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New Hampshire Primaries

I live in New Hampshire.

It’s a Presidential election year.

I can tell you that none of the candidates have found a friend in Noël Figart. I get knocks on my door, I get phone calls.  I get phone calls from people. I get phone calls from machines with carefully-worded recordings that make it impossible to give my real views on a given subject.  I get junk mail.

One phone call?  Okay, fine.  You gotta get your message out to the poor saps who don’t watch the news.  (I don’t.  I’m an avid blogger and reader of blogs.  Something interesting comes by, someone’ll link to it).

But calling me three times in one day is excessive, after having someone knock on my door the day before.  If I didn’t already dislike the politics of the Junior Sentator from New York, I’d be guarendamnteed to vote against Clinton after today.

I have one question to any candidate:  Did you vote against the war in Iraq?  No?

Ya don’t have my vote.  Abstentions don’t count.  If you voted for a war, please have the courtesy not to claim to be peace-loving and all tender hearted about the people.  KTHXBYE.

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Intelligent Goal Setting

Multi-talented people (which I would bet money includes most of you reading this), because they can do anything sometimes feel that they should do everything.

You wanna find yourself spinning your wheels and not getting much useful done, this is the way to do it.

I’m doing an experiment this year. I’ve got four basic year-long goals. If an activity does not apply to one of those goals, it does not belong on my to-do list.

This is not to mean that I am not allowed to do things that don’t apply to my goals. What this means is that I’m not allowed to do things that do not apply to my goals first.

My goals for 2008 are to lose 2 lbs a month, triple my monthly income doing what I love (less impressive than it sounds. I’m still waaayyy in the early stages of my business), make sure my friends/family understand I love and appreciate them, and get the PolyWorks Fund fully up and running with a specific goal dollar amount as our first year’s giving. Hardly onerous, but certainly a solid, productive year.

This is easy to break down into monthly, weekly and daily goals. At the beginning of each month, I decide what I want accomplished by the end of it. At the beginning of each week, same. This helps me set appropriate daily goals, which is where the real work is done. Other than planning sessions, I do my best to keep myself focused on the day at hand. I probably won’t give December 31, 2008 another thought until sometime next December. I know where I want to be, and the steps to get there. The steps are the important part now.

Notice “declutter the house” is not on the list at all. Does this mean my house will fall to rack and ruin in 2008? No. If it were in danger of doing so, I’d’ve had a housekeeping goal for this year and dropped one of the other ones. What it means is that unless I’ve accomplished what I set out to do for the day, I’m not to be cleaning out closets. If I get a wild hare across my butt to do so after I’ve accomplished my daily goals, that’s all good. I’m just not allowing myself to spend a lot of time on things that have nothing to do with what I’ve decided to accomplish. (Obviously, there is cleaning and organizing that does directly relate to getting my work done. Gotta maintain the files, etc. These things do make my to-do list).

I try to keep my to-do lists relatively short, too. Before I put it in Outlook (yes, I use Outlook as my task-tracker, etc.) I ask myself is this really productive, or is it make-work? I’ve noticed the very, very busy seem to be just awfully proud of being busy rather than actually accomplishing stuff. Anyone who has worked for someone who likes busy for the sake of busy knows what I am talking about! It’s an easy trap to fall into when you’re self-employed and feel guilty that someone might think you’re being “lazy”.

I know all this planning sounds like wheel spinning. I find that it is not at all. Every hour I spend doing it seems to save me about two when it comes to getting stuff bloody well done.

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An Interesting Thought

How often do we hear an apology accompanied by:

“but I was PMSing.”
“but I’d been drinking.”
“but I’ve had a rough day.”
“but I was distracted.”

I was thinking of it because of course, I’m vain enough to do that — to make excuses for myself and why a behavior I didn’t like in myself wasn’t “really so bad”.

What would things look like, I wonder, if we developed the courage to face our choices in behavior to the point where we can say, “Yes, I did X thing. I don’t like it that I did it, and I’m sorry I did it. I’ll try in the future to correct that behavior and not do it again.”? (If we’re really sorry about our behavior, of course!)

