Back before the holidays, I was one of the many members of the Crazy Chicks Club who participated in founder Lafemmeroar’s interviews. As the founder of the CCC, it is no surprise that she’s the queen of fun and interesting interview questions – the kind that make you think, make you laugh, and help us all get to know each other a bit better.

I’ll be back on Tuesday with my regular blog post. In the meantime, please check out the link below to my January interview with Lafemmeroar. Once you’re there, click on through and check out some of the interviews with other awesome crazy chicks, as well as her own hilarious posts. You won’t be sorry!

Lafemmeroar

Mommom and Granddad

I have been wanting to write about my grandfather’s funeral for a few weeks now. One of the reasons I hadn’t up until now was, of course, the demise of my former computer and with it my ability to write at home. Another was just busy-ness as usual.

But a big part of it was just not being sure exactly what I wanted to say.

In his healthy years, my grandfather was one of the most active men I’ve ever known. You’d never find him reading a book. He had no interest whatsoever in the online world. My jaw would have dropped to the floor if I’d ever wandered into a bar and seen him sitting on a stool surrounded by his cronies. In fact, the only sedentary activity he ever enjoyed was watching sports on TV – mostly college and NFL football and baseball.

He was constantly in motion. When he wasn’t at work, he was fishing, hunting, woodworking or just wandering in the woods. Between that and the sports-watching, you’d have labeled him a stereotypical manly man except for the fact that he also cooked, cleaned and was basically at my grandmother’s beck and call their entire married life. He wanted to be on the river with his fishing pole on a Saturday, but if she wanted him to chauffer her to 5 stores first he planned around her and never complained, instead contenting himself with listening to a ball game on the car radio while she shopped to her heart’s content.

When Grandad suffered a stroke 12 years ago, all that changed. The man of motion became confined to a wheelchair, with use of only one hand. He also lost his speech. Bits and pieces of that came back over the years, but his words were for the most part limited to “yes,” “no,” and “shit.”

“Shit” happened when post-stroke Grandad wanted to communicate something to one of us and we just couldn’t get it. He’d try to share something with us using hand motions and mumbles, and when his frustration at our inability to put the pieces together took over he’d shake his head and say “shit.” I certainly couldn’t blame him. He’d always been a man of few words, and to see him want them and no longer have them at all was heartwrenching. I’d always feel such a horrible sense of guilt when I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to tell me, and I know the rest of my family did too. Even my grandmother had those moments, and they learned over the years to communicate in their own language of motions and grunts and one-word hints. Their world flip-flopped and suddenly she was at his beck and call instead of the other way around, and she stepped up to the plate in a way that always amazed me.

I more than just loved my grandfather. I held him up as an example of what a man – or rather, a person, should be. So I was  confused by the strange sense of sadness mixed with peace I felt at his passing.

Don’t get me wrong. Knowing my grandfather was gone cut deep. Going to my grandparents house to see my grandmother and realizing each time that he isn’t going to be sitting in his recliner, that I’m not going to at least be able to say some silly thing that will give him a laugh, still hurts every time it happens. But I didn’t feel that horrific, overwhelming sense of kicked-in-the-gut grief that you expect if you’d ever known a friend or a loved one’s passing.

My grandparents have lived in Baltimore since their mid-20′s, and Grandad was 80 when he passed. They’ve built a small but close circle of friends here. On top of that, my parents circle and the friends my sister and I have made over the years knew and loved them too – some of them even calling them “Mom and Dad” or “Mommom and Poppop” because they’d grown so close over the years.

But instead of having a service here in our hometown, my family made the decision to return Grandad to Tunnelton, West Virginia. That was where he had been born, and where he’d been a child and a young adult. It was where he returned on the weekends when he could for the outdoorsing he loved so much. It would be a smaller service there, with just the family and a few old friends who were still in the area. But it would be taking him home, and sending him to his final resting place with the people we all knew he’d most want around him, even though he loved many in Baltimore too.

So that’s what we did.

My grandmother’s health has also declined over the years. She’s wheelchair bound as well and often in a lot of pain. We worried about her being able to make the trip. She rarely goes anywhere anymore – even most of her medical checkups happen at home. We needn’t have worried. Any wear and tear the trip put on her body was more than made up for by the healing effect seeing family and friends, taking Granddad home, and being there herself for a little while had on her broken heart.

What I didn’t expect at all was that the trip would have a similar effect on me. I didn’t grow up there – I was born and raised in Baltimore. I did spend a lot of time there in my childhood though – weekend trips and long summer vacations staying with family and experiencing a simple, easy country life I’d never have known otherwise.

It wasn’t until we were there that I realized just what that all meant to me. The flood of warm memories and comforting emotions that came just from being there was overwhelming. Some of it was getting big bear hugs from great-uncles and second cousins I haven’t since since other funerals that happened back in my 20s. But some of it was so much more simple than that – stopping at a well for a drink of fresh mountain water, riding by the house where my great-grandmother lived when I was a child and seeing that it looked much the same, the delicious country meal my great-aunt’s church prepared for us. It was being on the road for long periods of time without seeing another car, cresting over mountains and spiraling slowly downhill, realizing that the hairpin turns I used to think of as roller-coasters when Grandad drove them in my childhood were now just a bit more real-life scary, but breathtakingly beautiful even in the drab garb of January. It was stopping at Cool Springs Park, a restaurant/gas station/junk and convenience store we visited frequently in my childhood, and seeing that it hasn’t changed a bit. We had chili dogs and stocked up on their delicious roasted peppers, and in both I tasted my childhood.

Tunnelton, West Virginia and the surrounding areas are a beautiful mountain region of farms and winding roads, little churches and endless stretches where there’s nothing on either side of you but woods. It isn’t perfect – there are also patches of struggle and hardship that make a suburban gal like me rethink my idea of “poor,” – clusters of houses so patched and repatched that you wonder how they could still be standing, the woodsmoke of winter rising from their chimneys.

No, it is not perfect by a long shot, but natural and beautiful and full of a sense of community that I just haven’t found in places where I am surrounded by more people.

It is the place that made my Granddad, and the place to which we returned him.

And it was while I was there that I came to understand my own strange disconnectedness with grief I’d expected to feel on that day.

