Wordy Weekend

I spent most of the weekend reading. I’m not even ashamed to say it. Tune in this coming Saturday for more on what I read (I’ll sum it up here by saying it was a YA dystopian trilogy which was problematic in at least fifty-thousand-squillion ways but – and this is the important bit – I read all of it. So, draw your own conclusions.) Those bits I didn’t spend reading I spent watching the final of the Eurovision Song Contest and getting teary-eyed at how awesome Europe can, at times, be; I also did a bit of panicking. As you do.

Image: businessinsider.com

I panicked about many and varied things, dear readers. Perhaps the following will give you a flavour of it.

One of the weirder things I do in terms of my writing is convince myself that I’ve made a dreadful error once something has been submitted, or gone live, or been posted, or whatever. I make myself so certain that I’ve flubbed – I can see the error, dancing before my eyes like it’s taunting me, the traitorous lines of the letters going ‘nyah-nyah-nyah-NYAH-nyah!’ in their most irritating voice – and I have no peace until I check the text. I rake over it, heart pounding, searching for the nasty little mistake, feeling the sweats starting.

And, 99% of the time, do you know what I find?

There’s no mistake. My mind concocted the whole thing. The words I thought I’d misspelled, or put in the wrong order, or which I’d convinced myself were grammatically incorrect are either fine, or not there at all. This is weird. It’s strange for your mind to remember something so clearly which then turns out to be a fiction, but it’s far from being the first time this has happened to me. When I was a kid, I used to have a hard time telling dreams from reality; I regularly woke up convinced that what I’d just dreamed had actually happened, and lots of my ‘memories’ from childhood are probably not memories at all, but half-remembered dreams. Even still (as recently as this morning, in fact), I find it hard to shake off dreams when I wake up, and they linger – a touch, or a scent, or a voice, or a sensation like rain or cold wind or fear – long after I’m out of bed and going about my day. So, it’s no shocker to me that my brain can make me believe funny things. I suppose, too, that one of my biggest fears is making a mistake in a document; the fact that I’ve started up my business, Yellow Road Editing Services, has made this slightly worse. Now, I really have to turn out perfect copy, time after time, or risk professional meltdown.

But then, I’m a person who, as a kid, used the word ‘laudable’ incorrectly in her diary; at the time I used it, I thought it meant something akin to ‘laughable.’ When, years later, I discovered it meant something else entirely, I hunted down that diary and went through it until I found the incorrect word. I erased it, and replaced it, and sighed with relief as I slid the diary back into its hiding place – where nobody but me would ever even see it. Such is the level of word-nerdiness we’re dealing with here.

Anyway. So, I convinced myself I’d made errors all over the place – in blog posts, in Facebook status updates, in Tweets (one of those was correct, actually, but we’ll move on swiftly) – and it took major self-control not to whip the laptop out and pore over everything I’d written for the last month. I just sat and worried about it instead, in silence.

Panic? Who’s panicking? Not me! No way, mate.
Image: juliakovach.wordpress.com

Panic – or anxiety, I guess – is no stranger to me at the best of times. I usually have a mild form of it buzzing just underneath my consciousness, muttering things like Are you sure this is a good idea? Shouldn’t you be writing now? Perhaps you should be doing xyz instead of abc. This story idea is no good, you know – it’s bound to burn out around 25,000 words. Then, what’ll you do? Silly girl. Who do you think you’re fooling, here? Writing blogs like this really help to shut it up, but nothing – besides total, complete absorption in my work – can really quiet it. However, it’s hard to become totally absorbed in my work when this buzz-saw voice is keeping my brain from focusing. It tends to make me flit from one task to another, not completing either of them very well; it makes me feel as though I’m incapable of doing anything right, and then I feed it by falling into its trap.

But you know what helps, too? Reading. Spending a weekend with my loved ones. Taking my eyes away from a screen and engaging with the real world. Watching an awesome bearded lady become Queen of Europe. Remembering to breathe. Being thankful for all the happiness which my panic sometimes makes me forget about. Realising that everyone makes mistakes from time to time and that, if I do, the world’s not going to end.

Now. Let’s see how long I can keep these lessons in mind as I get stuck into a new week…

Mondaaaaaay! Let’s be havin’ yaaaaaaa!
Image: rottentomatoes.com

Mayday!

