Month: April 2021

The last few weeks have been a period of calm accomplishment. I’m trying not to measure the value of my life in “things done,” but when living a life where most days are similar to each other and weekly patterns repeat themselves, sometimes I can lose a sense of progress. At those times it is useful to look back at the state of things six months or a year ago and see how all the small efforts and changes added up over time. So, as I enter a spring and summer that will probably look a great deal like the ones I had last year, now seems like a good time to record some status reports.

I bought Scrivener today. I’ve felt daunted by the thought of learning how to use it, but I was also daunted by the process of organizing thoughts into a novel. My first draft was one giant word document and I longed for the ability to separate out chapters or scenes to view them separately. Then I found my way into a process for brainstorming my novel’s plot that involved 4×6 cards and a file box. This made the organizational portion of my brain very happy. It is tacitlely satisfying to write notes on a card and then drop it into place. However I could already see that the method is not particularly portable and impossible to back up. So when I learned that Scrivener allows me to create scene cards and shuffle them around in the same ways that I would with physical cards, I decided to give it a try.

All of this shuffling of card and learning of digital tools is because I’m taking another run at finishing my middle grade novel. I’m scavenging my first draft for parts as I pull a sub-plot into being the main plot, let go of some of the ideas that don’t fit anymore, and adding additional threads of lore. This discovery phase is being fun. I hope to have the novel re-drafted by July because a friend of mine with experience writing and publishing middle grade has offered to do a critical read of the book and I’m using that offer as a motivational deadline. It feels good to have a specific creative focus and to prioritize writing.

Teaching classes is on hold until July. (Yes this fits nicely with focusing on fiction writing during that same period.) But even though I’m not focused on teaching, I’m still collecting bits and pieces that will go into my next classes. I have some I’m very excited about. I’ve also pitched some of the classes to a writing conference in the fall. Hopefully they’ll pick them up and I’ll get to teach several classes there. I’m also working with a graphic designer to create some logos for myself and for the creative community that I’m trying to foster. I hope to have images to share soon. And, as I posted the other day, I’ve been dressing up my Zoom corner. So “on hold” doesn’t mean “nothing happening.” It just means that I’m letting that portion of my brain simmer while I’m sending most of my energy into other things.

The next big home improvement task is moving the door into the garage. This is a multi-step project that starts by moving food storage shelves out of the way. I’m breaking it down into bite sized pieces and doing a little bit at a time rather than letting the size of the whole thing make me stop. I’m also waiting (and waiting, and waiting, and waiting) for our tax return to come in so I can afford to buy a new door. I’m now on week six of waiting. I don’t like waiting.

Outside the house I managed to accomplish the critical early spring tasks. I cut back our pear tree so it can (hopefully) recover from blight, and I cut back our grape vines so I could build a new structure for them. More structure needs to be built, but at least they are set up for a good growing season. Later this week I hope to tear grass out of an old flower bed and scatter a bag full of Utah-native wildflower seeds. I want to re-wild portions of our yard and make it more wildlife friendly. Mostly that means birds and bugs. My neighborhood doesn’t get wild mammals larger than mice. However if I could convince a family of quail to take up residence, that would make me very happy.

The kids are all in fairly stable configurations. Growth is slow and sometimes in odd directions, but bit by bit they’re beginning to claim adulthood. For the most part my job is to stay out of their way and not make their lives too easy. They need to practice doing some of the small life maintenance things which are so second nature to me now that I’ll often do the things for my kids without thinking about it. So my job is to think, and to leave the small mess, or the small task, for my kid to (eventually) notice and do for themselves.

Howard is still working on creating process for his next comics projects. He keeps running into mental roadblocks, and he keeps being frustrated by his own lack of productivity. Again, my job is to stay out of the way.

In pandemic news, Utah is on a low-level plateau. The removal of the statewide mask mandate didn’t cause even a blip in the plateau. Possibly because I didn’t notice much behavioral change. Most retail stores and schools are still requiring masks. However church gatherings and activities are coming back up to pre-pandemic levels in the next couple of weeks. By “pre-pandemic levels” I mean that there will be as many hours, but masks are still expected and social distancing is the norm. We’ll have to see how that affects the numbers. I think it is a reasonable next experiment as we all try to figure out how much the vaccination effort is helping and what life patterns we can reclaim from the before times. In another ten days everyone in my house will be fully vaccinated. So venturing to church in person is something that we’ll be trying, and possibly retreating from if we discover it to be panic inducing. Slowly life is taking on a new shape yet again. However I’m still not planning on traveling this year and not going to any big conventions.

I have many mixed thoughts about the ways that pandemic have exposed privilege. I can’t help but compare the current crisis in India with the US having piles of open vaccine appointments with no one showing up for them. I have friends in Canada who are locked down and would love to be vaccinated. And I compare that to what I contemplate happening in my life in the next few months. It isn’t fair. I know that life has never been fair, but all the unfairness keeps being in the front and center of my attention. For the most part, I can’t fix it. So I focus on telling stories that help people whether they’re in the form of blog posts, tweets, middle grade novels, picture books, or letters.

One thing that the pandemic made necessary was setting up a space in my house where I could manage Zoom meetings and classes. I claimed a corner of the bedroom and set up this.

