On the Road Again

This is the time of year when I do a lot of traveling for work. I always go to the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics conference, usually held in Cincinnati (where I went earlier this month): my favorite philosophy conference of the year. I always go to the Children's Literature Festival sponsored by the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg (where I'll go next week): my favorite author event of the year. This year I'm also going to the Franklin County Children's Literature Festival (in Kansas); this is a spinoff festival from the Warrensburg one that in the past was held on the Wednesday following the Monday-Tuesday of Warrensburg, but this year it's the week before, which means two flights in and out of Kansas City.

I'm also going to have the proud moment of attending my son Christopher's graduation from Basic Training for the U.S. Army Reserves, in Fort Jackson, South Carolina - this Thursday! Then, after all of these other trips, I'll be flying home to Colorado for spring break, and while I'm on spring break I'll fly back to Kansas City for two days of school visits there (necessitating a third flight to Kansas City): once you start attending the Warrensburg festival, you can become quite popular in the Kansas City school district.

This means I have FIVE flights this month, and I would have had six if Cincinnati hadn't been within driving distance of my home this year.

So today I'm trying to get done every single thing I need to do in my life for a while. I've figured out a couple of creative and cool things to do with my classes (and I'm not missing as many as I had feared because of careful planning); I have to take care of all those pesky little Loathsome Tasks on which I've been procrastinating; I have to get my life in ORDER!

And then I have to relax and have fun. Stressed as I feel at the thought of all this travel, I have to remember that, hey, I love doing this. I love flying. I love packing my backpack full of books to read on the plane. I love talking to kids about my books. I love meeting other authors. I'll get to see Christopher, whom I haven't seen since New Year's Day. Even as I'm already teary-eyed with the thought of missing out on sweet Greencastle pleasures (oh, Blue Door Cafe!), I'm humming Willie Nelson: "On the road again. . . . Can't wait to get on the road again. . . . "

An Hour Lost

Today is my least favorite day of the year: the day when we change the clocks to "spring ahead," meaning that we lose an hour, an hour that will not be restored to us until we change the clocks again in the fall.

I have long hated Daylight Savings Time because I prefer my daylight in the morning to the evening. But I hate it even more now that I live in Indiana, which for some unaccountable reason is in the Eastern time zone when by all rights it should be in Central time. It is so dark here in the mornings! In fact, I just checked on the time for the sunrise today in Greencastle, and it was 8:04, eight minutes ago. How can there be a place where the sun doesn't rise until EIGHT O'CLOCK in the morning?

I know this shouldn't matter to someone who claims to get up every day at five, when it's dark outside, anyway. But true confession: it's been some time since I've gotten up at five. And somehow it's just harder to get up when even the promise of daylight is so far away.

I write this post not just to complain about Daylight Savings Time, however, but because the title of my blog is "An Hour a Day." If ever it was brought home to me how important an hour can be, it's on this day once a year when I'm cheated out of one. I will be sluggish and cranky all week, missing my hour, which now, in fond imagination, I would have spent writing the first page of a new novel, or writing a poem, or reading a book to remember forever, or walking in the DePauw University Nature Park, or snuggling under my covers for another sweet stretch of sleep.

Oh, hour gone, I miss you! May I cherish all your brothers and sisters, and never take a single one for granted.

Ninety-Nine Cents

I have been out every night this past week: dinner up at the Prindle with journalist Keith Woods of American Public Media, lecture by Harvard professor Lawrence Buell who writes on "eco-criticism" (the study of literature and the environment), picking up philosopher Cheshire Calhoun at the airport for her two-day visit to DePauw, the final meeting of the Cheshire Calhoun reading group. So last night I bought myself an early dinner at the Dairy Castle: a small hot fudge sundae with their wonderful black raspberry ice cream, my all-time favorite flavor. Then I went home at seven, put on my nightgown, and got into bed with my Kindle.

I bought a Kindle last year but have used it very little, even though I like so much about it: how small and lightweight it is; how easy it is to "turn the pages"; and best of all, the instant gratification of dreaming up a book you want to read one minute and having it delivered to "Claudia's Kindle" the next. But I just sort of forget that I have it. This week I remembered my Kindle when I saw a piece in the New York Times about the new Kindle Singles: nonfiction pieces by top-notch authors designed to be read in a single sitting. The Times article recommended one in particular: The Heart of Haiku, by Jane Hirshfield. I went to the Kindle website and bought it for ninety-nine cents. And then I spent the evening reading it.

