to write a grand total of 3279 words this month, which – I’m not absolutely positive, but I think – is my worst month so far this year. That in itself is extremely depressing, and is definitely one of the subjects of my stress. At least most of the words I did write were fiction, but still, that’s so pitiful. Most serious writers have that kind of word count in a DAY, never mind an entire month. Gah. I don’t even want to talk about it anymore.

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So yeah, long story short, that was my month. It wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, although I’ll definitely admit that the marketing side of things isn’t going half bad. But seriously, if anyone has any ideas as to how I can get 2-3 fewer hours of sleep each night without turning into a howling, emotional wreck, that would be extremely helpful because there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.

And with that said, I’m off to try to relax for 15 minutes. 😛 What was your month like?

Internal Interpretations

The other day I was clicking through some daily prompts on The Daily Post and I came across this one. It piqued my interest, so I thought I’d take part.

Do you remember a recent dream you had? Or an older one that stayed vivid in your mind? Today, you’re your own Freud: Tell us the dream, then interpret it for us! Feel free to be as serious or humorous as you see fit, or to invent a dream if you can’t remember a real one.

This prompt caught my eye because I dream a lot. I don’t know if it’s because of a sleep disorder, or if I just have a super-overactive mind, or what the reason could be, but I seem to spend an inordinate amount of the nighttime hours in REM sleep, just dreaming away. If I’m woken up in a shocking way – such as an annoying, blaring alarm clock – I tend to forget those dreams pretty much immediately, but if given the chance to wake up naturally I’ve found that I can remember so much detail that it makes me wonder if I got any deep sleep at all. I’ve grabbed notebooks and scribbled down my dreams only to find my hand starts to cramp up before I can finish.

And most of those dreams, while extremely detailed and vivid, are so odd and random that I couldn’t even begin to interpret them. For example, there’s this one recurring dream that I had multiple times throughout my last two college years. In it my husband (who was, of course, my boyfriend at the time) and I are moving through this huge building. Each floor of the building was something completely different; one floor was an enormous mall, another floor was a sprawling park. And there were no stairs; in order to move between floors we had to find a ladder or something else to climb in order to reach a trap door in the ceiling. We would steadily move upward, until eventually we would come to this one floor that was like an entire town – houses, trees, roads, the whole works – and in this town a war was going on. Everyone my age that I had ever known – schoolmates, college friends, etc – were there, but no kids and no older folks, and everyone had huge, sci-fi-style guns. My ex-boyfriend was always the one to meet us at the trap door and shove guns into our hands, begging us to help out. Everyone would be camped out behind bushes, cars, houses, and everyone would be shooting off into the distance but I could never see what it was they were all fighting. The remainder of the dream would be hubby and I trying to make our way through all the gunfire, trying to stay alive while searching through the next trap door. I had that dream more than a dozen times, and each time it was super-vivid – like, I could remember the clothes people were wearing, and which stores we ran past on the mall level – but I couldn’t even begin to tell you what it was all about. I mean, you tell me: what the hell could any of that mean?

But I have had dreams that I could pretty much interpret instantaneously. For instance, there’s another recurring dream that I’ve had for years. It’s not always exactly the same, but it’s always very, very similar, and it crops up in my mind every so often. Without going into huge amounds of detail, the dream always begins in an important place from my childhood, like my parents’ or grandparents’ houses. It’ll be early in the morning and I’ll be trying to get ready to go to school. I won’t be a kid or anything in this dream – I’ll be my fully grown adult self – but I’ll be getting ready for school none-the-less. And it will be an utter disaster. It will seem like everything in the world is trying to keep me from getting to school. Every piece of clothing I own will be dirty, the car will break down, one of my family members will show up and start demanding something of me; just in general I’ll be a nervous wreck just trying to get out of the damn house. Then, eventually, I’ll make it to school, but the school will be this enormous, winding labyrinth of hallways and staircases and I’ll have no idea where my classes are. Around this point my best friend usually shows up, talking like everything is super normal, and I’ll start following her, hoping that she’ll lead me to wherever the hell I’m supposed to go. We’ll push through hoards of teenagers on their way to class, and somehow I’ll finally wind up in a math class. But that’s not where my torture ends. Sitting in that class, I’ll suddenly realize that, somehow I’ve managed to go almost the entire school year without sitting through a single class or doing any homework. Without knowing how I even managed to pull that off, I’ll just intuitively know that I’m pretty much completely screwed and have, like, a week to teach myself the entire course in time for the final exam.

