Dear Writing Friends:

I am at Starbucks on North Lamar. It is Tuesday morning and I am deep in the embrace of my favorite grey armchair, my notebook propped on my lap. Jazz plays overhead, and my pen moves across the page to its uneven rhythm. It is a morning like any other morning—except that my 6½-year-old daughter is sitting beside me working on a puzzle and interrupting me every few minutes to see if I’m done. I was looking forward to spending this morning alone. I’ve been going at full speed since last month’s Agents and Editors conference, and my body is telling me to slow down. My joints ache, my head is fuzzy, and a familiar fatigue is settling in. I had planned to meditate this morning, to sit quietly in my writing studio and let my mind rest on the page. But as I was packing my daughter for camp, she threw herself on the living room rug, her derriere high in the air, and she began to wail—after which she rolled around on the floor for several minutes, rubbing her eyes and whining in short, uneven breaths. When she finally calmed down, I was able to extract from her the source of her discontent. She does not like dinosaurs as I much as I thought she did, and therefore the dinosaur camp I had enrolled her for the week was a drag. She did not want to go back.

“Let’s go upstairs and talk to Daddy,” I said smiling, trusting my husband would say just the right thing to send her happily on her way.

The three of us sat on our bed while my husband spoke to my child in his most soothing voice. “Why don’t you give it one more try?” he said softly. “Weren’t you excited about that papier mache project you were going to start today?” At that point my daughter wrapped her arms around me and began sobbing into my neck. And thus we are at Starbucks. Before we left, I made a deal with her. If she kept herself busy while I wrote, I’d buy her some organic vanilla milk and take her swimming after lunch. So we packed our tote bags with notebooks and pens and headed out.

We settled into the grey chairs, and I placed my timer on the table between us, setting it for ten minutes. “No interrupting until it beeps,” I said. And so I am writing, connecting to myself and to my mind moving across the page. I feel my back settle into the cushion behind me, and the air conditioning blowing on my neck. I hear my pen scratching the white paper. I don’t know how much I’ll get done, but I feel good about carving out this small bit of time for myself, and for showing my daughter that I take writing seriously. It is good for your family to see you write, to let them know it is an actual activity that you engage in, that there is labor involved and, perhaps most importantly, that it is a priority for you—especially if you’re a mom.

The conditions this morning are not optimal—I would rather be in my writing studio with gobs of time ahead of me—but I have trained myself to work in ten-minute increments and to write anywhere. I have written on park benches and waiting room sofas while my daughter was getting her hair cut, having her teeth cleaned, and taking tap dancing lessons. I have written at skating rinks, amusement parks, and aquariums. I have written at a table covered with half-eaten fish-and-chips looking over Monterrey Bay, while my husband played games on his Palm Pilot and my daughter drew on a napkin. I have written at the art museum, the children’s museum, and the museum of natural history. And I have written in the grocery store, standing in a long line with my notebook resting on the cart, grabbing the only still moments of the day before Thanksgiving. I crave long stretches of time with leisure to write at will, but that is not on the agenda today. I have negotiated three ten-minute writes, putting off my daughter’s desire for my undivided attention for one half hour. Right here, right now, I can write. One ten-minute write produces 450 words. Three ten-minute writes produces 1350 words, which is not a bad day’s work. The writing won’t come out perfectly, but I’ll have something to tinker with when I sit down to write tomorrow (I have already arranged for the babysitter). And when I head to the pool later, it will be guilt-free because I have accomplished my goals today. I can already feel the cold, chlorinated water on my skin and my daughter’s arms around my neck as she jumps in. I have negotiated an excellent day for both of us.
 
This month’s quotation:
If you want to write, you finally have to cut through and write. There is no perfect atmosphere, notebook, pen, or desk, so train yourself to be flexible.   Natalie Goldberg
 
Writing Topic:
Where I write
And/or
I write from . . .
 
If you have written something over the past few months that you would like to share, please send it my way. I’d love to see what y’all are doing. Also, if there is a topic that you would like me to cover, please let me know.
 
Keep your hands moving.
Saundra