Are You Ready or Not? New Beginnings

By Molly Field

As a writer, nothing brings you greater satisfaction than penning that crisp sentence, flowing with the prose you not only create yourself, but with excellent writing offered by other authors.

Because we fancy ourselves a complex species, the opposite side of the same coin proposes that as a writer, nothing brings you greater senses of defeat and challenge than the words of other authors.

Spring is coming. The cherry blossoms on our neighborhood trees are pinking and peeking; the cardinals and robins are chatty, looking for wives. The sun is shining a little stronger and a little brighter every day. Spring, brings Macy's white sales and thoughts of purging, spring cleaning, new beginnings. I believe that many "New Year's Resolutions" should really be made on the first day of spring because in the winter, it's still too cold (at least where I live) to begin training for a marathon outside. (Yes, I am aware that not all NYRs focus on fitness.)

So for this month, we are encouraged to talk to you about new beginnings, fresh starts... This is a challenge for me because I am in the throes of a mental reorganization myself. But no time like the present, eh?

I didn't know what I was going to write about today. I get my prompt from our fearless leader, and sometimes I gnaw on a bone and other times I just bang one out. This time, I did a little of both. 

Without boring you to tears, I gave up Facebook for Lent. I'm not terrifically Catholic, but the opportunity was so well-timed and I wanted an out anyway, that I couldn't resist. It had all become too much for me.

My intention was to spend that time working on my book's drafts and edit it, which I have done, but not with the attention I paid to my Facebook "career." So clearly, I've got some work to do. The thing is though, that yesterday, my cousin sent me the cover art for her friend's new book, Flat Water Tuesday, a story about competitive rowing and young love. As an adult rower who hails from a renown rowing town, whose extended family rowed, whose parents met because of rowing, and whose brothers and cousins and now son row, the book has a no-brainer appeal for me.

It is not ironic (rather I consider it cosmically inspired) that when that cover art came to me, I was also on the phone being wooed by an exiting board member of my novice son's rowing club to be... yeah: president. I have attended one general membership meeting. They do have their ducks in a row over there, but my "pedigree" was undeniable and most of the board members are land lubbers. I said yes. (D'OH!) We'll see how it goes. It could be great. New beginnings, right?

The energy of these new starts, beginnings, etc., theme is intoxicating; it reminds me of when That Boy looked at me for the first time. The theme for today's post is coursing through me like whisky. I am simultaneously totally psyched and utterly petrified. 

It was one year ago this week, that I sat on my cousin's micro deck beneath the unseasonably warm sun in Buffalo where we talked about her friend's book. He'd just signed on with an agent; a publisher was totally interested. The energy was ramping up. They were talking contracts, money, real business. A part of me died inside when I heard all this. I thought, "I'll never be there... this guy's amazing..." and yet a part of me never died, because that summer I wrote my book. The one that needs the editing and the love I need to give it. I can't blame Facebook; I blame me.

I'm stuck now, just a little, but stuck enough to say this about new beginnings: I am considering writing my foreword now. However, I have this sense that I'm going to end up writing a whole new book, in fact the feeling that I will end up writing a whole new version of that book is undeniable. Is that so bad?

I am an Adult Child of Alcoholics, plural. We ACOAs don't have much luck or experience finishing things, but I know this: if I get started on something that I love, I never give it up. I push and push and push. And while I know that writing that first version of my book was cathartic and amazing, the next revised version, the one that spawns through this foreword, is going to be even better, even clearer. I just need six uninterrupted weeks. Why did I say yes to the rowing club?

But I have to be careful. As an ACOA I am constantly doubting myself, my intuition, my gut. I question the enthusiasm I have for something, I wonder if what I'm doing is enough or valuable. I get so caught up in the questioning of the act that I seldom act. It seems the only thing that fuels my fire to get up and keep going is a silent rage that is borne of the frustration that constant second guessing yields.

People who don't know the world of an ACOA look at us when we talk about it as if we have three heads. "What do you mean you hid under your bed for hours listening for your angry parent to close their door for the night?" or "What do you mean you cooked your own food when you were five? Who does that?" or the other ACOAs in your life will nod knowingly. Either way, you end up talking about that stuff for hours until you can't anymore; you're either sharing stories with people who also survived it, or your busy trying to convince people that those memories were real. It can be taxing.

I'm writing about all this here, so candidly, because I can. It's my literary place under the bed. I'm 45 years old and I'm still worried that my parents will be mad at me if I write about my life. The spiteful kid inside me, my Peter Pan, says this, "Do you think for one minute they considered your anger feelings?" and I think for a moment, sigh, look into the distance and tell Peter, "I have no clue."

Just to be clear, I didn't grow up in tatters under a shanty on a mountainside; we had no want for anything material. My parents were well-educated, connected and intelligent people. I was constantly reminded of my potential, that I could be a concert violinist if I wanted, but I didn't want that. Because they are also ACOAs, my parents knew the damage that negative talk can do. However, it can sound cliché, but it was what they didn't say that spoke louder than anything they did say.

