500 Words Day 22 prompt: Fear

I'm so behind on this challenge. I needed to get going again. I need to feel like I'm making progress. I need to feel like I'm not dragging my feet.

Which makes the Day 22 subject prompt so engaging right now.

Fear. Maybe all this dragging my feet is because of fear.

Fear must be what makes inertia so powerful. Whatever we're doing at one moment is likely what we'll be doing ten minutes later, or so I've heard. Although I can attest to this. I've gotten onto the Internet to read fanfiction, intending to only spend ten minutes and ending up spending over an hour. And it's mostly stuff I've already read.

It's not like I'm short on ideas, or things I want to accomplish. But what's the fear coming from? That's the question I'm warring with myself over.

I've seen myself start stories and not finish them. Or finish them but fail to edit them to something I'm willing to share with fellow fanfiction writers. (And yes, I write fanfiction. I find it a form of therapy, to work through emotions by putting myself into another's shoes and experiences. Or sometimes to right what I perceive as the wrong choice made by the original writer.) Sometimes it's more like I've allowed life to sweep me away on someone else's plan.

I've allowed my schedule to be tweaked when I need to be doing things for professional development, or to see friends. Or go out on dates.

Why do I do this? Why does anyone?

I'm a huge reader, and yet even that's a habit I've fallen away from in the past years. (I think it really hit during college. Something about the prescribed reading that my auto-didact homeschooler core rebels against, maybe?) Reading helps me relax, learn, or work through things. So to help me figure out my fears I've picked up books again.

One, The Art of Asking, has hit a few nerves. It speaks to the artist's troubles, especially that pressure to GET A JOB. And how much trouble people have with asking for help. That's definitely the fear of not being enough, of not being good enough. But to learn that a number of famous writers needed help from friends and family to create the works they're best known for? It made the possibility less scary.

That seems to be the problem. I've been trying to go mostly alone, and I've not given myself the opportunity or permission to ask for help. Even if I don't like the idea of asking someone to hold me accountable, maybe that's the kick in the pants I need to get the life I want off the ground.

Could merely asking someone to be my accountability partner, and promise to do the same for them, be enough? Could asking someone to mentor me as I hone my ability to work from home be what it takes to overcome this rut I feel stuck in?

If a self-made singer/songwriter/author can still feel beset by the fear of not being enough, then maybe it's okay that someone like me feels stuck.

I wonder if she'd respond to a Tweet...

Why learn chess?

What if I told you that one game could help you and your child become better thinkers? That this game could help your child develop well over a dozen life skills and even help them become better at school subjects?

It's not impossible. It's not called a dream. It's called chess.

Yes, the game that's the driving force behind “Searching for Bobby Fischer”, book and movie. The game that an American beat a Soviet Union player for the world championship in 1972. And yes, that American was Bobby Fischer.

How could a game that's a bloodless battle help with scholastics?

First, chess encourages focus. You have to pay attention to what's going on and plan ahead. You start just being able to see one move ahead, and then more and more until you can carry out small plans called tactics. You have to learn to anticipate what your opponent might do, and meet those possibilities. This develops concentration as well, and the ability to visualize what could be.

As each piece has an assigned value, younger players learn how to add the total points captured (or at stake) to have a strong idea whether they're winning or losing. I've seen Pre-Ks playing, and sometimes taking to it like ducks to water. This also helps teach the consequences of making the wrong choice, say involving dropping a piece without gaining anything back.

This helps develop a sense of accountability that encourages their owning up to their actions, and that the consequences of cheating can stick with you for a long time. Students in my chess clubs are taught how to handle certain situations that come up often as players are learning the game, and also how to bounce back when something doesn't go their way. Students learn from their mistakes and how to think, as well as plan, differently the next time a similar situation pops up.

The game and the strategies and tactics are one part of package chess presents for any student. The biggest lessons come from the practical application: tournament games. These teach students how to make decisions under time pressure, how to act in a room full of games that require quiet, and – most of all – how to handle big losses. Some will be frustrating, but students who pick up the ability to fight back after a loss and win their remaining games gain the advantage of grit in competitions and in life.

