So Turns the Wheel of the Year

 

In the liminal space between this end of year cluster of holidays, I wish you the warmth and relaxation and coziness of Arya nesting in my lap. May the new year be bright, prosperous, healthy, and joyous. I have no great advice to give or pronouncements to make. May we all become the best versions of ourselves as we move into another cycle.

Goodbye 2023

My husband and I smiling goodbye to 2023!

It’s been a year. I spent countless hours at my kid’s sport events. Read 78 books. Wrote one sci-fi thriller. And I’m excited about 2024. I’ve got goals and I’m going to reach them. 

The new year is right around the corner. It’s a time to look forward in anticipation. It’s also a time that many make resolutions. Resolutions, goals, whatever you want to call them, they’re good motivators. And if you’ve been looking for the push, the thing that’ll energize you, now is a great time to decide that it’s going to happen now. 

A positive mindset can carry you a long way. I was reminded of that as I watched the most recent season of Alone with my family. If you're not familiar with it, it's a reality show from the History Channel that pits people against the wilderness and their own minds as they survive out in the woods alone. The woman who stuck it out to the number two spot was incredibly positive and grateful throughout the experience. She outlasted her competitors, who brought in more game, with berries and a smile. Watching her daily lift her face to the sky reminded me that I want to face 2024 with a grin. 

That’s my plan as I prepare for the new year. I hope your New Year celebration is safe and filled with joy and laughter, but also brings you a good dose of grit for your goals. 

Wishing You a Bright New Year

 

Wishing everyone a happy New Year!

In the New Year, as the days lengthen, may light also return to our lives. May we be healthy. May we create joy in ourselves and in others. May the universe tip toward equity and justice for all beings. May we be prosperous. May we love and be loved. May we know peace.

Wishing you a Glitter filled 2023!

As we watch the last sunsets of 2022 we’re sharing thoughts and blessings for the year to come.

There’s something refreshing about contemplating the year to come instead of pondering the year that has been. What has been has been, and what will be is still in formation. Have you put thought into your 2023?

Like Jeffe mentioned yesterday, over the past year I’ve realized that I do need people interaction. It’s been a few years since I’ve attended a con, and I miss it. Author friends get it in a way no one else can. Those relationships are precious and in the coming year I aim to give more time to them. I hope you have the bandwidth to put into author friendships, they’re worth all the effort. 

2023 will also be when I send out my next manuscript. There’s all sorts of scary wrapped up in that, but I refuse to be afraid of my shadow. It is time. 

And I’m going to continue to look for glitter, every day. It’s easy to let the no’s and negative stuff bring you down. I believe it’s important to focus on the good, every day. I hope your 2023 is filled with glitter, writing, and author friends! 

Happy New Year!

New Years Eve

New Year, new stray cat in the neighborhood who found the sucker sign hung out on my door. This is Hemingway. He started coming around in the early morning darkness to get yelled at by my cats. He wouldn't let me even look at him. He'd charge away at a dead run. The good part is that someone had clearly already caught him once. He's ear tipped, which means he's already neutered and vaccinated. He went on being really shy and elusive for months. It was clear he had someone caring for him. His body condition was too good.

This holiday season, though, something changed. He began coming around more often. A lot more often. I managed to get a plate of cat food out to him one morning. Instead of running away, he crept onto the back porch and ate like he'd never seen food before and might never again. He was skinny. I suspect whoever had been feeding him either got sick or moved away. Our handsome, solid black cat with gold eyes shows up every evening and most mornings, ready for his hand out. And yes. He is a polydactyl. The boy is graced with a couple of extra thumbs on each front paw.

My cats have gone from being offended by the trespasser (and complaining loudly about it) to sitting at the back door to watch him eat. I'd like to trap him and bring him in to assess his socialization. If a cat can settle into life indoors with humans, a cat should have that opportunity for two reasons. First - cats live longer, healthier lives indoors. Two - outdoor cats have a hand (a paw?) in stressing songbird populations. 

