Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Work in the Wrong Place

I learned something interesting about my work habits when I was visiting my dad and stepmom for Thanksgiving last week. We stayed in their big basement guest room, which is set up like a bed-sitter with a little living room area on one side and a nice bedroom area on the other, with a big table in between as a room divider. Lord, I love that table. I got more work done there in the half-hour before Thanksgiving dinner than I usually do in a whole weekend.

Which leads me to the interesting thing I learned: The workspace in my actual home is set up in the most perversely wrong way possible for the purpose of getting anything done. The desk is a computer workstation with no writing surface, and it's set so close to my easy chair that the difference between relaxing and working is standing up, aiming my butt in the other direction and sitting down again. The chair is a dining chair with no cushion. I have a lap desk to use in my easy chair, but my easy chair is so associated with not working in my mind that when I use it I proceed at about ten words an hour.

I used to think it was because I was lazy, but I work so much faster and more efficiently at my dad's house or the library or even my day job that I'm forced against my will to believe in the power of ergonomics. The thing is, I wasn't writing professionally when I set up my home office. The computer was for web surfing. The easy chair was for snacking. Finis. Five years into my freelance career, I'm still wondering why it's so excruciating for me to produce output when I ostensibly enjoy what I do.

So when I've met my two upcoming deadlines, I'll be cracking the old knuckles and shoving around some furniture in there until I've got a workspace that's conducive to, well, work. Something with a nice big surface for my books and notebook, with the computer over to the side, and the whole thing several feet away from my relaxing space.

Of course, this experiment was only performed on my freelance nonfiction. We'll see if it does anything for the novel. It certainly can't hurt.

Word Count: 32,116 (+0) -- yeah, you heard me.

Monday, November 21, 2005

Get out of Practice

Well, we had a pretty good time at Disney World, and although a couple of fairly major things went wrong, they mostly turned out for the best. For instance, we thought we had tickets to Cirque du Soleil on Thursday night, but it turned out that their online ticketing system had eaten them. Fortunately, we were really in no mood to see whippet-thin contortionists doing nutty things with their midsections after the enormous dinner we had just had, so it worked out.

Also, I woke up the very first morning with my first head cold of the 2005-06 season, which was a huge drag. But I have head colds every few weeks in the wintertime (my theory is that a mutant immune system that turns all viruses into head colds is one of my superpowers, along with finding lost things and reading bad handwriting), so I know exactly how to handle them and I was feeling fine on the afternoon of the third day.

Of course, by the time we got back, I didn't want to work for a living anymore. I'm accustomed to not wanting to work at a day job, even the Best Day Job in the World. But this past weekend I didn't even want to write for a living. I had the hardest time even sitting down to work on the two fascinating articles I'm working on for the
History Channel Magazine (this month features me on Audubon and Transcendentalist New England, pick one up at Barnes & Noble Booksellers today!). I practically had an anxiety attack; I kept getting up to wash the dishes, dig under the bed for the cat, stroll into the other room to see what Mike was up to...anything to keep from working. It's as though since I hadn't done any writing for two weeks, I'd forgotten how.

Word Count: 32,116 (+0)

Because if I can't write even when there's a paycheck on the other end, I sure as heck can't write for mere personal edification.

N.B. We're leaving again tomorrow night for Thanksgiving with my dad in Alexandria, Virginia. So there will definitely be no novelizing until at least the weekend. If then. I have two freelance things due on December 2nd and two more on the 5th, don't look at me like that.

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Skip Town

Mike and I will be at Disney World from the 10th to the 15th, and Jamie will be in the clink, so there will be no novelizing done.

I travel two or three times a year, about 25% of the time to Disney World, but I still can't get over feeling enormously stressed until the moment we get off the plane. I'm convinced that I'm going to forget something incredibly obvious, like taking Jamie to the vet, and he'll spend a week wandering pathetically around the house, slowly starving. Or that I'll leave my glasses at home, so I'll have to wear my contacts to sleep and my eyes will grow skin over them. Or that I'll forget the plane tickets and we'll have to spend another $X hundred dollars and sit there on standby, watching the hours tick away and the $150 I spent on Cirque de Soleil tickets for that night trickle slowly down the drain. I'm a very bad traveler.

Enjoy! I'll post pictures if we don't end up looking too fat in them.

Word Count: 32,116 (+759)