Can you interpret that one? I think it’s pretty easy myself: it’s all about stress. In the dream I’m feeling battered, lost, confused. I can’t figure out what I’m doing or where I’m going, and everything in the world seems set out to stop me. And then, just when I think I’ve finally reached my objective, I realize that I’ve completely dropped the ball and put myself into a super bad situation. The fact that the dream involves places from my childhood, school, and my best friend, is probably my brain longing for simpler times amidst all the chaos that I can’t seem to escape. My theory is furthered by the fact that I always seem to have this dream when I’m having a rough time in real life; I’ve had a really awful day at work, I’ve gotten into a huge fight with someone, the little missy had whiny, sooky day that made me want to pull my hair out…you get the idea. It makes sense, right? What better way for a person to deal with stress than to be forced to deal with even more of it in their dreams? 😛

What do you think? Am I probably right, or do you have another interpretation? What kinds of dreams do you usually have? Can you usually tell what they mean or are they totally off the wall? Please share!

Finding the Answer to the Problem

Before I start this story I want to mention that I’ve never sat down and spoken about this particular topic before; not with my husband or my parents, or anyone else close to me. People may have caught glimpses of the issue here and there, every now and then, but I’ve never taken the initiative to grab someone important to me and just talk about what I was feeling. Honestly, that’s just the kind of person I am. I like to keep my baggage to myself. But today, inpsired by a fellow blogger who recently had a very helpful doctor’s appointment, I’m going to tell you a little about what I dealt with internally for several years.

Some time before I was married, I found myself in my doctor’s office with a laundry list of complaints. I wasn’t sure if they were connected in any way, but I was hoping that there was some simple answer for why I was tired all the time (regardless of how much sleep I got), was often very lethargic, and had a lot of difficulty losing weight, amongst other annoyances. I’d done a bit of research and thought that perhaps I had a thyroid problem. Communicating this idea to my doctor was a bit tricky because he’s a difficult man to talk to sometimes; he tends to quickly make up his mind about what he thinks the problem is, and then he’s like a dog with a bone, refusing to let go even when new information is presented. For comparison, when my daughter was an infant and was constipated for over a week, I had three separate appointements with this doctor during which all he kept telling me was to give her fruit juice…despite the fact that I’d explained several times that she flat-out refused to swallow it.

So here I am, talking to my one-track-mind doctor, trying to convince him that I think I have a thyroid problem and that I’d like to be tested, and he comes out with this gem: “I think you’re depressed. I’m going to prescribe you an antidepressant.”

I was flabbergasted. I honestly couldn’t see how the complaints I had added up to a mental problem. I was certain that it had to be a physical issue – something that was off about my body, not my brain. “And besides,” I thought, “I’m not sad.” I knew that depression could come in many forms and that being depressed doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re sobbing all the time, but I genuinely didn’t feel like I was anything resembling depressed.

Somehow that day I managed to convince dog-with-a-bone to send me for the thyroid test before pushing pills on me, and I left that appointment satisfied that I was going to get some blood drawn, return to my doc, and get a prescription for thyroid meds that would make me feel loads better. But then my tests came back perfectly normal – on the low end of normal, perhaps, but still normal. I was honestly quite surprised, and the dog took his opportunity to start gnawing at that old bone again. I left the second appointment with a prescription for antidepressants and a gut feeling that they weren’t going to do a thing for me.

Now here’s the thing: I’m sure that there are lots of depressed people out there who truly don’t believe that they are depressed, or know that they are but don’t believe that medication will help, or are so concerned with all the stigmas that are associated with mental health problems that they refuse to admit that they might have one. But I wasn’t one of those people. I knew that depression wasn’t my problem. I couldn’t tell you how I knew, but I knew. And I was right. After over a year of taking the antidepressants as prescribed, I felt absolutely no different.

I officially stopped taking the pills after my wedding, when my husband and I decided that I was going to go off my birth control. I figured that since I was getting nothing out of them anyway, there was no point in risking that the medication might have an affect on a possible pregnancy. I stopped taking both the antidepressants and my birth control pills at the beginning of November 2009. In March of 2010 I took a positive pregnancy test, and in early December of 2010 I gave birth to my beautiful baby girl.