It functioned really well for the past six months, but I discovered that having a green screen behind me created a fuzzyness to my video images that I did not like. I wanted a real background. I also wanted a corner that was pleasant to look instead of a corner that looked and felt jumbled. So I pulled everything out, painted that corner (to cover up the gray stripes marking the location of wall studs) and put up some shelves. I like it a lot better now.

I have flat spaces to put lecture notes, shelves to display attractive things, and a place that is generally pleasant to look at. I finally mounted and hung my two original drawings from Strength of Wild Horses. I also invested in a better webcam so that when I teach and record classes, I’ll have a clearer image to work with. The view via Zoom also looks pretty good.

The last piece I need for the space is a footstool because the height of my chair doesn’t let my feet sit flat on the floor. I went shopping and found some functional ones at reasonable prices, but my heart caught on this fellow.

He was more expensive, but Howard pointed out that sometimes it is okay to pay for joy. So I placed the order and he is coming to live with me. His name is Clyde.

So now I’m set up to host more online classes, attend online social events, and visit with friends. This is good, because even with vaccinations, most of my connections with other writers will be online this year.

I grew up loving Hollywood musicals. I still love the colorful, glorious, joyous, extravagance of them, but I see them with different eyes than I used to. I see the ways that they taught my young girl self to form her identity around life with men at the center. I see and think a lot differently than I did back then, I have more trouble just enjoying musicals, I have to think about them, the messages they reinforce, and the context in which they were made. Today I re-watched My Fair Lady, which could be aptly re titled Misogyny and Gaslighting: The Musical. The nice thing about My Fair Lady is that it is specifically designed to interrogate the power structures between men and women with a small side order of interrogating class structure. The hard part is that it was filmed in 1964, an era when American women couldn’t get bank accounts or credit cards without a man’s permission. So even while the film clearly positions Professor Higgins as an asshole and shows us that Eliza is trapped, even while it gives her a powerful song of declared freedom, all of that is undermined by the closing scene where she returns to him. Higgins doesn’t even turn to look at her, just asks after his slippers while she smiles. The film pulls its punch and reinforces a status quo where men get to be comfortable and women have to put up with it. Women, you can have your independent moment as long as you’re back in the house for slipper delivery.

As a text for discussing systemic misogyny, My Fair Lady is incredibly useful. Particularly since both the 1900’s era classism/misogyny and the 1960’s era misogyny are in there to talk about and discuss. Unfortunately it is one of the beloved movies from my childhood that I can’t share with my children and have them love it as I did. It would be a huge sociological discussion rather than a shared delight. (Though, to be fair, an hours-long sociological discussion with my kids is its own kind of delightful.) We’ll find other things to love together. I wonder how other issues-based musicals like South Pacific hold up. The ones like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers are hard for me to even enjoy anymore.

I’m sitting here in the middle of a drifty Sunday afternoon, feeling like I ought to have something meaningful to write, but not quite being able to connect with my focused thoughts because I’ve been so successful at actually having a weekend instead of a sneak-in-all-the-tasks-between-pretending-I’m-taking-down-time. Weekends are something I’ve been nurturing in the past months, especially since all my days are spent at home and my work spaces are in the same physical location as my relaxation spaces. I drift from work into no-longer-working sometime in the afternoon. Then on Saturday and Sunday I don’t assign myself tasks. I’m free to do them if I bump into them, but I’m not pushing to get anything done. I can’t always have pleasantly drifty weekends, but during the times when I can’t have them, I try to hold the memory of their importance so that I don’t return to living an anxiety-and-task driven mode of being.

My life has had more appointments in it lately. This is a shift from last year when all the days felt long and formless. They’d been stripped of external structure by the pandemic shut downs. Most of that structure still hasn’t come back. I have no kids in school, no homework to monitor or oversee. My weekly church meetings are two half-hour web streams and a family blessing of the sacrament. I still only grocery shop once per week and have consolidated all my other errands. But over the months, I built a new structure to help me connect with people. I now have video visits with various communities and friends at fairly regular intervals. Seeing people is good, but it does mean that I am back to having time segmented into parts: Tuesday before appointment, Tuesday after appointment. But I don’t schedule appointments for Saturday or Sunday. It helps me remember what those long, formless days were like. It helps me to retain the lessons I learned from having all of my days be formless.

I wish I could write down my lessons from formless days into a clear list: Things I Learned From My Pandemic Summer. I can’t though. They’re all amorphous, nebulous. Sensations and feelings more than concrete thoughts. By shutting off all the ways I’d over extended myself, I learned what it felt like to be on balance in my center. While centered, I learned all the things I had waiting for me to grieve them, so I gave space/life/energy over to that grief process. I gave stretches of hours and days to let the feelings fully play out instead of processing emotion in stolen snatches of time between other obligations. I still think about how that felt now that I’m building a new network of time obligations out of the pieces of the old. Interesting that the time spent growing in a centered way has resulted in me being able to extend outward as far or farther than I used to reach in my former overextended mode. That’s a lesson I want to remember.

Perhaps someday I’ll find words for how I feel more whole now than I did a year ago, how I’m less afraid. So far any words I use feel like a thin layer of papier-mâché over a round balloon, describing the outline of the thing while not the fullness of it. For today, I’ll put down the words and drift through the rest of my Sunday afternoon.