Writing time for those with no time

I read writing blogs. I can’t imagine a writer who doesn’t read writing blogs from time to time. I get linked to a lot of blogs about time management. It makes sense, I don’t have much in the way of time and I am always interested in how other people handle lack of time.

But here is the thing: the blogs always start off ‘I have a supportive partner who works, so I can stay at home and make up these worlds.

That’s awesome and all, but how does that help the rest of us with time management?

I have a supportive partner that works outside of the house. I work outside of the house, as does my retired mother. Between the three of us we have six paying jobs. My mother and I also write and have farm work. My longest week in 2015 was 28 days straight through, with those work days being between 8 and 16 hours long.

I’m not saying that to make you feel bad for me, I’m just trying to point out that for me it isn’t about balancing time promotion and writing. I have finite time to do both. Super finite time.

These are the things I do to keep finite time from turning into no time.

1)Keep yourself healthy: Those of you who know me know I had a lie altering injury in 1985. I’ve been in and out of Physical therapy since then. A half an hour a day of stretching, strengthening, ti chi and meditation keep me upright and walking. They also give you a half an hour of plotting.

2) Use the time you have: if it is five minutes use that five minutes. I keep a notebook with me to write down ideas. I tried a mini recorder, but I found myself not listening to what I recorded. I’ve never liked my recorded voice.

3) meditate: yeah, I mentioned it in point one, but let me explain. When most people I know hear me say ‘meditate’ then think I mean ‘sit still and empty your head’ when I mean exactly the opposite. Most of my meditation is done moving and all of my meditation is done thinking. I may start off by thinking “how many zombie novels end up in sporting arenas” (by the way I have no idea the answer to that question) or even “Where does my character go from here” then let your mind go.

4) schedule time: if you schedule 15 min spend that time at your computer (or paper or whatever) if you write five words in that time that is a win.

5) don’t forget to recreate: Really. We all need people in our lives. We all need to do fun things. Once a month I spend an evening out with friends. We eat Chinese, go to a comic shop and watch a movie.

6) don’t beat yourself up: we are all human and life likes to laugh at us. If you can’t get to your computer (or you sit there and you don’t get your five words down) let it go. You can’t control the past, you can only control the future.

This last thing has nothing to do with time management, but always try to have fun!

Akhal-Teke the mythic Golden Turk

The Akhal-Teke is the horse of Turkmenistan. It is a horse of great speed and endurance. The breed started as sort of a Landrace. It was a raiding horse until 1881 Russia took over Turkmenistan and the Akhal-Teke was used in the failing war to keep that from happening. The horses were so tough and fast that the Russians called The Divine Horse.

No one knows the exact origin of this horse, like many of the really old breeds. The people of Turkmenistan kept oral records until the 30’s when the Russian’s closed the studbook. This horse is often a golden palomino or a golden buckskin. The breed carries the cream dilution gene. That is exactly what it sounds like, it dilutes the horses coat color.  

We will talk a bit more about this breed when we get to the Thoroughbred as the Byerly, Lister, White and Yellow Turks, all important and foundation sires the Thoroughbred may have been Akhal-Teke. The breed may have introduced Naked Foal Syndrome, a fatal genetic disorder, as well as cervical vertebral malformation, (CVM causes a horse to ‘wobble’) to the Thoroughbred breed.

I have, in the past, mentioned the race from Ashkabad to Moscow in 1935, a distance of over 2000 miles an incredible distance to race over.

 

There are only around 6000 of these horses world wide and the Turkmenistan government uses them as diplomatic gifts.  

Here is an in hand class of young Akhal-Teke

Edited to add a link to the Akhal-Teke breed registry.

Primitive markings and colors

 

I thought this was a good place to stick the primitive European horse. I have to admit that the ‘primitive’ horses have always fascinated me. So before I start talking about eastern horses I thought we should talk about the primitive markings.

Plus it gives me an excuse to talk about my horse. I’ll talk about her more when we get to modern New World horses. 
 

First I should define wild and feral.

Wild animals have always been wild, individuals may be tamed, or even domesticated but as a whole the populations have not been interfered with by people. Zebra are wild.

