Um, attention, body clock?

I keep waking up really early. Part of it is the story in my head, my new WIP. I don’t know what else to blame it on. I have been a perky early riser for decades. My normal alarm was set for 6am and I could get up with no problems. But since I’ve been working on the new draft? I wake up several times in the night and then I get up for good way before the alarm. This morning, it was 4am. Go figure. Maybe I will wind up hibernating and sleeping through the winter. This puzzles me.

Spent the day running errands and putting the finishing touches on my keynote speech for the SCBWI Fall Philly conference this weekend. Must remember to adjust my fantasy football team before I leave.

There are still ghosts and gremlins in our Internet, but I hope the hotel I’m staying at this weekend has wifi. I have a bunch of stuff to send to Theo and it has been pretty much impossible with our cobbled system.

Are you brave enough to love your body? Let’s all get ready to celebrate on October 18th.

Looking for answers

I want a magazine that refuses advertisements that use these deceptive dollbaby images.
I want models who don’t look like lollipops.
I want Hannah Montana to stop grinding her hips when she dances in front of an audience of 9-year-olds.

What do you want from the worlds of fashion and entertainment?

To balance out my anger, I went in search of goodness and found it: read about today’s hero, Karen Gaffney, who swam across Lake Tahoe yesterday. Read the article. I guarantee you’ll feel better. Then check out Karen’s website.

Our Internet has been taken over by poltergeists, so I have limited email and web time this week. I am deep, deep in my rough draft, walking around in a fog. It’s a good thing that BH is a patient man. Daughter Meredith sent me a giant vat of popcorn to feed the muse. If this keeps up, I might even meet my deadline!

Yes!

Please watch this – Mayor Jerry Sanders (Republican) of San Diego.

It takes a lot of guts to admit that you have learned something, and grown, and changed your mind. It takes even more guts to stand up for the rights of gay people, especially if you are a conservative politician.

Mayor Jerry Sanders of San Diego gets my hero of the week award. If you agree and you have a minute, please drop him a line and say thank you for being that rare, precious thing: a leader. His email is: JerrySanders@sandiego.gov . If you disagree with him, email him, too. That freedom of expression is what our country is all about.

Thanks to Deb and Aaron for the heads-up about this.

What do you think?

The difference between being a “Writer” & an “Author”

The writing has gone well this week. And that’s all I want to say about that because I am getting superstitious.

The other stuff I’ve been doing made me think about the differences between being a writer and being a published author. So, a list. maybe this is my Friday Five.

1. A writer writes stories and poetry.

1a. An author writes email to the kind people who ask her to visit their school, their library, the monthly meeting of their historical society, their book club, and explain that while she actually likes those kinds of visits, she cannot attend because she doesn’t have enough writing time as it is.

2. A writer writes stories and poetry.

2a. An author writes email to conference organizers with details about airplanes and questions about hotel rooms, and more email declining to read a self-published novel about the “pain and torment of (fill in the blank) and one soul’s journey to rise above it”, and more email declining to share her agent’s name, and more email with questions about publication dates, galley dates, revision dates, and more email inquiring of experts some profoundly obscure facts.

3. A writer writes stories and poetry and reads stories and poetry.

3a. An author writes blogs and reads blogs and comments about blogs and posts pictures to blogs. She writes to her web guy and beats herself up for not writing more content for the website overhaul.

4. A writer wakes up in the morning and eats and moves into her story without pause.

4a. An author wakes up in the morning and eats and moves into the phone call list: to the accountant and the kids and the mother and the mother’s doctor, then she rearranges her Netflix queue, and finally sits down to write …. speeches because she has a bunch of them coming. This reminds her to chase down a couple of hotel reservations.

5. A writer writes.

5a. An author wishes she could write more.

And now you now how the non-writing part of my week went.

In other news…

Thanks to everyone in Bishop who came out to hear me at SUNY Cortland last night. I hope Thursday wasn’t too thirsty.

I am not familiar with the graphic novel, Eightball #22, by Daniel Clowes (though I did like Ghost World). If any of you are, would you care to comment about how the book led to the resignation of an English teacher?

Lunch today: hard-boiled eggs and fresh acorn squash with honey.

I have to fire the Eagles defense and special teams from my fantasy football team. This is killing me, but the boys are not coming through. Sigh.

Winning weekend

This is going to be a quick entry to start the week. I feel like I have one hundred bazillion things to do and not enough hours in which to do them. That’s the bad news. The good news is I had a fantastic, energizing weekend and I am chomping at the bit.

The Mexico Cider Run 5K was a blast; perfect weather and BH and I had a great time. And, drum roll please, I won my age group. Yes! That’s right! Me – the one who has never won anything sports-related. I was so happy with my time (which was a personal best) it never occurred to me that I might have won. And they gave me a little plaque which is now sitting on the mantel. Suddenly all those soccer trophies my kids lugged home made sense.

Image and video hosting by TinyPic Here we are, the happy, sweaty runners. (BH is wearing the shirt we had made up for last Thanksgiving, when all of our kids ran in a 5K with us.)

When I started getting back in shape 15 months ago, I could barely shuffle two miles on the treadmill. In running, as in writing, persistence is everything.

Yesterday was a writing and canning day. I used a bushel and half of Roma tomatoes to make chili base. Thanks to a well-timed email from my friend Hope Vestergaard (who is a great writer and a lover of all things Danish, like me, and who I will get to see at the SCBWI Michigan conference next month) I roasted half a bushel and froze them. Thank you, Hope – they turned out great!

It was a packed day, so I woke up at 4am and hopped right to it. My reward was a gorgeous sunrise. The photos I took don’t come close to capturing the glory, but I thought I’d share a couple with you.

Image and video hosting by TinyPic The colors peeked out just after the hoot owls went to sleep (they sang to me when I first got up).

Image and video hosting by TinyPic See why I live out here?

I have insane writing goals this week. I would like to add 40 pages to the rough draft by Friday afternoon, if possible. That’s a lot, but I figure you never accomplish much if you don’t aim high. Plus I have speeches to write and piles of mail to get through. Wish me luck and focus… I am going to need it!

How was your weekend?