October Challenge

October is going to be an incredibly busy month, both at work and at home. So of course I want to set a challenge for myself to work on my writing and creativity in general. There's a reason I'm doing this. It's easy for me to get caught up in the grind, focusing on all the items on my to-do list, and forget the reasons I do what I do. It's also easy to take what I love for granted when I get in this mode. So this creativity challenge is a way for me to connect with writing, making things (whatever they may be), and living a creative life.

So this month I will try to do something that feeds that creative impulse every day. It might be taking a picture, visiting a museum, writing, cooking, whatever seems like a good idea.

To start me off, I will write a little about my fiction works in progress. If I can sneak in some time over the month, I'll work on these stories.

DISOBEDIENCE

This is a short story about a teenage girl and her mother who have run away from an abusive father/husband. They flee to South Texas and they have to decide what to do when the father finds them and asks them to come home.

Status: I submitted this to a journal several months ago, and the editors have asked for a revision. I'm taking a look at it, and I have a call scheduled with the editor at the end of the month to discuss it. Amount of revision is currently unknown. Depending on our conversation, I will decide whether or not to rewrite and to what degree.

THE END; THE BEGINNING

A strange story about the afterlife, though it's no afterlife I've ever heard of or read about. My main character is an atheist who finds herself frustrated by the environment she finds herself in. She doesn't believe in God, but her story has not ended with her death so she has to reconsider what she believes. 

Status: I've done a few drafts. I've gotten some feedback from readers and need to incorporate the changes. My guess is that this would take an afternoon or less to get to the next draft. Not a ton of work that needs to happen on this one, just need to make the time. 

DREAM HOUSE

This is a ghost/haunted house story set in San Antonio. I say story, but it's really a novelette. It's about 17,000 words.

Status:  This is currently the project I'm most excited about, but it's a little lower in the queue due to the amount of revision that needs to happen. I let Nate, my mom, and my mother-in-law read it. Now I know what's confusing, what readers are likely to have questions about, and have figured out a couple of scenes I need to add.

Here's hoping this month is a productive one!

 

Utopia, Texas

We took a little time off this past week to relax and spend time together as a family. We had talked about going somewhere cooler—Seattle or Colorado, maybe—but in the end I didn’t feel like getting on a plane with Liam yet. He’s at a difficult age for traveling in confined spaces. He’s old enough to be mobile and vocal and loud, but not yet old enough to understand that he has to stay put for a flight. Also he’s not old enough to be distracted by movies or books. He probably would have been okay, but in the end we decided to keep things easy and headed down to Utopia, Texas, about a three-hour drive south of Austin.

We stayed at Utopia on the River and it was pretty ideal for small children. We had a very short walk down to the river, where we explored rocks and fallen trees and water. Zoe loved to “go on adventures,” and Liam enjoyed throwing rocks into the river. For hours. We also had access to the pool and hot tub, and we alternated between the river and the pool almost every day.

There was a lot of “wildlife”—some domesticated and some wild—that the kids enjoyed seeing. Tons of hummingbirds, a flock of turkeys, horses, deer, Monarch butterflies (I think they’re about to start migrating south), and bats. The kids loved watching the hummingbirds and deer eat right outside our door.

We also took a day trip to Garner State Park. We started off the morning with a hike and probably chose a trail that was too ambitious for Liam. Many parts of the Crystal Cave trail were steep and challenging for us, and we had to carry Liam at the same time. We ran into two different families with older kids who said the trail was too much for them, so next time we’ll probably pick one of the easier ones. At least until Liam is a little surer on his feet. (It was challenging for Zoe, but she loved it.) We spent the rest of the afternoon swimming in the Frio River, and we had a hard time pulling Zoe away.

One night we headed to the Frio Bat Flight where you can see the second-largest bat colony in the world. It was strangely calming to hear their wings and chirps coming out of the cave in waves. Similar to waves on the ocean (as strange as that might sound).

 

We had some debate about whether we stayed one day too long. But I’m off the opinion that you should get a little bit bored on your vacation. That means you’ve truly had time to relax and unwind.

