Motivation: Found. Time: Still MIA.

So, I got up off my butt since my last post and actually did something.  I finished reading Pride and Prejudice, I started reading Emma, I caught up on email, I straightened out bank business, I bought appropriate shoes for the wedding I'm in on the 30th, and I thoroughly ransacked my room in stress and carelessness (I didn't say it was all good stuff).

I haven't written anything substantial for my current WIP, Outrageous Fortune, though I got started patching up a few plot holes that would've seriously put a snag in my progress for NaNoWriMo.  I'm due to submit for my writing tutorial next week, right after the start of Nano (grrrr), so sometime this week I do to need to write something.  This year is going to be tough, because I can't even write myself out of a rut by letting my characters get lucky like I did in 2007.  (That plot jump was epic, if embarassing.)  My main character is a pregnant widow, and the story is told 1st person from her point of view, so not much sex involved in the here and now.  Although, she does have flashbacks...

NO.  Stop it.  Bad writer.  You will not resort to sex just because it's convenient.

Anyway.  New subject. 

In other creative and crafty happenings, I made myself a comfort pack like the one on my Etsy, because it was just too darn cute and sitting hunched over a notebook trying to fix my plot had given me a serious crick in the neck. 

Who doesn't love Eskimos?  I did a big no-no, though, and fell asleep with it while it was still hot.  No burns, but I woke up at about 3am wondering what in the heck that lump was behind my head.  Kind of like when the cat sleeps with me or I cuddle Ted the Plot Penguin before I drift off.

Anyway, I am off to read more of Emma before my date with the bed. 

Motivation. I have none.

This past weekend was a three day break after midterm week, and on Thursday evening I had many shining visions of getting caught up on my "to read" list, bringing the two adrift sections of my novel neatly together, getting pumped for NaNoWriMo, and just generally taking advantage of no class and no work to buckle down and do stuff, but still relax.

Today is Monday evening and all I have to show for my amazing-epic-productive weekend is a pile of dirty laundry and one awkward picture of me sitting on a duck statue (I goofed off with friends -- don't ask).

I have no idea where my motivation went.  Okay, I do have some idea, and I think it's called "Senioritis," but I really don't want to get into the habit of blaming my unproductivity on that.  Still, I did even less this weekend than usual.  Okay, scratch that, I did add a new listing to my Etsy, but other than that, nada.  I think I took at least one nap each day, in addition to sleeping late, and I thoroughly updated myself on the various exciting happenings of the internets.  I relaxed, alright, but Monday morning came with a groan of dread, anyway.

Maybe a decent night's sleep and a good breakfast will make me feel better...

Back it up

There's a thread on the NaNoWriMo forums about backing up your work.  As the original poster makes a good point of, EVERY year it never fails that at least one person ends up in the forums, in tears and/or hysterics, having lost everything due to a computer crash, file damage, theft, something.  While you certainly can't prepare for every disaster, now is the perfect time to start getting into the habit of saving and backing up your files.

Having suffered data loss on three different occasions, I use a rule of three when backing up my work -- have the original document, plus three different types of back up.  Mine:

1. USB drive
2. SkyDrive online file storage
3. Hard copy

The first time I lost something to the point of hysterics, it was some sort of hard disk error or virus that caused a computer to shut down when I put in my flash drive, thus erasing almost everything on it, including the 12-page research paper I had been up until 3am finishing the night before.  The only thing that saved my sanity was the fact that I had hand-written 3/4 of the paper before typing it up.  The second time, I didn't save anything and my laptop crashed.  Hard drive had to be replaced, and I lost approximately 45,000 words of my novel.  I cried.  Honestly.  Third time was December 2009 -- I wrote a 13-page research paper and saved it to my flash drive, only to have something deep within the cosmos decide to screw with me and not save the paper properly. 

After that, I got a SkyDrive.  25 GB of free space, and it's accessible anywhere I have an internet connection.  Everything that is important enough to be saved to the (new and well-treated) USB drive goes into SkyDrive.  Even things that don't go on the USB go into SkyDrive, like my music, pictures, everything.  I will sing praises to that program all day -- I have yet to have any issues with it, and who can say no to 25 GB for free?  I've heard lots of writers talk about DropBox and how wonderful it is to have everything sync automatically, but in my experience, computers cannot be trusted and I'm not going to assume my irreplacible work is getting saved when it might not be.  Auto-syncs are wonderfully convenient, but I'd rather have the peace of mind in knowing I did it myself.

