How Should You Spend the First, Best Hour of Your Day? (Part II)

In the previous post I confessed that I have been spending the first, best hour of my day NOT on writing (my passion, my profession, my identity, my bliss) but on New York Times word puzzles. 

My work-in-progress was stalled. I thought it was simply because I was stuck, unsure where the story should go next. In fact, I told myself, maybe sinking for hours into the La Brea Tar Pits of the puzzles might be, oh, I don't know, a sort-of meditative practice that might actually help me get unstuck. 

But of course, the truth I was avoiding was that I was stuck because I was allowing myself to do New York Times puzzles instead of putting in a faithful hour a day sitting, pen in hand, trying to unstick myself. 

It was my sweetheart, ruthless though loving truth teller that he is, who pointed this out to me. 

I had to admit he might be on to something.

So for two solid weeks back in December, I made a commitment to myself to return to devoting that first, best hour each day to writing. 

I prepared everything the night before, carrying my writing materials and hourglass up to my writing nook and even filling the electric kettle with enough hot water for a pot of heavily sugared tea, with teapot, mug, and teabag in readiness on the kitchen table.

I allowed myself to get up even earlier than usual, at 4:00 (the earlier I get up, the happier I am all day, though impossibly smug). While the water heated - maybe for ten minutes - I did steal a peek at the puzzle. Cold turkey was a bit too daunting. But then, teapot filled, I tiptoed upstairs, settled myself on the loveseat, and wrote - WROTE! - till 5:30 or so.

The pages came pouring out of me. I wrote the entire last third of a 45,000-word draft in those two weeks, and the scenes I wrote were GOOD. Dare I say, with an author's besotted love for her own creation, they were WONDERFUL. All day long, I hugged myself with happiness for what I had written and could hardly wait till the next morning to see what would happen next as the story hurtled toward its climax and denouement with the fabulous force of momentum making it happen. 

Oh, and I still finished the puzzle every day, doing it in bits and pieces, as a palette cleanser between other activities, which turned out to be a much better way to approach puzzles, at least for me. 

Oh, dear ones, try using the best hour of YOUR day for what you love best. It might work as much magic for you as it has for me. 

How Should You Spend the First, Best Hour of Your Day? (Part I)

For most of my career as a children's book author, I published a book for young readers just about every year while working full-time as a tenured professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado and raising a family. My only secret was this: I devoted the first, best hour of the day to my writing. 

That is the whole entire secret right there. Wired to be an early-morning person, I woke up every morning at 5 a.m. (without an alarm), made myself a steaming mug of Swiss Miss hot chocolate, and curled up on the couch with my beloved clipboard, pad of narrow-ruled white paper, and Pilot Razor Point pen, to write for exactly one hour, timed with my most-beloved-of-all hourglass. 

Then, almost a decade ago, I took early retirement from CU. Now I had all day to write! Now I could write whenever I wanted to, all day long!

I did keep on writing books for young readers. But - funny thing - I wrote not MORE but LESS than I had before. With all day to do it, I also had all day NOT to do it. NOT doing it started to become my default setting. 

What did I do instead with my first, best hour of the day? Well, some of it was spent helping to take care of live-in grandchildren, a worthy activity I don't regret. But in recent years - oh, this is terrible to say!! - I have been giving the first, best hour of the day to New York Times puzzles. First Wordle, which after all, does take just two minutes followed by the fun of texting my score to a select few recipients. The new Connections puzzle, though sometimes infuriating, can be dispatched in five or ten minutes. 

But the Spelling Bee... oh, the Spelling Bee... 

It's possible to get lost in it for hours. Once upon a time I was satisfied if I got past the lower levels of Solid, Nice, Great, and Amazing, all the way to Genius. But then I learned there was the level of Queen Bee, where you found absolutely every word recognized by the puzzle. I became so obsessed with the NYT Spelling Bee that sometimes in the night I'd wake up and realize it was now past 1:00 a.m. here in Colorado (the puzzle for each day is released at 3 a.m. ET), and I'd actually leap out of bed to start doing it. 

Would you say I had a PROBLEM? 

To answer my original question: what you should be doing in your first, best hour of the day (whenever that falls for YOU in clock time) is what matters most to YOU (whatever that is in your own personal priorities). It should almost certainly NOT be hunting for one last eight-letter word starting with CO and one last six-letter word starting with PL. 

