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Buttontapper Challenge: Day 9

Motivation – Where do you find your motivation on days when it’s hard to keep pressing on?

I look at my husband, whether he’s awake and reading a book, or asleep in the bed or on the couch napping. I look at him and that always brings me a smile.

I look at our son and his wife. When I do, I can’t believe how lucky I am to have them in my life.

I look at our grandchildren. They tire me out, but always with a smile. I know I have to figure out a way to spend time with them that is quieter, less frantic, in order to introduce them to the power of patience and waiting to see what will come.

I look for the people in my community–my church community, my writing community, my civic community. They challenge me to do something good for others and that always ends up bringing more good into my life.

Those are the things that motivate me, by reminding me of how blessed my life is. With their support, I know I can do something great.

Photo credit: Clark Tibbs

Buttontapper Challenge: Day 8

Monthly Challenges – Do you participate in any other monthly challenges? Which ones, and why (or why not)?

In addition to this challenge, I hope to take part again in the April A to Z Challenge. The rewards for completing that one in 2016 were tremendous. Through my “E is for Eritrea” post, one of the boys on the soccer team I supported, now a 27-year-old young man, found me, giving me a most welcome early Christmas present this year.

Two monthly challenges is enough this year.

Photo credit: Diomari Madulara

Buttontapper Challenge: Day 7

STOP Doing – What are some of the things you want to STOP doing this year, and just let go?

Once again, making a list of what I will stop doing is dangerously close to making a New Year’s resolution. So this one will be short, too.

I plan to stop

wasting time by watching too much TV,
eating more than what fills me ,
volunteering for anything new.

Instead of watching so much TV, I’ll consider reading something, writing something, or going for a walk.

Instead of eating everything on my plate, I’ll consider throwing the excess away. if it doesn’t make sense to save the rest for another day.

Instead of volunteering for anything new, I’ll consider finding someone else who needs some encouragement to step up to volunteer.

photo credit: Michael Mroczek

Buttontapper Challenge: Day 6

Start Doing – What are some things you want to start doing this year?

This had better be a short list since I already have more on my plate than I can handle. Thankfully, tomorrow’s topic is Stop Doing, which should be longer.

Taking up this challenge is an example of one thing I want to start doing–or more precisely to restart doing: write every day.

I got out of the habit of writing regularly last year. Instead, I set a reading goal and I let that get into the way. Even more disturbing: I let the goal of reading a specific number of books replace reading specific books.

That gets to a second thing I want to start doing: be choosy about what I read.

I want to describe in one sentence why I plan to read each book and know that those around me won’t laugh at the reason.

That’s it. Making a list of things I plan to start doing is just too similar to making New Year’s resolutions, and I’ve already explained why I don’t do that.

photo credit: Hello I’m Nik

Buttontapper Challenge: Day 5

Audacious Goals – Let’s make some goals! Let’s make them SMART and BIG!

Hoo-boy. This one is tough. I have some big goals, even audacious ones, but the idea of writing them down as SMART goals, well that’s just plain scary, like climbing up a mountainside scary.

Any goal I can write up as a Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-focused, and Time-bound sentence is too small for me to consider audacious.

For example, I plan to travel to Norway in 2018. So my goal is to read the relevant sections (covering Oslo, Lillehammer, Røros, and Trondheim) of my DK Eyewitness Travel Guide on Norway (specific and achievable) and make a list of the ten places (measurable) in each location that I must see on my trip (results-focused) by April 1 (time-bound).

But I think of audacious goals as ones so big I need to keep them in my mind for a time while I chip away at them in order to find the smaller chunks that I can handle and define as SMART goals.

For example, I know I need to have at least one additional novel outlined in my head before I begin the process of seeking representation for, or deciding to publish independently, my current work-in-progress. I consider that an audacious goal because I need to do a lot of work–research and thinking–before I can choose which of the many stories hiding in the corners of my brain I should work on next. I can’t make the goal specific yet.

What I can do is make a list of all the little steps I think I need to complete–reading more books about the places of each potential story, listening to the tapes my great-uncle made about his experiences in one of those places, finding images of the places to augment my memories so I can describe them. But a list is not a goal.

For now, I will settle for making lists. I just discovered the Tasks and Reminders options in my Google calendar where I can save those lists.

Photo credit: Redd Angelo

Buttontapper Challenge: Day 4

Big Dreams – What are you dreaming about doing this year? Tell us about something you’ve been obsessed with, or that you’re just beginning to visualize.

Completing the first draft of my novel-in-progress is my big dream this year.

I thought I had almost completed a first draft a couple of years back. But the feedback from my read-and-critique group included far too many questions.

What does your main character want?
What’s standing in her way?
Who is acting against her?
What is your story about, anyway?
Who is your audience?

These very sensible questions kept coming up, and I didn’t have answers for them.

I started out wanting to tell my story, complete with all the funny incidents where Iranians misunderstood Americans or Americans misunderstood Iranians, and the consequences those misunderstandings brought about. I had told many of these stories to friends and family, and they all laughed with me at the funny parts–or at least at what I considered the funny parts. I just needed to tie them all together, I thought.

But the most astute among my read-and-critique group pointed out that my stories revealed an ego-centric and arrogant streak in me. That by writing stories that invited others to laugh with me, I was all but pointing my finger at those others, inviting laughter at them.

That wasn’t at all what I wanted to do. I wanted to tell a story worth telling. To do that, I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t all that smart as I went through the adventures. I didn’t learn everything I should have.

For the past four months, I haven’t written anything in my novel. Instead I’ve written, and rewritten several times, a summary, a synopsis, and the 50-word, 75-word, 100-word, and 150-word blurbs to go on the inside jacket cover to catch a reader’s attention.