Since Hemingway has warmed up quite a bit - I'm now allowed within three feet of him. He'll look me in the eye and ask for more food. I'm comfortable saying he's not really feral. It's clear he knows what people are and I think he's learning from my cats not to be afraid. The only hitch is that he's trap wise. If I put the live trap out, he won't come anywhere near. So I'm going to have to be much sneakier. However, the rescue I usually work with is currently shut down to quell a terrible upper respiratory infection that's running rampant through their cat population. So we're all on hold, caught in the liminal space between aspiration and action. Seems appropriate for New Years Eve when you're waiting for the old year to end and for the new one to begin.

Adjusting Those Variables for the New Year

 

This week at the SFF Seven, we're sharing thoughts about the changing of the year.

I like the reflection the end of one year and the beginning of a new one brings. You all know I'm into metrics, so the end of a year - however arbitrary a measure - provides me with a milestone to group data. I can look back at the past year, compare it to previous years, and make plans for the one ahead. 

Am I a maker of resolutions? Some years more than others, yes, but mostly I look on the process as adjusting my variables for the year ahead. Life is an ongoing experiment this way. We try stuff, see how it works out, then make changes accordingly. This is how all experimentation works: make a hypothesis, test it by gradually adjusting variables, and keep track of the resulting data.

I know a lot of people react negatively to the concept of new year's resolutions, especially given the daunting statistics about them. For example, from this article, after 6 months, only 46% of people who make a resolution are still successful in keeping it, and by the end of the year only 9% feel they are successful in keeping it.

Interesting to me, a third of the people who failed to keep their resolutions didn’t keep track of their progress and another quarter of them forgot about their resolutions. This may sound funny - I laughed! - but it's actually super easy to forget those aspirations in the tumult of daily life. 

One year I tried writing down goals for the coming year and sealing them in envelopes to be opened on New Year's Eve, so I could see how I did. People, I'm telling you: if I hadn't made myself a reminder to open the envelopes, I'd have forgotten they existed! Reading my goals from Past Jeffe of only a year before was truly eye-opening. It almost didn't matter which goals I'd met, exceeded, or fallen short of - simply comparing the reality with my aspirations taught me a great deal.

This is partly why I'm a believer in tracking all kinds of metrics about myself. Remember, a third of the people who failed to keep their resolutions didn't track their progress while another quarter forgot about them! That's 60% of the failures that might have been successes if they'd had daily tracking and reminders. 

So, I'm doing a series on my podcast this week about the metrics I keep - particularly regarding my writing process - along with the how's and why's. Feel free to ask questions! 

And Happy New Year to all!!

Three Tips for Staying Grounded in a Crazy World

Happy New Year, everyone, and welcome to 2018!

I feel confident in putting this as a fait accompli, even though I'm writing this midday on 12/31/17 because I imagine most of you will be reading this in 2018, or as near to it as functionally doesn't matter. I'm also confident that 2018 will arrive, which hasn't always been the case.

It's funny looking back at the turn of the millennium and thinking the whole banking/computer change from a two-digit year to a four-digit year was the worst thing that could happen... I look forward to the day when we can look back, shake our heads at the 2016 election, and trade our "where were you when you found out Trump was actually elected?" stories.

Until then, we do what we can to resist an increasingly authoritarian regime while still keeping our sanity. Thus, my take on this week's topic: Keeping Your Sanity: 3 Things You Do To Stay Balanced/Grounded/In Control.

While resistance is critical, so is keeping our sanity. In fact, it's important to keep grounded, in balance, and at peace with ourselves, in order to resist from a foundation of strength. There's a reason sleep-deprivation is a tried-and-true brainwashing technique: because exhaustion lowers our defenses. Being healthy and at peace is key to everything else we wish to accomplish.

I've counseled more than one friend in the following. One was having nightmares about being in a nuclear war with North Korea. Another had become depressed and anxious with all the political changes and programs being cut and destroyed entirely. So, here are three ways I keep myself balanced and grounded.

Stay Away from the News

Seriously. This is the first thing I told my friends above. I truly believe part of the reason things seem so awful is the sensationalistic news media and the echo chamber of social media. I know a lot of people regard it as their responsibility to "stay informed." There are three problems here:

1. There are major forces wanting to control what we're informed of
2. News shows on TV are about entertainment. They skew to shocking and exciting content
3. This has been exacerbated by click-bait headlines and the availability of news on our phones, etc. 