Fast forward to about two months after my daughter’s first birthday. Though I hadn’t thought about them in a while, I started to notice that some of my old symptoms were bothering me again, with an added joy: I started to have some pretty awful mood swings. I didn’t often express them out loud, but I would find myself getting extremely over-emotional about stupid, pointless things. If my husband left his clothes on the floor I would get enraged and want to put my fist through a wall. If I couldn’t get the baby to eat I would have to struggle to fight back the tears. At first I attributed it all to stress, since at this point my husband and I had both been unemployed for about five months and were just starting to seek employment out West. But the mood swings continued in full force even after I was back to work. I would be perfectly fine one moment, and then with the slightest provocation I would find my face growing hot and my throat choking up as I fought to keep myself from either bursting into tears or punching someone right in the nose. For the most part I managed to keep this inner turmoil stuffed firmly down in the bottom of my stomach, but every now and then I would say or do something that would have people looking at me like I’d suddenly lost my mind. It was all terribly frustrating and I wondered on several occasions if Iwas losing my mind. I almost went back to my doctor to ask for another antidepressant prescription. I was still confident that it wouldn’t help, but I hated feeling this way and couldn’t think of anything else to do.

It wasn’t until early 2013 that I started to realize some things. First, I’d had a truly excellent pregnancy. Though I would up with some pretty bad back pain in the last trimester, I’d been quite happy and issue-free throughout the pregnancy. Second, although I’d had to deal with the lack of sleep and mountain of emotions that come with having a young baby, the first year of my daughter’s life had ultimately been quite normal as well. My various complaints, along with the descent into Mood Swing Hell, had only cropped back up a little while after my daughter’s first birthday. So, I thought to myself, what was the common thread between the time before I’d gotten pregnant and the time after my daughter’s first birthday?

It didn’t take me very long to come up with the answer: my birth control pills. I’d gone off the pill in order to get pregnant, and had gotten pregnant only a few months later. After my daughter was born I’d opted for an IUD for birth control because I’d read that the hormones from the pill can leech into breastmilk. But then, when I officially decided that I was finished with breastmilk, I’d gone back to the pill because I’d had issues with the IUD – and that was right around the time of my daughter’s first birthday. My symptoms had disappeared a few months after I stopped taking my birth control pill, and had returned (with friends) a few months after I started taking them again.

Luckily, only a few weeks after my revelation, I had an appointment with my OB-GYN, who is a much easier doctor to communicate with. So, determined to prove to myself that I wasn’t simply insane, I took a deep breath and asked the doc, “Could my birth control pills be giving me mood swings?” You can’t imagine the relief I felt when she looked back at me and replied, “Oh, absolutely.”

I left that appointment with a prescription for a different brand of birth control pills – one that is known for being less likely to cause mood problems. And though the changeover to the new pill caused a couple of issues with my cycle for the first few months, I’ve felt a hundred times better ever since. My moods are back to normal (or as normal as the moods of the mother of a toddler can ever be), I’ve been sleeping better and subsequently feeling more awake and alert, and I’ve found that I’ve been gaining a rekindled interest in things that I had once been too lazy and lethargic to bother with for a long time. I’m still having a hard time losing weight, but there are a host of other reasons for that.

The reasons I’m choosing to share this story now are threefold:

One, as a reminder that it’s okay to complain if you aren’t feeling well. Even if you think that your complaints are trifling or that no one will take you seriously, you should still see someone if you think that there might be something wrong. Follow your gut.

Two, if you think that your doc isn’t taking you seriously, or that they are taking you in the wrong direction on something, insist on a second opinion. Find another practitioner or ask to see a specialist. Just don’t settle for the first opinion if it doesn’t feel right. Medical diagnostics is not an exact science; doctor’s make mistakes.

Third, sometimes it’s just nice to talk about these things – or in my case, write about these things. It can be embarassing, it can make you feel weak and pathetic, but it can also feel great. We all keep our crap buried down deep inside where it sits and festers, but if you’re brave enough to turn over that soil and plant some seeds, maybe – just maybe – something beautiful will grow.

