I Think, Therefore I Think I Can

     HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  I'm sorry, I'm laughing. Of all the existential imponderables in the universe-- 

what the heck is a Higgs Boson

what happened before the big bang

are unit prices really correct

 is canned tuna actually tuna

why does the mail come at so many different times depending on the day,

why does our blog change font and spacing randomly and unfixably

how do banks keep track of all those checks

and when the sign in the airport says "You Are Here," how does it know?

 -- the fabulous and talented LynDee Walker proves there is one, big, juicy question that is the unanswerable of unanswerables: 

   How are we supposed to DO all this?

Hang On, Be Right There

   by Lyn Dee Walker

      Distractions. In the age of the iPhone push alert, they’re an ever-present part of life for many of us.

       Not a day goes by that I don’t log into Facebook to see one (or forty) of my author friends declaring that they’re turning off wifi so they can actually, you know, write. There are even computer programs that will block your access to the Internet at certain times of the day. While that feels a little too much like a challenge for my rebellious side, I have several friends who use them and sing their praises.

       I’m just as guilty as the next author of being pulled from my work-in-progress by something shiny on the Internet, but this week, the appeal of Facebook pales in comparison to my house.    

I have three children—10, 5, and 3. They are my light, and the best thing that ever happened to me. Hence, they are often the tallest hurdle between me and writing. I love my babies with the fire of ten thousand suns. Spending time with them makes me happy. So it’s a constant juggling act, with lots of balls to keep in the air.

      Normally, I write in the morning after the older two have left for school and before the little one gets out of bed. And if something interferes with that, I can fit in 1,000 words or so at nap time, or in the evening after my hubby is through working for the day.

     This week is the perfect storm of mommy writer indecision in my house, y’all: I need to finish my new book in the next ten days. Writing isn’t a luxury right now: it’s a must.

      It is also Spring Break. My hubby is out of town. And that whole saying about the best laid plans? Yeah. They’re not working for me, either.

      My ten-year-old is very math-and-science-brained. She loves charts and graphs. I can already tell she’s going to be a spreadsheet person, just like her dad. Yesterday, she made a pretty poster we could use to check off my word count goal for the week in 500-word increments. We taped it to the kitchen wall.

       This morning, I came downstairs ready to open my laptop and knock off a couple of checkmarks before the children woke up. Then my BFF called with mommy worries about a super-feverish baby (the doctor couldn’t see him until 11), and by the time we’d talked through the childhood illness checklist, my littles were awake.

      Now, I’m pretty darned good at tuning out noise while I write. Years of working in a newsroom will do that to you. Scanners bleeping, sports guys tossing Nerf footballs and arguing about who has the best arm in whichever pro sports league is going at the moment, phones ringing, editors shouting: if you’re easily distracted, you never finish a story. I could get so lost in writing an article or designing a page my own phone could buzz with a transferred call and I wouldn’t notice until the receptionist walked to my desk and put her hand between my face and the screen. That’s a finely-honed ability to ignore, y’all.

      My children are enterprising, though. They adapt. The better I am at focusing on my work, the more they step up their game.

       My smallest one, who is so cute you just want to smother her with hugs all day long (I’m a teensy bit biased. But only a bit) has an internal timer. If I sit with my laptop for more than half an hour, she walks over and matter-of-factly closes it, with the sweetest smile you’ve ever seen. “Are you finished with your work, mommy?” she asks.

I am now.

*Yelp*Crash*

Oops. Stand by, y’all.

*********

      Okay, I’m back. To prove my point, in the past thirty-five seconds, my little one asked for help getting her dress off (yes, off, at 11:30 in the morning. Because she can). Freedom from her clothing inspired her to hold my face between her hands and sing me three verses of “Let It Go.”

      While she belted out the final chorus, my son tripped over the dog (our dog weighs six pounds and is less than a foot long from nose to pointed tail. You’d almost have to try to trip over her) and vaulted his snow-cone cup into the air. Snow cone splattered all over the white Berber in our living room (inherited from the house’s previous owners, who obviously had no children).

      I’ve now set the computer aside, stripped the baby’s dress off, smiled at her singing, checked on the dog (she’s good. And so happy with her treat it makes me wonder if an instant replay wouldn’t show her slipping underfoot on purpose. She’s smart, that pooch), and scrubbed rainbow ice syrup out of the carpet.

     Where were we?

     Oh, right. Distractions.

     There you have mine for this morning. I’m thinking it’s going to be a coffee and writing after bedtime kind of night in the Walker house.

     What about you, Reds? How do you handle writing distractions?

HANK: HA! (But we'll give a copy of SMALL TOWN SPIN to a lucky commenter!)

LD:   And dear readers—how do you juggle work and family? 

*************************************

SMALL TOWN SPIN

When a superstar athlete's son turns up dead in a tiny town on the Virginia coast, crime reporter Nichelle Clarke gets the inside scoop. But she quickly spies a gaping hole her inner Lois Lane cannot ignore.

Determined to unravel the mystery, Nichelle fights off paparazzi cameras and an unexpected rival. She uncovers an illegal moonshine operation, a string of copycat suicides, and a slew of closets stacked with more skeletons than slingbacks. Chasing a killer who’s a breath from getting away with murder, Nichelle realizes too late the culprit has her number—and it might be up.

********************

LynDee Walker’s award-winning journalistic work has appeared in newspapers and magazines across the nation. After nearly a decade covering crime, courts, and local politics, she left full-time reporting for motherhood with a side of freelancing and fiction writing. LynDee’s debut novel, FRONT PAGE FATALITY, is an amazon and Barnes & Noble #1 bestseller, and an Agatha Award nominee for Best First Novel. SMALL TOWN SPIN is the third in her Headlines in High Heels mystery series. The fourth arrives January 2015.

