A Blast From the Past

Don't we look like college girls?

That's me on the left, and the lady on the right is Anne, the girl I shared various dorm rooms with for three years. When she emailed me to say she'd be in Wisconsin and wanted to stop by, I jumped at the chance.

How long had it been? Well, suffice it to say we hadn't seen each other in XY years, where XY is a two-digit number, X is a positive integer, and Y a nonnegative integer. Didn't I tell you there'd be math in this blog sooner or later? What's more, XY+4=XZ, where XZ represents the number of years we've actually been out of college.

Relax, you don't have to solve the equation. In fact, you can't. You finally get to fill in the little circle next to "not enough information" and get the problem right! Nor is the answer in the back of the book. Sorry. :)

Did we talk about college? Only a little. Mostly, we talked about now. About our families, about writing, about her job which I will describe in layman's terms as "keeping tabs" on fires in the Sierra Nevadas near King's Canyon and Sequoia National Parks. "I don't even remember that much about college," she said. So much life has happened since then, we don't understand the first thing about each other's jobs, we live half a continent apart, and we've never inhabited the present together, yet we talked about it easily. I learned that friendships picked up from a long-ago season of life aren't necessarily frozen in time.

She says we should come visit her in California, on her eight acres of land where she gardens, turns wood, and renovates her house. "It'll be really cheap once you get here," she told me. "And you can even get into the park free if you take me with you!" Maybe we will get to go. Hopefully it won't take XY years to get there.

The Perennial Question

What question do people curious about writing ask more than any other? Well, besides, "Where do you get your ideas?" (And besides, "How much money do you make?") I'd say that the #1 biggie question is: How do you find the time?

By now, I've juggled writing time every way there is to juggle it. When my kids were little, I wrote nightly from 9 to midnight. At times I tried writing before they got up in the morning. Glad to finally become a daytime writer when the youngest started school, I may have had the best of all worlds when I was "home with the kids" yet had most daytime hours to myself.

But then I began teaching, by correspondence. Still at home and able to devise my own schedule, I tried writing mornings and teaching afternoons; teaching mornings and writing afternoons; teaching three days and writing two, the particular days of the week shifting now and then; teaching during the week and writing weekends; writing evenings -- and sometimes just plain all of the above.

Writing is funny. Not funny ha-ha, but funny peculiar. People often expect their writing to live on the edges of their lives, yet it requires a fair amount of immersion. Regular writing, reading, and market study are the three basics, but most publishing writers also take classes, study writing books, attend conferences, join professional organizations, do considerable topic research, network, read and comment on blogs and message boards, maintain a website and blog, and continue to read, read, read. And when you finally publish, promotion and speaking engagements enter the picture, as does producing approximately a book a year. Few career writers put anything other than God, family and day job ahead of writing. Hobbies or an active social life, if there's room for them, come after.

So, you're saying, "Okay, I get that I have to make time, not find time. How?" Try thinking in terms of a balance between regularity and flexibility. Can't write on a regular schedule? What if, each weekend, you schedule the upcoming week's writing? JUST the coming week. Block out those times on your calendar. When the time slots arrive, WRITE. When the next weekend comes, again block out your writing times for the coming week. It doesn't matter if they bear any resemblance to last week's writing times. It only matters that they mesh with what's on your plate for the week in question. Regularity feeds your momentum, and though we may seem to be crawling forward at times, books get written.

Book of the Semi-Month Club

Like my first pick (see the July 1 post), The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey by Trenton Lee Stewart is our second visit with a group of four children. Best friends since their first adventure, three out of four are, or were, orphans, and all strikingly intelligent in their individual ways. Reynie has great insight into people. Sticky possesses a photographic memory and can quote endless passages after seeing them once. Kate can accomplish any physical feat with her amazing speed, strength, and well-stocked bucket, and Constance seems perhaps a step behind them all -- until we find out she is three. In the first volume, the kindly but odd Mr. Benedict called on them to help save the world from evil in the form of his own identical twin brother, and in the process each of the orphans found a home. The present story opens with the children eager to reunite with each other and Mr. Benedict after a well-deserved vacation. Mr. B has devised a world-wide scavenger hunt to entertain and challenge them. Trouble is, they barely make it to Mr. B's house before they find out he's been kidnapped, raising the stakes far beyond a mental exercise. Is the evil twin at it again? Can there be any doubt?

Some books with a rollicking plot skimp on character development. Not this one. Each character takes another step forward in growth. Reynie must decide if his accurate hunches about people's motives will turn him cynical. Sticky learns to rein in his tendency to show off by reciting way more than anyone wants to know. Kate struggles with the idea that the one person in the world who is a better spy than she is her father, and up to now she's always called her own shots. And Constance, not quite the eternal crabpatch she was since emerging from the terrible twos, begins to get along with people and even to love them -- and to find out she can somehow predict events before they happen. Another strength is this book's ability to be tongue-in-cheek, over the top -- for example, Mr. Benedict's faithful assistant is a pencil-thin woman with a tuft of reddish-brown hair who wears yellow clothes and is called Number Two -- yet our willingness to suspend disbelief is never in question.

Though the last third of the book slows down compared to the first two-thirds, the puzzles, feats, ingenuity, quirkiness, and good-old-fashioned adventure combine to make a rousing tale.