When a loved one dies, I think there are two kinds of grief. There is the “selfish” kind, and in this context I don’t mean selfish in a negative sense. I just mean that this is the grief that is related to knowing that you and others left behind will miss your loved one and will no longer have them in your daily lives. Then there is the other side of mourning – the side that focuses on the person who is gone and the living they will not be doing.

In Granddad’s hometown, where everything is rugged and crisp and alive and smells like woodsmoke in January, where even the simplest food tastes like heaven and people put on no false airs at all, where the skyscrapers are trees and the roads are never congested, it was suddenly easy to understand that I’d been doing the unselfish part of my mourning in a slow and steady way for years. Tunnelton in all its beautiful wildness and close-knit community IS Granddad, as he always chose to live.

After the stroke, he couldn’t live that way anymore. He became confined. My whole family has grieved that loss for him for over a decade.

The sadness that was left was for ourselves, for the fact that we couldn’t see him or hug him or make him laugh or hold his hand for a moment anymore. It was for my grandmother who had built her world around him, too.  But even so, in the heart of a place that so defined who he was, wishing he was still sitting in his chair instead of free just didn’t feel right.

For the first time in my life, I understood what people meant when they said they’d found a sense of peace with mourning a loved one’s death. I had never quite gotten that concept before.

So thank you Tunnelton. And thank you Granddad, for being a man who first brought me to that place and helped me become someone who can, in her better moments, think beyond her own heart.

Note:  I’m a day off my regular Tuesday posting schedule, I know. I’m still working my way back on track. Instead of “a day late and a dollar short,” I’m calling it “better late than never.”

The bad news is, that didn’t come about quite as planned.

Last week, my home desktop decided it was worn out. It had hung in there longer than many desktops do, but it was tired of being the recipient of my stories of manwhores, my ranting blog posts, and my countless essays and short tales of both hope and creepiness. It was probably also tired of Facebooking, Words With Friends, and my inner weather geek’s obsessive checking of Accuweather.com.

It flitted off to wherever tired hard drives go without so much as a goodbye. And here, I thought we were friends.

I’ve been planning on getting a laptop for a while, and even wrote about my intention as one of my writer’s goals for the year. I knew that the flexibility of writing whenever and wherever instead of chaining myself to my desk might help my creative mojo. The desktop saying “sayonara” just expedited the process a little.

A little more than a week went by between The Great Kaput and my laptop coming home with me. Although I of course have a PC in my office at work, things have been crazy busy in the office, and I barely had time to update even my Facebook status to let my buddies there know my unusual silence had nothing to do with a winning lotto ticket and a disappearance to some Caribbean island.

Meanwhile, blogs went unwritten, 500-word-a-day goals went ignored, and short stories went unedited. You don’t know how much an inability to write will make you tweak until you’re faced with this situation. My brain was not happy with this turn of events, and even beer couldn’t help.

But that’s all in the past now. I’m back in business.

My laptop is a Dell, a refurbished one that my ex-husband put together for me. We’re getting to know each and other and enjoying each other’s company quite nicely so far. I think we’re going to be very good friends.

It is amazing how much catch-up I feel I have to play after just over a week, though. I am woefully behind on blog reading. My Twitter has been quite Tweetless. And of course, my stories and other writings have been neglected.

Before I begin catching up on those things, though, I’ve got a lot of housecleaning to do. Fellow writers, let my experience be a lesson. If you do not do so now, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE start backing up your files. After each writing session, I email my work to myself and then both store it on disk and in email files. If I did not do this constantly, I would be in mourning right now. Even one good writing session is too much to lose if your trusty computer takes a not-so-trusty crap on you.

So much of this weekend will be sent setting up all my files – my novel and my short stories and my many, many photos, on my new computer. I’ve got to move them into their new home and make sure they’re nice and comfy. Once I’ve got them all moved in, we can start visiting and having good times again.

I think ManWhore and all the others will like their new home.

Enjoy your weekend, my friends. I’ll catch up more soon!

And finally, a shoutout of thanks to AMC for having a “The Walking Dead” marathon and new episode last weekend. Without that and my Kindle, I don’t know how I’d have made it through a weekend of computerlessness.

Or, for those of us who spend time in the blogosphere, they may be other writers we might never have had the pleasure of knowing without the internet.

Today, we’re spending some time with Terri Sonoda, a woman whose words have brightened many of my days since I stumbled into her Little Corner. I hope you’ll join me in taking some time to get to know Terri. Once you’ve read her interview, please take the time to visit her blog and check out her fiction saga, “Sara’s Sleep.” You won’t be sorry!

1. If some fool (like me), asked you to describe yourself in 200 words or less, what would you tell them? After, of course, you were finished kicking their butt for putting you on the spot like that.

Anyone who has read my blog knows I enjoy talking about myself, however mundane.   I manage to find humor in most everything.  I consider that a gift, not a curse.  I’ve always been writing in some context, but only took it seriously in the last 1.5 years or so.  Writing makes my world interesting, colorful and worthwhile.  Otherwise, I work and study and watch TV.  Pretty boring.  And?  I’m underwhelmed about today’s Super Bowl, but have high hopes for the commercials.

2. Tell us a bit about your writing – either works in progress or finished pieces. Where can we find your fiction?

I’ve only been published for three short stories in someone else’s book, but it was an honor.    During this past NaNoWriMo, I completed my first novel and am currently in the editing  process while working on my second novel.  I can’t seem to stop the madness.  I love it. At this point, you can only find my fiction on my blog.  Currently, I’m running a Sunday   continuing saga called, “Sara’s Sleep”.  It’s getting some good reviews so far.  Come on by and check it out!

3. How long have you been writing, and what inspires you?
   A year and a half.  I’m inspired by so many things, but for purposes of this interview, I’ll just say words.  Words get me all excited and when I read someone who can ‘turn a phrase’ with finesse, I am in awe and totally inspired.

4. Tell us a bit about your blog. How long have you been blogging, and what inspired you to get started? What motivates you to keep your blog going, and how do you come up with ideas?

I’ve been blogging since August 2010.  My blog is named Terri’s Little Corner and it’s a culmination of humor and fiction, with some raw, honest moments thrown in from my lack of self-control.  Again, I love talking about myself.  Annoying at times, but true.  I never have a problem coming up with ideas.  I am an “idea” woman, in business and in writing

5. What advice would you offer to new writers and/or bloggers?

Most people would tell an aspiring writer/blogger to have a common theme and stick to it.  “Write what you know” and all that crap.  I don’t believe that for a minute.  Variety is what life is all about, and it’s what keeps me interested and motivated.  Sure, employ a theme, if you must, but make sure to throw in a bit of whimsy and/or random thoughts into your blog.  It’s freeing.  And?  People love to read that stuff.