In the Summer of (a Writer’s) Life

I’ve been talking a lot lately about Kristen Lamb‘s Rise of the Machines. And I’m not likely to stop anytime soon because every time I get a minute to read a bit more I end up finding something I want to talk about. It’s just that good. 😀

Today I read a short chapter that invites us to establish which type of writer we are…Spring, Summer, Fall, or Winter. Spring writers are the young ones with tons of time, almost no responsibilities, but not a lot of experience. Fall writers are older so they have lots of experience, and they have few responsibilities because their bills are probably paid off and their children are probably grown up. Winter writers are of advanced age, meaning they don’t have a lot of time left to make their writing dreams come true, but the time they do have can be 100% devoted to writing, and they have tons of experience.

I fall firmly into the category of Summer writer. In fact, I fall so firmly in this category that I found myself nodding enthusiastically as I was reading Kristen’s description. Summer writers are still fairly young, but they’re old enough to have gained a bit of worldly experience. At first it seems like an ideal time to be writing, but there are other problems. The biggest problem facing Summer writers is that they are in the most responsibility-laden era of their lives. Summer writers have day-jobs, children, mortgages, car payments, student loan payments, chores and errands that need doing. Summer writers can’t always find time to write because they have to dedicate many of their waking hours dealing with day-to-day career and family issues. Summer writers may be fatigued because they’re run off their asses by household requirements and children keeping them up at all hours of the night.

Summer writers, to put it succinctly, are bogged down with copious amounts of stress. They’re young, and they have experience, but they have no time.

Currently I am experiencing a slight reprieve, as my job out West recently finished and we’ve paid off enough debts that we don’t have to worry about money for a little while. Regardless, a lack of time is still my biggest complaint. On a daily basis, as the sun wanes in the West, I chastise myself for not writing more, and promise to do better the next day. But the next day I find a million other things to do, or the baby has a bad day, or I didn’t get any sleep that night so I’m completely knackered. And so when I do get a few moments when I could be writing, I instead find myself reading or playing video games or watching movies in bed (and trying not to drift off while doing so).

I’m not trying to give myself a pass or anything; I don’t get to just blame all my troubles on the fact that I’m at a particular period of life and I don’t get to whine that I can’t write because everything else is in the way. But I can say that there are challenges, and that I’m definitely not alone in having to deal with them.

No matter the season, all writers have struggles that they must work through, and as a Summer writer, I invite all other “Summers” to struggle with me. We have families and jobs and responsibilities, but we also have writing, and we have each other. We can do it, come hell or high water!

What season are you? What struggles do you fight with because of the time of life you happen to be in? Please share! I’d love to hear from you!

Keep Yourself Out of Internet Mud…or You Might Never Get Clean Again

As previously mentioned, I’ve been taking a bit of time to read some “craft books” on writing, and the first one I’ve been looking at is Kristen Lamb’s Rise of the Machines. The focus of her book is social media and how writers can use it to create a working “author platform”, but she also touches on other subjects such as traditional vs. indie publishing, marketing, and occasionally a little bit of (related) neuroscience. Yeah, you heard me.

One of the side-topics that has come up in what I’ve read so far (enjoying it so much!) is this idea of ruining your platform without even realizing it. In other words, turning your name to mud by accident. In a world where everything can be re-Tweeted half a million times before you blink, it’s easy for one stupid mistake to go viral and effectively ruin your good name for, well, for good. This doesn’t only apply to writers (or the celebrities we so often see spiraling the metaphorical toilet bowl); it applies to everyone. That’s why I wanted to talk about it today, because this is the kind of thing that everyone should know, but which most people never think about.

I’ve spoken before about how anonymity does not truly exist on the internet and how we should watch what we do and say because it can come back to bite us in the ass. In that previous post I was focused on what I called “The Golden Internet Rule”, which is simply “don’t be a jerk on the internet”. This time I’m not talking specifically about being a jerk, but simply about understanding that whatever you choose to talk about on the internet has now become searchable, findable, and quite possibly eternal.

Don’t want to be wearing this for the rest of your days, do you?

I’ll give a personal example, because what better way to show people what you mean than by sharing your own morbid embarrassment?

When I was in university, studying to be a technologist, I had ups and downs. I had chosen my path partially on a whim because of a stressful situation (the course I had originally chosen was cancelled two months before the start of the semester, so I had to pick something else quick or simply not go to school). The result was that I often wondered if I’d chosen the right thing, whether or not I should drop out and choose something else, and was I really suited for this kind of career? I kept pressing forward because change is scary, and eventually I found myself in the fourth and final year of program, having an all-out panic attack. It began to occur to me that I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do when I graduated. I didn’t know what kind of jobs I was even qualified for, how I would go about applying for them, where the work would end up taking me, or whether I would even be any good in the field. Sure I’d made pretty great grades in school, but the real world is a lot different from the class world. I didn’t know what kind of work I would be doing, but I was pretty confident it would not be writing short lines of computer code to set tiny LED lights to flash on and off at timed intervals.

