10 Ways to Procrastinate Writing Fiction

#1.  Resurrect a lapsed blog.

As I told you last summer, I signed up for a Writing Fiction class at my local community college, rather than deciding what kind of graduate degree I want to pursue.  I was very excited.  And as you know if you've been reading me, to get warmed up and make sure I didn't embarrass myself in class, over the summer I did a free online course through Open University called Start Writing Fiction.  I was concerned because I had never written a story before, not since I was a tiny little girl and wrote only a few sentences.  Class started in late August, a little while after I wrote my last post for this blog. 
At first I was really inspired, I had a bunch of ideas (mostly hare-brained) for short stories.  I wrote one of them over the course of a number of weeks, but it turned out sounding stiff and bloodless.  It was about a middle-aged character having a very quiet sort of experience.  Even though the class I'm taking is at a community college and meets in the evening, I am the only 'adult learner' in there, the rest of them look to be 18-19 years old.  I wanted to write something that they would like, since we have to read our stories aloud and have the class critique them.  I scrapped my first story at the last minute (one week before my first 'workshop') and wrote another, a YA short story about teenage Wiccans.  My classmates ate it up, although they misunderstood the story somewhat.
Once I survived my first workshop, I found to my dismay that all my ideas and inspiration had dried up, and I didn't know what to write.  I tried writing another story, and started it twice but both times it sounded stiff and contrived.
Meanwhile, Ariel had told me about the Young Writer's Program part of NaNoWriMo , and I helped Primo sign up.  He got really excited about it, and started writing character bios and story ideas.  Soon his friends were signed up too, and even Radish asked me to help him make an account.  I decided to sign myself up for the regular adult version of NaNo, the 50,000 word write-a-novel-in-a-month challenge.  I figured there was no way I'd make it to 50K, but writing toward that goal would give me something meaty to bring to my second (and final) workshop for class.  The professor seems to prefer unfinished 'first chapter of my novel' pieces over finished short stories, and the class, too, criticizes those less.  Anyway, I took my most substantial idea and wrote an outline, put it aside until November 1st.
Today.  I tried, this morning, to write from that outline, and the result was the poorest, most bloodless writing that I've done so far.  I think I might scrap the whole idea and write 'by the seat of my pants' in a genre, rather than straight real-world fiction.

But for this evening, I'm finding lots of other things somehow more pressing or interesting than getting to work on writing fiction.  There's this poor, neglected blog, for instance.  How could I let it languish for one more day? :)  Also, there's:

#2.  File away the kids' homeschool work in their notebooks.

#3.  Make a cup of tea, and some toast with jam to go along with it.

#4.  Hmm, laundry.  No reason to let it sit, just because it's Saturday night!

#5.  Christmas shopping!  Online, natch...

#6.  Email.  Oh, so urgent, these messages, must read right now...

#7.  Get ahead on tomorrow's chores: plan meals for the week, write lessons for the week (including all-new 'Baby Lessons'! more on that in my next post!)

#8.  Read-- if I can't write fiction today, I can still immerse myself in it.  Specifically, a terrific book by Octavia Butler, Wild Seed.  It's so interesting to read this book after reading about it and reading the first paragraphs, broken down, in Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy.  I'm having one of my reading crises again-- I've stacked myself up with too many things to read, trying to find inspiration.  I have an old favorite, Orson Scott Card's Maps in a Mirror out from the library for over a week, but untouched.  And a fun, YA collection of short holiday stories called My True Love Gave to Me.  Then there's the short story collection (Best American Short Stories 2014) that I don't have to read for class, but I feel like I should anyway (it was the 2013 edition that was mandatory for class, but I finished that).  And the boys have several things out from the library that I want to read, and I have a few more on my NOOK, and don't get me started on magazines and non-fiction (I have three or four books about helping your homeschooler get into college which I haven't started yet).

#9.  TV- and this one is ridiculous, because we only have the most basic cable and on a Saturday night there is *nothing on*, not until SNL and that's hours away. 

#10.  Make a list of some kind.  Oh.  Check. 

I guess I'll be mad at myself tomorrow if I don't at least make an attempt to write something worth continuing (the 150 words I put down this morning is not it).  But first, I hear Snorzy talking upstairs, more than an hour after I put him down in his crib.  A few more minutes before I have to face the blank page!

Struggling in February

This time of year is the pits, every year at this time I get at least a little fed up with everything.  Many years I entertain the idea of sending the kids to school, in February, but come March I love homeschooling again and wouldn't dream of doing things any other way.
I'm trying to keep things a little bit light and fun over here...the boys are doing plenty of math and all the other core subjects, but I'm making sure I keep some lighter things injected into our school day-- for example, today we started with a Valentine-making workshop (which included lots of practice in negotiation and working together, and for Milo also the skill of finding an unknown zip code--so, not completely noneducational).
Another way we're keeping it interesting is by doing science experiments, like this one on crystals:

And later in the week we're going to view some videos on Khan Academy and Ted Ed (or is it Ed Ted? never can remember) about plate tectonics, earthquakes, Pangaea, and Fibonacci numbers.  I've been thinking about how to incorporate these online resources into our homeschool, and what I've hit on this week is that I'll have them do their usual books-and-papers work on these topics, and then add watching the videos (and, as always in our hs, writing and drawing about what they've learned) late in the week as enrichment.  Up until now I've resisted using videos in the boys' lessons, going with the Well-Trained Mind idea that learning from books is a different skill that should be acquired first.  However, some of the home educating moms whom I respect the most (Hi Jen S. and Ariel D.!) use Ted Ed (Ed Ted?) and Khan Academy videos with their kids, so I knew it was time to re-think this and see what using these could do for my family.
Craft Challenge news this week: well, this time of year really is getting me down, and my week was, once again, almost up without anything to show for it (craft-wise, that is).  So, last night on Primo's advice I grabbed my fabric scissors and a big bag of felt scraps, and made some shapes and animals for Snorzy's felt board.  Radish agrees with me that the baby would probably just eat the felt shapes right now, so this will be put away and likely show up next under the Christmas tree later this year (when Snorzy will be almost 2)

Next up: remind me to get around to the post that I've been meaning to write about learning styles, Radish, and multiplication.  Also, I'm going to try to do a more involved and interesting craft this week-- not needle felting yet as I don't have the supplies, but something engrossing and fun.

Cold Snap

One fun thing about this prolonged stretch of cold weather is that we were able to get around to an art project I'd been meaning to do with the kids: an ice chandelier, as seen in The Jumbo Book of Outdoor Art (one of my favorites for unusual art projects).  Primo made the frame by himself (not visible in the picture below, unfortunately-- the kids were the photographers), and we collaborated on a set of colorful ice cubes and a circle, all with small objects (natural and man-made) trapped inside.  We hung it about a week ago, and it's been interesting to see the cubes melt and change, *even though* the air temperature hasn't risen to even close to 32 degrees all week.  How is this possible?  Our hypotheses include heat from the cars passing on the street, and sunlight shining on the ice.



Once again I felt a little 'under the gun' to make something for my craft challenge.  I had the idea to make Snorzy a felt board, but didn't know what to use as the base (without buying anything).  Then I realized we had just thrown a white board into the recycling bin.  I had one of the kids retrieve it, and used it to form the basis of a felt board (with a blue sky and a slight hill made of green felt).  I found that staples wouldn't stay well in the cardboard back of the white board, so I reinforced it with duct tape.  Not pretty, but hopefully it will hold up.  Next mini project: making some felt shapes for Snorzy to use with this board.  No rush, he's still at the age where he's more likely to put the pieces in his mouth than on the board.  Maybe I'll save this as a birthday or even Christmas present.  The important thing is that I *made something* this week, other than the chandelier (with the boys) and various baked good ('Samoa' Brownies, Chocolate Cherry Dump Cake).

Bunny Lovey 1

Lessons learned from my first attempt at sewing a lovey:

1. using my blue Mark-B-Gone pen on the 'wrong side' of the ivory swirl fur fabric was a bad idea.  Little did I know that the blue marks would show right through.  And I have a sinking feeling that they will not B-Gone when I wash the finished lovey.  I'm not sure what I could have used instead-- disappearing ink would have disappeared from one naptime to the next, before I finished the project.  And chalk would have wiped off.
2. the ears needed to be super-sized compared to the pattern in Moebes' book-- I traced around her pattern on separate paper to make ears that were probably more than 50% bigger, giving me the 'voluptuous flop' that I crave in a bunny
3. the part that I thought would be the hardest, sewing the curved seams on the head, was actually not bad at all. 
4. sewing the straight seams on the triangles to form the square blanket was where I made my biggest error, probably because I thought I was on the 'easy part' and got careless.  To my horror, as I was topstitching the blanket after sewing on the lining I found that along one of the blanket seams, for several inches, the seam had come apart because I had actually sewn into the fur at the edge and not the fabric backing at all, which leads me to:
5. when the directions said to sew a 'generous 3/8" seam', I needed to be more generous for sure-- I was too worried about the whole thing coming out too small when I should have been thinking more about making all the seams *strong* to withstand baby boy manhandling.  I fixed it in a kind of 'Frankenstein's monster' fashion by sewing by hand with ivory colored thread.  My hand sewing technique not being up to snuff, this is not an invisible seam of hidden stitches but a big hard ridge of sloppy stitches forcing the seam back together.
6. I stuffed the head firmly using little pinches of fluff as suggested by Moebes, I think I would have liked it better a little understuffed and floppy, to match the general floppiness of the ears and the blanket.
7. in the future, I'll have to find a way to mark out the circle around the base of his head for sewing last of all-- mine was a funny little lopsided spiral rather than a perfect circle, and it shows when using a solid colored lining as I did here.

Overall, I am over the moon about how easy this was to sew, and how cute it turned out even with all my errors-- this one will be under the tree for Snorzy's first Christmas, and hopefully Lovey's bunny charms will lure S away from his horrible, tacky store bought 'Taggies' bear that I got him just for 'second best' and that he ended up falling in love with and needing in order to sleep, every day and night.  I plan to make more of these bunnies, which I will continue to customize away from the original pattern (the head and neck are a little too skinny and weird for my liking).  I managed to make this, despite my inexperience, in 2 1/2 naptimes-- one for cutting and sewing the ears, another for sewing the head (very quick), and one more to do everything else but the embroidery (which I whipped through while watching t.v. the evening after finished the rest).  I don't know what I'll do with more bunnies but I do know that I won't be able to resist making at least one more of these, I think I have enough fabric left over from this one if I cut carefully!