We’re doing it again.

In preparation for having a small home dojo in conjunction with our new rented room at a local church, we’ll be moving our rooms around.

Have you ever done this?

It’s something I indulge in every now and then; it helps cure that stagnant feeling I get when I’ve been living in one place for too long.

Lots of people do things like turn a spare bedroom or guest room into an office, right? I just like to take it a step further. Our living room, for example, could probably lay claim to an identity crisis. When we first bought the house it was the living room. Somewhere along the way, it became “the train room” (we had a large table with Dylan’s model train layout on it, and we needed somewhere to put it).

Then it became the dining room. And I actually got the idea to turn it into the dining room one day about an hour before my friend and her family were coming over for dinner. So Ward and I moved the dining room into the train room (which had been the living room) and the train room into the dining room.

Eventually, the train layout got dismantled, we moved the living room back into the living room (only we decided to call it the sitting room, as by then we already had a living room in the addition we built at the back of the house) and the dining room was transformed back into a dining room.

(And the dining room was actually our old kitchen, but then we (and IKEA) turned our old den into the kitchen, which is why the old kitchen became the dining room.)

Are you confused yet?

Everyone’s so used to it, no one even blinks an eye when I get one of my room-flipping ideas. Although my husband always grins and points at me whenever we watch Sleepless in Seattle, at the part where Tom Hanks and Rob Reiner are talking about one of their clients wanting to pick up the house and spin it around.

This time around, though, I’ve actually got a legitimate reason for all this room flipping; it’s rather nice to have a reason. I don’t think I’ve ever had a reason before.

In order to have a home dojo, we do, you see, have to actually vacate a room in which to put the dojo. So we decided to use the living room; it’s in the addition, is beautifully bright and sunny, and has French doors opening up to the back deck.

So here’s what we’ve decided to do (it gets slightly crazy, I must admit): we’re moving our living room furniture into the sitting room, because it’s much nicer than the ratty old leather sofa that’s in the sitting room right now. So the sitting room will be our living room again.

We’re moving the old ratty leather sofa to the dining room (which used to be the kitchen and which, in fact, still has all the kitchen cabinets still up, plus a freezer and our old fridge). So now the dining room will be our sitting room.

Meanwhile, we’re going to do some desk and table swapping between the dining room and the office, because, as it turns out, we just might be using as a desk a table which would be perfect for the new dining room.

And where would that be, you might ask (if you’ve followed along this far and aren’t dizzy from all of this)? At the bottom of the stairs, right outside the kitchen and beside the living room (the old sitting room) we have a lot of wasted space – 8 ft X 9 ft, to be exact. Perfect size for a nice, cozy dining room, right?

So we’re going to switch desks and tables around, and create a new dining room where there was nothing before.

I’m really liking this. And as I pointed out to Ward, whenever we have people over, no-one ever goes into the living room anyway except the kids; everyone likes to hang out in the sitting room which is divided from the kitchen by a half wall of cabinets. Yes, the same sitting room with the ratty old leather sofa.

Only now, it will have our nice new living room furniture in it. Because, you see, it won’t be our sitting room anymore. It will be our living room. Which was what it was when we first moved in. See how nicely it all works out?

One of the things my husband and I have been planning is downsizing our home once our daughter is in university next year; when that happens, it will be just my husband and I, and our six-year-old, and our current house is really too big for just the three of us.

So we’ve decided to use the next eighteen months or so to get rid of all the clutter, and decide on the things we really need, versus stuff that, well, we don’t really need!

At the top of the list are my books. I have so many books, and aside from the to-be-read ones, there are only certain ones that I really want to keep. So I’ve been trying to figure out the best ways to get rid of some of my books. Since many of them are beloved-but-not-quite-keeper status, I’d like to see them go out to a good home.

Our local library doesn’t accept book donations; apparently it costs them more in terms of labor to go through donated books and catalogue them, so they simply don’t accept donations. So that idea is out.

I’ve only come up with one idea so far: box up the books I don’t want anymore and list them on Craigslist for $5 or $10 per box. Lots of titles in each, but no swapping between boxes.

But I’d also like to give some of my books away. We have a lot of younger children’s picture books, for example, that our youngest has outgrown, and it would be nice to see them go to a good home.

