Mrs. Unfocused got her supergenius freelance art director and designer friend, Housecat No More, to design a t-shirt for me based on one of my recent blog posts. In the post, it seems I said I was going to get this printed on a t-shirt; the Mrs. beat me to it. Here I am wearing my prize:
I have another one — same message, but the shirt is light blue (so calming!). I also got some other stuff, and very nice cards. My family is wonderful.
Today’s my birthday. I’m 39, and I have to leave off harassing Mrs. Unfocused about being the older woman.
We celebrated yesterday with cake and a visit from a college friend and his daughter, which was good fun. On Saturday, we got together with another college friend from out of town, and his wife and daughters, so it was a very collegiate weekend.
I did get my long run in yesterday. I went out late, at about 10:30, so it was already pretty hot, and again, my training fell off in the last couple of weeks, so I wasn’t terribly fast: 9.85 miles in 1:27 and change (don’t have my watch in front of me for the exact time). I’m okay with that, because at least I got it done. I should get a little more running in this week.
Birthday or not, I’ve gotta go to work.
June, quite simply, kicked my ass. Between May 28 and July 3, I spent 16 days on the road, and generally worked my keister off the rest of the time. It annoyed the kids, (Unfocused Girl, in particular), messed up my running schedule, cut my week at the beach into a weekend, and dumped extra work on the already-overburdened Mrs. Unfocused.
It also, unsurprisingly, took whatever discipline I had about my writing and put a bullet through its kneecap. How bad did it get, you ask? I scrolled back through the archives to find the post announcing I had hit 75,000 words. Here it is: Spring Sunday Stats #2, my post from May 18. That day, I added 2,200 words to my word count, and finished at 75,945.
Where am I now? This evening I wrote just over 1,000 words, and finished at 80,718. In the last eight weeks, I have managed to write a little less than 4,800 words. Before 6pm this evening, that number would have been 3,800, mostly consisting of two or three hundred word bursts typed on the train during my commute.
The travel did most of the damage. I’ve had very little downtime on these trips — there’s been a lot of sitting around in conference rooms, but very little time when I’ve been off the clock — and even on the plane traveling to and from my meetings, I’ve either been working or catching up on my sleep.
Even when I’ve been home, though, I’ve had a lot of trouble getting back into Meet the Larssons. I think writing on the train, which I’ve been doing for months, has been part of the problem. Instead of using the train time to supplement my writing at home in the evenings and on the weekends, it became my primary writing time. The problem is that my commute is too short to give me time to think about what I’m writing, or to get my head back into the characters and storyline. Without the longer blocks of time at home, my writing on the train gradually decoupled from the broader arc of the novel, and it got harder and harder to keep going.
I finally figured this out over the Fourth of July weekend. When I realized what the problem was, I started rereading the early chapters of MTL, to try and get back into the book. It worked beautifully. I have a page of notes after reading the first four chapters, knocked out 1,000 words tonight that start bringing back ideas I had for the book back when I started writing it, and have half a page of notes for the next chapter. I may keep rereading, but these early chapters may have been enough. Now I just need to recapture the discipline I had developed back in March and April, and I may yet have this first draft finished by Labor Day.
Also, you may notice that I have revised my word count goal in the meter in the sidebar from 100,000 to 125,000. I think that’s more realistic for this draft than the 100,000 I’ve been working with; there are close to 20,000 words in the first eight chapters that I expect to cut in the first revision; they contain important backstory, but I don’t think they work as part of the narrative, and clearly I’m not 80 percent finished telling the story. 125K is a good enough estimate for the first draft, and I’ll try to take it closer to 100K in the next draft.
Finally, not that my comments on your blogs are anything special, but if you’ve noticed I haven’t been commenting on your blog posts, it’s because I haven’t been commenting on (hardly) anything. I just haven’t had the time or the energy. I have been reading your blogs, though, and will try to stop lurking and start participating a little more now that my travel schedule has slowed down a bit.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Blogging, Meet the Larssons, Novel, unfocused life, word count, Work, Writing
That’s how Junior described his old man tonight. I’m gonna get it printed on a t-shirt.
And happy happy happy happy birthday to Mrs. Unfocused, to whom I have given… nothing.
