Making Space and Picking Teams

My folks are coming in town for a week which means I finally have a reason to throw stuff away and not feel bad about it. Time to de-clutter!!!

The first thing I tackled was my writing room, because this past year it turned into a room for holding stuff, not writing stuff.

I won't show you the "before" picture because you'll judge me and I'll cry, so here's the "after." This is where all the magic happens...(and by "magic" I mean "floundering and sputtering and head flopping")

I like to map out my story ideas on large butcher paper then pin them up. No, I don't have a fancy cork board...I just tack the papers right onto the wall. I am redneck chic.

Since I worked so hard to organize my office, I decided to reward myself with an afternoon matinee.

Sure, I could talk about story structure and emotional arcs, but really...let's get right to it. For about ten minutes during the movie, I actually went over to Team Jacob. Oh my God. But in the end, I was all Team Edward. That's all that matters, right? *sigh*

I hope you all have a great holiday! I'm so excited to be spending it with my family, but I'm also excited because my folks are going to watch our son for a couple of days so hubby and I can get away to spend some much-needed time together. Hubby has all the details planned out for us and I can't wait. I've been trying to exercise like crazy to fit into a very special dress. But...you know...it's hard to exercise when I'm so busy Christmas shopping! So I want to say, "Thank you, God, for creating Spanx."

I'll be back to blogging next week. Peace and joy and love y'all.

High School Stories Everywhere

I'm back to working on a young adult novel--it's a silly, light-hearted romp of a story with (hopefully) a lot of heart. It's mostly based on some stuff that happened to me. But now that I'm about half way through the first draft, I'm realizing that just because something happened to me, doesn't necessarily mean I have the makings of a full novel! My high school life was really not all that interesting!!!

So that meant I needed inspiration. I needed stories.

So I asked the two most important people in my life to tell me about their crazy high school experiences. Yes, I asked my chiropractor and my hair stylist.

My chiropractor told me a crazy story involving a limousine, cigarettes and $400 that will definitely make it into the manuscript.

And my hair stylist? Dang, that girl can tell a story! Since I was there for over two hours with a head full of foil, she managed to get through lots of stories. Her high school life actually was all that interesting! And the cool thing was she remembered everything...cars, songs, clothes, nicknames...everything! Thanks to her, I now have caramel colored highlights and an arsenal of raucous high school stories. Woohoo!

Now I think I'm going to go have a little talk with my massage therapist...

Like Father Like Son

We got tickets to a college basketball game. Courtside! My husband knows this guy who knows this guy who knows this guys' cousin...(sorry, that was a Spongebob reference)...and we got to sit at tables on the court. And there were people who brought us free sodas and candy. We didn't even have to get up and walk to the concession stand! Walk? Ha! Now I know how Jack Nicholson lives.

My husband was shooting the game for the newspaper and he gave my son one of his Canon's and told him to try to "outshoot Dad." The camera has a motor drive...he shot about a billion pictures. And guess what? He outshot Dad! And if it weren't for those pesky child labor laws, the sports editor said he would've published my boy's shot.

Check out this action!!!

But my son also seemed to have other aspects of the game on his mind...

It's Agent Appreciation Day!

Today we're showing our appreciation for our agents! Kody Keplinger started the idea and you can check out the amazing list over at Lisa and Laura's place for everyone participating.

I want to say thank you to my agent, Jill Corcoran of The Herman Agency, for these reasons:

1. She made the process of signing with an agent a dream. The novel I first submitted to her was not the one she fell in love with. But there was something about the writing that kept her digging around in my writing drawer. Jill kept saying, "I'm liking this, but what else do you have?" When I submitted my next novel, she kept me informed all along the way. She'd email to say, "I'm on page 35...loving this!" Then she updated me around page 70--she still loved it. And by midnight that night I had an email with a subject line that read, "Offer of representation." My husband woke me up to tell me.

Which brings me to the next reason...