Aren’t a summary and a synopsis the same thing, you might ask. Not exactly is my reply.

The summary is an outline in paragraph format. The summary focuses on how the events unfold. The summary was just for me, and I didn’t need to limit it to a certain number of pages. Mine varied from seven to nine pages in its many versions. I needed to write it in order to help me figure out which incidents I had previously written about are not necessary because they take away from, or complicate telling, the story. I consider the summary to be the condensed CliffsNotes or student book report version of the story.

The synopsis, on the other hand, is for prospective agents so they can decide if the novel is a good risk to back. Agents and publishers decide how long they want a synopsis to be, but to be safe, an author should have a one-page, single-spaced version. The synopsis must include the entire story, though without subplots or minor characters. Most importantly: it must reveal the ending. Another difference between a summary and a synopsis is the synopsis must convey the feelings and emotions of the characters, not just the action. A synopsis may look like a literary critic’s description of the book.

These shorter pieces have been as difficult to write as the story itself. They forced me to focus on who the main character is, what she wants, and who and what is in her way. In other words, to answer at least some of those pesky questions. The process also helped me recognize where I need to let go of my personal story, as compelling as I think it is, in order to tell a believable story that someone other than a close friend or family would want to read.

I’m ready to finish the first draft. The real first draft. Everything from before has just been doodling.

Photo credits: Adi Goldstein

Buttontapper Challenge: Day 3

This Year’s Plans – What have you got planned for 2018? Show us some pictures of your planner!

I have one big event planned and one goal I hope to complete in 2018.

The big event is a trip to Norway with my sister. We won’t be taking a typical tour package. My sister has already been to Norway once, so I wanted us to see something new for her. Together we decided to travel to see the Norway our ancestors came from. Since they didn’t all come from the same region, we choose a logical path which will include Oslo, Lillehammer, and Røros, areas where we know our ancestors lived, with the addition of Trondheim on the west coast, the town where the King and Queen of Norway were crowned in the twentieth century and where first King, then Saint, Olaf was buried in the eleventh century. We’ll miss seeing one area of our ancestors, Hallingdal, as it is too far south for us to include.

In order to keep focused on what we hope to see on our trip, I used Pinterest to create a Dream Board for 2018 with a section titled “Norway.”

My big goal for 2018 is to complete the first draft of my work in progress, The Friendship Code, a novel loosely based on events from my two years of living in Iran, though my main character is much smarter than I ever was, and she therefore was able to make more meaningful connections with Iranians in order to learn more quickly what is required to get along.

The second section of my Dream Board 2018, labeled “Success,” includes motivational quotes and images of authors I admire or whose success is worth emulating.

Watch for more about this Dream Board and my goal tomorrow, Day 4 of the Buttontapper Challenge.

Buttontapper Challenge: Day 2

New Year’s Resolutions? – Do you or don’t you? Why or why not?

I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions. Why not? Because I haven’t figured out the secret of selecting meaningful resolutions that will end with success.

If I can succeed at following a resolution all year long, it is likely something lacking in significance. Like, I resolve to get out of bed every day this year.

For someone else, this might be a meaningful resolution. But for me, chances are nothing will interfere with my ability to keep it. So it is insignificant.

If I set a meaningful resolution, I will likely fail. At least now and then. Like when I resolved to give up smoking. It didn’t matter that I only slipped up now and then and lit up a cigarette. Even a single instance of doing so meant I failed. In the end, I gave up smoking, but it wasn’t because of a resolution. It was because of a significant emotional event: I met my husband who had never in his life put a tobacco product into his mouth. OK, so maybe there was a resolution involved, but what worked was the fear that failure would mean he might not want to stick around. And I definitely wanted him to stay with me.

I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions because significant emotional events, the prompts for resolutions with meaning, don’t schedule themselves on a calendar. They happen when they happen. When they happen, I look anew at what changes in my life will bring greater meaning into my life. And then I resolve to make those changes.

Gif from Giphy.com.

Buttontapper Challenge: Day 1

Introductions – Introduce yourself! Tell us a little bit about yourself and why you decide to join the challenge.

The first 21 years of my life I spent trying to get away from my home town. Life in my home town was boring. All I had to do to prove this was turn on the TV and watch Fury or My Friend Flicka or Sky King or even Leave It to Beaver. Things happened on those programs. Things that never happened in my life.

So I thought the way to adventure required that I move somewhere else.

And I’ve been moving ever since. First, across the country from the midwest to the west coast. Then, across the globe, from North America to Asia.

Since I started moving, I’ve lived and worked in 12 countries where I had to learn at least a bit of six languages. My life has been like living inside a video game where I had to learn the rules for success as I went along.

Throughout all of that, I knew I would write about those experiences.

First, I wrote letters to my friends and family about the adventures I encountered in foreign countries. And I journaled, although at one point I decided that I could either live the adventure or write about it so I stopped journaling.

Then I created a website–before the concept of blogging came along–where I posted some of my stories. When blogging became common, I set up my first one on Blogspot where I set myself the challenge of writing at least 500 words a day which I posted there, an accountability step, not necessarily a claim that the words were quality writing. But I got into the habit of writing.

Most significantly, I discovered the San Diego Writers and Editors Guild where I met a number of like-minded people whose support has pushed me to take on the next step: to turn the lessons of my life–not necessarily the events–into a story worth sharing.

That is why I joined the Buttontapper Challenge:

to restore the habit of writing daily;
to make progress on my work-in-progress with the working title, The Friendship Code;
to find more like-minded people I can support along their writing journey; and, hopefully,
to feel the support of more like-minded people along my own journey.

I don’t have a daily word target. My goal is to write something of whatever length that I can say I’m proud of.

That’s who I am. and I’m very glad to meet you.

All gifs from Giphy.com.