It was delicious, a brief biography of the life of seventeenth-century haiku master Basho, interspersed with dozens of his haiku, each one analyzed to reveal common haiku themes. For example:

On a leafless branch,
a crow's settling:
autumn nightfall

Hirshfield used this haiku to explain the concept of sabi, a kind of loneliness or solitude: "It holds the feeling of whatever is chill, withered, and pared down to the leanness of existence. . . .To feel sabi is to feel keenly one's own sharp and particular existence amid its own impermanence, and to value the singular moment. . . ."

So last night, with no other company but Ruby my plush jackrabbit puppet, I lay in bed and read haiku and felt keenly my own sharp and particular existence, and valued each singular moment of a sweet evening spent reading, all for ninety-nine cents.

Outside the Box

As part of my project this year of living a more richly creative life, with the ultimate goal of writing a book that will surprise me, I'm paying attention to discussions in the media about how to enhance creativity. So I was struck by an article from a recent Sunday New York Times: "When Truisms Are True."

In this piece, the authors report on their research into "embodied cognition." They argue that when people literally act out various metaphors for creative thinking with their BODIES, their MINDS come up with a greater and wider array of solutions to creative tasks posed. Research subjects situated inside a boxed structure came up with fewer creative solutions than did research subjects positioned "outside the box." Research subjects set to solve a problem while walking on a prescribed path approached the task less creatively than those allowed to walk at will while thinking. The authors summarize their findings: "The differences were striking: students who walked freely were better at generating creative uses for the objects — coming up with over 25 percent more original ideas. Such creativity was assessed in terms of fluency (the number of ideas generated), flexibility (the number of unique categories that described the generated ideas) and originality (as judged by independent raters)."

So THIS is why it was a good thing indeed that I got off the beaten path this past weekend and drove a hundred and fifty miles without a map. And now, on my next walk around Greencastle, I'm not going to retrace my usual route; I'll just walk hither and thither willy-nilly. It's outside the box for me!

Off the Beaten Path

I've been working with my wonderful creativity consultant, poet Molly Fisk, for a few sessions now. After decades of writing my books as the "good girl" who follows all the children's book writing rules, I want to see if I can walk on the wilder side - not so much BREAK rules, but not even THINK about them. You may remember that my goal for the writing year is to write "a book that surprises me."

Molly suggested the following exercise. Block off a free weekend. Take $200. Get in your car. Start driving. See where you go. Don't look at a map. Don't have a destination in mind. Let the open road beckon. Follow where it sends you.

Isn't that the most wonderful assignment EVER?

The problem is that while I have the $200, I don't have the free weekend. But, driving home from Cincinnati on Saturday from the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics conference, I did have a free day. So I turned off the interstate as soon as I crossed the state line from Ohio back into Indiana. And I did peek at the map - I had to. But then I did just drive west, and north, knowing that was the general direction in which home lay.

I didn't have my camera with me, alas - this is the downside of spontaneity. But the upside was stopping in the little town of Mematora, IN, site of a historic canal dating from 1838. Almost all the little shops were closed for the season. But the one that was open - oh, my!!!

Grannie's Cookie Jars & Ice Cream Parlor has in it 2500 (!) cookie jars of all descriptions, meticulously sorted into a dazzling array of categories: dogs, cats, bears, cows, pigs, geese, chickens, little houses, little teashops, teapots - cookie jars shaped like purses, like thimbles, like toasters with toast popping out, like cookies. The one I bought is shaped like a teapot. I almost bought one shaped like a little duck to be friends with the one I already bought back in January at the Kokomo Treasure Mart, which is shaped like a goose.

So if I end up writing a book in which cookie jars figure prominently, well, I certainly didn't expect THAT. So THAT would be a book that would surprise me!

Robots, Raskolnikov, and Pomegranate Martinis

Greetings from Cincinnati, where I am attending the 21st annual conference of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE). In those twenty-one years, I have missed exactly twice: the first one (when I didn't know about it yet), and one that conflicted with the Children's Literature Festival sponsored by the University of Central Missouri that I also attend every year, so I had to make a painful choice. The APPE conference is often held in Cincinnati, at the wonderful Netherland Plaza Hilton Hotel, an art deco structure on the National Register of Historic Places, designed by the same architect who designed Rockefeller Center.

As soon as I walked in the door yesterday I was happy.