Not my fault, though. Blame Steve Jobs. Three more days.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged birthday, Family, iphone, Kids, unfocused junior, unfocused life
Last night, as part of responding to a meme-tag from Freshhell at Life in Scribbletown, I posted five things from my to do list for today and promised to report on how I did. Here’s the report
1. Go for a run in the morning.
It wasn’t pretty, but I did go for a run this morning. I was slow as molasses, even slower than I was on Sunday. Despite the day off yesterday, my legs — my quads, mostly — ached and had nothing to give me. On Sunday, I ran 9.57 in 1:22:37 (an average pace of 8:38 minutes/mile); this morning, I ran 3.64 miles in 35:21, an average pace of 9:42. I’m not entirely sure what happened, excepted that I lifted at the gym on Saturday (including squats) for the first time in three weeks, and may have taken too much out of my leg muscles.
2. Submit TTB to another magazine (snail mail again).
I took care of this on my way to the office. It cost $2.53 for first class mail (no surprise there — it’s a 63-page manuscript).
3. Take my glasses to the optometrist to have new lenses installed.
Yup, got this done at lunch, dropped off my regular glasses and my sunglasses just before the deluge started. I’m hoping they’ll be done by Friday; I’m traveling next week, and I’m stuck wearing my spare glasses until then, and I hate hate hate traveling with only one pair of glasses.
4. Make significant progress on a couple of briefs I need to get through by the end of the week.
I did all right on this one. I got a first draft finished this afternoon on the easier one, and spent most of the evening (when I wasn’t watching Barack’s victory speech or Hillary’s “victory” speech) working on the hard one. Lots more to do, but I got them off the ground, which was what I needed to do today.
5. Write 500 words — just 500 lousy words! — of Meet the Larssons.
Yeah, well, you can’t do everything. Nobody’s perfect. I wrote 350 words, all of them on the train. I got jammed up with work (see no. 4, above). I’ll try again tomorrow.
So there you have it. I have to say, I almost certainly would have turned off the alarm and gone back to bed this morning if I hadn’t posted about going for a run, so thanks for the social pressure.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Blogging, Meet the Larssons, memes, Novel, Running, unfocused life, Work, Writing
Well, I’ve taken my sweet time on this post. I got tagged by Freshhell a week and a half ago to talk about myself. I like talking about myself, so I’m happy to play along. Since Freshhell is a rebel (and she never ever does… what she should), she didn’t post the rules for the meme. As an attorney, this type of anarchistic adhocracy makes me nervous and insecure, but I’ll do my best to work with what I’ve been able to deduce from Freshhell’s entry.
What was I doing ten years ago?
In 1998, I was a third year litigation associate at my old firm, one of the oldest large law firms in town. Mrs. Unfocused and I had been married, but there were no little Unfocuseds on the scene yet. I traveled a lot that summer for work, mostly to Los Angeles (fun!) and Dallas (kill me!). Along with a number of my colleagues, I reviewed documents under the watchful — and heavily armed — guard of a rotating crew of FBI agents in an shuttered post office. Not the worst place I’ve ever reviewed documents (that would be at a shuttered mine, where I had to watch out for snakes and armed poachers), but the latex gloves we had to wear added a special layer of indignity to an already awful project.
The Mrs. and I also went to Paris that November, and spent the entire week NOT going to museums or monuments. We ate in wonderful restaurants, and looked for vintage posters. It was a fantastic week, despite the freezing weather.
Five things on my to do list today.
Since it’s 11pm, and “flossing” does not an interesting blog post make, I’ll give you five things on my to do list for tomorrow.
I’ll post tomorrow night or Wednesday to let you know how I did.
Snacks I enjoy.
My kryptonite: barbecue-flavored potato chips.
Things I’d do if I were a billionaire (in no particular order).
Places I’ve lived.
Who I want to know more about.
Why, you, of course. Do your own post and leave a link here in the comments.
At least, I assume I’m It, because that’s what usually happens when I get tagged. Mada tagged me for the dreaded “Six Things About Me” blog meme, and now I have to come up with six things about myself and tag six other bloggers.
