Balance

Such a difficult thing to manage, yet so essential. And easy to forget!

The responses to my last post made me think. Although I have found it useful sometimes to have a primary focus for a month, like last January when I did so much on the HBP (I have done some since then, but I feel as if I achieved more that month than in the whole rest of the year! It may even be true…) with things like health and my long term novel writing goal, I think it has to be far more important to gain some kind of sustainable balance.

I am in charge of the timing for my novel writing goal, so I don’t have to neglect my health for it to work! I did feel I had to if I was to get a thesis written in the timescale allocated. But that is precisely why I had to give it up. So then why even remotely consider doing that to myself if I don’t have to? Am I mad? No, don’t answer that…

So I need to try and find a balance which works for me. No more waiting to get well, I need to work at that. But not too hard or I wear myself out, seriously, if you didn’t read the spoons article, go back and read it if you don’t understand. I have a ridiculously small amount of energy compared to normal people. I’d love to be able to walk every day, but I have found that if I have a walk two days in a row my knees swell up like melons, which is not fun. We went for a little walk on Saturday, no more than half an hour and not fast either, but I had to have a nap when we got home and was too tired and grumpy yesterday to do anything. We had been out on Friday too, so I guess I just overdid it. 😦

But I do love going for walks, so I am not about to give up! I just need to be careful to get the balance right.

It’s a beautiful sunny day today, but I am enjoying it from inside, which is sensible. I ought to work on the novel if I’m not going out, but here I am writing a blog post instead… Of course, that is still writing 🙂

And the novel plot still twists and untwists in my brain as I do other things.

A random picture of Pebble being cute 🙂

Letting go and moving on

Not from the blog, don’t panic 🙂 In fact, more frequent posting is one of the things I hope to move on to! And I’ve set the bar for that vaguely worded ambition nice and low since I haven’t posted since August.

No, what I have had to let go of is my PhD.

I am not going to write a thesis.

I am not going to be Dr Runologist. (Although I am still a proper genuine authentic runologist 😀 because my supervisor said so, so there. After all, I did find knotted runes! Twice!!)

This has by no means been an easy decision, although it feels somehow inevitable. I have been off sick from it for 2 years so have had plenty of time to get used to not actually working on it. Yes, I can’t quite believe that either, being off sick for 2 years! It was good of them to let me keep extending rather than forcing me to stop dithering and go already, although my husband might not agree. He prefers to have decisions made, where I prefer to keep things open.

Nonetheless it has still be traumatic and not at all easy to let go of.

I knew when I made my last extension of the time off that it was the last time I could do that, so at the beginning of January I should be writing it again. I tried. Oh yes, I did try, I didn’t just bottle out and give up. I opened up the files, read through what I had done, marvelled at how rubbish it was, made plans, considered the best course onwards, panicked, got stressed, felt overwhelmed, tried harder, looked at different files which were more promising, failed to figure out how to build on those, worked myself up more, despaired, phoned my Dad and had a good talk, went to see my supervisor and eventually after several very difficult days gave in.

Some paths are too difficult.

So that’s it. The end.

Not entirely of course, I am still a runologist after all! I shall still go to the odd talk and conference, I shall try to write an article or two. The university has links with local schools and I have volunteered to teach them runes as part of their study of the Vikings, which I have done on one occasion and was great fun, they picked them up fast and loved writing secret messages to each other 🙂 I might even try teaching adult education and doing after dinner talks. I have done a couple of those which went down very well and I got paid for. My powerpoint skillz rock 😀

I also intend to start another blog to share some of the work I have done but not written up. It needs to be more professional looking than this casual chatty one, with a proper plan and a serious purpose (but not boring!) so I need to work on it for a while before making it public, but when I do I shall link to it from here. I might still talk about runology here of course, a blog called Knotrune with no runes would be an odd place. Er, OK so it’s already an odd place, but I mean odd in a not quite right way 😛

But that is not the extent of my writing ambitions for this year, oh no. This year I am going to finish writing a novel! I have started several, and it doesn’t matter which one I finish, but I am jolly well going to finish one, or die trying! 🙂

Other paths beckon.

That is my minimum novel writing goal, finishing a first draft. If I really get going I would like to finish a first draft in a few months (if I use a half done one it shouldn’t be any harder than NaNoWriMo!) then maybe if it’s good enough see about the next step, publication!

Is that a big scary goal or what?! 😀 But I shall be happy if I end up somewhere between having a whole first draft and a published book. After all, I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself after having seen how wonderfully well I handle that! Which is why I have the minimum goal as well as the big scary one.

After all, you never know what else a year holds. I do also want to leave some space and time for crafting, crochet and other hobbies. And of course for blogging!

All photos are my own, I don’t mind if you pin them.