One night when I was particularly stressed, I went online to a forum that I frequented in those days. I wrote a long post about my concerns, my worries, my stress level. I ranted about things like “wasting time and money on a degree I don’t even understand” and how I would disappoint my parents if I suddenly up and decided to do something different, and how I was terrified of the idea that I might have to move away from home for a job and “why oh why didn’t I choose a career path with a clearer future?!”

It was a rant born of stress, passion, and an overwhelming desire for someone to wrap their virtual arms around me and say that it was going to be okay. I did get that virtual hug from my virtual companions, but I also made a teeny tiny mistake. Within the confines of that rant, I used my full, real name. It wasn’t a concern because most of the folks on this forum knew my real name anyway, but in this particular post I wrote one line that described what my diploma would look like when I graduated, with my full name in the center of it. I added that bit in to make a point concerning my rant, but I didn’t consider what adding my full name in actually did to that post.

Haven’t figured it out yet?

It made me instantaneously  and easily locatable on Google.

For the most part this was a non-issue. I was a nobody that no one cared about. Who would even go looking up my name on Google, and if they did find my post, why would they care? At least that’s what I thought until someone did happen to Google my name and did click on the link that led them to my post. It was my uncle. I can’t recall the reason that he searched my name in the first place, but when he did he happened upon my post, read it, and subsequently wrote me a very long, very concerned email.

I was mortified.

My uncle was just trying to be helpful and calm my concerns, and he was very sweet. That’s not the mortifying part. The mortifying part was that he read my post in the first place. When I wrote that post it was with the intentions that only my internet friends ever see it. I just wanted a little bit of anonymous support from people who I never had to deal with face-to-face. For good or ill, I’ve never been the kind of person who can share their pains and emotions with their closest loved ones, so when one of those close loved ones found my whining, complaining, melodramatic post I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. And while in this case I had the opportunity to go back and change what I’d written (posts on this forum were editable), in another place I may have been stuck with what I’d written forever.

This is what we’re dealing with when we put ourselves out there on the internet, and my example is absolutely nothing compared to what some people have put themselves through. Every one of you reading this right now has seen at least one photo of someone who uploaded their pic on a social network site only to realize later that there was something excruciatingly embarrassing about it. One particular photo that comes to mind is of a teenage girl who took a “selfie” of herself and uploaded it to Facebook before noticing that her vibrator was sitting in plain view in the corner of the pic. As if that’s not mortifying enough, before she noticed it dozens of people had copied it and posted it elsewhere. The picture went viral. Because this girl failed to take a few seconds to actually look at the photo before posting it, she is now an internet meme that will never die.

Whatever you say, whatever you post, whatever you do, it only takes one opportunist to back-up your mistake on his computer before you can backtrack. In this way the internet is forever. Ask anyone who has ever found themselves depicted as a cruel jape on sites like 9gag. It doesn’t matter how much you beg or cry or scream, you can’t erase something from the internet once people have decided to use it at your expense. Even if it is an extreme example and you have grounds for legal action, it only takes one person to store the quote/pic/post away to whip out again at a later date. And the bigger a deal you make out of trying to abolish a bad rep, the bigger a deal people will make out of making sure that it never dies.

This is why we have to be careful, not only when dealing with touchy issues like religion and politics, or when letting our tempers get the best of us online. We also have to be careful with everything we say or do on the internet. Before you say or post or upload, step back and think. Think about how you would feel if your parents (or your children) happened across your post. Think about the repercussions if your employer saw that pic. Think about the veritable shit storm you might inadvertently stir up with your status update.

Basically, just THINK. It’s something we don’t do enough of these days, and with the Internet playing the part of devil’s advocate, one stupid mistake can mean that you name is mud for a very, very long time.

Have you ever said or did something on the internet that came back on you in an embarrassing or painful way? Do you know anyone else who has had to deal with this kind of unintentional reputation ruining? Thoughts and comments?

Go With the Flow. It’s Going to Drag You Along With it Anyway!