And now, back to the real world.

 

Length and genre: what the heck is going on with my fiction?

I've written long and short; fiction and non; for publication/pay and for personal pleasure. Before kids, almost all of my fiction ideas were novel length. Before Zoe, I wrote a novel that I ended up shelving. After she was born and while she was an infant, I focused on short freelance work. Between Zoe and Liam I wrote the first draft of a second novel. But since his birth, I haven't been able to pick it back up. These work patterns are all very much tied to sleep.

Liam was born almost 18 months ago now (sheesh). Since then, I have written a few shorter pieces. Funny, because I hadn't written short stories since college. But at this stage in life (read: sleep deprivation), I don't have the attention span to hold all of the narrative threads of a novel in my brain. 

Some people have kids who sleep through the night consistently at six or eight weeks. I do not have this mythical kind of child. My kids start sleeping through the night more around 18-24 months. I wasn't a great sleeper either. My parents had to drive me around to get me to fall asleep until I was four or five years old, so relatively speaking, things could be worse. This isn't me whining about my kids' sleeping patterns. It just is what it is. My kids don't sleep, which means I don't either, at least not while they're infants/toddlers. There's a reason I wrote a draft of a novel after Zoe was two, and I haven't been able to pick it back up since her brother was born.

So I adapt and look for ways to keep writing. Not as frequently or as steadily as I'd like, but I'll take what I can get. I've written a flash fiction piece about the last two speakers of a dying language who refuse to speak to each other (around 300 words); a story about Santa Claus that was published last year (around 5,500 words); a short story about the afterlife (about 5,300 words); and an essay about art and writing (2,000 words). 

My short fiction tends toward the longer side. Many writer-types put the upper limit of a story at about 7,500 words. Recently, I got an idea about a haunted house, and I figured it would become one of my typical 5,000 words or so pieces. Longish, but still in the realm of the short story. So I started writing. And now the story is pulling a Jack and the bean stalk on me and sprouting. I'm at 10,500 words with about two scenes left to write. I say that, but I've thought I have only two scenes left to write a few times, and then I keep thinking of something else to add. This word count puts me firmly into novelette territory (the strange and interesting land between a short story and a novella).

The length started scaring me a little, and then I got excited. My stories are growing again! Maybe this means I will have the brain power to work on the novel soon. So my goal is to wrap up a draft or a few of this novelette (or whatever it ends up being), and then I'll dip my toes back into my second novel and see what happens. 

The other interesting factor (to me and probably only to other writers, if then) is that for most of my writing life, I considered myself a "mainstream" or a "literary" writer. My novel/stories were realistic and about things like relationships, life decisions, conflict, etc. However, my recent ideas are all genre-oriented. I guess they'd be considered speculative fiction. In the past couple of years (which coincides with my time as a mom), I've tackled Santa, the afterlife, and now a haunted house. The novel I want to pick up again is horror-ish. I have no idea what this means, but I'm having fun with the change.

Yard Transformation

When we bought our house, we had a 150-year-old (or so) oak tree that provided shade for most of our cul-de-sac. This is what our side yard looked like when we bought our house.

 

 

Our neighborhood has been hit hard by oak wilt, and the previous owners treated our oak for it. Sadly, it didn't work. The tree died and we had to have it cut down. As a result, that area was in full sun and the ground cover got fried over the long, hot summer. So then we had an ugly dead zone.

 

We called Zach from Yard Farm Austin, and this is what he and his crew did.

 

We're facing the opposite direction now, but I think you can tell what an awesome transofrmation it is. I'm looking for cobalt blue bottles to go on my new bottle tree.

 

Here's a close up of the circle.

 

I'm also looking for some awesome chairs and maybe a small glider to go in the circle for seating. I would love to find some like these (photo borrowed from Design Sponge's sneak peak of Penny de los Santos's house in Austin).

 

 

Hopefully I'll be successful on my treasure hunt. I can't wait to put the finishing touches on the awesome work Zach and his crew have already done.