Why is this important to me? I've been a chess player since I was little. Tournaments, had they been around when I was that young, would've kept me playing much more consistently and helped me become a stronger player. Tournaments can get a player more engaged, wanting to become even better and advance to stronger competitions. Not to mention the joy of victory. There is nothing like the look on a student's face when they win a trophy – especially when it's bigger than they are.

There are many reasons to learn chess. What's yours?

Writing: The Good and the Bad

Writing about writing?

Well, my blog's all about “dancing” with words, so that seems natural.

Or is it?

The biggest challenge is writer's block, when the words simply won't come or feel like you're dragging them out and it's more like pulling teeth. It's when your characters seem to just stand around and do nothing no matter what you tell them. It's when the topic feels so vast despite your research efforts that you can't figure out which things to talk about and how much.

When I want to write sometimes I cannot keep up the concentration or focus, but that's a little different. Sometimes that's due to lack of sleep, and when the Muse isn't the cause that's no fun. Sometimes it's because there's something else hanging over my head and feels like it'll create major trouble if I don't make it go away soon. Sometimes there are all those little chores you put off because of life and work, or sometimes laziness, and it feels like they're staring at you until you break and do them.

I love being in flow, where the words feel like they won't stop coming and perhaps are taking my work in a different direction than originally planned. Even when plans don't go accordingly there's some wild or interesting discovery about the story or your writing to make. What I seek is being able to flow into that flow state more readily.

I've been willing to try a lot of things. I have books on creativity, the flow process, and focus in general. I'm a reader and a thinker. It's been part of my psyche since I was little. Although I was also more of a doer at that age than I am now.

Perhaps that's part of the problem. More doing, but with some planning to create the foundation.

I've downloaded a meditation app onto my phone, and have found it useful in relaxing. It has a number of sessions, guided for different reasons. I've tried the sleep ones, and when I do them I feel better falling asleep and like my sleep is more restful. (And why that doesn't get me doing it more often I haven't figured out yet.) I intend to try the ones for focus and creativity to see what happens.

I've completed five National Novel Writing Month challenges, along with four Camp NaNos. (Or is it six? I think it's six.) Those get me writing a lot, sometimes to see how many words can I write in one day. Story-writing, I've done over 10,000 in a day. I can only imagine what would be if I could take all of November off to write. Those have us doing battle with not just writer's block, but the dreaded inner editor. This last NaNoWriMo I got better about powering through the first draft without stopping to edit (which I've done slightly for this, but I'm always editing as I go with emails). It meant some pretty crazy errors made it to my betas, but they got good laughs out of it.

Maybe the favorite part are those laughter moments. When you surprise yourself with what you wrote, and maybe it said something you had no intention of saying. And that didn't belong. But the more intentional ones are more priceless to me, that proof I can be intentionally funny.

Those can make the difference between a good day, a bad day, and an amazing day.

First post for a 500 words per day challenge (getting caught up)

Why am I doing the Jeff Goins 500 words per day writing challenge?

Simple. I need to re-establish the writing habit for starters. After all, I've had the writing bug since I was 14 years old and had discovered fanfiction. I had already been writing to pen-pals for four years by then, encouraged by my family so I would learn how to write. (I think handwriting was the key factor.) I've been through periods where I hardly wrote at all, and I discovered that made for a very unhappy Kendra.

What I really want now is to get my writing career off the ground. I want to see the stories I've been working on become polished and publishable. I want to see those make me a living at writing.

But most of all, I think I'm doing this because I'm frustrated with parts of my life.

500 words a day is nothing to someone who's done NaNoWriMo every year since 2010, and won each year since 2011. My daily average during NaNo or Camp NaNo is at least three times this challenge. Some days I've managed over 10,000 words. (Yes, I had the day off those days. But I often still managed at least par even on days where I worked double shifts.)