Planning versus pantsing. It’s one of the great debates amongst writers. Which is the best? Why? What are the pros and cons of each?

I’ve discussed this before, but with Camp NanoWriMo just ending (I failed to reach my goal by the way…very sad about that) I figured I’d bring it up again, since Nano has been traditionally all about pantsing.

For those who don’t know, “pantsing” (or “flying by the seat of your pants”), is basically the exact opposite of planning. Rather than work out your plot line, character archs, and important scenes beforehand, you just write, going for quantity over quality, and deal with the results in editing.

Today I’m going to discuss a different kid of proponent for “pantsing”. I’m going to discuss my wedding.

Many women plan their wedding to death. They drill every detail into the ground. What color are the napkins going to be? Oh no, we can’t sit Aunt Agnus next to Cousin Greg! My shoes can’t have a silver beading on them, it all has to be white!!!!

You can’t really blame them too much because for many women their wedding is the most important day of their life, something they’ve been waiting for since they were little girls. It has to be perfect. It has to be flawless. Any misstep will follow her around for the rest of her days.

Right?

When I first started planning my wedding I was a little crazy as well. Even though I didn’t even want half of the bells and whistles that one is used to seeing at a wedding, I still wanted it to be perfect. No room for error!

But here’s the thing…things started going wrong almost immediately. Little things at first, like when I couldn’t find a printer to do the invitations. Then it was big things, like when two of my hubby’s three groomsmen had to cancel. Finally it was an enormous thing: we heard word that our venue – a bed-and-breakfast style inn with lovely grounds – was going out of business. I’ll admit, in those days I nearly had a nervous breakdown. At the time that we heard about the venue we only ha about two months to the wedding, and the invites had all already been sent. How was I going to find another venue this late and communicate the change to some 200 possible guests? I spent more than one work day gritting my teeth and trying not to burst into tears in front of all my coworkers.

As it turned out, the venue held on a little longer and we were still able to have the wedding there. When I found this out not only did a huge weight life from my shoulders, but my entire attitude toward the wedding changed. I realized that yes, things were going to go wrong. Things were going to turn out differently than I imagined. Things were not going to be perfect and flawless. That’s just life. And when I realized this and accepted it, it made all the difference to my psyche.

No, relaxing and letting things flow did not suddenly and magically make everything work out wonderfully. We still had lots of issues. My wedding dress almost wasn’t hemmed in time. The venue manager forgot to order the tent, which would have been a disaster of it had rained. My bridesmaids and I woke up the morning off feeling sick as dogs. My uncle mistook the seating set-up for the church equivalent and had the front row completely empty, expecting the wedding party to sit there. My mother-in-law went head-over-heels trying to get a picture of me coming down the aisle. I could go on, but the point is that it doesn’t matter. Despite everything we had to deal with before and during the wedding day, the wedding was beautiful. We got married on the sunniest day we’d seen yet that summer. My best friend’s father played beautiful music for us and we took hundreds of gorgeous pictures. We had a ton of fun drinking and dancing with our friends and family. And in the end, the most important bit happened: my husband and I traded rings and became man and wife.

I tell you all of this not because I think “pantsing it” is the only way to go. I’m not trying to convince you that everything will be cupcakes and unicorn rides if you just go with the flow. But if you can convince yourself I the truth – that nothing in this world is perfect and that trying to obtain perfection, especially on the first try, is tantamount to insanity – you’ll be a lot better off. I could have obsessed about every little thing that went askew with my wedding, but I choose to focus on everything that went right, because that’s what really matters.

I challenge you to apply this way of thinking to many areas of your life, whether it be your own wedding, writing a book, building a house, teaching yourself a new skill, expectations you have for your children, or any other number of life events. I won’t promise that everything will magically work out for the better, but I’d be willing to bet that you’ll be significantly less stressed out.

I’ve Been Changed in the Write Way

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

101. How writing has changed your life.

When I was in the third grade, we were assigned a writing project. I can’t recall exactly what the project was, but it involved writing a short story and binding it into a little book using construction paper and string. I wrote a story called “The Mystery of the Emerald-Eyed Cat” and while I can’t recall precisely what the plot of the story was, I remember that I bound it in green construction paper and that I drew mean-looking cat eyes on the cover. I also remember that I signed my name on the front with an extra middle name that doesn’t actually exist, but hey…kids are weird.