In the next post I will share my somewhat successful journey toward reclaiming that first, best hour of the day for the purposes of my true, best self. 

Starting the New Year - 11 Days Late

Things are looking up for me and my broken elbow! Surgery with the very young but very capable orthopedic doctor a week ago today! I am now the proud owner of six screws and one metal plate to hold my once-shattered elbow together from now until the grave. Then a few frustrating but healing days with the left arm cradled - i.e., imprisoned - in a huge, heavy, bulky, awkward, almost utterly incapacitating splint and sling. Then.... yesterday! ... the post-op visit where the loathed splint was removed and the arm was set free! Hooray! I can cuddle beside my sweetheart without this forbidding barrier of the enormous, lifeless arm lying in bed between us. I can type with both hands! 

What else in life is needed for happiness? I now know that the answer to that is: nothing.

But. . . I am so far behind on EVERYTHING! The year went right ahead and got started WITHOUT ME and now I'm panting - with my still-depleted store of energy - to catch up.  Already, on January 11, I'm ready to give up on 2024 and admit defeat. Maybe 2025 will be better? 

But this would be just a tad premature, don't you think? I have to find a way to give myself permission to start the new year 11 days late - or maybe, start it on Monday, the 15th, halfway through January, which feels a little less random. Or even... just ease into it? Just start doing a few of my pleasant little piddly tasks (like writing this blog post) and see what happens?

I've already developed, over the past decades, a few ways to trick myself into summoning the motivational energy that comes from new beginnings even when these beginnings don't fall on the most auspicious times of day or month or year. I fell in love with my trusty, trademark hourglass in part because the new beginning began whenever I turned it over, whether right on the dot of 5 a.m. or at 5:03 or even - heaven forbid - at 7:30. I inaugurated the practice of starting a new life on the first day of each month just so I could have that "5-4-3-2-1 Happy New Year!" energy twelve times a year. 

The saying popular in the years of my youth - "Today is the first day of the rest of your life" - was designed just to allow us to have a new beginning WHENEVER we need one. Today can always be the first day of SOMETHING.

So: today is the first day of a life with a partially healed fractured elbow and partially restored level of functionality. I'm giving 2024 another chance.

Starting today.

Starting All Over Again in the New Year - with One Big, Unexpected Hindrance

 Happy new year!

 As you may or may not have noticed, and as I myself barely noticed, I haven't posted on this blog since May. I was too busy with my sweet new romance, and feeling discouraged about the current children's book marketplace, and trying to decide whether I would ever write another book again, and then finally falling in love with a new book idea and spending the rest of the year happily scribbling away in my upstairs writing nook on my hour a day of writing bliss.

 But now it's the new year, and I was filled with plans for starting all over again with every once-beloved activity under the sun. Blogging again! Teaching an online course for the graduate programs in children's literature at Hollins University! Working with my mentees through the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators! And revising my beautiful book to share with my writing group and then with my agent and editor. I could hardly wait for the new year to begin!

 Alas, two days before Christmas, I was off to the grocery store with my two little granddaughters, and one of them was leaping and bounding with wild, uninhibited joy for the coming holidays, when she leaped and bounded so exuberantly that I tripped over her and fell hard onto the parking lot of King Soopers. “Are you okay?” a concerned stranger asked me. “No!” I wailed. Because I wasn't. He helped me up, both my grown sons were summoned, I was off to urgent care, and it turned out to be a broken elbow, with surgery now scheduled for this coming Thursday.

 What is to become of all my cherished plans? How can I type with one arm in a sling? Thank goodness it is my left elbow and not my right, but it is much harder than I realized to accomplish the tasks of daily life with only one good arm. Adjustments will need to be made. In fact, I am composing this right now, as an experiment, using the dictation feature on my laptop. Somehow this will all work out, right? So many of my friends have had similar surgeries, and they have survived. I suspect I will, too.

 At least I am writing this blog post today, just as I promised myself I would do. So I'm counting this as an auspicious start to the challenging first month of this new year.

 Wishing all of you health and happiness, and avoidance of unpleasant encounters with gravity, in 2024!

 

Help! I've Forgotten How to Write a Book!

