Think, type, ponder, type, daydream, type, blog...

I've started my second novel over from scratch. Given I already had nearly 200 pages on the first draft, this is pretty scary. Well, scary in the sense that I now have six months to write and edit an entire book rather than just the second half, but on the other hand, I think it's going to go a lot faster than the other one was.

You just know when a manuscript is working and when it isn't. When it is, the ideas flow (for the most part), and things seem to fit together before you even try to engineer them that way. When it doesn't work, it's like trying to jam the proverbial square peg into a round hole. I've known for a long, long time that this manuscript was one giant square peg, but I kept hammering away, thinking I could chip the corners off and make it fit. Silly me. Even when you shear off the edges, you still essentally have a square--you've just mutilated it and tried to make it into something it's not, and that's hardly the way to treat a perfectly innocent story.

So today I opened a new document and started afresh. I think it's going well, but I keep getting caught up in the details of the original draft, and forget I don't have to make them all the same in this new version. So what if six years lapsed in the first one? That was an arbitrary number when I first wrote it, I don't have to keep it if I don't want to. Yet when I try to change it, it feels like I'm altering reality, like somehow the reader is going to know I fiddled with things, so instead of going with the flow of the new version, I keep stalling and procrastinating between paragraphs. I think I just need time after each new bout of writing to get used to the new story; hopefully it is slowly replacing the memory of the original.

We'll see what happens.....

Sometimes 100% still isn't enough

I think I may have mentioned this before: I often refer to myself as 80% Girl. I do not mean that the other 20% of me is not girl. I mean that I tend to only go 80% of the way on things. There are very few things in life for which I will go all-out, no-holds-barred. I lack the drive to complete things. It is a character flaw evident in the many half-completed art and craft projects that I've stumbled across lately--cross-stitch patterns with only one color done, sketches that are missing integral components, boxes of supplies purchased for projects that never even got started. I'm big on ideas and not so big on the follow-through.

Well, almost a year and a half ago I found something that I thought I'd go 100% into: a direct-sales jewelry company that some colleagues at school worked for. It did not appear at first glance to be a good fit for me: I wore the same four pairs of earrings over and over, donned a necklace only on special occasions, and always forgot to put my wedding and engagement rings on after taking them off. But I liked the idea of working for myself, of doing the shows, of running my own little business, and there had always been that bit of me that liked being all dressed up and pretty. It also didn't hurt to see up-close and first-hand the profits some of these women were making. I thought to myself, "I've gotten fairly decent returns in the past for my 80%--just think what I could do if I went all the way!"

So I did. I spent a lot of money, a lot of time, and a lot of effort to get my business off the ground. And when I did shows, I was great. I really was. I had so much fun, and people always told me that I was good at what I did. For once, I was pulling out all the stops, and I couldn't help but dream of how far I'd go with the company.

But I found out that sometimes giving 100% isn't enough, and there isn't anything you can do about it. There are always factors beyond our control, and it turned out that there were too many of them getting in my way. At first I felt really bad about myself--I'd always blamed my lack of success in certain areas to the fact that I held back that 20%, and while I'm sure I could have succeeded more than I did, there's no guarantee I'd have reached every goal I ever dreamed of setting for myself.

So this week I decided to stop being an active consultant. I'm not folding altogether--I'm just not pursuing shows and sales anymore. And really, it sucks. I'd been really excited at the potential the job offered, and like I said, I had a fantastic time. But eventually you realize that your output isn't balancing your returns, and there comes a time to cut your losses.

So yeah, it's bumming me out. But at the same time, I'm glad I figured this out, because someday my kid is going to come to me crying because he/she did absolutely everything possible and still didn't reach their goal, and I want to be able to say to them, "It's okay! You're not a failure!" And it's one thing to say that to someone, and another thing to have lived it and speak from experience.

Oh really?

When I spellchecked my "Mysteries of the Freeway" entry, blogger.com suggested I replace "serenading" with "cremating."

???

Mysteries of the Freeway

Roadtripped with my mom yesterday to California's heartland--Bakersfield! Over the infamous Grapevine we went, getting caught in some nasty rain and emerging in the other side into a weird hybrid of Midwestern farmland and California mountains. Had it not been for the rocky horizon, we could have been on the highway I used to take from my Chicago-suburb home to U of Illinois--nothing but cornfields and the occasional house. Beautiful land, though.