An excellent post on the need for fairly traded chocolate (and I am working on resuming regular posting of my own… but I keep coming across good stuff to reblog)

year-struck

I like chocolate dark, three taste buds shy of bitter. One small bite and I start getting messages from my brain saying, “Thank you,” and “More, please.” As food, it delights my tongue, and as medicine, it soothes my brain.

 

I have liked chocolate since I was a small child and discovered that the Easter bunny laid small chocolate eggs in my Easter basket. I later learned that rabbits do not lay eggs; they do, however, extrude something that is eerily similar to little chocolate pellets. I lived with that disturbing juxtaposition of ideas for years, but eventually got over it and continued trying to consume my allotted 11.64 pounds of chocolate each year. That’s how much each American averages. The Swiss eat almost twice that. Clearly, I was born in the wrong country.

 

 

As an adult I have lived a relatively undisturbed life as far as…

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Snowbow

It was a bright sunny morning, much like today, except it was snowing. My Dad suggested my sister and I might like to go see the snowbow which ought to be behind the house.

We ran in thrilled excitement! Imagine it! Rainbows are beautiful, snow is beautiful, a snowbow must be beautiful squared!

We craned out of the back window, searching everywhere.

No snowbow.

Of course not, it was this day too many years ago to mention.

Best April Fool ever!

I’d love to accompany this post with a photo, but of course there’s no such thing as a snowbow. Only… it turns out the joke is on him, at least a little bit, because there is such a thing as an ice blink rainbow. But it’s not as pretty as the ones we imagined 🙂

I love these photos of natural ice sculptures, thought I’d share them. (And now you know I’m still here… I do intend to write a post soon…)

draw and shoot

Our temporary “summer” has been replaced by more normal seasonal temperatures.
A windy breath of -10° c overnight drove the waves and spray up on to the sloped shore of this bay resulting in a strange and magical landscape when I came upon it yesterday. Not that long ago the ice fishing huts resided in this wide bay.

The perfectly ice-upholstered and fringed rocks along the shore.

Surreal spaces…

Although this place is quite removed from the city and looks idyllic and peaceful there is a strange juxtaposition of bird song and intermittent rapid gunfire from the nearby rifle range. It all feels rather surreal as I wade through the water in high rubber boots; a strange shore bird among chandelier skirted trees.



Shirley’s Bay, Ottawa River

All images © Karen McRae

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Never reblogged before, but wanted to share this. Why is nice so underrated? Nice is good 🙂 I need to be nicer.

Bluebird Blvd.

 
 

 
 

I was so bummed at my accidental rudeness that when I saw her smiling face at the window, I apologized for not using my best manners and said that my blood sugar was low.

What happened next floored me. This woman— this angel of a woman— said, “Sugar, just hold on one second, I’m going to get you some brownies. And you eat those right away.”

As I was eating the brownies she gave me, she said, “Sugar, here’s a little lemonade with a little iced tea, it should put you to rights, my darling.”

Now, I’m polite. I’m über-polite. I’m turbo-sized polite, in fact, and sometimes, sometimes people even call me sweet. But, I have never, ever in all my days been as warm and good as this woman is on her worst day.

As I was sipping the special drink she made me, I…

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Behind with blog, but not with life :)

Sorry I’ve not updated for over a week, of course I mean to and then it just slips by. I have been excited about several things which I wanted to share, but didn’t get to it and then I wanted to update the HBP and missed that, which meant I felt I ought to do that before a post on a different subject. But now I just decided it’s better to just write something and then fill in the bits I missed later.

It’s a bit like my less than stellar attempts at writing a diary. As a child I would make it my new year resolution, so I have many old diaries with the first week of January filled in and not much else. The fullest one is one I got halfway through the year so I didn’t feel the gradually increasing pressure of the missed days building up. Because there were so many missed days, I just started, went back and put some of what I remembered and didn’t worry if I missed days because it was so patchy anyway.

I intend to do a proper HBP update for what I managed in January, with pictures, but for now I shall just say that I got further than I expected to in the bigger goals of moving furniture around and increasing storage, but didn’t quite get the finish of everything messy put away in the two rooms I was focussing on.

Which meant that my start to February, month of creativity, didn’t get off to a flying start as my creativity spaces were still not cleared 😦 But I did manage to clear enough of my table to make a start today, again, a proper post with pics should follow at some point 🙂

I have a bit of a cold, so I don’t want to be sat here too long, but hopefully now I’ve broken the block I can post at my leisure without feeling guilty for being late or pressured into writing a particular topic.

I’m excited about creativity February – I have lots of ideas and cool stuff to play with! As long as I do so. Between feeling a bit blah with this cold and Tim having less work so he wants to go out which can be fun but makes me tired I expected to have done more. It’s also surprisingly hard to make a start on something new. But that is another post for another day.

