It’s Been a Long Time

I can’t believe it’s been ten months since I have posted. Life gets in the way.

I have been working on finding a publisher for my Young Adult novel, Jewels in Time. This has pretty much sidetracked me from everything else related to writing, although I still have ideas floating around in my head.

I have also discovered that there are things I need to eliminate from my life if I want my creative mind to be available to write.

Here is my list of things that stifle my creativity. They might be helpful to you, whether you write or not.

1. The news. As important as it may be to know what’s going on in the world, I find that too much too often makes me tense, and I obsess about things I cannot change. I listen to NPR sometimes in the car. I figure if something really important happens, someone will tell me. Like my husband, who is a news junkie. I occasionally follow up on links on FaceBook. More about FaceBook later.

2. TV. I broke the TV habit when I moved to the East Coast, where programs come on later than I was used to in the Midwest. I am an early to bed early to rise person. I just can’t watch something at nine or ten in the evening. I occasionally watch Jeopardy with my husband to keep him company, but as he mostly watches sports, I’m not tempted by anything else. I do watch some series on Netflix and Acorn, and an occasional movie, but I honestly never turn the TV on and sit down by myself.

3. FaceBook. This has probably been my biggest time waster. I would tell myself five minutes, and then forty-five minutes later . . . I love FaceBook. I have former students and colleagues from around the world, and I love to see what they are doing in Barcelona, London, Costa Rica. But there is also a lot of junk as we all know — silly quizzes, ads, videos of cats and ducks that are shared over and over. So I have to be strict with myself. Half an hour a day. Maybe five minutes while waiting for my husband to go out, or while I’m waiting for water to boil for tea.

4. No listening to podcasts or music while I walk. This might seem like a good use of the time, but to be creative, I need to let my mind wander. I need to pay attention to sights and sounds around me. I can’t come up with new ideas when I am constantly being bombarded by the ideas of others.

Right now I am looking out my window and I can see three bluebirds — one on the suet on our deck, one on the feeder, one on a tree branch. If I were watching TV I would miss that. Or the fox in the photo below.