Some things are different this year, and some are the same.

Different: for the first time, I drove here, as it's just a two-and-a-half hour drive to Cincinnati from Greencastle, Indiana. To pass the time in the car, I started listening to the twenty-CD audio book set I have of Crime and Punishment that I originally bought to listen to on the drive from Colorado to Indiana last summer. I subsequently decided that it might be too grim and heavy a choice for my mood at the time, so I replaced it at the last minute with The Paris Wife, a novelization of Hemingway's first marriage, to Hadley Richardson, during his Paris years. But as I needed something for the trip this time, I dragged out Dostoyevsky.

Oh, my goodness! What a book to listen to as one drives! It's so brilliant and mesmerizing, but also SO intense. There I was, heading into rush hour Cincinnati traffic, trying to look out for the left-hand exit for DOWNTOWN - FIFTH STREET and to avoid ending up in Kentucky, as I'm listening to the horrific scene of Raskolnikov's dream of the savage fatal beating of a poor, broken-down workhorse. I'm lucky I made it to the hotel at all.

Also different: This time I arrived in time to see the semi-final round of the national championship for the intercollegiate Ethics Bowl, where our DePauw team had placed in the FINAL FOUR out of the thirty-two teams competing that day. So what a proud moment that was for me, and for all of us.

The same as always: Every single year I've attended a session on some fresh, new ethical issue I have never thought about for even a second during my twenty year career. This year it was a fascinating session on the ethics of designing robots for interactions with children. What a spirited discussion we had on the question of whether robots should or should not be presented as having a gender! Yes: this might enhance children's bonding with the robot and increase the authority of the robot as the robot gives caregiving guidance to a child. No: this might perpetuate gender stereotypes. I was inclined to the latter view, but then I started to think that maybe a supposedly ungendered robot would nonetheless seem to be gendered as male, male being the "default gender" in many cases. Most of my ungendered teddy bears somehow seemed to me to be boy bears. Were yours?

Finally, the same as always: pomegranate martinis in the gorgeous Tiffany hotel bar. Yes!

My Writing Pal

I've blogged before with worries about my weight. All that Blue Door Cafe French toast! All that free food at Prindle Institute events! One of my blog readers, fellow author Brenda Ferber, wisely recommended that I try the approach of "taking emotion out of the equation": banish guilt, banish ought's, eat when you're hungry, stop when you're full. I tried that for two days, but then couldn't sustain it, even as I know it has to be the only long-term solution that there is. To channel Anne Lamott, I am not remotely sane enough to do that.

Then a dear DePauw friend recommended My Fitness Pal, a free online tool that allows you to track everything that you eat every day. You record what you eat and how much you exercise; it does the math to tell you how many calories you have left for the day. It's enormously simple. Best of all, at the end of every day, when you sign off, it tells you, "If every day was like this, at the end of five weeks you would weigh x." Sometimes x is a smaller number than what you weigh now. Sometimes it is a bigger number. But either way, it just feels so GUARANTEED: if this is what you do, this is what you'll get. After all, My Fitness Pal said so!

Now I'm wondering whether I could create My Writing Pal on the same principle. You would enter your target number of pages, or words. Then you would enter what you write every day. Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope actually did this, though of course without any online tools to help him. In his magnificent autobiography, he writes:

When I have commenced a new book, I have always prepared a diary, divided into weeks, and carried it on for the period which I have allowed myself for the completion of the work. In this I have entered, day by day, the number of pages I have written, so that if at any time I have slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there, staring me in the face, and demanding of me increased labour, so that the deficiency might be supplied. According to the circumstances of the time,--whether my other business might be then heavy or light, or whether the book which I was writing was or was not wanted with speed,--I have allotted myself so many pages a week. The average number has been about 40. It has been placed as low as 20, and has risen to 112. And as a page is an ambiguous term, my page has been made to contain 250 words; and as words, if not watched, will have a tendency to straggle, I have had every word counted as I went.

On my version of My Writing Pal, at the end of each entry it would say, "If every day was like today, at the end of five weeks you would have written x pages." Now, this means that if the number for today was zero, then at the end of five weeks, if every day was like today, that's precisely what you'd have to show for yourself: zero. But, oh, if every day had even just one page, think what you would have in five weeks: thirty-five pages. In ten weeks: seventy. In fifty-two weeks: three-hundred fifty. And at the end of a lifetime of writing, so many many books.