In the past, we’d give books away to Goodwill, but I’d like to give my books to places where the books would actually get used, rather than used only if they get sold.

I could really use a blog-based brainstorming session around this problem – if you have any ideas or suggestions, please leave me a comment!

Shirley Valentine is one of my favorite movies of all time. I watched it again last night, and, as always, came away from it feeling uplifted – time hasn’t dated the movie at all, perhaps because it’s about something that’s simply timeless.

On its surface, the movie (and the award-winning play from which the movie was adapted) is about Shirley Bradshaw, a middle-aged housewife living a stagnant, loveless life, and the choices she makes during a two-week vacation in Greece.

But at its core, it’s about remembering who we really are – and reminding us that in every moment, the choice to be who we really are is always there, no matter what conventional wisdom might dictate.

There are lines in this movie that always make me cry. For example, when Shirley’s sitting on the beach by the ocean, and she’s thinking about why we get all this life, when it can’t be used – “That’s where Shirley Valentine disappeared to. She got lost in all this unused life.” Or the scene where she says, “I used to be the mother. I used to be the wife. But now I’m Shirley Valentine again.”

And I always feel so good when the movie is over; my dreams become real again, alive, beckoning. Everything shimmers with the brightness of possibility.

“I’ve fallen in love with the idea of living”, Shirley says, and that’s what this movie does for me, and a little bit more – it reminds me to fall in love with myself, with the me I really am.

It’s the same feeling I get after reading an Elizabeth Berg novel.

Have you watched Shirley Valentine, either the movie or the play? What are some of your favorite “comfort movies”?

Sounds like a song, doesn’t it?

So, with my, uh, vast knowledge of social media, I appear to have been promoted to the role of Social Media Marketing Director for my husband’s martial arts dojo.

(Fine. I did promote myself, but someone had to.)

One of our intentions, in light of recent changes we’ve decided on, is to begin rebuilding the dojo; to do this, we’ll be working to build up the sense of community spirit that has been missing at the dojo for the past few years. We live in suburbia, in a true “bedroom community”, so a sense of community isn’t always such an easy thing. People are often too tired after all their commuting to indulge in community spirit.

Anyway, whenever I think of “community”, my thoughts always turn online. I thought, well, why not put to good use all the things I already know (and have fun with daily), like blogging and Twitter and Facebook?

So I’ve been busy. And now – ta da! I present to you the fruit of my labors (all performed yesterday, some of it in the interests of procrastination. Today I’m going to write. Really. I promise.)

The new dojo blog. I decided to opt for a Wordpress.com blog instead of a self-hosted one because the server my husband’s using for the dojo’s website requires extreme technical prowess to install a blog. I don’t have anything even approaching technical prowess. I like to use a nice little something called Fantastico that works like magic a la presto. But it’s not something the dojo’s webhost offers.

So Wordpress.com it is. Also, the tags in a post show up at Wordpress.com’s tag pages, and perhaps people interested in the martial arts we specialize in might find us that way. Don’t want to waste any opportunities, right?

(I must say, though, that a blog on Wordpress.com is very limiting design-wise, when compared to a self-hosted blog, or even a blog on Blogger or Typepad. This seems to be so even if you choose to upgrade to the premium option. On the other hand, there are some nice little widgets and bits of shortcode – creating a contact form, for example, was a breeze.)

Renseikan is live on Twitter! We’ll be tweeting about martial arts stuff, so if you’re interested in karate, aikido or jodo, please do join us @renseikan. We’re looking mighty sparse right now in terms of followers …

And the pièce de résistance: the Renseikan Fan Page on Facebook! This one took me a while, because I didn’t have a clue how to set up a fan page on Facebook; it even took me a while to figure out how to upload a profile pic. But I did it! (I still actually don’t have a clue exactly how I did it – it took a fair bit of bumbling around and holding my breath.) I’m not too sure exactly what we’ll be posting to the fan page, though, not being one to join many fan pages myself (I think I’m following two, both of them fan pages of friends).

There are other bits of marketing we have to do, including a promotional flyer for physical distribution in the new neighborhood the dojo will be in. But one of our students is a real marketing whiz, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I can get him to write up some dazzling and hypnotic copy for us.