The news on TV and on social media is, by its very nature, sensationalized. Choose a reliable newspaper to read. If you want news from Twitter, carefully choose who you follow for it. Look for reliable sources. I also give you permission - *waves permission wand* - not to look at all. (See Make Your Life a Paradise.) At the very least, stop reading articles on your phone to kill time. That's setting yourself up for the most sensationalized, most upsetting news without deep understanding or context. Remember when we used to see waiting rooms as an opportunity to read books? See next.

Deep Read*

That's my mom in the pic above. We spent some time over Christmas just sitting in the sun and reading. She has a lovely patio for it. But now that I'm home, I'm spending time in my favorite armchair, reading by the fire. The benefits of deep reading have been well documented. (I'm using it here to mean reading a narrative, as opposed to reading Facebook posts, Tweets, etc. I really don't think reading on a paper book vs. an ereader makes a difference, so long as I'm reading without interruption.) It's more than me being an author and being a fan of reading in general. (Buy my book!) Reading is relaxing, restorative, hones the intellect, and gives us time away from all the voices. It's also a skill that's easy to lose in our current culture of So Many Things shrieking for a piece of our attention.

I've been reading Robin Hobbs' SHIP OF MAGIC, which is *long* - 880 pages in paperback, though I'm reading in digital. At first I felt impatient with the slow, elaborate pace. As I've settled in, I'm remembering how much I loved fat books in my youth. The more pages, the better, because I could enjoy them longer. I don't have data to back it up, but I'm pretty confident in saying that my reading declined immensely with my increasing involvement with social media. Time I once spent buried in a book, I began to spend scrolling Facebook and Twitter.

Recently I've made several changes. I've removed Facebook and Twitter notifications from my phone. I've taken them both off my array of tabs to display when I open my web browser.

(I realize this is a total reversal because I used to tell people who said "I always forget to check Facebook," to make it one of their home pages. Don't. Run away. Look at it if you like, because it's still the best way to keepup with some people, but choose when.)

I've also gone back to an ereader (a paperwhite, which I'm loving) that has no functions for people to message, text or otherwise interrupt me while I'm reading. I can feel the difference in myself as my attention span relaxes.

*One note on deep reading: I've noticed, and a number of other people I've talked to have noticed, that at first it's difficult to get back into deep reading. It's as if we've lost the "muscle" for it. Start back slowly and give it time. We've all found that the more we practice, the better it feels.

Make Your Life a Paradise

Alert readers might notice I left out "in control." That's because I think control is elusive and must be judiciously sought. As far as national politics are concerned, we have very little control. We can vote and campaign for our candidates. We can donate to campaigns. We can participate in our communities. Fretting about North Korea? Not really in our control.

So, this is my best advice: take action, then walk away and work on your own life.

For example, because it's become clear to me that senators elected in other states will influence my life in profound ways - like whether or not I can afford health insurance - I donated to Doug Jones' campaign in Alabama. I felt good about that action. Immediately, however, the campaign began sending me emails - every couple of hours - with hysterical doomsday headlines. They wanted me to contribute more. But I had already taken my action. And I could feel just the subject lines upsetting me. So I labeled them spam and didn't look at another email from them. I'm delighted to report that Jones won! One small step. I took my action and got the result I wanted.

The walking away and working on my own life? That's key.

I mentioned above about turning off notifications. I'm selective about who can grab my attention. Bigger than this, however, is the idea that if each of us made ourselves and our lives a paradise, then by extension, the world would be, too.

I make a lot of choices for personal happiness. To the extent I can, I focus on doing what brings joy and beauty to both my life and the world. This includes friends, family, the organizations I volunteer for, and in the books I write. I find that if I enjoy my daily life to the utmost, I worry much less about the larger world. Which I can't control anyway.

This last is the foundation of being grounded and at peace for me. It really works.

And, at the risk of being accused of having lured you here for marketing purposes... if you do want to read, Smashword’s is having a site-wide promotion! https://www.smashwords.com
This is only good through January 1, 2018, so I felt I should tell you now, just in case!