Yet it is a good goal for someone who is considering also making money from copywriting. I want to establish such a strong pattern in my core that I'm beating any goal set before me.

What's stopping me in my tracks is the not knowing where to start with the training. I've signed up for several writing and self-publishing courses. Yet I've allowed life to overwhelm me and delay my start.

I feel like it'd be a gutsy move to make my theme for this month exploring the emotions and thoughts that are holding me back. I moved to another state to start a career as a coach and teacher, and it's taking longer to estabish success than I had expected. Enough that I needed to take a second job that's now drumming up the majority of my income. I had expected to be out of that particular industry, which makes me even more frustrated.

Could this frustration really be fear? Or is it that I've lost so much touch with my instincts that I've stopped trusting in the things that motivated me to succeed before? I went through an on-line masters program, so meeting deadlines isn't the issue.

Or so I believe. Maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe the issue is more about enforcing my own promises to myself, holding them sacred and worth honoring. That's something I feel I've had trouble with lately, and my goal is to work on that with this course. I somehow missed the prompt for Day 1, and so I also spent time writing over 800 words of fiction as a prompt for someone I owed a story to. (A secret Santa thing.)

And even that ran into trouble. I kept stalling and pausing. Partly because I wasn't entirely sure where the story was going. I knew the prompt, but getting it to a natural conclusion wasn't coming easily. I don't think the problem was that I was also listening to friends (I was writing at a write-in established by members of the local NaNoWriMo group) I hadn't seen in two weeks. I think it was the lack of thinking about the arc.

That's sometimes been a theme with me. If I don't plan ahead things don't go well. I seem to work best with a plan to guide me, and then sometime winging the details. At least where my NaNo projects are concerned. With other things I have to plan more of the details so I know what to do and when to do it. That makes my jobs run smoother.

I also have to recognize when do I work at my best, which leads me to the Day 3 prompt from the challenge (which technically hasn't started for me as I'm still on March 2 as of the moments I'm writing this). It suggested getting up 60-90 minutes early each day.

This one I balk at. Why? Because one of my priorities for my well-being is sleep, and that means getting enough each night. I had to arrange to give up one of the classes I taught because I was losing so much sleep getting up to teach it that it had to be why I got sick each term. My immediate family are all night owls. We naturally don't fall to sleep early and therefore need to sleep in later than most.

Now, I've heard some claim that early birds are more productive. I feel that those who know their own rhythms and how to work with them do the best, whether they're early birds or night owls. I've had times of great writing productivity staying up late, or answering the call from my muse when I couldn't sleep.

For me the key is planning ahead and figuring out what needs doing sooner rather than later. I even bought two different planners to help me with this.

But tools are no good if you don't use them.You could have a fabulous system, but if you don't pick it up daily and work with it how will it work for you? When I used the Franklin Covey planners regularly they worked great.

I'm trying the Productivity Planner and the Passion Planner. The former is for establishing a record of the most important things to do for five days each week. It makes sense to focus on the work week of most of the work since I've tended to have very full weekends – usually with work. It lets me see things move from the To-Do list to the Done list, which is very satisfying to see grow. The latter is meant for longer-term plans. Say a few months out to maybe preparing for a year-long plan. And it's flexible in how I could use it.

We shall see how they work for me. For now the goal is to establish new habits.

Mind dumping - a form of journaling

In talking with a valued guide about my path in life, I was reminded of a writing practice that more than a few writers have encouraged. Julia Cameron, author of "The Artist's Way", wrote a book called "The Writing Diet" after she noticed that a lot of her students were losing weight without going on a diet. The first tool she listed is the "morning pages." Other authors call it a mind dump.

Is it journaling? Yes, and no. It can be done in a journal, but it's meant to be done first thing after waking up. (Okay, maybe you need to take care of a few critical things first, but otherwise...) You're trying to empty your mind of whatever is lingering from the dreams and the previous day. To help you focus better on the day ahead.

Why am I going to resume it?