In doing that though, I don’t mean saying, “I’m an awful person and I did X”. I mean facing it without self recrimination, but simple acknowledgment, accompanied by any apology you feel necessary and a sincere desire to correct it.

Serenely accepting imperfection and still trying without slacking, I think, can be hard.

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Just Because I Impress Myself

I said this in reply to someone on another group talking about working out of a black mood hole:

You are in control of your actions.

You can influence your emotions by your choice of actions.

You can make choices of actions that influence you in itty, bitty positive ways. Consistently choosing small things to influence your mood for good will start to snowball — VERY slowly at first, but it’s like lifting weights. At first you struggle to life ten pounds. By going and trying a little bit consistently, you get stronger and a year later, you’re tossing around 100 lbs like it was nothing. Then people who haven’t tried it get mad at you and say you’re just “naturally strong” and don’t understand what it’s like to find it hard to lift ten pounds.

*wrygrin*

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In Praise of Dumbbells

Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers!

The gym was closed today, and it’s weights day today.

Being a holiday, of course I can choose to skip a workout.  I chose to skip one earlier in the week due to sleep deprivation1, so on a day I was well-rested, not all that busy and the weather being gray and gloomy, I did want to go ahead and get in the mood enhancement of a short workout anyway.

When I started lifting, I started with a set of adjustable dumbbells.  I made great progress and was happy with them.  I figured though, since I’d “graduated” to a big ole macho gym workout that today would be light.

HA!  I had a wonderful, sweat pouring off me workout quite as good as any I get in the gym.

Friends, if you cannot afford a gym membership and want to lift, do save up and treat yourself to a cheap set of adjustable dumbbells, no kidding.     Mine are a set of Athletic Works that come in a case with 40 lbs of plates in the set, but each bar can take closer to 75lbs if you have the plates for it.  I don’t, nor do I need them yet!  (The heaviest weight I put on them is about 35 lbs for a total of 70 lbs for  dumbbell squats).  The original set cost me about $30, and I may have spent an additional $30 on more plates.  Plates are relatively cheap.

Now, do I like the gym?  Good lord yes!   The feedback and the motivation is wonderful, and exploring all the neat gadgets, machines and whatnot is all kinds of fun.  But they’re not necessary.  If I’m in a situation where I can’t afford a gym membership any more, my good friends the dumbbells will always be there for me.

And if you don’t believe me, check this out:

All Dumbbells, All The Time!
Dumbbell Exercises
The Complete Dumbbell Workout

1Up with a child having an asthmatic attack. He’s fine now, thank goodness!

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On Procrastination

If you can order your life in such a way as to *not* find it necessary to write 5,000 words (~20 doublespaced pages) of fiction in a day to stick to a goal, this is probably a good course for your life to take.

Think broken, can’t brane.

However, got a wonderful idea for That Damned Book, and it’s beautiful and subtle and makes a great metaphor and I love it.

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The Ten Rules of Bodybuilding

In between my writing sessions, I’m looking up stuff on bodybuilding.

When you throw out all the stuff that’s clearly been paid for by supplement companies of dubious worth, it seems this is the basic advice:

  1. Lift heavy shit.
  2. Make sure every muscle in your body gets involved in lifting heavy shit.
  3. Make sure that when you’re lifting heavy shit that you don’t lift shit that is too heavy and tear something so you can’t lift heavy shit for awhile. (Your body will hunt down your ego and punish it if you forget Rule One1).
  4. Make sure that you give your muscles ample recovery time from lifting heavy shit.
  5. If you want your muscles to get bigger from lifting heavy shit, feed them enough protein
  6. If you want enough energy to lift heavy shit, make sure you get enough carbs.
  7. If you want to make sure your systems function properly while lifting heavy shit, you have to get enough fat, but not too much.
  8. While lifting heavy shit, make sure you get enough water.
  9. If you want to look like Mr. Olympia, you have to inject hormones while lifting heavy shit.
  10. You can’t be healthy only lifting heavy shit.  Get your heart rate up for a bit a few times a week not lifting heavy shit.

That’s it.  They don’t have to publish fitness mags any more.  There’s all the info you need.   So, howzat for simple?

1Don’t be a fucking idiot.

