The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Organizing

Friday, October 2, 2009

Organizing

At 5:52 this morning, Philip leaned over my bed and said, "Hey, Mom, did you know that if you give a cat a mint, it sneezes for like twenty minutes?"

I sat up immediately. "And how did you find this out, Philip?"

I listened to a story involving Sarah, one of the already crazy cats, a perfectly timed cat yawn, interest in the texture of a cat tongue and a mint Tic Tac. You can fill in the rest. (She's fine by the way, and is safely sleeping right now on a basket of papers on my desk)

Papers on my desk lead me to announce my latest plan: I am going to get organized. It occurred to me that when I went through some of my writing titles that I don't really have records of sending my stuff out. I get emails from aspiring writers who can tell me, "I sent this to 17 publishers, 4 agents..." and go on to tell me dates and times and responses.

My system is more like, "Wait. Where did I put chapter two?" or "Ok, let me send John the editor an email to make sure he got this rewrite. Did I finish that rewrite?"

It's so aggravating when editors don't publish my stuff just because I haven't sent it yet. You would think they could anticipate more.

It's not that I haven't tried organizing. It's actually that I have tried organizing one too many times I write things in different notebooks or I save them under different file names and then misplace the notebooks and forget the file names.

I teach people how to organize their writing. I start by explaining there are only two types of organizers: internally organized people and externally organized people. Internally organized people can write, do taxes, compose a libretto with a messy desk, cats, and piles of laundry all around them. (That's me) Externally organized folks need spare, neat space, the rug vacuumed (preferably with all the swirls going in the same direction) and the dishes done before they can put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.

Part of the problem is that I write in short breaks between work, house and kids. I am going to try to organize my time as well. I might even change the layout of this blog. I want to have one of those WIP bars with my daily word count. I have never even thought of doing such a thing, probably because I like to work on different novels and types of writing simultaneously.

I told the kids this morning. Emma looked at Christopher. "It's like all 'o' things today - organizing, October..."

Christopher added, "Odd.."

Then he went on to explain that Cami, our insanely mischievous kitten, had just swallowed a piece of string that had broken off Emma's YoYo string. He had tried to pull it from her mouth, but she growled and went under the sofa until she had eaten it.

I can't tell you how happy I am that I am internally organized.

11 comments:

Elizabeth Bradley said...: I am organized. Still trying to whip The Husband in shape. :-) I'll tell you this much, staying organized is a lot easier now that the kids are gone.

I did not know that mints made cats sneeze. Learn something new every day visiting blogs.; Friday, 02 October, 2009
Bish Denham said...: Oooops! I am somewhere inbetween internally and externally organized. What does that make me? Confused? Undecided? Throwing up?; Friday, 02 October, 2009
storyqueen said...: Internal Organizers Unite!!

I have never heard it put that way, but you are so right.

(I also write on several things simultaneously.)

Shelley; Friday, 02 October, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: Elizabeth, you can also spend a serious amount of time watching a dog lick peanut butter off the roof of his mouth...I learned that last winter when we were iced in.

I don't know about you, Bish -- you won't fit the pattern of my Composition I lesson plan. That's ok, and welcome back to the blogosphere!

Finally, Shelley, someone who works on several things simultaneously. Stories have moods and certain ones match your mood better than others. Either that or we all have mood disorders...; Saturday, 03 October, 2009
Mary Witzl said...: You crack me up. That first paragraph had me howling! I'm even tempted to buy some Tic-tacs and find a cat (just kidding. Really. But God, that must have been cute...)

I've been trying to organize my writing stuff too. A year ago, I got a call about something I'd sent off and I had COMPLETELY forgotten I'd sent it off. That doesn't look good, does it?; Saturday, 03 October, 2009
Adrienne said...: I'm good at removing the clutter I can see - if I bump into it constantly or it falls on me, it's gone. But things like computer files never seem to make it into neat little folders...

Your son's addition to the o's made me laugh.; Saturday, 03 October, 2009
Jemi Fraser said...: If you find one of those externally organized people - could you send her my way. I'd really like to see her vaccuum little swirls into my rug!

It seems a lot of us writer-types organize internally - must be a connection in there somewhere!; Sunday, 04 October, 2009
K.C. Shaw said...: I get way too anxious if I don't keep meticulous records about where I've sent stuff and when. I think I'm an internally disorganized person trying very hard to make up for it.

Your cats seem to fit in your household quite well. :); Monday, 05 October, 2009
Linnea said...: I can so-o-o identify with your cat. I sneeze if I eat mints too!; Monday, 05 October, 2009
Carrie Harris said...: I'm still laughing at the fact that he had to tell you at 5-fricken-52 in the morning.

And I'm just not organized. At all.; Tuesday, 06 October, 2009
Glynis Peters said...: I am trying, that is all I can say about me getting organised. :0

Loved your cat stories.; Thursday, 08 October, 2009

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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