Right now, I can feel the energy ebb a smidge, but the passion is still there; the nagging thought that this foreword can be the jack to "unstuck" me must be attended to. It must be honored.

New beginnings are here for all of us. You don't have to be an ACOA to have them. You just have to be willing to leave the past in the past and if you can summon any ounce of courage from those crushing days that kept you going to today, use it to move you to tomorrow and get that book published.

We are writers. Let's do this.

come out come out, wherever you are. photo credit: me

   

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Five Foods Safe to Eat While Writing

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by Carrie Bailey

If you are a writer, you probably face two major issues that will undoubtedly impact your health, if they haven't already. Check the number you see on the bathroom scales. Yeah, me, too. Since I started writing in 2009, these two little problems have added FIFTY unwanted pounds to my otherwise incredible life.

1. Writing is a sedentary activity
2. Over-eating is easy to do while writing

So far, I've lost THIRTY pounds by following a strict diet, but just as soon as I started getting enthusiastic about what I'm writing again, the weight started creeping back on.

And no, I'm not going jogging. If you're thinking that all I have to do is show up at the gym, hold on to your dumbbells, because I do enough physical labor during the forty to sixty hours per week at my day job. Ouch, I know. It's not fair, but it is true. Parents of young children can confirm. They chase the children, but they don't lose weight. Why?

It's the writing. I know it is. Writing makes an otherwise healthy person fat. I don't feel like I eat more. I don't feel like I eat differently. I get more physical activity than before when I weighed less and I'm still in my 30s...only I am writing in the room next to my kitchen and my sense of time is distorted while I'm busy working on my novel or a blog post or whatever if may be today. That's what's different.

My distorted sense of time allows me to eat and drink whenever I want. I know grazing is supposed to be healthy for a person, according to the experts, but whoever that person is, I don't think they like food as much as I do. Or, perhaps they just can't cook anything that tastes as good as my sweet potato, corn and black bean Shepherd's Pie. Probably, not. Anyway, the difference between when I'm losing weight and gaining weight while writing is remarkably simple. When I'm losing weight, I make a meal plan the night before including beverages. I set the food aside, in exact portions, so I can physically see how much there will be for me to eat each time I take a break from writing and when it's gone, I stop eating. When I'm gaining weight, I eat small meals that I know are healthy, but I really couldn't say how much my snacking adds up, because I'm not actually paying attention.  

I'm not going to stop munching while writing. I need safe foods. And I realize that foods that make healthy snacks when I'm not writing, can become bitterly dangerous when I'm not paying attention. That handful of nuts becomes the whole bowl. Those fourteen crackers transforms quickly into, yep, the whole box. Forget chips, don't even mention them.

I have, however, identified a few writer-safe snack foods. If you fail to stop when you should, the consequences for leaving these on your desk while you work will be minimal.

1. Popcorn. Boring, plain, popcorn. No salt. No real butter or margarine. Just corn, popped. If you've got to have a carbohydrate and you need to eat and eat and eat, eat this.

2. Apples. Good luck getting fat eating apples. Sure they're sweet, but you've got to be a special sort of person to take a fresh apple and keep going with it the point of danger. They're excellent for binging because they both satisfy the desire for something sweet and they're fibrous.

3. Cucumbers and onions soaked in half vinegar and half water. Slice them in a dish and let them set for a while. They're a lot like eating pickles, but fresher.

4. Sugar-free hard candies. If you've tried them years before and realized as I did that they were awful, give them another chance. Great advances have been made in replacing sugar with other substances of questionable merit. I like the Werther's Sugar Free candies. Even if I impatiently crunch down on fifteen of them, I'm only regretting it to the tune of 120 calories. Fifteen!

5. Tea and coffee. No, they're not foods, but how many times have you eaten something when in truth, you were dehydrated? Maybe that's just me. Still, if done right, tea and coffee can be calorie free things to do with your mouth while writing. And that's what it's really all about.

These recommendations don't satisfy hunger necessarily. They do something else. They help you extend the time between meals when you're not capable of giving your full attention to what you're putting in your mouth.

Personally, I only can follow what dietitians recommend when I've got the time and attention to devote to it, but most of the time, I care about what I'm writing much much more than what I'm eating. I don't want to waste the mental energy on thinking about food and I don't want to lose focus on my writing to count calories, carbs, read labels or otherwise consult my diet.

And that's the problem. Most diets are designed with the assumption that I, like the dietitian who designed them, want to spend lots of my time and energy during my day on my diet. They are wrong. As soon as my day starts and I'm focused on my characters want to do, the opportunity to deal with my meal plan is lost. So, I start the night before and I minimize the damage done by mindless eating with safe foods.