6. What are your preferred surroundings when writing? Do you need silence or background noise, changes of scenery or a special room or area at home? What helps you kick writer’s block to the curb?

I have two spots that I enjoy when writing.  One is at home in my easy chair in the corner of my living room…laptop, coffee, snacks and TV on in the background.  The other favorite spot is a booth in any coffee shop.  I love to people-watch while I write.

As for Writer’s Block, I stop writing when I come down with this affliction.  I give it a day or so, and I try not to think about it.  Of course, that’s not easy, as I soon go into withdrawals and have to return to the scene of the crime (of not writing).  It eventually works itself to my favor, though.  My problem lies with patience, or the lack thereof.

7. One of the things that keeps me coming back to your blog is that even when dealing with tough stuff, your words always make me smile. Usually, I truly do “LOL” when reading your posts. What helps you keep looking at the lighter side of life?

Ah this question is near and dear to my heart!   I am 58 years old and have experienced many lifetimes, lived all over the world, been stricken with severe grief and hardships, and conversely, lived an amazingly happy life.  I’ve had it all, so to speak.  I’ve been well-off financially, and then flat-broke.  I’ve seen the goodness and the ugliness of the world.   I choose to look at life with satisfaction and amusement.  There is much to laugh about, if you just look around.  Humor defines and accentuates me, and I’m so very grateful for my natural talents in this area.  Thanks for asking!

8. You balance work, school and writing. How do you do it all and stay sane?

I don’t.  I am as nutty as a fruitcake.  Seriously.

9. Guilty (or not-so-guilty) pleasure time. When not working, studying or writing, what would we find you doing?

Eating, drinking merlot, watching reality television, online shopping, gambling, enjoying friends, bugging my kids and grandkids.  I can always find ways to be happily busy.  And?  I’m really good at goofing off!

10. Favorite author(s)? TV show(s)? Food and beverage of choice when life calls for either celebration or stress eating?

Robert McCammon and Stephen King are two of my favorite authors.  Have you ever read “Swan Song” by Robert McCammon?  You won’t be able to put it down.  I am not kidding.

Celebration food and beverage:   Always wine and either pasta (good pasta) or seafood.

Thanks for spending some time here at Hawleyville, Terri! I hope you all enjoyed getting to know Terri as much as I did doing this interview.

- I might have been reading a novel called “Horns” by Joe Hill. He’s been around for a while, but I hadn’t stumbled across his work until I finished Stephen King’s 11/22/63. In the “afterward” information there was a mention of Joe, who just happens to be his son. So of course, I had to check him out to see if those mad writing skills with a healthy side helping of crazy run in the family. I’ll write a more detailed review soon, but I can tell you that they do. After finishing “Horns” I got “Heart-Shaped Box,” another of Hill’s works. I think immediately moving on to a second novel by a new-to-you writer is a pretty good indication of how you reacted to their first.

- I might have been at the pub watching the Superbowl, calling Tom Brady names, and cheering for the Giants. Because even when the Steelers are out of it, I’m still evil like that.

- I might have been having a ball playing Bingo with some friends. I never thought I’d hear myself say that. To me, Bingo was a somewhat boring game that occasionally caused little old ladies to beat each other with canes or Sunday hats. But when you get the right group of friends together and serve up your Bingo balls with a few drinks, it is a ton of fun!

-  I might have been having a movie night and getting all teary-eyed over “Real Steel.” I never thought a fighting robot flick would make me cry, either. It has been a week for new discoveries.

-  I might have been dealing with an extra dose of crazy at work.

-   I might have been sticking to my 500-words-a-day goal on other writing projects for 4 of my 7 days, which is not stellar but not awful.

-   I might have been avoiding the gym because I have let myself go on a bit of a January slack that simply Must. End. Now. Someone beat me with a cheeseburger if I don’t get my butt back in gear this week.

-     I might have been reading the proof I received from a publisher for an essay I wrote that will be out later this spring. More on that at some point, I promise. But for now, I can say that the experience of receiving and approving a proof from an established publisher of essays and stories is a bit of a head rush. I’m grinning all over again writing this.

Those were the things I did this week instead of preparing a Tuesday blog, so any one of them might have been what I was doing instead. In some ways this has been a week of “Living in Fast Forward,” but it has been a good one. I’ll chalk it down to collecting stories for future tellings.

Please check back next Tuesday for an interview with blogger Terri Sonada, who won my final Life List Club Milestone Party Giveaway. The hilarious slices of everyday life you’ll find at Terri’s blog are eclipsed only by her short fiction. She’s definitely someone you’ll want to get to know.

See you then!

Here in Baltimore, it has been that way for much of January. And as we close out this month and dive into February, the weather forecast calls for more of the same.

Although I could do without all the rain we’ve been getting, I have loved the mild temperatures. I enjoy a pretty snowstorm or two, but ice and bitter cold winds make me just want to curl up in my house and hibernate. Since that’s not an option, I’ll take the almost-springlike sunshine any day.

Still, winter isn’t ALL bad. Blizzards and winter storms might not be much fun when you’re living them, but they make for some good memories. Here are a few of mine from years past:

1. Ice Day

A few years ago, we got an overnight ice storm in Baltimore. When I went outside in the morning, my street looked like a very cruelly designed thrill ride. I, of course, was due to be at work.

My boss knew I lived on a dead-end street that also happens to be one big hill. That means we can’t always get our van out safely in icy or snowy weather, even when the main roads are relatively clear. He also knew that there’s a busline that goes right from the bottom of my street to the campus where I work, so I could still trek downhill on foot and get to the office.

That morning, I sent him this picture with a note that said “I’ll be there, but I’ll probably be late.” Then I pulled on several layers of clothes and my boots with the best downhill-slip-and-slide traction. In the time it took me to do that, I received the following response from him: “Holy crap! Forget that. Just check your email from home today.”

Who doesn’t like a surprise “get out of the office free” card, even if it is a frozen one?

2. Stranded

In my first year of college, I commuted with a girlfriend. During a winter final exam week, we stayed at her house and pulled an all-nighter for a tough 8 am exam. In the morning, snow was falling hard. We anxiously watched the morning news and called the campus hotline, hoping to hear that we’d be closed and our exam delayed. No such luck. Because he was worried about us traveling in the bad weather, her father dropped us off at campus on his way to the office.

