Heidi Moore

Do you think our own worst enemy is ourselves?  Sure there are some people around us who are negative and derogatory, maybe even abusive, but at least in my experience we only let those people have access to our lives if on some level we believe we aren’t worth being treated with respect.

What goals do we set for ourselves that we sabotage by saying, “but probably I can’t do it,” or “who do I think I am?” or “I didn’t make it the last five times, what makes me think I will this time.”

I for one am taking a page from the Fly Lady and am going to love myself by how I speak to myself.  This week, that means I took an agent rejection letter, the one written upside down on letterhead that looks like it ran through a coffee percolator, and I said, “Thank goodness, I didn’t want to work with you anyhow.  I’m better than that.”

Sign me up for happy.  It’s going to be forty degrees today.

Of course that means I will soon have more to compete with my writing life.  The garden days are right around the corner.

But the competition for my attention is okay in some ways since I’m learning that writing is not just about sitting in front of the keyboard.  So much of my writing is generated away from the keyboard, and so many problems with the writing are worked out when I say, “I just won’t think about it anymore.”  And, anyhow, do I really want to become a crotchety old biddy who goes to her basement to write for sixteen hours a day and yells  when her kids get too loud upstairs?  Well, some days, I do want to at least left alone long enough to jot down an idea.

I would consider myself a failure if I didn’t write because I watched TV, or played Sudoku for hours at a time.  But if I only get three pages written today because the rest of my writing time is spent showing my kids how to plant a sunflower seed?  Well, that doesn’t seem very much like a failure.

Well, actually it’s six weeks.  Not six degrees.  That’s the amount of time left between me, my family and the Silver Comet Trail.  Six weeks left to get my heart muscle stronger than pudding.  And six weeks left to figure out how I’m going to continue my writing habit while I’m pedaling what I hope will be an incredibly aerodynamic bicycle.

I’m not an author who says, “I write because I have to write.”  I don’t have to write anymore than I have to plug my stethescope into my ears and listen to little kiddie hearts go pitter-patter.  I write because I want to, and not counting the clumps of weeks when I think, “who am I kidding? I stink at writing,” the more I write, the better I write, and the better I write, the more I want to write.  Got it?

So how can I write on the trail?  I guess what works at home could work on the bike trip.  I could get up at o’dark-thirty and pump out 2 hours before anyone else realizes a new day has arrived.  Or I could stay up late at night and type into the wee hours.  I worry that sheer exhaustion is going to rule out both those options.

So I’m going to try something new.  Maybe.  If I can work out the details.  I recently downloaded a new recording app for my iphone.  I’ve used it a few times already, mostly while driving, to record snippets of idea, dialogue, and character sketches.  What I haven’t worked out yet is the best way to transfer the voice ideas back into my stories. Catherine Carmichael has given me some good tips, but so far, I haven’t found her advice necessary to implement. Just the process of verbalizing my ideas seems to make them permanent in my mind.  They transform from the fleeting itch of an idea I had to a solid concept that I own in my long term memory.

So in six weeks, I’ll have one hand on the handlebars and one hand on my cell phone, and at the end of the week, I’ll have an iphone full of wheezy story ideas.

Oh, and as for six degrees: Elissa Schappell is a professor at Queens University.  I am one of her thousands of friends on Facebook.  She is one of my handful.  While online the other night, the rolling scroll of Facebook activity announced that Elissa is now friends with Uma Thurman.  I assume there’s only one.  And she was in Where the Heart is with Maury Chakin who was in Where the Truth Lies with Kevin Bacon.

1. Approach every relationship as a means to practice phagocytosis

2. Have no solid boundaries

3. Deny sexuality

Communication is difficult for lots of different reasons.  One reason is because most people can’t listen over their own voice.  But that’s another post altogether.  Another reason it’s hard is because the same word can be interpreted in drastically different ways.

I wrote a story and described something…what was it? eyes? a Lego block? a carpet?…as dirt colored.  The readers had negative connotations about dirt, and relayed those negative feelings to the object described, but my intention had been to give a positive energy to the object.  What is better than dirt after all?  I think of the smell in the spring after the frost is gone, when I tear open the first seed packet and kneel down and plant my garden.  The wet dirt stains my jeans knees and packs under my fingernails. Dirt is alive, full of life, microscopic and macroscopic.  It sustains life.  It is the basis for being.

But I guess I didn’t communicate that idea very well.

