Just blabbing
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
Wednesday 4:52am 3Jan06

I seem to wake up at 3:34 each morning. I never get up though. I call the cats and say, "We have less than a half hour girls" and promptly fall back asleep. I love sleeping. It really is hard to believe that I get up before the crack of dawn.

I did my hour long write when I got home last night and because I didn't have much to rant about (not complaining) I tried to guide it toward something useful. So I ended up with about a page of stuff for Rachel in White Wishes which has fallen off again. I realize that I need to get myself back to a head space where I'm thinking about it all the time. Some form of having it in the back of my mind while I do other things. I'm going to have to read through my notes and decide on a character to focus on and keep that person in my mind and listen to her. Watch her react.

I also have come to understand that I have two stages of freeflow writing. I have the stream of consciousness writing where I write nonstop and my mind is out of it. I can write and only know the word I'm writing. I don't know what I've written nor what I'm going to write. It's almost meditative or channeled. Then there is the plain nonstop writing where I write fast and I know what I've written and I'm thinking about what I'm going to write next.

I'm only recently starting to understand that I have the two types. In the past if I couldn't maintain the SOC writing, I'd often stop, thinking that I was failing at doing it. Of course the SOC writing feels better so it feels like the right way but like a deep meditation, I'm setting myself up for failure if I'm expecting to have that all the time. The plain old aware non stop writing serves a bigger purpose. I can guide it. I can start to pick at what I need to work on.

It's a full moon today. I predicted that Travisimo's wife will go into labour today. Let's see how psychic I am. ha! My horoscope for January says that today (tonight rather) will bring me a romantic encounter. So as I question how this could possibly happen, not that I believe it will but as the writer the first thing I ask is what if?... I have a dime and a nickel to rub together so I'm not going out. I've dropped all interest, contact & thought of the men that were in my life so it couldn't possibly be one of them. No cute guys to speak of in my apartment building. And then a little part of my mind flits off on a tangent and says, "I bet you the Lesbian hits on you!" I cringe.

Just because I said I'd do Selma Hayek doesn't mean I'd do, well, her! I had a lengthy conversation with my gay male friend recently about it because I hadn't told him the whole story of the octopus armed lesbian that would not go away and then acted like a spurned lover when I finally slapped her down. I admitted that I actually questioned whether I was homophobic because I was so uncomfortable with what was going on ( I know how to get rid of a man that's harassing me, I don't know how to get rid of a woman that's harassing me). But he reminded me that there are a lot of gay men that insist that all straight men are really gay in disguise and that there are lesbians that believe that if they have one night with you they'll make you gay. sigh!

How come it's never the attractive lesbians? I'm just asking!

But seriously with every thing a gay person goes through to come out and find their place and the ridicule and not being able to be married and just plain being born gay why the fuck couldn't I be born heterosexual or anyone else for that matter? There's no coercing or insisting or harassing that will change the fact that I love men. It's like Donald Trump saying that he's got a great guy for Rosie O'Donnell's wife.

Come on! No means no!

EY

Pushing Ourselves Harder
Topic: Newsletters
I got this article from the Early to Rise Newsletter in my email yesterday.

"Crystallize your goals. Make a plan for achieving them and set yourself a deadline. Then, with supreme confidence, determination, and disregard for obstacles and other people's criticisms, carry out your plan."

- Paul J. Meyer

Kicking Off the New Year With ETR: Prepare to Accomplish the Unthinkable

By Michael Masterson

I was inspired to ante-up the challenges I'm setting for myself this year by a piece I clipped from The New York Times a few weeks ago. The article is about Suzan-Lori Parks, a pretty, dreadlocked, 43-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who, in 2002, decided she would write a play a day for a year.

Think about that. A play a day for a year.

When it comes to goals (setting and accomplishing them), I consider myself to be a strong player. Before my 40th birthday, I met and surpassed all my business and financial objectives. Since then, I've been knocking off other lifelong goals at a pretty steady pace - and many of them involved writing.

To me, writing a short story a month is a very ambitious goal. And although that's been one of mine for at least the last five years, I've never quite accomplished it.

How is it possible to even imagine that you could write a play a day for 365 days in a row? And even if it were possible to imagine, how could it be done?

The NYT article doesn't tell me that. It talks about how, after finishing the project, the huge manuscript sat in Parks' drawer for three years until she and a theater friend hatched a plan to produce all 365 of her plays. (The plan is very complicated, opening them a day at a time in 14 different cities, using a network of hubs and satellite theaters.) And it tells me her subject matter ranges from "deities to soldiers to what Ms. Parks saw out of her plane window."