We headed to our classroom and found a few other students milling around waiting for the professor. We chatted nervously about the exam. We waited. And waited.

That was back before everyone had cell phones, so finally one of us went to a payphone and called the campus hotline. Sure enough, they’d made a last-minute decision to close the school for the day. Unfortunately for me and my girlfriend, we now had to wait until her dad got off work to get home. Along with a few of the other students, we trekked to a comfy area of the building. We sprawled there all day with nothing to eat but the collection of mints, gum and candy we all pulled from our pockets and purses and nothing to drink but water from the fountain. We studied our butts off, because when you were stranded in the pre-Ipad-and-Angry-Birds age, there was absolutely nothing to do other than open your textbook.

We aced that exam, and a few others too.

3. Trashbaggin’

A year later, I had moved to an apartment on campus. I was one of the few students who stayed in their apartment over the January break rather than going home. My friend Scott had come to visit. One thing about college students is that they don’t pay much attention to weather forecasts when classes aren’t in session. So we were blindsided by a sudden snowstorm, and Scott got stranded at my apartment.

Our friend J was also staying on campus over the break, and it was he who decided we had no reason to be bored. He rummaged in my kitchen cabinets until he found my box of trashbags, and the three of us bundled up and trekked across campus to a hill that led down into an open field.

We spread the trashbags out, sat on them, and took turns giving each other pushes down the hill. It was no flying saucer ride, but it was fun all the same. With a really good shove, we got some great momentum flowing and flew down that hill on our trashbag magic carpets. All the sudden, we weren’t college students any more. We were children again, with sleds and snowballs and a day off from school.

Our butts and the rest of us were soaked by the time we gave up and went in. We warmed ourselves with cheesy movies and peppermint schnapps that we drank right out of the bottle, and before we knew it the sun had come up to find us still giggling and chattering. To this day, that remains one of my favorite snowy memories.

4. Parking Wars

In our mid-twenties, my then-fiance and I lived in the heart of Baltimore City. For most of those years, we had mild winter weather. Our image of winter in the city was how pretty flurries looked in the soft light of the streetlamps outside our favorite pubs.

Then one year, the forecast called for a walloping. That day, we noticed a strange phenomenon on our street. When our neighbors would leave for work, they would pull out of their parking spaces and have someone else in their household put a lawn chair in their vacant spot.

“Freaks,” we thought. “How paranoid can people be?”

Until a day or so later, when the snow had fallen and  we left our own carefully shoveled parking space unguarded while we ran to the grocery store. We ended up pulling up outside our house, running our groceries in, and then driving BACK to the grocery store to leave our car in the parking lot and walking home. Someone had grabbed up our spot, and with the streetsides so full of snow there was simply no place else to put the car.

In the city, a snowstorm means “guard your parking space with your life.”

The next time it snowed, we no longer thought the Lawn Chair Legions were mad. Problem was, we had no outdoor furniture of our own. We did, however, have a ferret cage we weren’t using because we’d just upgraded to a larger one. So when he went to work that morning, I walked out with him and plopped the cage in our parking space when he drove away.

I felt like the “Crazy Weasel Lady,” but we had a parking place.

5. Back to Back Blizzards

Two years ago, Baltimore got hit with two blizzards in a week. Considering our average is MAYBE one every five years or so, that was off the charts. We couldn’t get our van off our street for a week, and did so much shoveling that we ached all over. What could possibly be so great about that?

- A day that me, Lee, and 5 or 6 neighbors we really didn’t know decided we were tired of waiting around for a plow and worked together to shovel the snow off our entire  road. There’s no better way to get to know your neighbors than to have to work together on a ginormous job.

- The night I had such a bad case of cabin fever that I put on my boots and trekked down the hill on foot to meet my Dad at the bottom of the street. He had dug out enough to get back and forth to his pub so that he could reopen it, but my street was still impossible to get through. Everyone at the pub thought it was hilarious that I wanted to get out and have a beer so badly that I’d slid and snow-stomped my way down to where someone could meet me to whisk me off for some socialization.

- The way Lee became so childlike (in a good way) because of the snow. He was in his element, and loved every minute of it. We invented silly games to pass the time and he kept me calm during the blizzards themselves when the power flickered (I was OK with us being in the dark, but not with my ferret being without heat. Yeah, I know …).

- The unexpected week I got off work.

I’ll never be a fan of truly bad weather, but there is something just a little magical about being pulled out of your normal routines. I’d rather see a pretty snowstorm than a rainy day most of the time. After all, rain never comes with a chance of getting off work.

Are you experiencing a mild winter like ours this year, or are you getting some snow days? Do you like the occasional winter wonderland or would you prefer endless summer? What are some of your favorite winter weather memories?

I’ve learned over the years that dreams are no more than sugarplums dancing in your head if you don’t turn them into goals. Saying your goal is “write the novel” just isn’t enough. You have to break that down into chunks -”to finish this novel, I will write at least an hour a day,” or whatever mile-markers work best for you. 

Hey, back up! That goal-setting stuff sounds an awful lot like … hard work.

For me, hard work happens best when I’ve got support. So when Marcia Richards and Jess Witkins asked me to join the Life List Club as a contributing writer back in July, I jumped at the chance.

What a great ride it has been. Guest posting for fellow LLCers every two weeks has forced me to analzye my progress so that I can share what I’ve learned about being a day-jobbing writer who wants to write … everything. Hosting other LLCers and reading our round robins has taught me even more.

But one of the annoying things about the “making dreams goals and making goals reality” journey is making tough choices along the way. You can do a hell of a lot, but you can’t do it all. If you don’t set priorities, you will dabble in all of your goals but not meet any of them.

I want to finish at least one novel this year, and make significant progress on another. I want to learn enough about self-publishing to make an educated decision about what to do with my works when they are finished. I want to continue querying and seeking markets for the short stories I’ve finished but not yet published. I want to learn more about the craft of writing itself. I want to maintain this blog. I want to pad my income as a freelance humor writer/essayist. I want to hit the gym at least 4 times a week to stay healthy and make sure my butt fits in its writing chair.