On the way back, the I-5 took us through the cement jungle of Los Angeles, and it was there that we began to contemplate the Mysteries of the Freeway. With Carole King and Peter Gabriel serenading us, we discussed the conundrums of the highway:

1. With a shoulder merely a few feet wide and the majority of California drivers being borderline homicidal, how does graffiti get onto the side walls? How does one get to the side of the road without getting hit, or at least witnessed by the hundreds of drivers careening down the freeway every minute, since the I-5 is NEVER empty in LA? And then how does one have the audacity to sit there in plain view of thousands and tag the wall with their nonsensical letters?

2. Loosely connected to #1: how does graffiti get onto the overpasses? For the writing to be right-side-up to those of us on the road, the taggers must be writing upside-down, and in some cases, hanging from something, given how far down they write. Again, how do they do this without being seen? I think I'd notice someone hanging over the bridge I was about to drive beneath.

3. Despite my best intentions and most tenderloving attention, I can't get plants to grow. My thumb is beyond black. And yet, against these walls along the freeway that are miraculously graffittied, there are the most beautiful flowers and bushes and vines. What are they spiking their Miracle-Gro with to combat the exhaust these poor plants are constantly battling? Heck, half the time there aren't even sprinklers!

4. This one can also be cross-posted to the "Mysteries of the Grocery Store" list: why does it NEVER FAIL that, the minute I move into the lane that has been passing me at the speed of lightning, the fast lane grinds to a total halt, and my previous lane moves into warp speed?

5. How is it that the most deadlocked traffic can untangle and loosen for absolutely no reason at all? For that matter, why does it get deadlocked for no reason in the first place? It is as though 20% of the cars disappear off the road and no one notices; they just realize, "Hey, things are finally moving!" Buy WHY? WHY are they finally moving? WHAT HAPPENED??

We have no answers. The more we contemplated, the more confused we became. But as the three-laned potholed and littered LA portion of the I-5 gave way to the six-laned clean and smooth Orange Country stretch (gotta love Disney money), we shook our heads and gave up our ponderings and rocked out instead to the live version of "In Your Eyes." I guess some things will never be understood. They are, as my husband would say, mysteries wrapped in enigmas wrapped in bacon. Yum.

I got used!

I spoke at my old school's 8th grade chapel this morning. I've known about this for months, yet I waited until this week to really polish up my talk, which I thought was going to be a beefed-up version of a talk I did for the elementary kids earlier in the year. But when I tried to fix it up, I couldn't seem to do it. All these other thoughts--about how they're about to go into the big bad world of high school, how so many of them have been in this small Christian school for their entire school lives, how some of them, even after all the Bible memorization and chapels, still aren't Christians--kept invading my head as I'd try to work on that talk, and it just seemed so inconsequential when they were facing such huge changes. So finally, last night, I wrote a new talk, styling it like a prayer. "God, you know how I'm supposed to do this 8th grade chapel Thursday morning? Well, it's Wednesday night, and I still don't know what to talk about..." Then I devoted a little time to hashing out all the fears and concerns and desires I had for these kids, some of whom I feel rather connected to as they were in my very first class, and laid it out as though I was asking God to tell me which topic to pursue for the presentation. It was way shorter than the talks I usually do, and even after I was finished with it I felt like it was a cop-out. But that's all I seemed to have, so what was I going to do?

Well, God did His thing and it turned out incredible. First of all, the worship set was longer than usual, 5 songs, and the teacher that led it, Doug Harrison, chose the most awesome songs and brought the kids from fun, upbeat worship into contemplative, soul-seeking worship. Then I got up and almost lost it. My emotions have been on ultra-high lately, and between that worship set, the knowledge that my little babies were going to high school, and my fragile emotional state, I had to fight not to burst into tears for the entire ten minutes of my talk. (Actually, there was a rather substantial pause between my opening, "Dear God," and the next line, because I couldn't get myself together.) But I really felt like God was super-charging my words, and that it was going really well, and all was great until the closing line, and then I lost it again.

But then something cool happened. I just started talking. All I could say at first, in a strangled whisper as my throat closed with tears, was "God loves you." And then words kept coming, mostly reiterations and restatements of things I'd said in my talk, but some new stuff, too, and while I don't know if it was my words or the fact that I was sitting there in front of them with tears streaming down my face, I know I definitely had their attention. Heck, I think some of the teachers even got a little teary-eyed.

I wrapped it up somehow; I don't even remember what I said, but when it was over the principal, a really stellar guy, told me it was the perfect thing for them to hear. Some of the teachers told me that, too. I don't know if it really sank in--these are 8th graders, you know--but I know God did something, and as embarrassing as it was to sit in front of them and weep, it's a small price to pay if it planted a seed in someone.