Author: beckylevine

• Yes, I’ve become a Doctor Who convert. I ADORED Christopher Eccleston. For those of you who assured me I’d also like David Tennant, okay, yes, he’s good, he’s cute, he’s sweet, but he’s not Christopher Eccleston. And to those of you who told me I’d love Rose, you’re absolutely right. What a fun actress! We’re hooked, although still seasons away from all the excitement about the 12th doctor. This feels a little bit like when I read Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, which–if I remember correctly–had dual points of view, and as I ended each traumatic, exhausting chapter, I had to grieve about leaving that character on the next page. Except, here, Christopher Eccleston won’t come back. Sigh.
• I’m sitting here, writing this post, listening to my son compose a bass solo (homework!) to Lullaby of Birdland. Like so much of what he does with music these days, I have no idea what he’s doing or how, but I know it sounds pretty darned cool. And it is more than cool to watch this world of his grow.
• It has been a busy, busy work week, but there have been and will be a few hours of picture-book revising. I was told by my critique groups that one of the PBs I’m working on is “almost there.” Yes, I know that can still mean plenty of revisions still to do, but close feels so much better than miles and miles away. I’m shooting for getting this back to them for our next meeting. LOVE critique deadlines.
• I’m amping up my meditation schedule. I’ve moved from searching for just the right mp3 of guided meditation on random days, to really trying to sit for 10 minutes of silent meditation every day. Sometimes I have a plan of what the meditation will focus on; sometimes, I just try to quiet that noisy mind I so often wake up with. I’m trying to think of my days as full, rather than busy, and sometimes I just sort of meditate all the to-do list items out of a tangle into a calmer, more linear sequence. Me and Bonnie Franklin.

• One week till school starts. Have I mentioned lately that my son WILL BE A SENIOR!!! He is so very different from the little boy he was not that many years ago and, at the same time, I can watch him now and see the roots of his personality all those years ago. But he has taken those roots and watered them as he wanted and pretty much pruned and directed and grown himself into the plant he WANTS to be. Oh, for pete’s sake, a GARDENING metaphor? From me? Motherhood turns you into a mushbrain. It’s going to be an insane year (hence, perhaps, the increased need for meditation), but an incredible one. If I could make sure that every eyelash and falling-star wish went toward him landing in The Place, for this next stage of his life, that makes him happy and healthy and still-growing, I would. But, really, all I can do is make sure he gets those applications in, get him to his auditions, and then, pretty much, hold my breath.

When I think about being a child or a young teen, what stands out to me is how far into the future my gaze didn’t go. I know a lot of people think of kids and teens as self-centered, sort of in a bubble of their own world, their own time. That may be partially true, but if it is, it has to make a kind of sense that, having lived so few years so far, they don’t stretch their vision decades forward, don’t yet look at people much older than themselves and say…there is where I may go. And maybe many teens do actually look that far out, and I was just one who didn’t.

The thing is, I don’t really remember thinking much about my what my life would be like at this age. This is probably at least partly because I moved out of the house when my parents were a decade younger than I am now, so my age now, at that time, meant grandparents.  Wonderful as mine were, they were still one more generation jump away from me, so I’m sure I simply loved them much more than I saw them as a potential future model. And, honestly, even if I did look at my parents as a pattern for how my life might go, that pattern would have turned out to be false–not in any huge things like love and happiness, but in subtle shifts that, obviously, work better for me than they would have for my folks.

All this is leading up to the fact that, here I am, once again, looking at where my life is and thinking, yeah, so…didn’t see this coming.

Last summer, about this time, I went back to work. Part-time and basically within school hours, but I still knew it would be an adjustment. Luckily, I like my job a lot, and, luckily, it’s definitely filling a hole that had bee in my life for a few years–a hole that needed something new and brain-stimulating-in-a-different-way to fill. And, honestly, during the school year, I didn’t see all that much difference.

Then summer came. It’s been a good one. I’m still happy to be working, and I got my awesome vacation, and weekends are treasures, but–once again–a “season” doesn’t feel like it did last year. Or five years before that. Or five years before…you know. It’s relaxing, yes, because–hey, no school for son–but it’s busier, duh! The motion feels steady and forward, like a set of wheels powered by kinetic movement. It used to feel like an oasis of long, slow, warm weeks, in which you barely noticed the turning of the clock, let alone the calendar. Neither is better. Boy, are they different.

It’s not like I’m surprised. If you’d laid out a plan for me decades ago, showing me that things would change, I’d have said, yeah, sure. Okay.  I think, though, that I would have also said something like, it’ll be easy/simple/straightforward/boring (pick your word), because I’ll be settled. I’ll have things figured out. I’ll understand life.

Mwahahaha!

And…thank goodness I would have been wrong.