All that might be doable for someone who didn’t have a dayjob. Or for someone who had a dayjob but wasn’t too concerned about maintaining good relationships and sharing happy times with their partner, family and friends. Those someones are not me.

Sometimes you have no choice but to set priorities and sacrifice some things to make room for others. For me, one of those tough choices has been to give up my contributing writer spot with the Life List Club. It made me sad to admit it, but I needed sacrifice the time I spend writing about my goals to squeeze in a few more hours of actually working on them.

But because today is LLC Friday, and there’s another awesome blog hop happening even as you read this, there was one more thing I needed to do. It just seemed wrong to take off my LLC writer’s hat without tipping it to my fellow members. I’ve learned so much from each of them along the way.

Marcia Richards

I have a dirty little secret. I am completely and utterly disorganized in my personal life, and in the past that has included my writing life. I am easygoing, flexible and “spur of the moment” to a fault by nature. I can’t be these things in my day-job life of constant scheduling, deadline-juggling and routine. So when I leave the office, I let my inner “by the seat of her pants” girl out to play. Like many writers, I bundle this sometimes irritating aspect of my personality into my  “creative quirks” package. I use “but I’m a writer” as an excuse for my disorganized chaos.

At least I did, until I met Marcia. Spend a little time over at her place and you’ll know you’ve found a creative and inspired writer. An organized creative and inspiring writer. Marcia is proof that you can be a creative spirit, have a ton of fun, and still use structure and organization to “get ‘er done.” I’ve learned from Marcia how to better arrange my personal life, my writing and even my blogging and social networking time while still letting my “free spirit” take the reigns now and then.

Jess Witkins

Jess and I have joked that in each other we’ve found our “blogging twin.” Marcia’s co-founder Jess is truly a bright light out there in the blogging world. Her blog – aptly named the “Happiness Project,” is chock full of the experiences she lives and shares. From travel adventures to the simple joys of books and guilty pleasure television, you’ll find a pick-me-up and an idea or twenty for spicing up your own life in her world.

But even with all that fun going on, Jess is busting her butt to meet her goals. Of all the LLCers, I sensed that her life was most like mine in terms of struggling to balance the demands of a crazy job with writing goals and the wonderful rest of life. The holidays found her practically working round the clock while still writing and soaking up the good stuff. Jess is doing it all. Sometimes it hits her just how hard that is, and she shares her struggles and frustrations. Then she gets back on the horse and does it all again.

We may be “blogging twins,” but I have years on Jess. If I had known at her age some of the things she’s already realized, you might just see my name on a bestseller list by now. She is a rising star. Watch her.

Gary Gauthier

If Gary ever decides to teach a course on publishing, I will be the first to sign up. He is a true student of the industry and his posts on both self-publishing and traditional markets have given me much food for thought and set me on the path to exploring my options myself. Gary is someone I would write to for his opinion on a publishing option in a heartbeat, and his thoughts would weigh heavily in my decisions. He does his research and he shares his findings in a way that helps us all.

Gary also helped set me back on track with my writing goals when I was on the verge of at least temporarily derailing. His guest post here on setting a writing goal of 500 words a day helped me reset my targets to something I could manage without being overwhelmed. Giving this suggestion a try kept me from throwing up my hands in frustration and walking away for a while – something I’ve done in the past and regretted sorely. For that, I will always be grateful to Gary.

Sonia Medeiros

What I’ve loved most about reading Sonia is how she delves fearlessly and honestly into some of the questions and emotions that come with being a writer. So many of Sonia’s LLC posts have resonated with the thoughts rattling around in my own brain.

Perhaps the one that sticks out in my mind the most is a guest post she did at David Walker’s on “shoulds and shouldn’ts.”  Until I read her post, I hadn’t really thought about how many opinions I get on what I “should” (or shouldn’t) be writing and how much that well-meant advice often weighs on me. As someone who wants desperately to get out of the grind and write full-time, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come close to just trying my hand at “writing what sells” even if it doesn’t truly inspire me. That urge is a “should” that bops around in my own head and is echoed in many of the suggestions I get from others. Sonia’s thoughts on that have helped me quell that urge – at least for now – and keep working on what I WANT to write instead.

Jenny Hansen

In college, my advisor in our creative writing program told me that my writing reminded him of Erma Bombeck. When I read Jenny, I often think the same of her. She shares snippets of daily life with a humor and sense of shared experience that keeps you coming back for more.

Jenny translates this gift of hers into writing about goals – and writing – too. She spoke to my evil inner critic with a post about done being better than good. In another post, she took the lessons she’s learned from being a parent and applied them to raising our own inner writers. And let’s face it, there are times when carrying an author around in our heads is a lot like trying to manage a toddler. Making those connections and relating our goals to everyday life is the hallmark of a writer who is going places.

David Walker

Sometimes, my writing and my work take over my time to the point that I’m neglecting other aspects of my life. I lose me, the girlfriend. Me, the daughter. Me, the granddaughter. Me, the friend. Me, the person who needs to go look at a sunset.

When these times hit, I sit back and reflect on some of the things David has written. He is working on his own writing and publishing goals, maintaining a diverse and thought-provoking blog, and working with Writer’s Boot Camp. But always in the forefront of the advice he shares in his LLC posts is a reminder to keep loved ones and daily joyful moments at the top of your priority lists.  David has been my reminder that a writer who doesn’t take time to live is going to be a dull – and unhappy – writer. Through sharing his own writing journey, he’s also taught me that having your goals and priorities around your works-in-progress shift is not only OK, but sometimes necessary to get where you’re supposed to be going.

Lara Schiffbauer

I’m still discovering Lara. One of the awesome things about a group like the Life List Club is that, like our writing, it grows and shifts and changes. Other contributing writers have moved on before me, and newcomers have joined after me. Lara came on board at about the same time I decided to resign.

But I can already tell what a wonderful contribution she’s going to make. Her first LLC post, “Discipline, Planning, Work. Ewww,” made me laugh out loud just at the title. I could see that Lara, like me, is one of those creative types who doesn’t like the structure part of the game as much as the storytelling. A woman after my own heart, but one who like me is realizing just how critical the “worky” part of writing is and sharing how she’s going to make it happen. I look forward to seeing more of Lara’s work and getting to know her better!

I wouldn’t give up learning from and sharing the journey with this gang for the world. I may not be guest posting anymore, but I’m still following the LLC and keeping my own list out there. My LLC blogroll will stay right there on the sidebar, and I’ll be clicking through it every other Friday for a new dose of inspiration.