But in terms of the social media side of things, I can’t think of anything else right now. Any suggestions? Have I missed out on anything? And if you’re interested in the martial arts (you all are, right? Right? It’s okay to fib to me and nod your head vaguely), what kinds of things would you like to see being tweeted/blogged/Facebooked?

Ouch.

I did my readthrough of WAVERLEY yesterday. I wasn’t entranced by the opening chapter, which will need a thorough re-write and in-depth trimming.

The rest of the beginning chapters were good for a first draft. I even had some nice character building going on. It was all a fairly good match to the movie that’s been playing in my head.

And then the tale began to go wonky. The vision I had then just doesn’t match the vision I have now.

The result? I kept 20,300 words. And there are three chapters which I will rewrite, so some of it will be salvaged. But the rest of the novel?

Ziiiiip. 33,000 words pitched into the Deleted Scenes file (for “just in case”).

The good thing is, I can start working on it again now. I know why I felt so stymied and unable to get back to the writing. Now everything is a whole lot clearer.

Now to see if I can pull this one off. WAVERLEY is a story that’s been near and dear to my imagination for quite a while now. When it went off track, it went majorly off track. But it’s back on track now.

I think. I hope!

It has been a very long while since I last sat down to work on WAVERLEY, my current WIP. First it was the workload over the holidays – I tried, but I just didn’t have the energy to write on top of meeting all those deadlines.

Then, during the past three weeks (my recuperation phase, as it’s now fondly called at the Bookish household), I found myself procrastinating the final approach to the computer where my writing program rests waiting for me to – at long last – click on it and open it up. And start writing.

Here’s the thing: I really, really like Stephen King’s idea of whipping out that first draft without going back to reread, not until the first draft is done. I like the sound of that as much as I like the idea of working without an outline, so that I have the fun of discovering what happens as I write. So I’ve been determined to do both things.

But there comes a time when one has to look facts in the eye and say, “flexibility is a good thing”. And that time is now.

Because, you see, the seven weeks of not-writing has really pulled me out of the loop when it comes to WAVERLEY.

It feels a lot like putting down a book when you’re only half finished, and not picking it up until seven weeks later; I don’t know about you, but I hesitate to pick up such books again (which is why often when I put down a book and don’t pick it up for a while, it’s the kiss of death for that book even though I hang onto it, fondly thinking that, yes! I will! eventually! finish! reading it! Doesn’t happen as often as I’d like, sad to say). The excitement of reading the first half is, by that time, only a ghost of its former self, and it feels like a lot of work to pick up where you left off.

Not only has my momentum been lost, but there are certain things I remember only vaguely. And I also added a new, important character and it would be nice to go back and add in the scenes where we first get to meet him, and re-do the scenes that he’s supposed to be in, only he wasn’t, because at the time I wrote them, I didn’t realize he was supposed to be in them.

So I’ve decided to print out the 50,000 plus words of WAVERLEY and give it a readthrough before I start working on it again – even though I’m really only at the halfway point.

(For all of you who’ve offered to be my first readers, no need to panic. The first draft will likely be over 100,000 words, which is way too long for a children’s book, but my intention is to pare down to the requisite number of words by the final draft.)

After the readthrough, I will begin my “it’s just 20 minutes a day” daily writing goal again. It worked so well for NANTUCKET, and I know it’s going to work well for finishing WAVERLEY now that NaNoWriMo is no longer here to push me onward.

It helps that I’m pretty certain I’ll be able to get back into the momentum of it all once I’ve read it through and the things that have faded become bright and shiny for me again. To write my stories, I need to be in the world I’ve created; a hiatus only works to pull me further away.

I think this is what King was talking about when he said don’t stop the momentum of that first draft. Get your story down as quickly as you can. And now I’m adding, for myself: and if by chance you do stop the momentum, get your momentum back by reading what you’ve got, get yourself back into your story again, and then … don’t stop the momentum.

And as for NANTUCKET – it’s been sitting on my shelf for three months now. It’s also ripe for it’s first readthrough. I know it’s my practice novel, but I’m feeling very curious about how it will read after airing out for this long.

The thought of reading what I’ve written so far of WAVERLEY and my first draft of NANTUCKET is very exciting …!

I recently stumbled into a whole series of games called “time management games”, a name which I think is terribly, terribly misleading.

“Time suck games” is more like it.