Before I forget, I need to post the rules. The rules are:
Without further ado, here are six things about my favorite subject, me
Enough about me; let’s talk about you talking about me. Or about you, if you must. I hereby tag:
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Armageddon, Blogging, BPF, Me, meme, pentominoes, Running, smoking, unfocused, unfocused life
This is my entry for the February Blog Chain. Our theme is BALANCE, and each blogger in the chain will incorporate into his or entry an element from the previous blog post in the chain. I’m first this time.
I’ve been practicing law for almost 13 years now, and by last year, I had allowed all of my other interests to fall by the wayside. We dropped our theater subscription when Junior (our second child) was born, and around the same time I dropped off the board of the small theater company I had been involved with. I haven’t taken a French class since 1997. By the fall of 2006, I had even stopped watching television. When Mrs. Unfocused had trouble sleeping, I would tell her about my day. I had conversations at parties and bored myself.
Great — now I sound like Rodney Dangerfield.
The point is, I had gotten into a mental rut. During the week, I went to work, came home, had dinner with the family if I got home early enough, helped put the kids to bed, then worked for another three hours. I might go for a run or go to the gym, but that was about it. Finally, I got to the end of the year and found that I had the luxury of taking some time at home; I would still have to work a few hours each day, but I could manage it so that I wouldn’t have to come in at all.
I took the opportunity, and in that time I started this blog. It was partly the result of a November visit from an old college friend, who suggested that the Mrs. and I start a blog together (we’re still talking about a joint blog, but she has had other projects on her mind), partly the Mrs. telling me to just go ahead and do it, and partly my own attempt to start writing again for pleasure. I needed to engage the creative part of my brain again, if only to convince myself that I was not as dull as I was beginning to think I was.
Creating the blog was relatively easy, and I found that I was perfectly happy to blather on ad nauseum. Lucky you, reader. More importantly, I felt the beginning of that balance I had been looking for, between solving other people’s problems at work and thinking through situations on my own, for no better reason than that I found them interesting.
Then on January 2, after my first day back at work since before Christmas, over a glass of wine with Mrs. Unfocused after the kids had gone to bed, I rattled off a complete synopsis of Meet the Larssons. I started knocking out some notes on the computer, and ending up spending the next several hours writing down the idea, ending up with four or five pages of typed notes and a hand-drawn organizational chart for the structure of the business discussed in the novel.
Since then, I have let the novel and the blog take over whatever free mental space I had. For a while, it was the novel. For the last week or two, the honeymoon has been over for the novel (I’m not done yet? What the hell!), and I’m more obsessed with the blog: how many hits today? any new comments? why is my Technorati authority stuck at 4? I’m sleeping less than I was when all I did was work, because when it was just work, I wanted to put it down and go to sleep. Now, it takes a real effort of will to close the laptop.
As I write this, I can see why it is so easy to get sucked in by the blog, and comparatively hard to work on the novel. It isn’t that the novel is harder to write; on the contrary, the novel is much easier to write than these blog posts. I know where the novel is going and largely how to get there; on the blog, it’s a different topic every day, and most of the time I have no idea what I’m going to write about until I sit down and start typing. No, the reason why the blog is so hard to resist and the novel is so easy to put down is that there is no feedback on the novel. I keep checking my word count (I hit 30K on Friday, on the train home from work) and updating it on the little graphic on the sidebar, because that’s the only way I have to keep score, and frankly, it’s pretty damn unsatisfying. With the blog, I have page views. Comments. Mrs. Unfocused even reads it, and I can ask her to give me comments on posts before I publish them, which is handy. But I would be uncomfortable showing anyone the incomplete pile of mush that Meet the Larssons is now. So there’s no feedback, no reward. My little lizard brain likes rewards, and it doesn’t think very far ahead. Maybe I need to promise myself a new toy when I hit 50K words, just to give myself something to work towards.
Don’t get me wrong: between the blogging and the novel, as well as the time I’ve taken just to spend with the Mrs. and the Unfocused offspring, the last seven weeks have been terrific. I’m going to spend a little less time on the blog this week in order to spend more time on the novel, but I doubt I’ll get any more sleep. And I’ll still keep checking those page views and comments, just to keep score.
Up next in the chain is Auria Cortes; remember to check out her blog over the next few days to see what she makes of this topic.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged absolute write, balance, blog chain, Blogging, chain, focus, links, Meet the Larssons, Novel, unfocused, unfocused life
The Unfocused Life 