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Month: March 2021

Progress Starts with Writing It Down

It’s been a good bit more than six months since my last Organizational Freakout. (Listed and linked in this, the previous post.) This time, however, I’m not starting a new system. Nope. Not this time. This time, I am reporting that a system I already started, expanding what was my bullet journal with elements of Control Journal (Flylady) and Getting Things Done (GTD) into what I now call my Flight Manual. Because I’m gonna freaking FLY, y’all. I am! Ahem. Yes, I know, you’ve heard it before. But this time I didn’t announce my attempting a new system because I have tried and tried and tried before, and failed and failed and failed again (though a little better each time!) This time, though, it’s still working. I am so excited by that fact, you have no idea. One thing that’s making it work, this time, is that I’m actually looking at it. A lot! I have a look at my goals every morning, rotating through the week, and then on Saturday I review the week and Sundays I look forward at what’s coming. So each morning as I do my 750words, I may not ONLY ramble about the goal of the day, but I definitely do some rambling on it. Turns out that “oh, I should do something about that sometime” is a lot less useful than “okay, first step is this, I will do that on this day, and the next step is this and I will schedule that for this…

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Life…One Year After Lockdown

So today is the one-year anniversary of our lockdown in Michigan. My husband was laid off from his job for two months. I was still able to work, as I work from home and in publishing, and publishing keeps going on, which is a good thing. I had a unique perspective on this entire thing because there was literally no break for me. I’ve worked this entire time, and there was no worry about when I’m going back, what would happen when I did, if my co-workers would be sick, if there’d be new protocols in place, etc. That stress did not happen for me, thankfully. It did happen for hubby, and it was pretty rough. Everything was rough. Him being home, while nice, was a bit different and required some adjustment to my routine. Having to do the unemployment thing — he couldn’t even register for weeks and weeks because too many people were filing in Michigan. Did your state have this issue, too? Once he did, he had to do the online certification thing, which was new to him. Thankfully, I knew how, being that I’d been laid off just three years prior. So I was able to guide him. And of course there were the changes to life in general. No more going out to eat. No takeout either in those early days. He couldn’t fish, which was one of his favorite things to do. It was too dangerous to be out there. We got all of…

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Defunct Writing Challenges

You know what’s interesting? The way March seems to be embedded in the online writing community’s consciousness as a month for revision. This is because there was NaNoEdMo (National Novel Editing Month) once upon a time. All versions of EdMo I can find are defunct, with 2019 being the most recent any seem to be active, but even before that, it wasn’t that big. Yet, it has stuck, and it seems like almost every writing community I’ve ever belonged to turns to revision in March. I don’t really have a point, it’s just interesting to me. How pervasive the challenge was for not really ever being that big of a deal. Writing challenges come and go, and even ones that stick around change over time. The NaNoWriMo that exists today is very different from the one I did back in 2003. Adapt or die, I guess. As for me, I never seem to be on revision or editing in March, and I’ve certainly have never been able to finish an entire revision in a month. Man, that’s the dream. It is interesting to me, the way challenges age or don’t. They either get more people every year or dwindle down until they die, or sometimes the people running them don’t feel like doing it any more, or sometimes something bigger or shinier comes along and overshadows them. I still don’t have a point, except perhaps that I like writing challenges–the idea that doing something as a group makes you more…

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Last Chance to Read…

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting tired of staring at all the same stuff in my house, where I’ve spent a lot of time in the past year. (Canada has designated this March 11 as a Day of Observance and reflection. Where I live, most things shut down between March 13 and 17 last year. It’s been both a very long year and a very short one, in different ways.) A mixture of heavy workload and pandemic depression/anxiety have meant slow progress on the decluttering front, but I am getting there, gradually. The most recent success was handing off to a neighbour some unopened condiments that I bought in the Great Shopping Panic of 2020…they hadn’t expired yet, but I knew we wouldn’t get through them before they did, and my neighbour was as happy to take them as I was to get rid of them. Here at TDP, we’re also doing some virtual housecleaning, taking down the oldest of our short works. The short stories and serials that we posted as freebies in 2014, 2015, and 2016 will be unpublished at the end of March. That will allow us to resell them to other markets (as reprints) or reissue them as ebooks as individual authors. That means you have until March 31 to read: my fantasy serial Still Waters Run Deep Erin’s horror story The Contract Kit’s creation myth When the World Was Young and more! If you want to read them all, start from here and…

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The Breath-Stealer

by Siri Paulson In a dark pandemic winter our breath is trapped in our lungs with fear of the breath-stealer “Look for the helpers” sounds stale by now “Let’s talk” sounds laughable “Thank you” will never be enough we cling to “Protect the vulnerable” but it’s a long, long road each of us walking alone or in tiny groups, bereft of the touches and smiles and tiny moments that made up our lives, once A day in the neighbourhood, going for brunch with a loved one, chatting with shopkeepers, strolling home along the sidewalk our breath easy, relaxed… A spin on the dance floor, a community moving together, stomping and twirling as one, smiling into others’ faces, breathing each other’s air as the band plays on the stage… A hug from a loved one, family or a dear friend, catching a wink or a gaze, sharing a plate across the table, a visit to a home where we are welcome, a head massage or a playful poke, breathless because we’re laughing so hard, casual platonic intimacy… A flight across the globe, an adventure away from home, new air entering our bodies as we breathe deep new smells sounds tastes sights, to carry back inside us, expanded… We never dreamed of a day when we’d lose all of those at once the little things and the big ones, crowds and theatres and stadiums casual shopping, casual hugs, bare faces and free breaths, lives more expansive than we knew… Now we are…

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