I hope you will too. Since today is LLC guest post Friday, grab a cuppa joe, jump up to any of the links above or on over to my blogroll, and join me in a blog hop!

Any time Stephen King releases a new book, I am that kid doing the snow dance. I just can’t wait to get my hands on it. I love to read many authors, but King transports me to other minds, times and places in a way that no one else can.

So when 11/22/63 was released in November, you would have expected me to have it on hand the same day. Instead, I decided to wait until after Christmas to get it, so that it would be my reading treat over my long holiday work-break. I knew that if I put it on my Kindle beforehand, there was no way I could wait for those long and lazy days to get started.

As it turns out, it took me much longer than my 10-day break to finish the book. It wasn’t that King didn’t pull me in as he always does, because he certainly did. It was just that life happening and my own writing gave me a case of “reader, interrupted.”

For those who don’t know, 11/22/63 asks the question “what happens to the future if we could not only go back in time, but change the outcome of history?” Specifically, high school English teacher Jake Epping is asked by a friend to travel back in time and finish a job he couldn’t complete himself – stopping the assassination of JFK. At first, Jake is reluctant to take on such an overwhelming task. But then he learns about a tragic childhood event that happened to someone he knows and cares for as an adult - and decides that he has no choice but to dive into changing the future.

Because the “rabbit hole” (as Jake calls his time travel portal) can only take him back to 1958, Jake has to live in the past for 5 years to accomplish his mission. The novel is the story of a man who was in his late 30′s in 2011 discovering life in the late 50′s – of learning to savor simplicities he’d never known even while missing some modern conveniences. It is the story of a man building relationships with people who would have been long gone or very old in his 2011 life. It is the story of what happens when a man from the future who carries the weight of a world-changing mission on his shoulders finds himself trapped in the beautiful and everyday experience of falling in love.  Jake has to wrestle with deciding what matters more – changing the outcome of history or having a ”normal” life with a woman who would have been old enough to be his grandmother in the future – if she was even still alive.

Such a storyline is a tall order for any writer. Here are my impressions after finally finishing King’s wild 11/22/63 ride.

- Once again, he is the master of pulling me into the impossible and making it real enough to hold me there. Do I believe someone could go back to 1958? No. Does King describe the time and place, the emotions and people, the everyday events and odd deja-vus and “harmonies” that Jake encounters along the way well enough for me to get enmeshed in the story and characters anyway? Of course he does. He’s Stephen King.  I had totally suspended my disbelief after the first few chapters.

- Lee Harvey Oswald seen through Jake Epping’s eyes is one of the better history lessons I’ve ever received. I’ve mentioned before that I grasp history best when I see it through a story. In 11/22/63, we see Oswald’s desperation, cruelty, and craziness. But we also see his smallness, and there are moments where you don’t exactly pity him, but you see something else. You realize that if he had been able to control his violent temper, see the good in his life along with the hardships, and accept being ordinary, he might have led an average but happy life. It wasn’t his uniqueness that made him a villain in the pages of history. It was his inability to accept being small.

- I loved Jake Epping for all his struggles and mistakes as well as for his heroism. But he wasn’t my favorite character. For me, he was eclipsed by Sadie Dunhill, the schoolteacher who steals Jake’s heart.

No main character in a King novel has a history that isn’t full of small or large strangenesses and horrors. Sadie was no different. She wasn’t just some auxiliary storyline love interest who fell into a weird world the day she met Jake. She had suitcases full of her own crazy already in her heart, and they changed the outcome of Jake’s story as much as her involvement with him altered hers.  

Of course King wouldn’t let Sadie be some wilted flower who always needed saving by the hero. But he didn’t make her superwoman either. There were times when I felt she was being so weak and stupid that I wanted to grab her and shake her. But there were more times that her determination, open-mindedness, and bravery made me wish I could call her a friend. For a late 50s/early 60s chica, Sadie grew herself a big set of balls. What I loved most about her was that growing them scared the crap out of her and she did it anyway.

Obviously, I recommend the trip into the past with King, Jake and Sadie. If you love King, a good story, food for thought, tales of love or just an adventure, it is a must-read. But I did come away with a couple of questions I wanted to throw out there to other readers.

1. As I’ve explored the guidelines of various potential short story publishers over the years, I’ve seen the following suggestion more than once – “don’t make your main character a writer. Bor-ing.”

King doesn’t listen to that rule in his novels. He doesn’t have to.  The lead in Salem’s Lot was a moderately successful writer. Stuttering Bill in “It” grew up to be a famous writer, and that’s what he was when he went home.  Mike Noonan in “Bag of Bones” was a wealthy novelist with a bad case of my-wife-is-dead writer’s block. Paul in “Misery” was a novelist who got kidnapped by a rabid fan. The main character in “Lisey’s Story,” was a woman encountering a weird world that was essentially created in the mind of her dead writer husband Scott.  Those are just the ones that come to mind in a two-minute think-through.

Jake Epping is a high school English teacher. He doesn’t become a published writer in the story, but he writes his butt off. He uses “working on a novel” as his cover story for being an unemployed man with enough money to get by, and actually works on the book that supports his alibi. Even when not talking about his book, Jake thinks like a writer. Early on, we spend a lot of time with him as he grades high school and adult learning class English papers.

For me, that stuff is like candy. As a writer, I love it when the characters I’m spending my time with write. It helps me relate to them. I usually get an unexpected lesson in writing from them even as I’m enjoying a good tale.

But what about non-writers? If you’ve read a lot of King, what does his leaning towards making his main characters successful or struggling novelists contribute or take away from his stories for you? Does it get old, or do you enjoy the glimpse into the writer’s life? Or, given that their profession is just one slice of the story and their personalities, does it matter at all?

2. In 11/22/63, Jake Epping spends some of his time in the past in Derry, Maine. King fans know Derry well, of course. I loved the return visit. As an avid King reader, it almost felt like one of the “harmonies” (the past and present coming together in odd ways) that kept happening to Jake himself. I especially enjoyed his encouter with Bev and Richie, two of the children who were lead characters in “It.” For me, it tied their own off-the-wall experiences to Jake’s in a way that made perfect sense. They were all insiders into the “out there.”