Anyway, I remember my teacher at the time, Mr Power, telling me how good the story was and that I should write more. Looking back, he was obviously just being a sweet, encouraging teacher, but at the time I took him at his word it was pretty much then and there that I decided I wanted to be a writer.

My writing continued on throughout grade school with my best friend and I writing what we called “The Game Masters”. They were two separate series’ with the same basic plot, one written by each of us. They had the same characters, but in my series I was the main character, and in hers she was the main character. We would write our stories in those thin, crappy scribblers that little kids get for school, and whenever we each had a full chapter or so we would exchange and read each others’. It was great fun, and though I’d probably cringe terribly to read those stories now, they seemed pretty damn awesome at the time.

From there on my writing has waxed and waned due to any number of reasons, but I’ve always returned to it. I wrote nonsensical mini-stories in junior high school, fanfiction in high school, slash fanfiction in college, and eventually returned back to original fiction over the past 10 years or so. In the past couple of years I finished my first original piece, start to finish (minus the editing part), and I am currently in sight of the finish line for my second original piece.

So you see, writing has been a part of my life for a long time. As to how it has changed my life?

On the negative side, writing has definitely made my life more stressful over the past few years. It’s difficult to work a writing schedule around a full-time job and a husband and child, and even thinking about doing so makes writing feel more and more like work, which I hate. Writing is something I love to do, so I have to struggle hard not to let it become one of those things that I have to do and dread to do. I would love to be able to write for a living, but I never want writing to become a job, and sometimes when I’m trying to force myself to write a few paragraphs in camp after I’ve worked a 12-hour shift, that’s exactly what it feels like.

But on the positive side of things, writing has kept me sane all these years. No matter what else was going on in my life, I could always write. When I had a fight with a friend as a child, when I was a ridiculously awkward teenager, when I experienced heartbreak, when I had doubts about my future…whenever something frustrating was happening in my life, I still had writing. Some people escape into books written by others, but I’ve always been able to escape into stories written by myself. I can pour my feelings out into my characters when I don’t know what to do in real life. I can torture my characters to make myself feel better, or give my characters the world for the same reason. I can twist reality exactly as I see fit, which is even more satisfying than you might imagine. Writing, for me, has always been one of the most cathartic things I can do. It keeps me from punching holes in the wall and screaming until my voice gives out. It is my Valium.

So I guess, what you could say, is that writing has changed my life by helping to prevent me from becoming a violent lunatic, because I can just write violent lunacy instead! That sounds sane, right? Right?

We Are Currently Experiencing Difficulties…Technical and Otherwise

Scheduling has never been a strength of mine, and as such it’s not surprising that only a few weeks after setting up a blogging schedule for myself I mucked it up. You’ll have to forgive me, however, because the lack of updates the past two days was the result of a mixture of my own lack of planning ahead, a ban of mobile devices in the control room in which I work, a chintzy-at-best internet connection at the camp where I stay, and a very, very terrible few nights of sleep.

I swear I’m not making excuses. I’ve been so tired that I passed out and started snoring on the bus to work yesterday. Very unbecoming.

I am currently working on ensuring that next week does not befall the same fate that the end of this week did, so I hope you will be kind enough to cross your legs, fold your hands, and wait patiently for regular posts to resume.

Or don’t. It really won’t make a difference.

(But I have found patience to be somewhat less stressful.)

Moral: Math is Evil

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

49. Advice you wish you had never heard

It’s a sad truth of human nature that we like to believe that we’re experts on anything we have a tiny grain of knowledge about. Anything we saw on CNN, read about in a magazine, or tripped clumsily over while browsing the internet becomes a topic on which we can speak as though we’ve taken a university course or three on it. The result of this shared delusion is that a lot of people give a lot of advice on things they aught not be giving advice on. Bad advice ends up being given to people who don’t know the difference and don’t figure out that it was bad advice until they’ve already used it and reaped the “rewards”.

I believe that for the most part I’ve managed to be lucky on the receiving end of this issue. I can’t honestly say that I’ve never given bad advice, but I’m fairly confident in stating that I generally recognize bad advice that is given to me and am able to react accordingly. As with all things, however, there are always exceptions.