My goodness. Is it Friday yet?

Image: sonotstraight.com

This has been a busy week. The other day on Twitter I listed out all the various accounts I now have on social media: five email addresses, three Facebook pages, two Twitter feeds and two blogs. I’m now an assistant editor with a literary magazine, as well as the ‘owner’ of my own small business (can I say ‘owner’ when nothing, on the face of it, has actually changed?), and I’m still making time to write amid all the clamour too, of course. Writing is what I do, after all. Isn’t it?

For a person who tends, in all other ways, to be cautious, I can also be rather impulsive. The more important something is, the quicker I can seem to make a decision about it. Choosing a pair of socks in the morning, therefore, can turn into an angst-ridden melodrama; deciding to go ahead and set up a proto-business, however (albeit one that’s been brewing in the back of my mind for over six months) was rather spur-of-the-moment. Perhaps this is because the pressure of an important decision tends to cave me in, and I choose a course of action so as not to remain on the precipice for too long. Or, perhaps – and this is a little more comforting – I’m allowing myself to be guided by my ‘hindbrain’, which knows better than I do about what’s right and wrong and which doesn’t see the need for delaying proceedings

Muwa-ha-haaa! I am Hindbrain! Bend before my almighty Will!
Image sourced from: indigenize.wordpress.com
Image copyright: Extrafeet Inc., 2011

Whatever the reason, I’ve been making a lot of decisions this week and throwing so much caution to the wind that it’s surprising I have any left at all.

It’s exhausting.

But it’s exhilarating too, of course.

Yesterday morning, after I’d completed my story for the Wednesday Write-In, I found myself doing some reading for the literary magazine (Number Eleven, for the curious, in which I was published a little over a year ago; if you haven’t checked it out before, or it’s been a while since you’ve taken a peek, go and have a look. It’s gorgeous.) Once I’d popped off my feedback to the editor, I turned to my own WiP, which has been languishing for a fortnight, read it through – editing as I went – and added just over 1500 words to it. Then, I decided to take another plunge and create a Facebook page for my new business, Yellow Road Editing Services – and, because people are wonderful, it has been ‘liked’ almost sixty times in less than twenty-four hours. All the while, I was keeping up with the Twitter feeds both for myself and for Yellow Road, and keeping an eye on blog traffic, too.

It was a lot to get through in one day, and I’ve taken away a few valuable lessons from the experience:

People are wonderful. I have had so much support and goodwill shown to me over the past few days that it would, quite frankly, bring a tear from a turnip.

Getting up early in the morning is a great habit to have. I started work yesterday at 6.30 a.m., and kept going – pretty much uninterrupted – until 4. I’m usually awake by about 6.30 most mornings, which proves that you can train even the nightliest night-owl to be an early riser with enough cold water and torture… I mean, willpower and motivation. (And yes, I know ‘nightliest’ isn’t a word. But doesn’t it sound pretty?)

Who *DARES* wake The Great Hootowlio?
Image: thefeaturedcreature.com

Dividing one’s attention is hard. Yesterday, I tried to do All the Things All at Once. This isn’t usually a good idea, no matter what you’re attempting to do, and despite the fact that I know this, I still try to do it from time to time. Yesterday was one of those times. I found my attention being dragged away from my WiP because I wanted to make sure I’d sent the proper Excel sheet to the editor or because I had to check one of my email accounts or because someone followed me on Twitter, or because… the list went on.

What I should have done – and what I will do, from now on – was take a deep breath and a step back, and realise that everything will get done in its own time. Putting myself into a frazzle is going to accomplish exactly nothing, and may in fact hamper my efforts to be productive. I’m going to get a wall calendar and block off the days, focusing on one thing at a time, and I think I’ll change my screensaver to a picture of the gently smiling Buddha, or something. As my sainted mother always says: you can only do a day’s work in a day. She’s right, as she is about everything.

And, of course, the more divided your attention is, the more your work – all your work – will suffer. And nobody wants that. (And yes, I know I just started three sentences in a row with ‘and’, but it was for emphasis. I can do this. I’m a professional. Don’t try it at home.)