I’m a winner! NaNoWriMo 2011

So I succeeded in my goal to write 50000 words of a new novel in the month of November. It feels good.

This is my third time and my third win 🙂

I’m happy about that, but I’m not just showing off. I thought I would share my thoughts on why I find NaNo a useful challenge, what I’ve learnt from it, what I’ve got out of each time and how the experience differed. And hey, that might be a long blog post, or I might cut it down, but, err, well, I’ve kind of turned off the inner editor so I’ll try not to ramble too much!

The first time I did NaNo was in response to being advised I should by the tutor on a writing course. I was quite resistant to the idea. No way could I write that much that fast! It had taken me years to get past chapter 3 for goodness sake! And I was already working on a novel but NaNo wants you to make a new one. You can be a rebel of course, but the first time I do something I prefer to do it properly!

So I checked out the site. Ooh, pretty forums… I think I was lost at the forums. I enjoy forums. (Or should that be fora?) They remind me of newsgroups, waaaay back at the dawn of the internet…

Anyway, I wanted to play, but I wasn’t sure I could really spare the time. I had a PhD to write. And we had a family crisis on. But maybe that was why it seemed so tempting, escaping into a fictional world where I had complete charge. I decided I would write fiction in the time I would usually read fiction, so for that month I gave up reading novels and on the morning of Nov 1 I signed up and began!

In order to justify the time spent writing anything other than my thesis, I decided to write a story set in 12th century Norway, in a little settlement in the fjords, with a stavechurch, and each chapter would be about a different runic inscription written on it. I used real runic inscriptions from real stavechurches, I just made up the story behind how it got onto my invented church. It was great fun!

I learned so much from that first time. About my field of study – it was so useful to spend some time imagining the world they really lived in, their day to day concerns, what might lie behind each text. Also to discover little areas about which I just didn’t know enough, like how many people would be in a bishop’s retinue when he consecrated a church. So it was great for my studies, as a new perspective.

Also it was enormously helpful for my confidence as a writer, both of fiction and a thesis, that I could write so much! The most I had written previously was 15000 words of my MA dissertation (on Self-Referential Runic Inscriptions) and 12 chapters of a novel at maybe 3k each, if I recall right. And I could meet the goal. I even finished a couple of days early.

But as soon as I reached 50k I stopped dead, halfway through a chapter and I’ve never gone back to it. Oh I’ve read it a few times – I got it printed as a book (with Blurb, who I recommend), which made me happy to see, as a reward to myself for having done it! But the poor characters are still dangling where I left them…

Also the forums taught me heaps. I had no idea how to write a novel really, but I found books and websites there which have been so helpful. Snowflake, Storyfix and Kristen Lamb are worth checking out.

Last year I wanted to do it again because it had been so great. But I really really couldn’t spare the time from my thesis, because my upgrade was due. So I used the motivational aspect and the feeling of community, a bunch of folks working towards a difficult shared goal, and Nanoed my thesis!

I still think this sounds crazy. Actually, I think it would be. Because I very quickly realised that it is not possible to write 50k of a thesis in a month, and it was killing me trying! I had to compromise. What the hey, I was a rebel anyway, because what I was writing was no novel. I included my process journal for the month too. I think I ended up with about 15k being thesis words, which was great actually because 15k was what I was supposed to have for the upgrade. It’s just that there’s a universe of difference between a first draft and polished ready-for-publication academic writing. But that was for the coming months. You can’t edit nothing!

A process journal is a really useful tool anyway, so it was fair to include it. It’s where I recorded my thoughts and plans, how I felt about it (a vital vent!) and a way to problem solve how to proceed.

And that time I couldn’t just ditch my writing at the end of the month. No, I had to push on through December, cancelling Christmas (apart from I did go to the carol service and to my parents for the actual day).

And in the middle of January I reached burnout and had to go off sick, diagnosed with a stress condition. As I began this blog during that time (why? why did I think I needed another writing challenge right then? I think I needed an outlet…) I suppose it must chart some of that, were I to go back and read it. I will one day, maybe in January.

And so we come full circle, to this year’s Nano. As I’ve hardly written much this year – this blog for the first half of the year, a few poems and a my crochet journal, I felt it would be a good way to try and rediscover the joy of writing. I believed it was important towards my recovery to set and achieve this goal, in particular.

It worked. I enjoyed it. It was hard some days to make myself write, and I’m surprised to say I hardly touched the forums this year. But I wrote a fun and very self indulgent story. The best day, my character woke up in this brilliant fantasy place, went down the waterfall water slide to swim in a pool with giant waterlilies, then had breakfast in the garden and hiked in the forest by a stream, where she sat on a mossy rock and crocheted.

I actually had a brilliant day the day I wrote that too! I think it put me in nearly as good a mood as if that had been my morning!

