Sleep Schedules

I struggle with sleep. Always have, to varying degrees. Part of the issue is that of being a night person in a morning person's world, and I have tried several different ways to manage that issue. (Largely I end up just ignoring my body's actual needs and requirements in the arena of sleep time in favor of going to bed at a time that feels natural and satisfying and allowing the harsh jangle of my really obnoxious alarm clock to jolt me out of bed.)

However, in the past several months I've given a lot of thought to sleep rhythms, wondering if I went to bed later, would the alarm clock catch me in a phase of sleep more conducive to waking up, or if I tried sleeping in two chunks instead of one, would that allow my body to rest rather than simply sleep. The experiment seems more fraught with disastrous possibilities than going on the way I've started typically does, but some one of these days I think I'm going to try something new. )Such as getting up at 3 am if that's when I happen to be awake and alert, which does sometimes happen.)

100 Words at a Time

That's how I write. For a while now, I've had enough stories or pieces of stories going at once that in order to keep them all moving, I've gone to writing each of them 100 words at a time. I'm very lucky that I can fragment my attention that way, jumping from story-world to story-world and picking up where I left off fairly seamlessly. I keep thinking I should fix that habit and start writing in larger chunks, but the thing is that the short bites works - the stories get written, and each one makes fairly regular progress. And as long as that remains true, there's very little incentive - or  reason, really - to change the process.

Thought for the Day

Organization is the key to success.

(I really believe that. Sadly, I have a hard time implementing the principle in my daily life.)

Counting Down to the End of January

I've never been all that fond of January, or winter, for that matter. But this year it seems more like an  endurance test than usual (mostly due to still owning the other house, which makes every snowstorm feel a bit more complicated than it would otherwise be). The temperatures,  the snowstorms ... really I just feel like hibernating, and instead I'm trying to force myself out of the house and back into the stream of coffees and playdates and kids' activities. Meanwhile, my writing mojo is recovering, but very slowly.

Commenting

I find myself writing comments all the time - on blogs, and Facebook statuses, etc. - and then rewriting and hesitating over the wording and finally deleting them unposted because I think I'll sound stupid or offensive or something else undesirable. Depending on the day, I either wish I had the option to study and delete my spoken words in the same way ... or the courage to stop thinking so much and be confident that my comments are valuable.

Input and Output

I was thinking about word flow yesterday, and about the sheer volume of words I consume in the course of a given day. A good day is one where the output of words is at least close to the inflow. Somewhere in there is a word clearinghouse where the words come in and are joined with other words and sent back out again. I was thinking of this mostly on paper, but it works with spoken words as well ... only there it's reversed. So if a good day is one where the number of words I take in visually is matched or more by the number of words I write, it's also defined as a day where the number of words I speak is significantly lower than the number I hear. In other words, read less, write more; listen more, talk less.

The Title of the Blog

I debated various clever titles ... but I've known for a long time that if you were to ask people from different walks of my life to list the things they most associate with me, the two common threads throughout are books and coffee. Voila. Plain, simple, descriptive.

Differences

Having three children, I never expected them to be all the same - certainly I was prepared for different interests and appetites and tastes in clothes, etc. But having all grown up in the same house and gone to the same schools (in at least a couple of cases had the same teachers), I wouldn't have expected such a radical difference in small mannerisms and speech patterns.

Friends Old and New

It's been a very friend-y week, between sending letters out to several people who volunteered to be penpals with me, to different group activities on Saturday, to a visit from a friend (and her four-footed companion) on Sunday, to an old friend for coffee yesterday, to breakfast with a new friend this morning. It's nice to feel like I'm getting back in that groove again ... the later part of the fall I basically hibernated through, flailing a bit in the process of trying to get things done. Now I'm feeling as though a good routine is in reach, which leaves some energy left over for other people.

Another Day, Another To-Do List

I've been experimenting with time management for years, trying various ways to get myself and my time organized and get a lot of things done, and I've never found anything that works more efficiently and productively than a to-do list - with heavy reliance on randomization to choose which item on the list gets worked on next. I try to avoid skipping things that come up, sticking to my randomizer (either dice - gamer 20-siders tend to work best - or random.org) as much as possible.

The problems with this are that sometimes the more important things don't come up on time, or on days when I can only do a portion of the list I often don't get started at all ... and, of course, if I lose my list, I'm done for! Still, in lieu of a better system, I stick to it, making small adjustments where I can to improve productivity. (And try not to think that the best improvement to my productivity would be a shorter list!)

Books Read Breakdown

Last week I sat down and collated the list of all the books I've read since 2005 - although the earlier years of that set weren't entirely complete. One thing I noticed was that the total number of books read per year climbed and climbed ... until 2010, which is when fanfiction took over my life and I started writing all the time.

This past year, 2013, I read 144 books, while keeping up with six different stories. It's pretty much the pinnacle of my writing and reading life put together. I'm hoping to maintain both my reading and writing rates at their current level of productivity.

The Page 56 Meme

Starting the new blog off with the page 56 meme. (You know the drill - the fifth full sentence on p. 56.) It's supposed to be for whatever book is nearest you, but I like to do every book I'm in the middle of, since there tends to be a lot of them.

"He had spoken as he had because he knew, and she knew, that every call, in and out of the building, was listened to or recorded."

"Harvey himself proposed the syndication, but he implied that greater circulation was his only concern, not how much money it made."

"Without even grabbing a coat, she ran to a neighbor's field and tore a strip of cloth from her petticoat with which to fashion a hackamore halter for one of his horses."

"Following the loss of the transport, he decided to descend on that position with his entire force in order to eliminate the threat to the Union line of communications on the Mississippi River."

"True, they have repeatedly stated that they wish to produce geographical knowledge in the very form that the US state/military needs it; they have gathered at Fort Leavenworth for stratetic meetings; they express pride in their military funding (Herlihy 2010, at 35:30)."

"Turning to ward leader Matthew Keany for help, Fitzgerald obtained a post in the Boston Customs House."

"There was terror and agitation in the castles of twenty petty kings."

"Moreover, anyone who defaced a whale by 'cutting, stabbing, or lancing' it before the inspector could investigate would lose the right to the whale and be fined ten pounds, payable to the colony."

"'You're certain it's exactly one hundred dollars?' Mason inquired again."

(1. Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love; 2. Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain [from the introduction]; 3. Lisa Alther, Blood Feud; 4. William L. Shea and Terrence J. Winschel, Vicksburg Is the Key; 5. Joel Wainwright, Geopiracy; 6. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, Vol. 8; 7. Lord Macaulay, A History of England, Vol. 3; 8. Eric Jay Dolin, Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America; 9. Erle Stanley Gardner, Perry Mason Solves the Case of the Worried Waitress.)