So, in honour of May Day and its traditional association with workers, I’m going to resolve to work smarter and harder, and to love every second. Stress isn’t a nice thing, but it’s also a powerful motivator, and I’m going to try to use it as a force for good in my life from this day forth.

Really? Aren’t you laying it on a *little* thick, now?
Image: halliewestcott.com

All right, all right. I’d better sign off here, and get on with the rest of it. Jeez, you guys are hard taskmasters.

Happy May Day!

Approaching the Event Horizon

April is nearly over. May is nearly here. That means a few things, of course, not all of them scary and new; it means there’s likely to be more of this sort of thing, which is good:

Image: paleohappy.com

And people will, more than likely, start to wear stuff like this (even though, in Ireland, just because the sun’s out doesn’t actually mean it’s warm, but we’re eternally optimistic – a sort of ‘if you wear it, summer will come’ thing):

Image: lukitaslittleworld.blogspot.com

Sadly, it also means a lot of people will be going around looking like they’ve been dipped in boiling oil, too, because – while the sun’s not particularly strong here, unless things are exceptionally warm – the Irish pelt just isn’t equipped to cope with anything much beyond a vaguely bright afternoon.

But, on a personal level, the approach of May means a few different things.

Firstly, it’s going to be a busy month for me. As well as attending two conferences (at one of which I’ve been given the opportunity to pitch my book to an agent), I am also going to be giving a reading at a book festival. On top of all that, I’ve decided that now would be a good time to branch out into a new business venture. It’s official. I’ve ordered business cards, and everything.

What’s that silence? Oh, don’t worry. It’s just my quietly controlled panic.

Secondly, it’s a month full of new stuff. I’ve never given a reading before, for instance – the very idea of it seems slightly ridiculous, as if someone, somewhere, has made a terrible mistake and is expecting Sinéad O’Connor instead of me, or something.

FYI: not me.
Image: thetimes.co.uk

Actually, there’s an idea. Perhaps if I pretend I am Sinéad O’Connor, it might make the whole thing easier – and more enjoyable for the audience. I’m sure I could belt out a few verses of ‘Mandinka’ before being manhandled off the stage.

The next challenge is to write and memorise a ten-minute pitch for my book. Delivering this in front of a mirror, or my mother, will be scary enough. Delivering it in front of a top-notch literary agent, however – that’s a whole new level of terror. What if I forget how to talk? Maybe my mind will become a field of pristine snow, unblemished even by the tiny pock-marks of foraging birds. Perhaps my teeth will chatter so hard that everything I say will come out all chopped up, like baby food.

Maybe I’d be better off printing the whole thing out on laminated paper and giving it to the agent to read. You know, in her own time.

Image: emeryruth.com

Yeah. Or maybe not.

The second conference I’m attending is less nerve-wracking, mainly because I don’t have to do anything, per se; I just have to be outgoing and friendly and approachable and all that other stuff that sounds easy (and which, in truth, I’m good at, once I stop tripping myself up). When I’m surrounded by people I consider important, though – in the sense of ‘oh my God look it’s a famous published author I must scuttle out of her way forthwith’ – I find it difficult to be my happy-go-lucky self. I think I need to take a large dose of ‘Get On With It’ before I enter the room, and go in wearing my widest, brightest smile.

Easier said than done.

And finally, the business venture. Well, calling it that probably lends it an air of importance that it doesn’t really deserve; it’s not like I’m going to be appearing on ‘Dragons’ Den’ looking for funding for my ingenious invention, or anything like that. If you’d like to find out more about it, there’s a website over here – you can even sign up to follow it, if you like – and there’s a Twitter feed over at @YellowRoadEdit. It’s extremely early days yet, but maybe – with a bit of luck – I’ll be able to use my talent for words to help those who don’t find it easy to pick just the right phrase to express what they mean, or who aren’t as clear on the rules of apostrophe usage as I am.

Or who aren’t as pernickety about the rules of apostrophe usage as I am, maybe.

So, I have a lot going on. By the end of this month I’ll have neither fingernails nor a strand of hair left, and I’ll probably be living in a vat of caffeine. If you have any good wishes knocking about that you’re not using for anything else, it’d be brilliant if you could send ’em my way.

Welcome to a shiny new week, everyone. May it be fabulous for one and all.

Image: hellogiggles.com