So I’ve learned that I can still achieve this goal. Hopefully I’m getting a bit better, as I don’t think I’d have even begun, let alone finished, had it been much sooner in the year.

And if I edit it veeery heavily and work on it some more, there is actually enough of an idea in there that I can play with it more if I want to. I wonder if I will this time? Or will those characters also wait in limbo…

I’m not sure it matters, because I have rediscovered my joy in writing, so I know I’ll write something, whether it’s this one or one of the many others jostling for attention. The goal gets closer, the more I practice and the more I learn.

And that’s 1267 words, which is only 400 less than the daily word count goal for Nano, so I’ll stop there. If I was really kind, I’d cut this post in two, but it’s late and I just want to finish. I hope you don’t mind. OK, I really do need to stop now! What do you think of Nano?

Slightly naughty silly fun!

Today we decided, my husband and I, to go out and do something fun, silly and slightly naughty.

We went to a garden centre.

Which must immediately sound dull, middle aged and not at all silly, naughty or fun. You could decide at this point that my blog must be beyond tedious and navigate away before being bored rigid by hearing about bedding plants or decking. But we didn’t go to buy bedding plants or decking.

We did begin in the cafe, as I had not yet had lunch. I was pondering the menu, considering the various sensible options, but in fact they stopped serving lunch at 2pm (ridiculously early! It was only 20 past too.) thus forcing me to the first slightly naughty action. For my lunch I had lemon meringue pie and a hot chocolate, with marshmallows. It was very nice and not at all sensible 🙂 Tim had a latte and a mince pie. He’d already had soup at 12.

Then it was time for the silly fun we had come for!

Hide and seek 😀

We both have fond (and distant…) memories of playing this as kids. I was excellent at hiding as I tend to think outside the box. (Or should that be inside the box?) I once balanced on the window sill and wrapped myself in the curtains. Tim seems to have played the more active running around variant more often, but ours was just that one person hunted while the others hid and stayed still. When they were found they joined the hunt. I was usually found last.

Since I can’t run we made a compromise between our two versions. The hider could stay put, but they didn’t have to. Catching was by sight. Toilets were not allowed as a place to hide, for obvious reasons!

We should have made more rules, such as limiting hiding to within the actual garden centre. I did wonder whether he’d hide in the car (he did). But we both played slightly dirty 😀 as I hid in a part which had become disused and may or may not have been somewhere customers were supposed to go…

If I was as limber as in my youth, there were limitless options! However, even if I could have squeezed myself into that damp cramped urn, I am now far too grown up to relish the thought of hours in an uncomfortable position, needing the loo, getting cold and risking being locked in if he gave up!

I think Tim cheated. Quite apart from the car and the fact I suspect he mostly spent the time wandering around rather than actually hiding, he admitted he had been in the toilet at one point when he was supposed to be hiding. He claimed he needed it. But as I recall that’s just part of the game!

Well, it made us laugh, so it was well worth it 🙂 Next time we’re considering Ikea…

It’s been a while

Um, what must it be, 3 months since I wrote a post? Sorry! And I have no idea how it will be until the next one. I just thought I’d let all my loyal readers know I’m still alive! Although some of you know that because even though I’ve not been posting, I’ve still been reading blogs and making the occasional comment.

I think the break has been good, really. Trying to post every day was too much under the circumstances. But typical for me to try! Especially in unsuitable circumstances 🙂

I am currently undertaking a challenge I am more likely to succeed at (not to jinx it!) but I have done it before and am ever so slightly ahead, at 32583 words so far this month. Yes, I’m doing NaNoWriMo again – this time much more sensibly with a novel, not my thesis! I’m just trying to rediscover the joy of writing. Although my story does have some parts which just might work in an actual book, it would need a LOT of editing! But more importantly, I’m having fun with it 😀

I do love NaNo 🙂 The first time I did it was 2 years ago and the discovery that I can write that much, and get past chapter 3 as well, was a huge boost to my writing confidence. Even if I did stop dead as soon as I reached 50k and broke off mid chapter… I also discovered from the forums (fora?) many useful sources to help with writing, books, blogs or whatever. Maybe one day I’ll actually complete a first draft! And then edit it. And then fail to become a millionaire…

Good thing I never planned to be a millionaire.

I crocheted loads last month, but have hardly picked up my hook and yarn this month. I blame NaNo of course! But since many readers of this blog might not be crochet fans, I have plans to roll out a whole new crochet blog. It is nearly all designed and ready to go, I just need to write a couple of posts for it. I think it would be good if I can manage to post once a week here and once a week there. But no promises. I’m not ready for concrete plans yet.

Anyway, I think that’s enough from me for now. Please leave a comment and say hi if you feel like it 😀