1. I believe clearing one's mind is helpful.
This is only partly connected with yoga. Mostly, it's about getting into the emotions that we don't always realize we've stored within ourselves. Sometimes they manifest as physical symptoms. (Mine is mostly tension, but I think there are others that are attributable to stress...) Consistently mind dumping chips away at the stored things, and frees us of a lot of stress.

Of course, a bit of mind dumping at night might be useful. To let go of the day and make it a bit easier to sleep by getting lingering things out of our system. (Then again... as a writer, sometimes we want things to percolate overnight...)

2. We might start noticing patterns we didn't see before.
I admit: those morning (or evening) pages won't make a lot of sense at first. We're tired, we might be resisting doing it, and all sorts of other things can make us unwilling to look back over them. But after some consistent writing, it can help you see a change in yourself, or notice recurring themes that you didn't know where such a big deal in your life.

I did an exercise similar to this at my guide's suggestion today. It reminded me of why I did mind dumping originally, and of Julia Cameron. It also led me to locate her website for "The Artist's Way." Seems worth exploring...

In any case, it also reminded me that I had this to return to. Since writing is such an important part of my psyche now, making myself write entries again is one more step toward being a writer for good. (Along with writing stories.)

Habit 1: Be Proactive - Labels and Self-Talk

This is a thought experiment a life coach taught me once:

First, imagine a being in a situation that you don't like. Notice how you feel and what your thoughts are about being in that situation. Then imagine a situation that would be a treat to be in, like being handed (and this was her example) $10,000 to spend in any way you wanted for this study about how people spend money. Again, notice the thoughts and feelings.

Yeah, that second one sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Yesterday, I was at the 3rd Annual Ultimate Networking Conference held by YourLocalCity.com and the event put that thought experiment to the forefront again. I listened to people in a variety of businesses talk about how to successfully promote yourself, and gear yourself toward success. The idea of the controversial "Law of Attraction" (see Wikipedia and other sources for details), which stresses that what we think and how we think about it influences what happens, was mentioned several times.

As a scientifically-minded person, I do like to see hard evidence, but I also watch how others are acting (which is a form of data). It's already been established that we can choose our response to a situation, and we can see that people like working with people who are confident without being arrogant. The "I can do it" attitude is part of being proactive, and it's a label in itself. It boils down, to me, to one question to ask our respective selves: "What am I doing that is preventing me from being successful, and what can I do/think to get what I want?"

Of course, you have to know what you want. A word that more than one person urged attendees to eliminate from our vocabularies is "basically." You want to be as specific as possible; that makes things clearer to you and to those around you. It helps you project a confident attitude, and may make you even more enjoyable to be around.

Habit 1: Be Proactive - Word useage and paradigms

A huge aspect of proactivity is the language we use on a daily basis. Do we say such things like "I can't" or "I must/have to" or "if only" or "I'd be happy when I have..." in our thoughts? This is a sign of a mindset that pushes us toward a victim pathology - letting things happen to us rather than be the primary actor in our own lives. It also prevents us from unleashing the maximum potential of our muses; not taking responsibility for making our own destiny is surrendering power to chance - unnecessarily.

So what does being proactive mean for writers? I think it means being open to creating new ideas, trying writing in a different style, using a different way of capturing your thoughts, or trying something related to whatever you're working on. I bet that every writer has read that kind of advice in multiple writing books, and in multiple ways. Now, reading all of this advice is proactive, but it takes another step to actually implement the methods. I can't think of how many times I read something potentially useful and didn't start using it, or perhaps started and stopped with something. I'm already restarting with the idea of Morning Pages from Julia Camerson's The Writing Diet and getting current with my feelings.

Everything I've read about Habit 1 suggests that being proactive means seizing opportunities, and turning problems into opportunities to be creative. Sound hard? Well, it's a matter of how you see the world. If you assume that you can't break through writer's block on your own, then you're setting yourself up for that. But if you assume that you can by being creative, then the odds are more in your favor. My favorite poster is all about how we make our own destiny by our choices. The tropical scene is a bonus.