Buoyed by my recent success (after a stretch of discouragement) in writing my most recent book, The Last Apple Tree, and selling it to my favorite publisher, I thought, hey, this was fun! I think I'll write another book!  

So I gathered up my trusty clipboard, pad of paper, and Pilot P-500 pen, and prepared to start thinking about what my next book should be.

There was only one problem.

I had forgotten how to write a book. 

Now, given that The Last Apple Tree will be my 63rd book, in a career spanning 40 years, plus my good-sized stack of unpublished and unpublishable books, you might think this is the kind of thing one would remember. Alas, you would be wrong. I believe it was Eudora Welty who said, "Each book teaches me how to write IT." But not how to write the next one.

Still, in case it might jog my memory, I dragged out the notes I had made when I was groping toward The Last Apple Tree.

They are, to put it mildly, a mess. I started out jotting down something I had heard on NPR about the origin of song some 270 million years ago. Ooh! And then I wrote random things like, "firsts and lasts" and "noise and silence" and "noise pollution" and "FINDING YOUR OWN MUSIC." Plus unhelpful questions like: "How can this be made kidlike?" and "What can children do?" 

Page 2 of the notes was not much better:

By this point, I recalled that my plan HAD been to write something about heirloom apple trees. So I wrote lines like "orchards involve planning for the future" and "man plants a tree that will outlive him." This was barely a start, so I wrote, "but who are my characters? what is their story?" Yes, these would indeed be useful things for an author to know! More random notes: "2 dif. families" - "quiet book - but: something big? some big loss?" 

On page 3, I start listing possible candidates for the "big sad thing": death, Alzheimer's, family shame, poverty, prison, bad thing in family history . . . 

The pages of notes continued to accumulate, with more questions I struggled to answer: "HOW WOULD THIS TIE IN TO APPLES?" "What ELSE is going to happen?" "What do each of them WANT?" and some encouraging comments to myself such as "I am starting to love this book!" By page 11 of the notes, I was urging myself to start actually writing the thing: "JUST START WRITING - PLEASE DO THIS!" followed by the crucial question: "but: where does the book BEGIN?" 

I did start writing, and I see on p. 14 of the notes that the writing is going badly. "MY WRITING TASK FOR TODAY  - figure out why I have so little interest in this book and how to fix it!!!" with a list of  "THINGS I STILL (think) I LIKE" and another list of "PROBLEMS WITH THE STORY - MANY!! Then, later on the same page in huge capitals: "HELP!!!" Then many pages headed "SALVAGING THIS BOOK" and" SALVAGING THIS BOOK, CONT'D" with the agonized question "SHOULD I THROW OUT EVERYTHING SO FAR?" And many sad-face emojis. 

I went on to produce a total of 51 pages in the same tiny, scribbly writing, over a period of months, as I continued going back and forth between actual writing and reflecting on what I had written and what I might write next. And then: I had a full draft! And my writing group, the Writing Roosters, read it and gave me heaps and heaps of comments, and I made heaps and heaps of changes! And then my agent loved it, and my editor offered a contract on it, and I've now done three more rounds of revision/edits for her.

So did re-reading these old notes help me remember how to write a book? Sort of. The main thing they helped me remember was that WRITING IS HARD! WRITING TAKES TIME! EXPECT FALSE STARTS! EXPECT A ROLLERCOASTER OF SELF-PRAISE AND SELF-DOUBT WITH OCCASIONAL DARK NIGHTS OF THE AUTHOR'S SOUL! 

That was helpful, after all. 

I might as well jump on that rollercoaster today.

Spring Comes at Last to Rainbow's End

Today is the first day of May! Hooray! So as I (almost) always do on the first day of a month, today I start a new life.

It's also a new season, as spring has finally come to Valley Lane in Six-Mile Canyon where I live with my True Love in a funky treehouse-sort-of-house called Rainbow's End. 

It was only this past weekend that the weather was so lovely that David and I could sit on the deck for much of the day. 

The hummingbirds have returned from their winter migration, so I filled the feeders we bought last year with nectar of four parts water to one part sugar, and we hung the new feeder for the pygmy nuthatches and Stellar's jays that we bought from a local bird store with the assistance of a pleasant and knowledgeable young man whose advice proved entirely correct on every point. What joy it is now to see the birds flocking to our bird buffet, as we sit with mimosas and David's fresh-baked sourdough bread spread with delectable fromage d'affinois. Yesterday two deer lingered on the hillside, nibbling the coarse wild grass that is now making the rocky cliff emerald green. Forgotten is the toil of shoveling those 66 steps from the January snows that refused to melt, or trying to drive up the steep, icy hill at Coffin Corner, and talking more and more often about "when we move back to town." We love it here, we love it here, we love it here! We want to live here forever!

So at the heart of May's new life: savor spring in David's arms.

But addicted as I am to productivity, I have two writing goals as well. First: produce a good draft of a book chapter I'm writing on "the library as a liminal space in children's literature" for a scholar friend's edited collection. I've already hauled home dozens of books from the public library, read them all, and taken 43 handwritten pages of notes about them. But now I need to make notes on the notes! And think of something I actually want to SAY! 

Second: start brainstorming ideas for a next children's book of my own. Some of my writer friends have dozens of ideas buzzing about in their feverish brains. I don't. I have little teensy scraps of things that might become ideas someday, but actual ideas come to me ONLY when I sit down with clipboard, pad of paper, and pen, and write at the top of the pages: IDEAS. Then, and only then, do a few pitiful ones start creeping out from their hiding places. I plan to spend all of May just gathering enough pitiful ideas that a few might grow into something that could become a real, live book.

Progress on both goals starting today!

Resume regular font. 

Just When I Thought My Career Might Be Over . . . It Wasn't

I have given many motivational talks throughout my long career as a children's book author, cheering on fledgling authors through disappointment and discouragement. But I found out (to my shame) that it was harder to say these cheering things to myself when I was the disappointed and discouraged one. When the book I thought was my best book ever was published to fewer accolades than I had hoped, and when the next book (equally brilliant in my humble opinion) didn't get published AT ALL, I started to wonder if maybe it was time for this old gray mare to put herself out to pasture. 

But then (as everyone in the universe knows by now) I fell in love in March of 2022, and suddenly everything that had previously seemed impossible started to seem possible again. Finding late-life love after loss does make one inclined to believe in miracles! And this new man turned out to be someone with a gift for brainstorming ideas - particularly, he informed me, ideas in fields he knows nothing about. 

When David offered to do a brainstorming session with me, at first I balked. "But . . ." I tried to tell him as kindly I could, "your ideas are going to be DUMB! And then I'll feel embarrassed for you! And I won't adore you in the same way ever again!" He replied, "Of COURSE my ideas will be dumb. That's what happens all the time in brainstorming. But I think something will come unstuck for you."

So last April we brainstormed together. And he was right. I came unstuck. I had identified some features of the kinds of books I like to write - books that are "Claudia Mills" books. He typed them up on a sheet of paper; all the teensy writing here was my thoughts as they bubbled up in the course of our long conversation.

Two of the items scribbled on this page spoke most deeply to me: 1) heirloom apple trees in need of saving (my previous book, The Lost Language, was about endangered languages in need of saving - I have a weakness for people who try to save things, even if their efforts to do so are ultimately doomed); 2) an intergenerational oral history project (oral history involves saving STORIES - so more saving!!). 

I began to grope... and to make voluminous notes... and then, timidly, to write. I read the first pages to David, and he offered just the right mix of big-picture questions about the story, smaller insights about particular details, and unfailing, enthusiastic encouragement. In December I shared the finished manuscript with my writing group, the Writing Roosters, for their many challenging comments. I revised mightily and sent the book to my agent right before Christmas; he sent it out to my editor at the start of the new year. She responded - a career first for me - within HOURS, saying she had only meant to take a peek, but had to finish it, and loved it... and a week later - also a career first for me - I had the  offer for publication. 

Several rounds of revision remained, and it takes forever to get a contract finalized and signed, but I SIGNED IT YESTERDAY! The Last Apple Tree is set for publication in summer of 2024. I love the brief description of the book in the contract (which I didn't write): "The Last Apple tree, a middle-grade novel work of fiction, approximately 240 pages, about memory, generational grief, and the importance of difficult truth." Ooh! I would like to read this book myself!

Here are the flowers David brought home for me on the day I got the email with the official publication offer, perched atop a stack of all my notes for the book. 

With The Last Apple Tree now in production and the bulk of my work on it completed, he asked me the other day if I'd like to have a brainstorming session for a new book. Um - yes??!!