Yes, life is more scattered, more chaotic than I thought it would be. Yes, there are changes coming–both for myself directly and through my son and husband–that I can’t predict, as much as the little control-freak-monster part of my personality might want to. Yes, there are days when I would happily swap the still-not-settled feeling for just a TASTE of boredom, when the unknown makes me anxious. But…oh, well. Whatever. If I had to live now with the “me” I would have visualized back then…?

YAWN.

I’m not here to shout, “Bring it on.” You can bet I’m hoping that most of the changes I’ll have to face will be good ones. But trade the sometimes-chaos for predictable and defined? For everything in its place and on my calendar? Nah. No way. Thanks, but no thanks.

I’m good.

Okay, this post has very little to do with writing and very little to do with actual science. You’ll find a tiny reference here and there to either, maybe, but don’t look for any big revelations. This is mostly a gratitude post.

Just under a year ago, I hit what I consider to be my middle-age. (Both of my grandmothers lived past 90, and both of them smoked when they were younger, so with age-inflation and my never having lit up a cigarette in my life, I have done some generous math and pushed things out a bit. Hey, optimism is a factor of long-life, right?)

Anyhoo…So far, this side of the middle-age line, along with the two decades or so before, seriously top the previous decades for growth, self-understanding, self-change and just all-around happiness. And this from someone who had a very good childhood.

But I’ve been thinking about one aspect of this getting older thing a little lately. Prompted, probably, by my re-realizing some things about myself as a writer and about my writing process. Things I thought I had figured out, yeah, decades ago. Things that, apparently, I’m having to relearn again, but in a different way–maybe in a more open way, maybe in a more flexible way. As in, let’s try this again and see what happens; not as in, I’ve got it now and nothing about it will ever change again. (Yeah, right.) Also, I’m currently letting my husband borrow my Kindle, to see if he wants one, and I downloaded a couple of books for him from the library–one on brain plasticity, a topic he loves.

Here’s the thing. I remember a time when all the talk about brain growth was dedicated to young brains. I remember when people, if not scientists, knew that brains stopped growing and changing after a certain–not that old–age. I remember how amazed people were when they found out that some teens don’t develop the long-term planning areas of their brain until, gasp!, in their twenties. And I remember reaching my forties and discovering–both by reading and by experience–that I could take active steps to set new and better patterns into my brain, that I could regroove it.

Do you want to talk relief? Do you want to go into all the ways that my brain and I worked together, in my youth, to keep my life narrow and limited? Do you want to know how magical it is that, these days, my brain and I can exchange peptalks that keep us from making those kinds of choices ? I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying it’s not painful. Hey, we’re talking about carving out new neural pathways. Of course, it’s tricky.

But it’s so possible.

It seems to me that people are talking about this like it’s a new discovery, like it took science to give us the truth. Or does it just seem new to me, because when I was younger I didn’t care so much about what an “older” brain was like? Go talk to my parents, and they’ll tell you about life changes, life hits, adapting, and taking on new adventures. Put my dad on a plane to another country; okay, just watch him put himself on that plane, and watch him eat whatever food is on the menu (yes, even rotted shark in Iceland) and ride whatever animal there is an opportunity to climb onto (yes, elephants and camels). This last trip, he got on a motorcycle, for the first time ever in what’s getting close to eight decades of life. (I know, not an animal, but he didn’t even know the driver!)

Why did I think, all those years ago, that I was set? That the person I was then was the person I would be forever? Is that how teens feel today? Is that what makes being young so tough?

Yes, sure, I could do a Cherry Drop (with help) off the monkey bars, and I could sleep till noon on Saturday without cracking an eyelid, and I could eat bowls and bowls of Lucky Charms without worrying about a sugar crash. And, during those years, I guess my brain had to be growing. But there were years when it felt like any movement it was making was circular, spinning and spinning in the same way of thinking.

I’ll take the now. I’ll take the stiffer joints and the semi-constant sleep-deprivation and the lower-carb diet. Because with that all seems to come the possibility of bumping the record needle out of its groove and seeing where it will land.

Frankly, brain plasticity rocks.

I received an email today. The email set me to a small task. The task helped me make a decision. The decision made me send the right email back. The path was pretty straightforward: cause-to-effect, cause-to-effect, cause-to-effect. Sequential. Linear. Except for this other little layer, a seed that got planted somewhere during the sequence and that germinated for the next hour or so. And then I was talking to my husband about. And I had a lightbulb moment.

The task involved pulling out some chapters of an old WIP and reading through a few pages. I had distance and time from the project, from all the words on the page. I had some nice surprises and, yes, some grim recognition of what wasn’t working. The thing was, though, I’d put a pen nearby without really thinking about it, and before I knew it, the pen was in my hand circling sentences and passages, crossing out lines, scribbling critiques and compliments in the margins. The decision meant that, for today at least, those notes aren’t needed. So I put the pen and paper down and went from decision to task.