Let me just say, none of these games have helped me with my time management issues, although they’ve been quite good at adding to my time management challenges. Maybe that’s why they’re called time management games.

These games have been around for quite a while; my daughter used to play Diner Dash when she was younger. I always thought it was one of those “tycoon” type of games, where you build up a restaurant empire and earn mega bucks.

Thanks to my iPhone, where I now get to do things like play Cooking Dash (I’m at level 30 something, and let me tell you, running a Japanese-themed diner is hard), I now know what these time management games are all about. You’re not building up empires. You’re keeping customers and clients happy.

So here’s what I’ve learned so far from playing these games:

1. It is preferable to be the wait staff at an unsuccessful (ie slow) restaurant (or hotel. Or fast food outlet. Or spa – yes, a spa. And here I thought a spa was for relaxing.)
2. Customers these days need to learn some patience.
3. Wait staff definitely work for their tips, and then some.
4. It’s a good idea to play something like Cooking Dash right before you’re planning to clean up the kitchen, because you actually do end up cleaning the kitchen a whole lot quicker. (The job isn’t nearly as thorough, mind you, but for a little while there, you’ll feel like Speed Man/Woman.)

While these games are addictive, after a while you do get rather tired of rushing around, which is a good thing.

It’s at the point where I’m contemplating dumping plates of food onto the floor and throwing up my hands in despair that I switch to Sims 3. Which isn’t exactly the most productive thing in the world to do, either. But it’s a lot slower pace, and quite worthwhile for building up those procrastination muscles, too.

This post has been written to explain where I’ve been the last little while. Now you know.

Nora Roberts is such a prolific author, but I’ve never read a Nora Roberts novel before.

It’s partly because I always think of her as a romance writer (although I haven’t read any of her J.D. Robb mysteries, either – not sure why that is); while I do enjoy the occasional romance, I prefer romance with a large dose of humor, so chick lit is more to my taste.

But a while back when I hosted the Comfort Reads edition of the Bookworms Carnival, Sheila from One Person’s Journey Through a World of Books submitted as her entry Roberts’s Three Sisters trilogy. I found the concept of the books very intriguing: they feature three independent women, all witches, living on an enchanting sounding island, Three Sisters Island. The combination of magic and every day life has always been very appealing to me, so I requested the first book in the trilogy, Dance Upon the Air, from the library.

I actually picked up Dance Upon the Air immediately after putting down another book, a DNF which I had thought would be very much to my taste, given that it was an urban fantasy with Arthurian elements. I’d read ten pages of this particular novel before realizing I wasn’t really getting into the story at all; I wanted to read something, though, so I picked up Dance Upon the Air from my pile of library books, and started reading.

Roberts is extremely skilled at telling her story; it took far less than ten pages before I was pulled in. I’m about halfway through the book now, and I’m enjoying it very much.

The setting of Three Sisters Island is beautifully rendered; this is a place I’d love to move to! In Dance Upon the Air, the setting itself is as much a character as the other characters in the book.

There’s a good dash of romance but it’s well-balanced well with the intrigue of an abusive husband who’s hunting down his wife. Add in the magical elements, and it’s easy to see why I was hooked so quickly and so thoroughly.

The only quibble I’ve had so far is Roberts’s tendency to describe her main characters too thoroughly. All three of the women in the story are impossibly beautiful, and there’s also the fact that I prefer less description because it’s always more enjoyable for me to use my imagination to fill in a character’s appearance in my mind’s eye.

But really, that’s a small thing. I’ve been enjoying Dance Upon the Air quite a lot so far, and I’m pretty certain once I finish this first book in the trilogy I’ll be moving to the next two books. I’m probably still not likely to read any of Roberts’s straight romance novels, but Roberts has written other trilogies with a dash of the paranormal, and I’ll be keeping my eye out for them.

What about you? Is Nora Roberts one of your favorite authors? What books written by Roberts would you recommend to someone like me who enjoys the suspense and paranormal elements more than the romance?

I’ve never met a cliché that I haven’t mangled in some way or other.

The other day I was thinking to myself, “Hey, wait a minute. There is a cliché that I know inside out. That I would never, not in a million years, mangle. A dollar for your thoughts. Hah!”