There are seven types of dialogue we can engage in between each other:

Persuasion

Inquiry

Discovery

Negotiation

Information-seeking

Deliberation

Eristic

In literature, there are six sentence structures, one of which is dialogue, and another which is indirect dialogue. In life, as in literature, people become more interesting the more varied their dialogue, and the more varied their use of sentence structure is. Can a character or a person be effective or interesting if he is stuck in one pattern of speech?  He may be an effective character in literature if the world around him is changing and he continues to engage in the same form of communication and pattern of behavior that has always served him, but it is no longer working.  But he cannot be an effective character.

The type of dialogue to be avoided when we write literature is the discovery form, because then we risk putting exposition into dialogue.  “You went to the store in order to find the tool you needed to rig the cellar door so that when Uncle Jack walked in it would close behind him, latch automatically and lock him in?”   “Yes of course.  That was the only way I would get back at him for his years of childhood abuse.”

The other types of dialogue are fair game though, and should be used often and with lots of variety.

Who creates a dinosaur cartoon and then makes the main characters something other than dinosaurs?  I’ve spent hours trying to find a pteranadon in our dinosaur reference books, and finally turned to Wikipedia and learned that it’s a lizard, commonly thought of as a dinosaur.  Maybe that’s because there’s a whole TV show about them called dinosaur train?

Of course when I sat my four year old down, ready to have a conversation equivalent to “there is no Santa Clause,” she said, “I know.  They’re lizards.”  But still, I feel betrayed.

I keep track of my submissions in an excel spreadsheet.  The headings are: recipient, article/query, date sent, agency, response, contact information and a miscellaneous column that may include a specific website’s login information or what specifically I sent.  (e.g. query + synopsis + 3 chapters)

The submission tracker file has helped do a few things.  It keeps me organized, but it also keeps me encouraged.  Because every now and then when I move a row from the pending section to the completed section, I highlight it green.  Accepted.  Do the Happy Dance.  Someone other than my mother is reading my work.

I read an article in People recently which was an hour by hour analysis of a day in the life of Mr. Clooney’s latest love. Seriously? I thought.  It took her four hours to get dressed for the show?  Because what I do between 5 and 8 AM every day would take her a month to accomplish. I’m sure she’s a nice girl, and maybe on every day except the one she was asked to highlight, she does something other than pander to appearances.

Meanwhile, there’s the rest of us.  And between 5 and 8 AM, I’m writing.  Or getting ready to write.

5:00.  Stare at the ceiling until my husband complains about the sunrise alarm clock and I can answer all the salient questions: who am I, where am I, how many children do I have, what is my husband’s name.

5:07 Sit on the side of the bed and wonder why everything hurts on my body.  I’m almost twenty for goodness sakes.  Body parts shouldn’t ache.  Oh wait, I got my dates wrong.

5:10 Stare angrily at the coffee pot because the hard water from the well makes the coffee percolate at a rate slightly slower than the rate a snail travels across my screen door in the summertime.

5:12 Sit at my computer and open…the file.

5:13 CREATE.  In my pajamas, with a rose colored background for my MS Word documents.  I try and find the white hot zone.

6:45 squeeze out a few more minutes of writing even though I think maybe there are footsteps pattering down the stairs just outside my office.

6:51 hug the kids.  Love. Love.

6:52 turn on Dinosaur Train and buy another 28 minutes of writing

7:30 Enter the rest of the day.

The only way I can balance writing and life is to forget about balance, and separate the two. Each area of my life, family, medical practice and writing, requires total concentration, total absorption and commitment. Two hours of writing a day doesn’t seem like much until you look back on the year, and all the sudden, 712 hours have accrued on paper. Of course that means if I dedicated eight hours a day to appearances, I would have a heck of a body.

I dreamed about Martha Stewart last night. As one may or may not expect, there was no sex involved.  Instead I entered a kitchen shop on my search for the perfect plate for my table.  She stood there in a nice matching cashmere cardigan sweater set, baby blue, with pearls at her neck and a precise way of cupping her hands together in front of her stomach.

I stumbled into the dish shop in a pair of ragged jeans, manure stained boots, and an IU sweatshirt that I inadvertently took from my brother’s house.  Now it has a stain on one sleeve and a hole in the other, and I can’t give it back now even if I wanted to.

Martha looked at me at said, “How may I help you?”

“Stop making me think I’m stacking wood the wrong way,” I said.

“You aren’t stacking it by alternating direction of the wood in a 90 degree angle?”

“No. ”

“How do you get proper air circulation?”

“I don’t.”

She was disappointed and the dream ended when she said, “I really don’t think I have anything in this shop that would be suitable for you.”

Analyze that.