So, I went to see the movie Julie & Julia last Friday night. And I loved it. Mostly because the heroine is a blogger who achieves fame and fortune and it appealed to my fantasies, but also because I love to cook. I also despise the Joy of Cooking (my mother will be shocked and my husband will be shocked – he swears by it). I also love Nora Ephron and all of her books and Meryl Streep is simply brilliant.
I never really thought about Julia Child all that much. I might have seen her cooking show once, maybe twice? I don’t know. I like French cooking, but it’s a little heavy on the butter and the force feeding of geese for their livers. Deboning a duck? I don’t think I’ll ever try it. But I must admit it was a genius idea for a blog. Now that I’m jealous about.
I’ve been working on finishing a book for about eight years now. If that seems like a long time, well, just think how my spouse feels when for eight years in a row, on New Year’s Eve, I say, “This year I’m going to finish my book.” And the funny thing is that it’s not just one book. It’s not one agonizing editing project. No, it’s about eight books with eight different plots. None of which have ever kept my interest long enough for them to be finished.
What happens is that I’ll get excited about an idea, work very hard on the idea, and then my life and work conspire to distract me for some time from the project, so that when I go back to it it seems old and stale and well, bad. Thus, a new idea begins, and the pattern repeats.
For inspiration, I’ve read every book “On Writing” that has ever been published searching for the magic formula. I’ve read Stephen King’s advice, William Zinsser, Annie Dillard, Anne Lamott, and many lesser known authors who decide to break up their own writing block with a book about writing. Some of these authors are more famous for their books about writing then they are for any other type of writing (e.g. Julia Cameron). Don’t get me wrong. I’ve enjoyed all of them, but they weren’t what I needed.
At times, I’ve spent weeks sleep-deprived because of the odd notion that writing an hour before you normally would get up inspires genius and somehow taps into the right-side of the brain. I’ve filled journals full of “3-pages” blather (Julia Cameron’s advice) that I can’t seem to toss. I have notecards upon notecards with ideas from “Writing Down the Bones”. I’ve joined a monthly writer’s group to impose deadlines for production. I’ve outlined. I’ve not outlined. I feel envy when I’m in bookstores, and I listen to author interviews almost religiously. Imagine what I might have accomplished if I had put this kind of effort into writing?
I blame all of this lack of finishing on that great old beast — perfectionism. It’s a scary thought, finishing something that you care so deeply about, and risking its failure. It’s a scary thought that if I actually finish the book it may never see the shelf of a bookstore. You see, if you don’t finish something, well, you might not have to face up to the fact that it’s not perfect. It’s just always a work in progress.
Sigh. So this year I have committed to finishing, once again, only this time I’ve said that it’s ok if it’s not perfect. It just has to get done. Inspired by a friend who finished a rough draft of a book in a month by writing 1,500 words a day, I finished a very, very rough draft of a young adult fantasy novel earlier this year. The revision process killed me though. It was too rough.
So, I’m onto another project, only this time I’m doing something I’ve never tried before. First, I’m writing it with someone else, so I have someone to bounce ideas, edit, etc. on a regular basis. Second, I’m writing what I know. I used to try and write great literary research monsters, and now I don’t care about that. I just want to get my story down on the page, make people laugh, and tell the truth. I hope that’s enough to keep me going, one word at a time, one sentence at a time, until it’s done. I’ll keep you posted, and in a shameless plea for help, encouraging words are welcome.
One of the best parts about blogging has been discovering other writers and their unique voices. But it hasn’t been easy. I’ve really had to search.
The reason why I’m writing this post is because even though we hear about how many millions of blogs there are in the blogosphere, it’s hard to actually find ones you enjoy on a consistent basis. So, I thought I would share my favorites in case others are looking for a few good blogs, and hope that readers will recommend some more in the comments section. What I look for in a blog is either something consistently funny (which goes with the theme of my site) or a personal blog that is well-written, engaging, and includes some humor.
Catherine Sherman was my first good find. I found her blog through Wordpress.com which offers free hosting for bloggers. A lot of my friends use blogspot, and I kind of regret not going that route myself because it would have been simpler but I learned a lot purchasing my own domain name and it offers a lot more flexibility.
From Catherine’s blogroll I found Kiwibloke, Planetjan, and Middleground. I’ve mentioned Kiwibloke several times in my posts about Flight of the Conchords because he also follows the show and chronicles all things New Zealand. Planetjan is written by a California teacher with a witty sense of humor and great research skills. She wrote an excellent series about narcissim and Narcissistic Personality Disorder that I greatly admired. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since because I’ve had a few close encounters with narcissists myself and it isn’t pretty. I’m just getting to know Middleground but it’s written by a southern married mother of one with a dry sense of humor .
I recently added Montana For Real to my blogroll. This is written by a friend of my family’s who writes about life on a working Montana ranch. She does an excellent job of capturing the essence of modern day ranch life on a daily basis. She is also an aspiring fiction author, like me.
Barnes and Noble introduced me to Dooce through the audio series Meet the Writers. Heather Armstrong writes Dooce from Salt Lake City, a blog that started in 2001 and famously got her fired from her job. She just finished a memoir called, “It sucked and then I cried: How I had a baby, a breakdown, and a much needed margarita.” I’ve put it on my reading list. She also is witty and honest about parenthood. Can you sense a theme here in what I like?