LynDee adores her family, her readers, and enchiladas. She works out tricky plot points while walking off the enchiladas. She lives in Richmond, Virginia, where she is either playing with her children or working on her next novel—but probably not cleaning her house. You can find her online at www.lyndeewalker.com.

LynDee Walker

The Headlines in High Heels Mysteries

www.lyndeewalker.com

Get signed copies: Fountain Bookstore

Twitter: @LynDeeWalker

Facebook: LynDee Walker

Margaret Moore on how to organize your writing life

JAN BROGAN - As you might have picked up by now, I love books about the brain and at the top of my most recent reading list is Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life by Margaret Moore and Paul Hammerness, MD.

It's all about ways to keep focused in this world of non-stop distractions, how to keep your eyes on your own particular prize. A lot of the advice is useful for learning to reduce stress and live a healthy lifestyle, but I found it especially relevant to writing goals. Having run the writing challenges, I know how many other writers out there could use inspiration on how to ignore the distractions and stay focused, so I invited Margaret, also known as Coach Meg, to Jungle Red and she graciously agreed to visit.

She is is co-director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, a founding advisor of the Institute of Lifestyle Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the founder and CEO of Wellcoaches Corporation. If you are lucky enough to hire Coach Meg for your executive coach, you pay top rates. Here, she gives us some of her advice for free.

Writers are the worst procrastinators and they also struggle with balancing their lives with writing and promotion, so I asked Coach Meg to explain one concept in the book that I found especially useful. It's called "focus time."

COACH MEG: Focus time (when you bring all of the brain’s attentional resrouces – top, down, back, front, right left – into the full spotlight of focus) is the most enriching and productive time of our days. It’s one of the top contributors to psychological well-being. Schedule at least one focus session per day where you set up the ideal conditions for a calm, positive, energetic, and creative mindset.

JAN: You not only need to schedule it. You need to guard it with your life! Writers are vulnerable to distraction. We talk a lot here at Jungle Red about the lure of email and the Internet and how it sidetracks us from our writing goals. Can you give us some of your tips for controlling the impulse to check email or surf the net?

COACH MEG: First notice when and how you are responding automatically to impulses – it happens frequently. Most effective approach is to turn off the wireless so no email or web is available. If you are waiting for an urgent message, tell your brain (Hello Brain, while we will scan email for the urgent message we are expecting, we will let go of any others that come along, all of which can wait until the end of the focus session.)

JAN_ Writers, or probably anyone who works at home, faces a lot of interruption in a day. I was fascinated by the concept of shift sets, and your advice to make conscious decisions when your day gets interrupted - how to capitalize on the interruption instead of resenting it. Can you give us an example?

COACH MEG: Scenario 1 – something urgent comes up, more pressing that what you’re doing now. Make a decision to shift completely to the new activity for a defined period, then perhaps shift back to the original period.

2. S Scenario 2 – your brain is tired and your productivity has slowed or stalled. Take a brain break. Save tasks like making a bed, cleaning out the dishwasher, putting in a load of laundry, making a quick call to set up an appt for your brain break times. Go exercise during brain breaks.

JAN: You talk a lot about mindfulness, what might the advantages of mindfulness training or practice be for a writers?

COACH MEG: In order for your mind to better “drive” your racing car brain, your mind needs to be awake and aware of what your mind and brain are both doing in any given moment. The ideal state is that your mind is objective (and not falling mindlessly into distraction or frenzy) and has an arms-length relationship with the brain’s automatic processes, noticing them and pausing to choose a response.

A mindful brain is a clean and healthy brain that can focus without distractions, be productive and creative, and make fewer errors. Other benefits include better immune system, decreased depression and chronic pain.

Experiment to find a meditation practice which works for you (you notice benefits in a week or two). There's also more on mindfulness and a meditation exercise to help clear the brain for work at my website www.organizeyourmind.com (under mindfulness tab).

JAN: Writers have to balance writing with promotion. Right now you must be doing the same thing, balancing book promotion with coaching your clients - do you have tricks that you can share?

COACH MEG: I monitor the state of my brain and body continually:

• Is it tired and needs a quick break, or a workout?

• Hungry or thirsty, needing a snack or meal with the right balance of protein/fat/carbs as optimal fuel, water or “antioxidants” (such as a bowl of berries)?

• Wanting some spontaneity – do anything you feel like for a short period?

• Needing to stretch to loosen muscle tension?

• Needing to connect with another human being?

I call this body intelligence and for more on why it's so important, click on this link: body intelligence .

JAN - Thanks, Coach Meg!! She will also be checking in today to answer questions, so fire away!

On Writers Challenges or slipping into bad habits

JAN: I admit it, I've fallen into bad habits. I just finished a book proposal for my non-fiction project -- a proposal that took me almost a year as I had to get my head out of the original story structure - used for the screenplay - and shake up my thinking. I had major mental roadblocks and it took a lot of research, hard work and hard thinking to get past them. So when my agent loved the book proposal -- I mentally signed off -- although I've been sitting at my computer working on my fiction, I've been allowing too many distractions.

You know, the email thing. Then there was the baking for Thanksgiving thing. Of course, next there is the Christmas shopping thing. So I was thinking as part of my new year's resolution to issue a new WRITE FIRST writer's challenge for January 1.

But before I do, I'd love to hear from writers in what there special trials were and what kind of writer's challenge might be most useful. Please feel free to comment here, or email directly through my website www.janbrogan.com