Then my husband came home, I was describing the sequence, and…

O.M.G. I. LOVE. REVISION.

I know this. I so know this about me. For pete’s sake, it’s a big part of why I participate in a critique group and why I wrote The Writing & Critique Group Survival Guide, and it’s why I did freelance editing for many years.

I think I just didn’t know until today how much more I like it than first-drafting.

How clueless can I be?

The book I have been most successful in, both in getting it written and in getting it closed to agented & published, I wrote in a week. I’ve blogged about that process before–I did some very basic plotting and then sat down for five days, while my husband and son and brother-in-law took care of Life around me, and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. I didn’t take breaks at the end of a chapter, I had a word count for the day, and I reached it. And then I started again the next morning. And I did it again. And when I was done, I had…crap. I sat down and started reading, and it was painful and messy and I didn’t have to even read through the whole thing before I had my first big revelation: I’d given all the action and drive to my sidekick. My hero was observing and narrating, but he was also following. I sat down and started my second draft, in which–in every chapter–I shoved that MC to the forefront of the action and made him do things to make things happen. Sure, I made other, little changes along the way, but the focus of that revision was on one thing and one thing only. And that’s the draft I sent to my critique group.

I think I’d be really fooling myself if I said that I could write the first draft of my current WIP in a week. I’m back to work part-time and, well, I’m just in a different place than I was. I’m not going to dissect all the reasons.

What I’m going to do is try to push myself back into a speedy first-draft mode. I’ve talked about it and blogged about it, but for some reason, I haven’t started doing it again.

Yet.

I’m setting a goal: Complete first draft of this WIP by the end of the summer, by the day my son goes back to school.

I know this is doable. I know it’s doable by me. Sure, there are ifs, but, frankly, I’m feeling like dropping those ifs down the garbage disposal and flipping the switch.

This means something big for me. This means not sending chapters to my critique group until this draft is done. I’ve talked to so many writers who take this idea as a given; they accept that they can’t receive critiques on their first drafts. I’ve been looking at that idea a little more closely lately, and I’m starting to come around to it. The problem for me has been that I really, really, really love having people read my work. I love the idea that I’m sending it out, that I’ll get to hear people talk about it, brainstorm ideas, come home with more grist for my mill. I’m pretty good at knowing that the comments need to be reserved for later, for when I reach revision. But, somehow, I think wanting to do it that way has gotten me into accepting a slower pace from myself. I’ve slipped back into that idea that I can get my X number of chapters written, send them along, and then–you know–wait a bit and write a few more.

If I loved first-drafting, that might work for me. But I think what I’m doing is keeping myself  too long in the stage that is just so-so for me. It feels okay, but it doesn’t feel inspirational or motivational. I feel a little like the kid who gets all their home work done and…gets some more. I don’t hate first drafts, but…oh, revision.

It’s where I want to be.

So that’s the plan. The new process will be the old process, the one that…hello? WORKED.

And we’ll see where it takes me this time around.

It’s not Friday, so I’m not doing five, and it’s not Saturday, so I’m not doing six. Is Sunday seven? Even when it’s the Sunday of a three-day weekend, and Monday won’t really be Monday?

I could go on.

But, instead, just some thoughts in May.

• When you are feeling tired and rambly, your writing may very well turn out to be tired and rambly. Which is okay, because, hey, it’s still writing and the word “writing” is just code for “pre-revision.”
• I cannot complaint that I have been a little chilly this weekend, because–and may I say, GEEZ!–people in Vermont and other northern sites in the U.S. had SNOW this week. I’ll just put on socks and deal.
• Eucalyptus are still my favorite trees, a fact I was reminded of by a recent trip to Golden Gate Park. Yes, I have Eucalyptus trees less than 100 feet outside my office window at home, and, yes, I love them. But you do stop looking. Temporary relocation is a good thing.
• One of the biggest reasons summer vacation is so awesome is, because May can be, let’s just say: Quite. The. Challenge. Every year, I forget (blessed wimpy memory) how schools seem to have a great, demanding need to pile on and pile on and pile on. Next year, I swear, I am scheduling NOTHING in May. Nothing. Except perhaps the purchase of a new freezer, to be dedicated solely to the storage and supply of ice cream.
• If I’m really, really careful and use props, I can do the Pigeon pose in yoga again. Which I couldn’t for a while, after hurting my hip. Pigeon is good. Props are good.
• Piles on the shelves behind you are much less worrisome and intrusive than piles on your desk.
• Mindfulness. A path I’m really glad that I’m finally stepping on to. Yes, okay, sure, sometimes also a path that I wish were one of those motorized person-sized belts, like at the airport, that carry you wherever you want to go without any effort on your part. With, you know, a High-Speed setting. But, overall, just glad.
• I do believe, even with the weird weather, that Spring is definitely here and Summer is on its way. And that feels good.