But how did she do it?

Did she wake up early every morning and get to it and not stop until she was done? Did she work on other projects first (she is also a screenwriter and novelist) and then get to her plays at night? And how much did she write? According to the NYT, some of the plays were "only a few pages long" - but that doesn't detract from her achievement. She gave herself an almost unthinkable goal and went ahead and accomplished it.

And she did it smart: She didn't put a minimum length on each play. She let each one take its own length. That's a clever way to do something great.

That's something to think about for 2007. What sort of incredible personal goal could you set for yourself? And how would it transform your life?

I've been asking myself those questions, because I'd like to accomplish something unthinkable myself. And I'm hoping you'll join me in making this one of your goals for the coming year. If you're not sure what to shoot for ... here are some ideas:

Learn a marketing secret a day.
Read/scan an educational book a day.
Write a story a day.
Study a promotion a day.
Analyze a stock a day.
Make a sale a day.
Contact a potential customer a day.
Recite a poem a day.
Call/write a friend a day.
Practice a speech a day.
Sing a song a day.
Practice a musical piece a day.
Exercise intensely each day.
During the next two weeks, we'll be offering many suggestions in ETR for how you can prepare to make this year your wealthiest, healthiest, and most successful yet.

To get started, you need to identify one significant goal in each of the four most important areas of your life:

Your health (without which most of the others don't matter)
Your wealth (which is undeniably important - so treat it as such)
Your personal self (your hobbies and interests)
Your social self (your friends, family, and community)
Each of these goals should be not only significant but also specific. That means you'll probably have to break each one into several smaller objectives. For example, you might want to resolve to become stronger, leaner, and more flexible. To make this fitness goal more specific, you could resolve to add three pounds of muscle to your body, lose four pounds of fat, and learn how to do a proper Sun Salutation in yoga.

Today, since you're not (and shouldn't be) working, your job is to set these four big goals for yourself - and to make one of them unthinkably great. Then, once you set them, commit to them.

You can use the ETR goal-setting system to convert each of your four major goals into monthly, weekly, and, eventually, daily objectives. By taking the time now to write down your goals and think about what it will take to accomplish them, the likelihood that you will accomplish them will increase dramatically.

Studies show it: People who make formal goals and write them down accomplish more. If you follow the ETR goal-setting system and stick to it, I am 100 percent sure that 2007 will be the most successful year of your life.

While you are picking one unthinkably great goal for yourself this year, why not allow me to suggest a second.

I'd like you to consider making a commitment to spend at least five minutes every morning skimming through ETR for ideas, tips, techniques, and strategies that can improve your life. You don't have to promise to spend any more than five minutes - unless you find something that is especially good and you want to slow down and study it.

I recognize that there are times when you don't feel you have a spare second to read another e-mail message. And I know, too, that not all of our articles will be particularly helpful to you.

But every day, Suzanne Richardson, Judith Strauss, Charlie Byrne, and I review all the many good submissions we get from the dozens of smart and successful people who regularly write for ETR - and we do our best to include the best possible information in every daily message:

1. to help you build your wealth

2. to make you healthier

3. to make you wiser

We won't always hit the bull's eye - but if you read ETR conscientiously and with an open mind, I'm sure you'll find plenty there to learn from. I know I do.

Five minutes a day. It is a small investment that will pay you back many times over.

[Ed. Note: When you set your "unthinkable" goal, we'd like to hear about it. Please send an e-mail to ReaderFeedback@gmail.com. Include your full name and hometown, and we may publish it in ETR.]

One Hour Mind Cleanse
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
Tuesday 5:05am 2Jan07

Ahh this is the fun part of the New Year, trying to remember to write 2007 on everything and trying to remember what day it is. Feels like a Monday but it's really Tuesday. Will the week fly by or will it drag on? That is the question. Should it matter? Should I be more focused on the now and not the next week or next month? Are we really wishing our lives away? So many questions so early in the morning.

The cats decided not to sleep with me last night and only joined me when it was time to get up. I told them it was too late, they didn't listen.

I was mad at someone last week. I tried to stay calm and not focus on it too tough but knowing how I am I knew I'd have to do something proactive to get the junk and the anger and the need to rant out of my head. A sort of mind cleanse, if you will.