The others on my blogroll, like 1000 Awesome Things or Indexed aren’t personal. They mostly chronicle life in a unique way, or make fun of things like passive aggressive notes, or apostrophe abuse. I check them out occasionally for a chuckle, but I like the personal blogs better.
Anyway, that’s all of my endorsements for this Saturday afternoon. I hope you can add a few more in the comments section. Now off to enjoy the good weather!
It started with my niece Hannah, who is studying abroad this year in Australia at the University of Queensland. Before she left last summer, she urged me to come and visit.
Hannah
I love to travel and I love my niece and if I were a millionaire the decision to visit her in Australia would have been a no-brainer.
But as I told her, the $2,000 per ticket price just didn’t fit my particular wallet size, so the likelihood of me getting my butt to Australia was close to zero. About that time I was reading a book called, “Finding Your Own North Star” by Martha Beck.
Martha Beck
I first heard about Martha when she was interviewed on one of my favorite podcasts called Meet the Writers. I liked her immediately, and picked up her book the next chance I had. I later found out that she is a regular columnist for Oprah’s Magazine and I’ve read almost all of her books now.
One of Martha’s ideas is to set wildly improbable goals for yourself. These aren’t goals like, “I’m going to win the lottery” or “All the unwanted hair on my body will mysteriously disappear one day” but more to the heart of why you want to win the lottery or have a hairless body. The way I found my wildly improbable goals was to think of things that made me spontaneously smile and light up inside.
The two that I came up with last June were to run a 10k in less than 50 minutes, and to visit my niece in Australia. Believe me, both were wildly improbable at the time, and I’m still working on the 10k time.
Once you set your goals, Martha advises doing a little creative brainstorming and research on all the ways you could think of to meet that goal.
So, the ideas that I decided to pursue to try and get myself to Australia were:
1. Win a contest.
2. Find a way to get there through work (like a work-related conference).
3. Save about $5,000 in 6 months (totally impossible).
I went the “win a contest” route first and googled, “Win a Trip to Australia.” Really, that’s what I did. People look at me a bit aghast when I tell that part, as if just taking that step required a leap of faith akin to walking barefoot across hot coals, but hey, it seemed easy at the time and I guess I am a testament to the power of Google (and no, they did not pay me to say that).
Before going further, I should say that I have never won anything in my life. Well, maybe $1 on the lotto card that is still sitting in my desk drawer from 7 years ago. But even when I go to events where there are 20 door prizes and only 21 people show up, I’m the unlucky one. So, I knew the idea of winning a trip to Australia was beyond a long shot for me. Still, I had some hope.
After sorting through the first couple of pages in Google that popped up of previous contests and dead-ends, I found a contest that seemed to be a pretty good fit for me. It was an essay-contest sponsored by Jurlique, an Australian organic and biodynamic beauty products company, and the grand prize winner would win a trip for two to the Jurlique farms in South Australia. The company posted a video to explain the contest.
I had heard about Jurlique when a donor to my former work protecting gray wolves in the Northern Rockies had mentioned that they were the only cosmetics company she would use because they didn’t use nanotechnology in their products. I never followed up on her recommendation, but I had always had Jurlique in the back of my mind to check out.
So, I knew that this was a legitimate company, making a good product, and even better, the essay topic for submission was “personal renewal and the earth” a topic that I could write about with some passion. Advocating for wolves is an unlikely career path for a woman who grew up on a cattle ranch where predators are unwelcome and my personal journey from ranch-girl to journalist to conservation made for a good essay.
Last July, I submitted my essay and linked it to a photo and video of a CBS news segment about wolves where I am interviewed.
And then I waited, and waited, and waited. In November, I received an e-mail from Jurlique that I was a “finalist” in the contest and that I had either won the grand prize, or the runner-up prize – a $1,000 worth of product. Don’t get me wrong, the runner-up prize would have been nice, and a few family members would have found some great face lotion in their stockings for Christmas, but it wasn’t my wildly improbably goal, so when the call finally came, I held my breath until he said, “Janelle, I’m calling to let you know that you’re Jurlique’s grand prize winner!”
Jurlique posted the names of the contest winners and I called my sister and my niece and screamed a little on the phone. And then I waited some more. Originally, the grand prize winners (3 were selected – one from the UK, one from the U.S. and one from Australia) were supposed to visit Australia in January, during the farm’s harvest time, but the scheduling didn’t work out.
So, after some back and forth about dates, Jurlique booked our tickets to Australia for March 20th – April 4th, and we leave tomorrow. We’ll spend the first week with Jurlique in South Australia’s Adelaide Hills, and then the second week we’ll be on our own in Tasmania. Hannah will be flying down from university to join us for most of the trip. I hope you’ll follow along with me on this blog while I realize my very first wildly improbable goal. Thank you Martha! Thank you Google! Thank you Jurlique!
I’ve been working on finishing a book for about eight years now. If that seems like a long time, well, just think how my spouse feels when for eight years in a row, on New Year’s Eve, I say, “This year I’m going to finish my book.” And the funny thing is that it’s not just one book. It’s not one agonizing editing project. No, it’s about eight books with eight different plots. None of which have ever kept my interest long enough for them to be finished.
Here’s the short version:
