Do you remember you had the time to make special cards for the loved ones in your life?  For those who still have a craft table and supplies, I am eternally envious.  For all those creative types with no time to customize their invitations, log into www.purpletrail.com to see if this might be a great substitute for the doiley and construction paper bifold.  

This site offers a quick and easy way to send customized email invitations free.  It has the potential to change the way you do business, invite friends and keep in touch.  While most use this as a party planning tool, I think this would be a great way to track seminar or workshop attendees. 

This event planning evite is a little more robust than its competitor www.evite.com.  These features include event access everywhere, including your mobile phone.  It has tracking and management, hundreds of invite designs and themes to personalize your invite. Also included is a rich desktop application and a consensus building tool (to make it easier to coordinate a time and place amongst busy people).  What a relief not to have to try to coordinate schedules and sort out who said what last in the chain email snafu. 

The site is user friendly, but the sending part can be a bit tricky.  Oh, the feature I most like is uploading my own digital photo to create a very personalized invitation.   I liked it so much that I attempted to create and email a card to a single person.  It didn’t delete the When and Where type on the card, so bear that in mind, you creative types, when you want to do something totally out of the party event realm.

Remember this evite tool when you are ready to hold a book signing party.

  I have hit a brick wall.  I haven’t posted in two weeks…or has it been longer?  So I do apologize for being absent.  Unlike some writers, I’m not stuck for ideas.  Or ability.  Or skill level.  It’s just plain poor time management. 

In Victoria Schmidt’s book, a self help book for the miserably time challenged (Book In A Month), she identifies several self defeating thoughts.  The one that I identified most was “I feel like I have no control over my time and how I spend it; writing is always pushed to the wayside.”  I don’t blame anyone but myself.  

Here are some strategies that I am employing to see if I can get over the brick wall:

1.  I started blogging to see if just the act of writing daily would morph into writing more substantive material.  Result:  It turns out I like blogging, but as you can tell by the last two weeks, I haven’t had much time. Results:  Blogging keeps me sane and as focused as I’ve ever been. 
2.  I have been searching for a writing buddy.  I’m not thinking about writing collaboratively, just someone to talk about writing, critiquing each other’s works, and to keep me from sliding into the nonwriting abyss.  Results: The first three people whom I approached wanted to be a writing buddy, but time management got in their way.   A little disappointed, I figured it was  better to know early in the game than later…and if they have more time issues than I do, how was I to ever improve?  I have a new writing buddy.  I am ever hopeful that this will be the one that helps me push through my writing dormancy.
3.  I have set deadlines for small assignments.  Results:  These have come and gone…and another deadline for a short story at the end of this month looks like more of the same. 
4.  I have daily to-do lists.  I have started listing writing at the top of the list instead at the bottom as an afterthought.
5.  In my spare time, I am always reading.  Results:  I’m enjoying the reading.  Am I more a spectator when it comes to writing?
6.  I’ve mapped out every hour of my day to see where I could be amiss.  The last two weeks I was sidetracked by the Olympics and now the political conventions are full steam ahead.   Results: No excuses.  I shouldn’t have given television a priority over my time with the computer.  
7.  Part of my problem may lie in the fact that I am working in front of a computer 8 hours a day.  I try not to hop back on the computer right after dinner.  I get a little exercise and then write.  Results: Obviously, this area could use some improvement.  Is my job the large elephant in the room?  Would I be more productive, if the best energy hours of the day were open to personal writing?  Do I have to wait until retirement, because I’m too undisciplined to make any progress?
8.  I am trying to say “NO” to people, but I often slip up.  Results:  When I do say no, which cuts down the level of noise that runs through my head, I am able to sit and write and enjoy myself.

Anyone have any suggestions that I can employ?  Giving up my day job is not one of them. 

Btw, writing is a great cheap form of therapy.  Try it.  I understand that writing also aids good health.

 I took a photo of three bamboo stalks a while back.  What interested me was the curling.  As I looked at the stalks, I realized that in its simpleness there is much symbolism. 

Bamboo is a Chinese symbol for longevity.  It earned this distinction because if you ever had bamboo grow in your yard and tried to get rid of it, you realize that bamboo is hardy.  It springs back even when you have pulled all the stalks year after year.  The bamboo root system is extensive and prolific.  Despite my efforts to eradicate the plant, every year the tender stalks poke their way through the underbrush.  Its endurance and adaptability are a lesson to us all that the secret to a long, happy life is to go with the flow.

It is significant that there are only three stalks in this vase.  You’ve heard people say that “things happen in three’s.” 

Three seems to have a completeness about it.  Many phases of life and other references exhibit how three is important in understanding higher concepts of life.  Take these for example:

• child/adult/senior
• mother/father/child
• life/death/rebirth (meaning life after death).
• birth/life/death
• red, blue, yellow - the 3 primary colors with which all other colors are created
• three phases of the moon
• three wishes for a genie
• three wise men
• Goldilocks and the Three Bears
• physical, mental and spiritual
• thought, word and deed
• animal, vegetable and mineral
  

In writing combinations of three also appear:

• beginning, middle, end
• creating a scene: goal, conflict, disaster
• creating a sequel: reaction, dilemma, decision
• three acts in a play
• rising action, climax, denouement

If you are looking for some real insight, I don’t have any.  I’m just writing whatever comes to my head in the early hours of the morning (1:22 AM).  I could go on and make some connection to the fact that the stalks remain green all year round.  And maybe there is something symbolic in that the leaves, which are much more tender than an oak, are few and appear at the end of the stalk. 

This exercise shows what can happen when you let your mind wander, connecting the dots between the universal truths and that which is real and concrete.  Every writer needs the ability to dream, because that is his or her well of inspiration.

As a panacea to my time management issues and my desire to focus on my writing, I purchased Book in a Month by Victoria Lynn Schmidt.  She claims it is a fool-proof system for writing a novel in 30 days.

Yes, this is what I want.  To knock out a rough draft in 30 days.  This goal I know would be much easier if I wasn’t working full time.  However, I am determined to give it a try.  I am tired of being the hamster in the wheel — expending energy, but not getting anywhere.  I may not progress fast enough for a 30 day book, but I commit to working steadily.

I read the first 50 pages, which covered goals and time management, fighting off your inner critic, and a chapter dedicated to resistance.  Geesh.  I thought I was unique.  Naw, it seems there are a whole lot of us writers out there wallowing in desire, but clueless in getting the work written.

I am encouraged by Schmidt’s analysis of the writer’s plight.  She comes with solid credentials.  I will keep you posted on my progress.  In the meantime, she has a website that might be of interest.  I haven’t visited it myself yet, but maybe you would be interested.  Schmidt claims it can be a motivator to keep writers focused.   Check it out if you have time.  www.CharactersJourney.com 

Also, if you haven’t already signed up to get an email notice when I post, please feel free to do so.  You will find a place to subscribe on the home page of this blog.  If anyone has also purchased this book, I would love to hear your thoughts on Schmidt’s strategy.

I used to know a lot of important stuff and a lot more unimportant, unrelated bits of information that I’m sure will not come in handy to anyone, except if you are a game show guest or writing a novel. 

I used to be smart, but one day I was watching Cash Cab, a tv reality game show.  The fares answer questions for money while riding to their destination somewhere in mid-Manhattan.  I read the newspapers. I watch the 7 o’clock news.  I pay attention to Jay Leno’s monologues to be up on the really important highlights of the day.  But I miss half Ben Bailey’s questions.

In college, I entered trivia contests and believe it or not…won.  I won geography contests…this makes my husband roll over in laughter.  I won spelling bees, but now I have trouble remembering how to spell hors d’oeuvre.  Gee, that word will forever look like it is spelled wrong.

In high school my friends actually thought I was cerebral.  I liked talking about literature and cut my teeth on Sidhartha, Nietzche, and Marxism.  I was enthralled by Machiavelli’s The Prince.  The denial of morality in political affairs and the justification of craft and deceit in pursuing political power came as cerebral jolt to my naive teen outlook of the world.

I used to be smart.  I knew who the 16th president was.  And what year George Washington became president.  I knew how to spell Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and now I have all I can do to pronounce it.  In the years since earning my graduate degree, I began a long, slow slide into a mental lethargy. 

Around age 35 I started teaching college English.  It is then I realized how ignorant I had become.  I entered motherhood a couple of years earlier.  I had traded in my grasp of concepts and thought for expertise in diaper rash, flash cards, and walks in the park. 

I watched as my expensive education became obfuscated by the distraction of babies crying,  mundane chats with neighbors, and house cleaning.   It was like quicksand.  Once I stepped in, it was hard to pull myself out, that is, unless I was Bear Grylls in Man vs. Wild.

I depend on Google to remind me of the details of chronological history, names and dates and have to quickly scour literary SparkNotes.com to jog my memory about plotlines, characters, and themes.  I can still add 2 plus 2.  Thank heaven for small favors. 

As I fast approach my senior years, will I my life be reduced to toggling between watching “Wheel of Fortune” and playing gin rummy?  Will I pick up a Danielle Steele novel instead of a book such as “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch?

What do I attribute my cerebral void?  It isn’t all about aging.  It is about life’s choices.  At the time, I wasn’t aware how my choices would shape my present.  If Dara Torres (42 year old Olympic athlete) can make a comeback on the swimming circuit, I can too, especially now that my children are leaving my home to start their own.  And while I am creating a wish list here, I wouldn’t mind reclaiming my twenty-something body. 

I have a stack of books to read. I have the Internet.  I am ready to become an information junkie.

So, Ben Bailey.  Next time I’m in NYC, I will be looking for your cab.  I’ll be ready for you.