But thinking back, I wonder if Bev and Richie did anything for the story for those who had never read “It.” The encounter is too brief to get too much insight into them, but long enough that you know it is supposed to matter. If I didn’t already “know” these kids, I might have just thought their words and actions were unexplainable and just too off-the-wall. It probably wouldn’t have bothered me much – I’d have just chalked them up to something I didn’t understand yet, and so much happened later that I’d most likely forget about them.

But still – I wonder. Is putting in characters from other works with only minimal context a good idea? For King, it works. But he gets away with things other writers don’t. Like writing about traveling back in time to 11/22/63 in the first place. Because he’s King. If you’ve read the book, what did you think of Bev and Richie’s part?

If you haven’t read 11/22/63, I hope you add it to your list. If you have, what were your impressions?

For me, it was traveling to West Virginia for my Granddad’s funeral. It was a farewell, but it was also a trip back in time to my own childhood and even to my dad’s. I will write more on that later, because I want to be able to come back some day and recapture those thoughts. It was getting back into the groove of work after bereavement leave that followed right on the heels of a 10-day holiday break. It was getting back into the gym and a lot of writing. It was making some tough but exciting decisions.

The Writerly Highlights:

1. I’ve come to the tough decision to stop being a contributing writer for the Life List Club. Note I did NOT say to stop Life List Clubbing. I’ve gotten so much out of getting to know this group and still plan to keep on keepin’ on with my goals just as if I were still reporting on them. I also plan to keep following the contributing writers and hope you will too – I’m keeping my LLC blogroll right there on the sidebar for your convenience.

The next LLC blog round robin is next Friday, January 27th. While I won’t be guest posting, I hope you’ll stop by for my recap of my LLC experience and my personal thanks to the members of this very special group.

2 . After letting it sit for a few months, I’ve made some revisions to my short story “The Not-So-False Prophet” and shipped it out to a potential market. In a weird way, this tale is sort of a different twist on the plot that has become one of my current longer WIPs, “Like There’s No Tomorrow.” I feel good about the revisions I made, which involved cutting out an ending where I went off on a tangent that took some of the punch away from the finish rather than adding to it.

Lesson Learned: I need more patience. Just because I think a piece is done doesn’t mean it is. Incubation time is good, and I now have enough items in the hopper that sitting on a piece for a while doesn’t mean I’m not moving forward with others.

3. With the exception of a few days of setbacks due to my family issues and work craziness, I’ve stuck with or exceeded the 500-words-a-day goal I set after hosting Gary Gauthier’s post recommending this approach. After trying it for a few weeks, I give it a solid “A” as a good technique for working or otherwise super-busy writers. We shy away from writing on some days because it feels like we don’t have enough time to do our words justice. But really, when you think about it, how long does it take you to pour out 500 words when you’re on a roll? Not long at all. I can do it with my first cup of coffee. Knowing that’s all I have to do gets me in my writing seat. But I almost ALWAYS go over the 500 words, sometimes by miles. And if I don’t, that’s still OK.

4. Finally, if you haven’t had enough of me already, please pop on over to Marcia Richard’s blog. Marcia is celebrating the first anniversary of her blog, “Sexy. Smart. From the Heart.” I’m super-thrilled to be featured as one of the women who have been a big part of Marcia’s blogging community.

5. OK, I know I said “finally” just a second ago. This time I really mean it. I was checking out a few new Twitter followers recently, and one of them was Squawk Back. What I stumbled into was a very intriguing publication with a wide variety of unique, interesting and sometimes downright captivating short fiction. Check them out, either as a potential place to submit your own work or just an escape into some good reads.

Amidst all this living and writing, I managed to finish Stephen King’s latest novel, 11/22/63. Please check back on Tuesday for my thoughts on his latest creation. Until then, happy writing and reading!

Every now and then, we slap our hands to our foreheads and let loose a long, melodramatic sigh.

“If only I didn’t have to work a day job, I’d have that book finished. And another one too,” we say.

OK, I don’t slap my hand to my forehead and go all drama queen. I’m more of the straight-up bitch-and-moan type. But even in what has been the best writing stint of my life, I have fallen time and again on blaming my job for not writing more, better or faster.

That’s not entirely unjustified, of course. When you work 40 – or usually more – hours a week, your time for other things IS limited. And when your job is of the problem-solving variety that lingers in your brain during non-work hours, it zaps even more time and energy. So my excuse does come with a hard-core element of reality.

I’ve heard writers weigh in on both sides of the spectrum. Many, like me, feel their day jobs hamper their writing progress. But others argue that their non-writing work provides a structure and regimen that helps them stick to their schedule and gives them experiences to write about.

I’ve met quite a few people through blogging who started out as day-jobbing writers like me. Over the years, their circumstances changed and they no longer work full-time. They may be moms or dads and/or homemakers with working spouses now. They may have retired or been able to cut back to working part-time. They are living my dream.

The thing is, they write about the same struggles I do. Their battle to carve out enough time or inspiration to write really isn’t that much different than mine.

Well, WTF?

Since I work at a college, we get the week between Christmas and New Year’s off. This year, I decided to put myself and my excuses to the test. Between December 24th and January 3rd, I didn’t have to go to work. That’s 10 long days of freedom. What better opportunity to pretend, for just a little while, to have the life of a day-jobless writer and see how I did? Would I fare better than my non-or-part-time-working writer friends, and prove that I’d could live my dream if I had the same opportunities?

Here’s out that turned out:

Saturday, December 24th

I kicked off the day by organizing and wrapping the Christmas gifts I hadn’t yet gotten together. I drank gobs of coffee and savored that indescribable sense of relief and freedom that happens when I stare down a meeting-and-work-free week.

At 1 pm, Lee and I tuned into our dualing football games – the Steelers game for me and the Ravens for him. There were big playoff implications, and we were both nervous wrecks. At halftime, it looked like my win was under wraps, so we went up to the pub to watch the second half of his game with friends. Then I went to my parents’ house to spend Christmas Eve with my family.

Sunday, December 25th (Christmas Day)

We went back to my parents’ house for our traditional present-exchange frenzy and ginormous Christmas breakfast. We lingered into the early afternoon, then Lee and I left and headed to my Grandmom’s. We spent some time there chatting and enjoying the holiday together, then headed home and took a deliciously long nap. We woke up refreshed and spent Christmas night watching “Cowboys and Aliens” and “Captain America.”