And, last but not least, I keep hard copies of my most important documents.  Every time I write a new chapter in my novel, I print it and keep it in a water-proof accordion file.  I hand-write a lot of my school work and keep a hold of those pages, too.  One can never be too careful.

Don't wait to back up your work, and do it in more than one source.  Don't make your backup habits long and convoluted, but definitely don't leave it to chance.  Your sanity is really not worth it, and your precious writing deserves to be well cared for.

A Place to Create

I have this friend, Kelly, whom my other friend, Alysa, calls the "key-finding desk cleaner."  While Alysa and I fit the messy, chaos-minded artiste stereotype, Kelly is the neat freak who organizes things when she gets stressed/bored/angry.  And since she keeps her own room impeccable, she's taken to cleaning my room and Alysa's when she's bored and/or has homework that needs to be procrastinated on.  This afternoon was such an occasion.

So, I now have an orderly place to create!  I really do prefer things to be mostly organized and all that good stuff, but I have no mind for it.  I get distracted easily, I avoid unpleasant tasks like the plague (sweeping and dishes, mostly), and I don't really know how to organize.  At least, not in the overall sense of things.  I can sort my books by genre and author and my fabrics by type, color, and swatch size, but I cannot seem to get a handle on how things should be in general.  Where do I put all my random notebooks?  I dunno.  I leave them where I used them last, typically on my desk or next to the bed or on my chair.  What to do with all my crafty WIPs?  Who would've thought that sticking them in a "project bag" might help make sense of things.

Now that Kelly has helped me make sense of things (she did most of the work, I admit it), I feel like my mind has been freed up a little.  The mess in my room/on my desk tends to have a direct correlation with my stress levels, and now I have a sense of peace, a sense of everything being in its proper place, and I can end my week by letting go of my stress and starting over.  Clean room = happy Tandra.  Relaxed Tandra. 

Creative Tandra.

You'd think that, since I am aware of the stress-mess correlation, I'd be more proactive about keeping things clean.  But that would be like assuming that I always remember to just let go of things and chill. 

As soon as I figure out where Kelly put my camera, I will post a pic of my lovely space.

An Apple For Teacher

Today, I taught a workshop, "College Writing 101," with a friend and fellow English major and one of our professors.  It was hosted by the Academic and Career Enrichment Center on campus, an event specifically tailored to incoming freshmen. 

Now, something most people know about me is that I have always resented the assumption that, because I am an English major, I want to teach.  There are other career paths for the literary-minded, you know.  This was especially exasperating because I couldn't see myself teaching at all.  Partly -- okay, mostly -- out of vanity, I just did not want to be stuck in a classroom, plodding through the beat-to-death classics, grading 2-page papers and spending entire class periods reviewing what a thesis statement is and how to write it.

Guess I forgot that I was once that blank-faced, thesis-less student, and wouldn't have been there in the ACE today, teaching, if not for some great teachers who got over that vanity.  Oops.

Not to mention that, but my students today surprised me.  Some were a bit blank-faced, but they caught on to what we were teaching and made an effort.  I loved seeing the "ohhhhh" looks on their faces when something clicked.  One of the best feelings in the world, I think, to know that I've succeeded in helping them, and enjoyed it, to boot.

Now, I know that this was an exceptionally good experience and that there will be those students that come along and just don't get it and/or just don't care.  Baby steps, though.  At least I know that the prospect of ending up in a public school classroom (which is most likely to happen to me, given the current economic climate as well as the lack of resources where I live) is not such a bad one after all.

Best of all, I spoke to a student at the end of the workshop who wanted to know what classes to take to improve her fiction-writing skills.  Fellow creationist in the making.  Score.

The Creative Season Ahead

It's October 2, which means a lot of things:

-- 29 days until NaNoWriMo 2010 begins!
-- 14 days until I have to send out three Craftster swap packages
-- 2 months until I need to start studying for exams
-- 1 month until the Etsy holiday rush "officially" begins

Many other things, too, mostly school and work-related, but those aren't important.

I may have overcommitted myself in the creativity department, but, ehn, who cares?  By the end of November, I will be in a caffeine-induced coma, twitching in the corner, trying to crochet with a pen and trying to write with a crochet hook, but at least I'll have had a hell of a lot of fun.  Nano always is fun, even though I've never won (I WILL WILL WILL this year), and crocheting is always fun, too.  And when my characters get to whining at me, like they usually do, I can turn on the sewing machine and drown the bastards them out.  Come to think of it, the sewing machine can drown out a lot of things...