It took me a few hours to realize that perhaps the correct saying is actually, “A penny for your thoughts”, and maybe even “A nickel for your thoughts”. But it’s highly unlikely that inflation has had that kind of impact on this particular cliché just yet.

I’m not sure why I have this glaring lack of ability when it comes to clichés. All I know is that I usually don’t dare to employ a cliché when I’m writing anything.

Once, I sent an email to a group of wonderful, empowering women who have been by my side every day for the past five years or so, and I headed it “Petal to the medal”. I meant, I realized later, “pedal to the metal”, but to this day, “petal to the medal” looks right to me (and as proof, I actually had to Google “petal to the medal cliché” to find out exactly what the right phrase was).

Luckily, embarrassment isn’t something that happens when I’m within the circle of this particular group of friends. But still, it was a reminder that I must stay away from clichés.

I guess as a writer, this is a good thing. On the other hand, in my current WIP, words and idioms play a rather large role.

So I’m now well-armed: I decided to get a copy of The Facts on File Dictionary of Clichés, and on my wishlist is The Scholastic Dictionary of Idioms, which I had borrowed from the library last year but didn’t get a chance to do more than dip into.

I figure I’ll be well-prepared as a result.

What about you? Are there any clichés that you tend to mangle?

It doesn’t often happen to me, but yesterday I woke up feeling rather glum. Whenever that happens, I find that the best antidote is to focus on being open to inspiration.

Often, too, the inspiration that comes tells me a lot about something important I’ve been forgetting, which is often at the root of why I’m feeling glum to begin with.

It turns out that yesterday’s spot of down in the dumps was due to my writing – or rather, my not-writing. Because, as it turned out, all the inspiration that flowed to me was related to writing.

First up: a new perspective on my writing. Joe Finder tweeted about James Patterson Inc., an article in the New York Times, which was the first step for me in coming out of the doldrums.

It’s quite a long article, and what fascinated me the most was the reminder that there are two sides to writing: there’s the creative side, and then there’s the business side. And from a business angle, my writing is all about a product. I know it’s not a romantic, creative or artistic way of saying it, but from a business perspective, it’s true. Each novel I write is also a product, and the thing is, if I’m not-writing, well, my writing isn’t exactly going to go anywhere, is it? Because I won’t have any products to put out there into the big wide world.

After reading this article, I suddenly remembered reading about J. Kaye’s new writing blog, 365 Days of Novel Writing at Molly’s blog, My Cozy Book Nook earlier this week. I had scooted over to 365 Days of Novel Writing that day, and enjoyed reading about J. Kaye’s commitment to her writing this year.

And I’m really tickled to see that Molly just posted more extensively about J. Kaye’s writing endeavors, as well as her own, in this Sunday Salon post yesterday.

Putting the James Patterson article together with J. Kaye’s new writing blog, I remembered something else: writing is something that I need to do every day.

It’s not that the month off from writing has been a bust, creativity-wise. I have spent time nearly every day “working on” WAVERLEY, my current WIP, in my mind; I “see” my novels in my mind, like I’m watching a movie. I’ve always done this, and I have to say, it really makes daydreaming fun and productive.

But still, eventually the scenes that I see need to be put into words. And that’s what I’ve been needing to do: the actual act of writing down those words.

And that’s what prompted me to start listening to the audio version of On Writing, by Stephen King; I have read the print version many times, but a good friend of mine sent me the audio version as a gift a while ago.

Last night was the first time I listened to it. It’s read by Stephen King himself, and it turns out he is quite a good narrator. I skipped right to the “writer’s toolbox” section, because I’ve always found myself most inspired by King’s discussion of the tools every writer needs to hone.

So I ended up going to bed inspired, and this morning, the inspiration continued when I discovered this delightful post (again, via Twitter, this time through Debbie Ridpath Ohi) on Johanna Harness’s blog on Magic Note Cards.

I happen to be an office supply store nut – I can never go inside one without coming out relieved of a lot more money than I had intended – and I love index cards. I don’t do any outlining, preferring to write by the seat of my pants, but I’m thinking now that maybe using index cards would be fun for revisions.

You’re asking now – so, did you sit down to write some more of WAVERLEY today, Belle?

Um. Well, if you’re going to put it so bluntly … not as of the writing of this post. BUT the night is still youngish … !