There is one particular example that I remember from college. My program was set up in such a way that we would take four separate math courses, creatively named Technical Math 1, 2, 3, and 4. Alternatively if you were ambitious you could choose to take Calculus 1 and 2 instead. The coursework would logically be more difficult, but you would save a lot of money by taking only two courses instead of four. I had always been good at math and, seeing this, my department dean advised that I take the Calculus courses. He rationalized that it was also an excellent decision because if I ever decided to further my education toward programming someday I’d already have the required level of math behind me. I reluctantly agreed and signed up for the more difficult option.

But here’s the thing…the Calculus professors at our college, uh…left something to be desired. One was a Chinese man with a thick accent who, while he was actually quite a fine teacher, was extremely difficult to understand. The second was a tenured jerk who did whatever he pleased, and what pleased him was to see how many of his students he could fail each semester. The third, the professor that I ended up with, just plain didn’t give a rat’s ass. He had no teaching skills to speak of, and all but refused to answer questions asked during class. In addition to dealing with this less-than-half-decent excuse for a professor, I was also dealing with the various other stresses that one experiences during college, not to mention the stresses that any young adult deals with on a daily basis. In case you aren’t catching my point…I was stressed.

I passed Calculus 1 with a mid-70. Calculus 2 was another story. By the time the final exam came along I was seriously concerned that I was going to fail. I hadn’t done well on any of the homework and I’d only barely managed to pass the various tests throughout the term. As I sat in my bedroom studying the night before the exam I realized that if some of this stuff didn’t start sinking in immediately I was going to fail the course. I had never failed a class in my life. Hell, I don’t think I’d ever even failed a test in my life. The thought of it panicked me. While I knew that it wasn’t really the end of the world, it felt like it at the time. I was miserable, and that night was the closest I’ve ever come to a genuine anxiety attack.

In the end I managed to make a good enough mark on the exam to pull out of the course with a 52 and I never had to concern myself with advanced mathematics again. However, while I did end up passing the course, I experienced a level of panic and anxiety that I couldn’t have imagined up until that point. Looking back it was clearly not something worth losing my mind over, but the way I (choose to) look at it is, I never would have found myself in that position if it weren’t for the advice of my department dean. Okay, sure, it wasn’t technically bad advice since he couldn’t possibly have known what I would go through for that course, but the prompt wasn’t about bad advice in particular, just advice you wish you had never heard, so it still applies. 🙂

New Job, New Time Management Issues

My husband’s uncle asked me a question today. An innocent question: “How’s the book going?” The answer was not quite as innocent: “Not as good after going out West!”

I haven’t written a thing since the week before my flight to Alberta. At first it was because I (obviously) had more important things on my mind, like figuring out how meals work on the camp, and becoming acquainted with my many new coworkers. As the days went on, writing continued to go by the wayside because I was adjusting to a new job that involves a hell of a lot of walking, climbing stairs and ladders, and hanging out in stifling heat while wearing flame-retardant, long-sleeved coveralls. In other words, I was tired. By the time the last few days of my two-week rotation began to wear down, I continued to fail to write because of good old fashioned laziness. Even after returning home, I got no writing done over the past five days because I’ve been too busy enjoying my daughter and filling other obligations (i.e. my niece’s birthday party…enjoy being 3, cutie!), and no one can possibly blame me for that.

Reincorporating writing into my schedule is one of the things that I’m going to have to work on with this new job, but other than a few minor complaints (I never did get the internet working in my room) the entire ‘Out West’ experience has gone much better than I expected. I don’t mind the camp at all, the work is easy and laid-back, safety is actually number one for a change, my coworkers are all good guys, and there is no way anyone could possibly complain about the money. All in all, I have to say that I am honestly enjoying the job. Yes, of course, being away from the baby for two weeks at a time is less than fun, but look at it this way: how many people get 14 days out of every 28 off? 14 days that I can spend doing whatever I want, which in this case is enjoying my adorable daughter? Not to mention, this job is so stress-free that my days off (so far) are being spent in a great mood, actually enjoying myself, rather than coming home from work every day cranky and tired and inadvertently taking my mood out on my daughter and husband.

Everyone is different of course, and I’ve only had one rotation so far so I can’t definitively judge, but it’s looking good so far. I really think this job might be the start of something good. If nothing else, it will allow us to ditch some debt that we’ll be ridiculously happy to see the backside of…we’re coming for you, student loans!

Now if I could just squeeze the writing in there somewhere as well, I’d be doing great.