Monday, December 26th

Other than taking breaks for food and a shower, I wrote all day long. The floodgates were open, and I let the waters flow. I lost track of time and enjoyed myself immensely. Other than a few brief breaks to get some fresh air, I was indoors all day. I never went farther than my own backyard. I went to bed that night feeling on top of the world.

Tuesday, December 27th

In the morning, we went back to the gym and got an extra-long, easy-paced workout in. I took my time really getting back into my gym routine. Then I came home and wrote my heart out for a few hours. After another 5 hours of writing, I still felt good, but also drained. So I jumped in the shower and headed off for girl’s night out at the pub.

Wednesday, December 28th

I slept in quite a bit after staying out late the night before. I grabbed a cup of coffee and sat down to write in the morning, and was distracted by the dustbunnies all over my workstation. So I tackled them. Then I noticed that my ferret Vin Weasel’s cage was a little dingy, so I tackled that too, in addition to clipping his claws. My mini-cleaning frenzy motivated Lee, and before I knew it he was scouring the fridge. So I jumped in and helped him with the rest of the kitchen.

Somehow, we moved on to the kitchen cabinets, and then the bathroom, and then the walls and ceilings in the rest of the house. “A few odds and ends” became a serious cleaning frenzy that lasted all day.

I did no writing that day, but still felt marvelously accomplished as I looked around my sparkling clean home. All those neglected chores hadn’t bugged me when I was at work all the time and barely home to notice the fallout. But in my few days at home, the state of my household had subconsciously bugged me, and having the mess tackled felt good. So I celebrated with downloading Stephen King’s 11/22/63 on my Kindle and curling up for a long winters’ read.

As he has a million times before, SK kept me up long into the night.

Thursday, December 29th

I slept in way too long again. After all, Stephen King and Jake Epping had kept me up even later than my girl’s night out had the night before. When I got myself together, Lee and I headed out for some shopping. Once home, I spent the rest of the afternoon catching up on blogs, dying my hair and researching my upcoming laptop purchase. Then I curled up and hung out with SK and Jake some more while Lee played his new Madden Football game.

Again, I hadn’t written a thing.

Friday, December 30th

First things first, of course. I spent the morning checking in with the Life List Club for our New Year’s Milestone Mania. Then I felt a bit of the writing bug returning, so I bonded with my thoughts and my keyboard for a few hours. Then I curled up on the couch for some more time traveling with Stephen and Jake.

Saturday, December 31st

Wouldn’t you know it? With just 3 days left in my vacation, I woke up with one of those writerly brainstorms. Not the push-comes-to-shove kind you have when you know you’ve got to meet your word count goal or a deadline. I’m talking that full-force, baseball-bat upside the head flash of inspiration. A story. A big story.

I spent all day with it, other than a trip to the gym. When we headed out to the pub to bring in the New Year, I was on top of the world. There is nothing like the feeling of something GOOD grabbing your muse, twirling her around in a happy dance, and saying “Write me … write me NOW!”

Sunday, January 1st

Oh, football, how I curse you for distracting me.

All day.

But there was this, at least. The New Year rolling in with a rainbow can only be a good omen.

Monday, January 2nd

I spent the morning with my new brainstorm project, writing away. By the afternoon, the reality of “I have to work tomorrow” had set in, and I started to get distracted. Oh, ok, I got bummed. I always told you guys that kids who throw temper tantrums about going back to school have nothing on me.  My inner writer and my inner slacker were both a bit peeved about their reign coming to an end. So my creative mojo for the afternoon got eaten by the SulkMonster.

So, how exactly did that all add up? Will I fare better as a writer if I can ever give up day-jobbing, or will I fall into the “I’ve got all the time in the world” trap and accomplish no more than I do now?

First of all, I admit that my experiment is flawed. Having 10 days off when you’re used to spending all your time at a job is NOT the same as not working. There’s so much to catch up on in the realm of both chores and fun. Your mind and body crave rest and relaxation and the chance to savor your freedom in a way they might not if you have more constant flexibility. And as lovely as they are, 10 days off are still not enough time to figure out what routine would work best for you if “this was the rest of your life.”

Still, I did learn quite a bit from the test run.

If I ever get the chance to be a full-time writer, I’m going to have to get better at discipline than I am now. I did write quite a bit more in my time off than I would in an average 10-day stint. But the extra writing didn’t reflect having 40-50 extra hours in my week by a long shot.

The days I went on long writing stints seemed to zap my mojo and lead to me skipping writing on other days. I’m OK with this in my day-jobber’s life. If I spend an entire Saturday at the keyboard and then don’t feel like writing again until Wednesday, who cares? After all, I’m busy at work anyway, and actually got more writing done in one day than I would in an hour here and there during the week.

But if I ever become a full-time writer, I think I will restrict myself to writing 2-3 hours a day, always making sure I am fresh and revitalized for the next stint. I’ll spend the other “working” hours on research and networking.

I also realized that I am not as productive when my closet night owl takes over. If a job doesn’t force me out of a bed at the crack of dawn, I will need to learn to drag my own butt out from under the covers if I don’t want my writing and fitness goals to suffer. I stuck with writing and working out on the days off that I chose to get up early anyway, and slacked off like a fool when I slept in.

Overall, I’ve concluded that I do need structure, deadlines and a certain amount of routine in my life to stick with my goals. But that doesn’t mean I need all the obligations I have now. I would probably flounder, at least for a while, as a writer with nothing but free time on her hands. But I believe I would thrive as a writer who had a part-time job doing something else – preferably the kind of job I could do, then go home and leave behind until my next shift.

For me, I think working 20-30 hours a week would be ideal. It would give me structure, ideas and inspiration without zapping all my time and energy.

I’m not sure how to get there, other than to keep doing what I’m doing and hope it pays off. But I’m glad I did this little experiment anyway. I have a more solid understanding of how and why my non-working writer friends struggle with the same obstacles and issues I battle myself. I know what I’ll need to work on if I ever get the chance.

Besides, if I hadn’t done this experiment, I probably would have spent my whole week off watching chick flicks, hanging out at the pub, reading, and taking naps. It would have been fun while it lasted, but I’d have seriously wanted to kick my own rump for not getting any writing done.

What about you? If you are a working writer, how does your job impact your writing? Do you dream of leaving your current career behind to pursue writing full-time, or do you think doing so would actually hurt your creativity? If you are a full-time or non-working writer, how do you keep yourself on task? If you’ve done both, which works best for you?