2. She works late into the night. Jill doesn't close shop at 5 p.m. She works weekends, holidays, and even vacations. When we were working through revisions on my novel, we brainstormed and fixed plot problems and certain passages for weeks until it came down to literally tweaking one particular sentence. (Which was super important because it was the climax.) Jill was on vacation with her family while we were emailing at 11 p.m fixing that darned bugger of a sentence. I finally nailed it and told her to apologize to her husband. But she never once complained.

3. She is the best cheerleader. Ever! Jill believes in me, and I feel like I am a stronger writer because of her. She believes in the importance of not only intriguing children and teens with our writing, but also entertaining them. She appreciates humor. She appreciates children's books that are accessible. And she values story...always. I want to impress her, wow her, and write something that makes her use ALL CAPS and lots of exclamation points (!!!) in her response.

Thank you for all you do, Jill. I am so happy to be going on this journey with you.

Hugs,

Robin

And Just Like That...

So today I was wallowing. I waded around in my own misery for quite a while before I called another writer friend to help me out of my funk. This whole waiting-while-on-submission thing had gotten the best of me. I was convinced my future was doomed. My talk with her helped a lot.

But for some reason, I was still feeling a bit of the funk.

Later, I went to work at my other job. (The one that pays a little bit of money.) I had to go do a school observation of a child in a fourth grade classroom. Whenever I do school observations, I try to sneak in undetected so the kids don't notice me and hope they don't ask me questions about why I'm there.

But as I sat in the back of the room today, this little fourth grade girl sitting nearby kept watching me as I took notes during the lesson. Finally, she leaned over and whispered to me, "Are you here because you want to be a teacher one day when you grow up?"

And just like that...I was out of my funk. She reminded me that I still haven't grown up. I can still choose "what I want to be." My future isn't doomed. It just hasn't happened yet!

So a big thank you to that adorable fourth grade girl and my supportive writing friend. You both rock!!!

Feeling the Twinkle

We've been in a decorating frenzy here lately. I love it! This time of year makes me happy and thankful. (And it also brings on my annual addiction to spiked eggnog.)

Part of our annual decorating tradition is to hang the lights on the outside of our house. Which seems like a rather normal occurrence, but we live in an A-frame so my husband has to teeter on a ladder on our second story deck and hang the lights 3 million feet in the air. Which is when I always do my annual freaking out where I obsess over whether our wills and life insurance policies are up to date. But when he comes back down safely and my son plugs in the lights, we all hug and decide it was worth risking dad's life.

Later we plan to watch National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation to remind ourselves just how lucky we are.

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I Am Officially Scheduled

I feel like I have too much on my plate. Don't you? My plate is spilling over onto the table and on the floor. What a mess! My time is split between my part-time day job (I work with kids with autism), our wedding photography business, writing books, volunteering at my son's school library, being a mom, being a wife, and being a labrador retriever owner. Not to mention that bathroom that needs painting and those Christmas lights that need to go up and my obsession with GLEE. And then there's all those pesky self-care activities like bathing and re-applying lip gloss. It's too much!

Having too much on my plate means I've gotten good at being mediocre at everything!

So I've decided to schedule myself and take advantage of every moment while my son is in school. I wrote my new schedule on a dry erase board and attached it to my refrigerator. Here's my new schedule, in case you find things like schedules interesting...
(but feel free to go back to what you were doing, and if you're like me, you were probably cruising this website)

7:00 Coffee, facebook, twitter, blogs, random other time sucks, take a shower, get the boy off to school

8:30-11:30 Photography business only (or other day job, depending on the day of the week)

11:30-12:15 Exercise

12:15-12:45 Lunch

12:45-2:15 Writing

2:30-midnight Family time, cook, clean, finish work I didn't get to, dink around, watch Daily Show and/or Glee

Yesterday was my first day with my new schedule. It worked!!! Almost. My times got tweaked a little because I got stuck on a project for our photography business and I decided to take a looooong run, not a short one. But I did still manage to get over an hour of writing in. Yay!

It feels good to finally get to everything on my to-do list. Hopefully I'll move out of mediocrity and do something in my life pretty darned good! We'll see how day 2 goes...

What about you? Are you a schedule-type person?