I set myself a goal to write non stop for an hour. I know with timed writing that my best times to use are 15 to 30 minute intervals. I knew that a straight hour would push my limits. It's like trying to fill a glass with your tears. A struggle. No one could cry that long.
I really had to stretch to pull out every last bitch about the situation but when I'd hit the hour I felt like I'd emptied out every last bit of obsessive thoughts that I could possibly have.

I made some solid decisions about my relationship with this person, dump his ass. To top it all off, I kept myself focused on a goal rather than wasting my evening away on a person who really isn't worth the time or attention I've given him.

What started out as a way to get rid of the anger and frustration may become a new daily challenge to cleanse the daily junk out. In that hour I cracked 2100 words which isn't too shabby. So starting tonight I'm going to give it a whirl. A daily practice to get rid of the day, the residual aggravations and complaints and stress and whatever else that could be holding me back from my writing. It reminds me of my hour long walks of years ago. When I used to walk an hour to get to work and an hour to get home. I used to leave my stress at the corner of Spadina and Bloor and the rest of the walk became my meditation.

If writing is to be my practice, which it is, might as well use it to clear the junk out to go deeper. Plus it gets me closer to my 3 hour daily writing goal.

EY

Coronation Street
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
Sunday 9:02am 31Dec06

They finally killed off Mike Baldwin on Coronation Street. That's the joy of writing giving a character a bit of a comeuppance. He died in the street outside the factory that he spent most of his life in. He died in the arms of Ken Barlow, his arch enemy, rambling about Deirdre, Ken's wife that Mike had an affair with years ago.

Mike Baldwin was consistent as an asshole, a womanizer, a man that out witted many a business man. He was a bit of a villain most of the time and then would show his redeeming qualities in the 11th hour, like when Alma (his ex wife) was dying. And he wasn't beyond any pain like when he caught his wife Linda having an affair with his son. The two people he was actually ever generous with betrayed that generosity and trust.

Yeah, he must have been a fun character to write. He was the opportunity to get out all the bad behaviour and the opportunity to be punished for all the bad he did. That's what writing is all about, putting a character into a situation and watching him react.

Now we watch the aftermath, how the other characters react to his passing. How his son's and grandson's interact with eachother. Who calls who a vulture and all the other emotions of people who have to deal with the death of a loved one. There's always a character that will surprise you.

EY

I Live Alone
Topic: Living on Purpose
Saturday 3:33pm 30Dec06

When I get home from work I don't have anyone to ask me how my day was and all the other questions that people who live together ask each other. I don't have anyone who looks in the fridge and says, "Where's the ginger ale?" just as they spy the green plastic bottle. I don't answer to anyone nor do I have to explain anything that I do.
I had to explain to one of my co workers yesterday, after snapping at him more than once, 'You have to understand, I live alone."

I realize that I have to remind myself of the opposite for other people that they live with other people. I get so impatient with people who ask me a lot of questions. i wonder why they're so nosy. I wonder what purpose it serves to ask questions that could be naturally answered in time. Like if I'm holding my winter coat at 3pm when I normally leave work at 4:30pm chances are that I'm leaving early and instead of asking me the obvious, wait until I put my fucking coat on and I say good bye.

Sometimes I get so sarcastic in my responses to questions. I say stuff like:
"Are you my fucking boss now?"
"If I'm holding my coat clearly I'm leaving early."
"Why don't you try checking the binder to see if there's any new time sheets instead of bugging me about it?"
"I told you yesterday that I'd do it today. When have I ever said I'd do something and then not do it?"
Yeah, pretty bitchy!

I have to remind myself that that's how most people who live together talk to each other. They ask questions and sometimes for answers they already know. For a lot of people it's their way of making contact, to acknowledge another's presence. I have to remember that a lot of people either have nothing to talk about or can't stand the silence when they are with someone else.

I'm not one to ask a whole lot of questions. I realize that most things can be figured out just by observation. Plus some answers aren't that important to know. It's one of the reasons my boss and I get along so well. Neither of us ask a lot of questions and because of it we tend to tell each other a lot more than we tell the others who ask questions all the time. His response to most questions is, "What are you a cop?"

If there's anything I need to focus on in 2007 aside from being nicer and being disciplined, it's to remind myself that not everyone is like me. In fact, most people aren't like me. Not every one walks through life with my kind of lone wolf independence. And if I can learn to tolerate more questions maybe people will learn to ask me fewer questions.

At the very least, I'll stop hurting people's feelings because they are trying to connect with me in the best way they know how.

EY