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Stolen "Ideas"

Neil Gaiman talks a lot about ideas in the linked post.

I chuckled a little when I read it.

Back in late 1990, early 1991, I write a story about a dragon that played chess. The “voice” I heard in my head for that dragon was Sean Connery.

In 1996, “Dragonheart” came out with, you guessed it, Connery doing the voice of the dragon.

Do I squawk that my “idea was stolen”.

No. The first reason being that the likelihood that anyone connected with Hollywood in any way read that short story in the appropriate time frame is slim to none. (I don’t know when development on the film started, but I’d bet it was before ’94 and I didn’t have it on the Internet then).

The second reason is the entire concept of an “idea” being stolen is mostly whiny hogwash. You can plagiarize, but stealing an idea is harder than you think.

I say this as someone who has seen sites put up that follow formats of sites I’ve written. I say this as someone who has seen her own turn of phrase used to convey concepts in alternative lifestyle communities. I could scream “stealing” or “copying”, but that would be dumb. No-one in the world can steal how I write an article without actual plagiarism.

The reality is that writers are unique. It’s not that we’re telling stories, it’s how we tell them. There’s no such thing as a truly original plot. The very best stories are not popular because their plots or their characters are particularly original. It’s that they’re told in an engaging way. It’s that what the author has to say and how she says it strikes a chord.

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That Damn Asperger's Meme

There’s a meme running around about how “neurotypical v. asperger’s syndrome” you might be.

It drives me up a motherfucking wall. I know it looks like I’m holding back and all, but please understand that my sweet smile and gentle speech covers a boiling, seething rage at this one.

Why?

Autism spectrum illnesses are complex, involved, multi-layered and not completely understood. I know a lot of people want to lay a certain level of social cluelessness at the feet of a neurological issue, but it’s a lot more complex than that. A self-diagnosis won’t work.

Autism, while on the rise1, is rare. It is a spectrum disorder that is amazingly complex and difficult to diagnose except in the most extreme and obvious of cases, but even then, don’t be too sure. There are other issues that you have to rule out, first.

Asperger’s is also a very specific diagnosis within the range of autism spectrum disorders. It is not a synonym for, “Your kid might be a high-functioning autistic.”2 If you have a preschool teacher tell you that your kid has Asperger’s, for instance, find an expert in these disorders. I promise you that unless that person did more than take a semester’s worth of abnormal childhood development courses, or has worked for many, many years with a large range of children with these issues, he doesn’t know. A quick way to stop punch that sort of nonsense is to demand that they list the diagnostic criteria for Asperger’s according to the DSM-IV. If they cannot do that, they’re not qualified to give an opinion. Get an expert.

If you suspect you might have Asperger’s, and you think a diagnosis and training in coping would be useful to you, find more than one expert. Explain your problems. Get multiple opinions. Yes, this is difficult and will be insanely expensive. Unless you’re experiencing serious quality of life issues, it might not be profitable to bother. I can’t choose for someone else’s life. Only you can decide that one.

But by whatever you hold holy, don’t judge it from a damn internet meme!

1It is also on the rise because the diagnostic criteria have changed in the last fifteen years or so!
2For instance, if there is a speech delay issue, and you’re told your kid has Asperger’s, you can chuck that opinion in the trash. One of the hallmarks of Asperger’s and one that makes it tragically difficult to diagnose early, is that the kid is hyperverbal.

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Another Rejection

According to Yet Another Rejection Letter, the premise of my novel is “intriguing” but not right for an agent I was rather hoping would want to represent me. Did my homework on her and she’s got some good authors and herself has a good rep and does represent this particular genre. The letter also said that she (the agent’s assistant who wrote the letter) encouraged me to continue submitting my query to other agents. Very kind and encouraging.

Yep, another personal rather than form rejection slip. At least, I think it was…

I suppose if my next one is a critique, I should celebrate and then get to work revising the novel. I do see a trend in the personal comments already, so that’s a good sign.

I know they say when you start getting personal letters rather than forms it’s a good sign, but you know, that advice was written back before word processors. I have to wonder if that’s quite the same now, as you can write a perfectly original-looking “Fill in the Blank” template.