Feral animals come from stock that was domestic once but now run wild. Mustangs are feral. 
 

Two other terms domesticated and tamed. 
 

A tame animal is an animal you can touch, but pretty much that is all you can do with them. Chincoteague ponies are tame. You can go to the park and touch them, or at least some of them. 
 

Domesticated animals live and work alongside humans. We are interdependent. 
 

There is a lot of controversy about whether or not there are any true wild horses. I don’t really care if there are or not, but if I was pressed I would fall on the side of there aren’t wild horses.

I know it is semantics.

Anyway back to primitives.

Primitive breeds include the Przewalski’s, Tarpan, Konik and Heck Horses. That isn’t an inclusive list, some primitive breeds are going to be covered in other posts and I mentioned them when I was talking about the Viking horses.


 Tarpans

The Primitive horses are small with shorter legs, straight shoulders, high backs and strong necks and they have primitive markings. 
 

They are generally dun.

A dun has the body color from a sandy yellow to a steel gray, they have darker legs manes and tails. All duns have dorsal stripes, a stripe that runs down the horses back.

Other primitive makings are guarder or zebra stripes on the legs, shoulder or transverse stripes crossing at the withers, dorsal barbs that come off of the dorsal stripe, rib marks, varnish, soot or shadow marks, darker marks on the horse’s body, zippers of light colored hair that runs up the back of the horses legs and with the zippers are often pared with light colored guard hairs in the main and tail. 
 

Sometimes you will see a line running along the belly matching the dorsal stripe. 
 

Faces are usually darker on the lower half, the ears will have darker markings (matching the dorsal stripe) and they may have light markings around the muzzle and eyes (mealy mouth and eye spots). 
 

Primitive duns may have white or cream bellies. 
 

Not all duns are primitive and not all horses with primitive markings are dun. My American Quarter Horse was a roan (mixed white and dark hairs all over the body) she had almost all of the primitive markings. If I had to classify her body type it have been more on the Baroque side. My little war pony.


 Sausage showing spider webs and eye patches

 Sausage showing guard hairs and garter marks

Tarpans in VA

Maintenance Day

It was a good weekend. Friday night I went to see Dropkick Murphys with my best friend - always a good time.

 

Saturday was a maintenance day for me. I slept late made my lunches for the week and did laundry. Then I watched some hockey, I can say that was research, but I would be fibbing.

I wrote a little, but not much.

Part of me feels guilty about not getting any writing or anything else real done, but at the same time I know I need down time. That is the problem with working so much is that you don’t have time to do the day to day things.

I’m not sure that I function well without some time off-probably no one does. It is the situation I am in though, so needs must.

My year goals:

    23884 out of 100000 76116 left to go

7 pounds lost 3 pounds left to go

How about you all? Did you make new years resolutions and if so how are you doing on them?

Split Attention

Happy Monday!

Well the 50k in 30 days didn’t go so well. I got 11 K done in a little over a week and then suddenly my brain wanted to write something else. This is part of why I don’t complete things that are more than 20K without a lot of starts and stops.

So now I have a paranormal hockey story based of the song Tam Lin that is sitting at around 11 K. I am right at the point where he goes missing and Janet has to go off and save him. Oh and my Janet is a minister who hunts vampires. 

And story that is set in an America that has survived a second Civil war. This war was between people who dealt in Faith and people who dealt in Magic - neither side realizing that they were using the same power, they were just focusing it differently. The hero in that one is a young man working for an alliance of people with faith and people with magic trying to get things back to some semblance of normality after a war that both sides think they have won. While out on a job the boy, Zeke, gets followed home by a woman in wolf form. She’s not like the werewolves that Zeke knows.

The first story is something that is all set up and I can just write if I can force myself to focus on it.

The second story I would need to spend time setting up the world and the characters and then I have to write it, but that is where I am being drawn right now. I may have to give it a shot, I mean you can’t know what is going to work until you give it a try, right?

 

Maybe I can balance the two.

How about you? What are you guys up to?

The devil is in the details

I read quite a bit and I watch television.  I guess we all do.  But I have a problem; I can’t watch or read without being pulled out of the story by little things. 

I work in a living history museum on the weekends, so sometimes even my favorite shows can drive me crazy.  Fantasy, historical and post-apocalyptic things are the ones most likely to have things that drive me nuts in them.   You have to understand that I have ridden horses, raised, killed and dressed my own food, loaded and shot a flintlock.  Oh yeah, and we use a water powered grist mill.

It takes me right out of the story to see things done wrong – or weirdly or whatever.  The image sticks in my head for days and days.  Or the image of the words in the case of a book where a woman took off a bra in the about 600 years before the bra was invented.

So if you are writing, try to make the details as right as possible.  After all, if I notice, others will.   

Where I have been all your life

Well really only for the past two weeks.  I know that I’ve been woefully absent since the middle of the month and I didn’t say I was going on a hiatus.  I know that I should tell people when I am going away, but I never seem to manage it. 

For four days I was at Pennwriters with my mother.  It was a lot of fun and I got to meet great people, some of whom I knew on-line, some of my mom’s friends and some that I had never met.  I’m planning on doing a whole blog post of who I met and what I did while I was there this week. 

It takes me awhile to assimilate things in my mind to get to the point of being able to really talk about things.  I’m not the person who can come home from these things in a cloud of creative energy and can just jump into everything.

That said, I have set up new facebook, twitter and a Pintrest under my ‘pen name’ (my full formal name) and as soon as I get them all spiffy I’ll let everyone know. 

When we got home I had a lot of work to catch up on as well as some editing that I had to get off of my ‘to do list’ and a few things that needed to be handled for my various ‘other jobs’, now that all that is mostly off of my list I can get back to working on a piece for my step-daughter. 

This week looks like it is going to be a scorcher at least for the first half of the week, so I may be done in by the time I get home at night.  Sometimes that is the most creative times for me, of course when I get over heated all I want to do is eat ice-cream and watch bad television. 

How about you guys? What’s been up with you?  

We aren’t entirely sure how to market this

“We aren’t entirely sure how to market this” was one of the reasons the publisher used for dropping my novel.  In all honesty I get that one.  The novel ended up being a paranormal, sports romance.  And the sport involved isn’t one of the bigger sports, it is ice hockey.  My husband (a lifelong hockey fan and a man who played until he was in his 40’s) once called ice hockey ‘the fourth ring in the three ring circus of sports in the US’. 

I couldn’t have picked a sport like football, basketball or baseball. 

I like hockey.  I’m willing to put in the time to research about hockey, about the organizations and the culture.  Heck I even have put in a lot of time to research fighting and the sorts of men that become enforcers (fighters) in the NHL, even though none of my characters have been enforcers.  If you are wondering it is normally guys who have caretaker personality who end up fighting the most.  I’m guessing that my love of the sport and my willingness to put the time in are the reason that only one of my non hockey stories have sold.

 I’m probably not going to give up the fantasy elements of my stories.  The romance comes and goes – but most of my characters have some sort of partner, but they aren’t all in the process of falling in love.

So I have to figure out a way to start and market my own sub-genre.  In the 80’s I started reading fantasy books set in modern cities.  It may have taken years, but Urban Fantasy is a common sub-genre.  So given enough time and effort maybe the ‘next new big thing’ will be ‘paranormal sports romance’, it may take twenty years, but I’m still young. 

How about you?  What is your favorite sub-genre to read or write?    

Restarting

 I realized the other night that it has been quite some time since I posted.  I’m going to try to be good about it again.  So I’m restarting. My goal is to post three times a week, but we will see.  When I restart next week I will be running a contest for comments in my Live Journal and blogger.

In other news, I signed a contract for my third Hyena short story and I am trying to rework my novel – they may, at some point, be marketed together. 

Lastly, my team has been eliminated from Stanly Cup contention.  I’m actually kind of happy about that, it will give the youngsters something to work for next year, and with the injuries that the Bruins have right now, they would have been out by next week anyway.  Plus my two Eastern ‘ex-wives’ (DC and Philly) are still in it. As well as three teams I have an emotional bond with in the West.

I’m not Pollyanna, but sometimes…

Last night I received an e-mail from my publisher that they were dropping my novel. They had pressed me to send them my rough draft three months early and I did. At that point I totally stopped being comfortable with them. I have a learning disability; I don’t like anyone seeing my first drafts.

I am a little sad I guess. I am angry. But mostly I am feeling a profound relief. I hate that I feel relived over something that should be a negative in my life.

I feel like I will be able to create again and work on the things that have been hanging over my head and maybe even participate in on line activities and get back to reviewing short stories again.

How ‘bout you guys have you ever had something so negative feel so incredibly positive?

Best books about writing?

My vacation was fun, but not exactly what I had expected. My team (the Boston Bruins) have gone from first to worst. Stanly Cup to bottom of the Eastern Conference. But all good Bostonians know that this is just right and proper. Boston fans have to be in it for the long haul, you have to be in a city that went 89 years without a world series win and 39 without a Stanly Cup. I got to see one win and one loss on my vacation the games were fun.

I only mention that because I write about hockey.

The best book I ever read about writing is a book called “hockey tough” It was written by a sports psychologist who seems to mostly work with NHL and NFL players. I had never thought that sport and writing had a lot in common until I read the book. I think of writing as a solitary pursuit and team sports as – well – team sports. Even though I write about players I’d never really thought of how much time they must spend alone. I knew, intellectually, that most NHL players pretty much spend their afternoons alone, sleeping or playing video games or yoga or what have you. One of my favorite players often does a skating practice in the afternoon, alone.

I guess we all do our important work alone, even when we work in a team.

Hockey Tough talks a lot about persevering and getting yourself through touch spots. It also talks about trusting your support people. And what to do when everything is not going our way.

I’m stuck in the doldrums of the center of my book. The part where it’s not exciting anymore. I don’t really want to work on it anymore. I will, of course, and I will finish this book. I have time, it’s not due to the editor until the beginning of March. Mind you I want to have a first draft done by January 1st to give me time to re-write.

Being in the doldrums makes me think of Hockey Tough. I may do some of the exercises from the book and get back on track.

The best book I’ve ever read about writing has nothing to do with writing at all. How about you? What is the best book you’ve ever read about writing, and was it supposed to be about writing?

What is a fandom – what is your fandom?

One of the things that everyone tells you when you start writing (or at the very least when you first publish) is that you should have a ‘writer’s blog’ and on that blog ‘fandom’ is strictly forbidden.  I understand why.  We shouldn’t let our ‘fan fiction’ flag fly.  Publishers just don’t take to writers of fan fiction (or at least they say they don’t) but the question is:

What should, or shouldn’t be in this blog?

I love several television shows, and I even have participated in fan communities.  And, yes, there is fan fiction.  I have been at the edges of fan communities based on books as well and there is a bit of fan fiction there as well. 

But my question is, what makes a fandom a fandom?    

I love hockey.  All but one of my published pieces involve hockey.   I love the Bruins most of all and then the other 29 teams are in my mind in a sort of matrix of teams. 

And, believe it or not there is NHL fan fiction.  Not that I’ve participated in that.  I’ve made my own league, with my own teams and I write my fiction about them.

So the question is; Is being the fan of a sports team being part of a fandom? 

What do you think? 

And what is your fandom?  

And the poor old dog was drowned

What inspires you? I think everyone who writes gets asked this at one time or another and I never know what to say.  I’m betting that most people don’t. 

I also get asked if I would rather be deaf or blind often enough and one day a few weeks ago I got asked both question on the same day.  And it lead me to an answer. 

Sound inspires me. 

I was going to say music, but that isn’t entirely true. I do love music and it does inspire me, but other sounds work just as well.  Anything from the cat pacing around the room reminding me I haven’t fed her or the traffic out side or the background noise of the TV turned down low and tuned to a reality show. 

For the past year I have been writing pieces that have ice hockey players as heroes, so the sound of skates on ice and the roar of the crowd have inspired me. 

And right now it’s the combination of the two.  The title of this post is from a the song ‘the Irish rover’ the song that was on my MP3 player before the hockey game I watched this afternoon.  I hope it brings me inspiration.

So what about you?  What gives you inspiration?