Filling your creative reservoir

In January, I'm leaving my job to stay at home full time.  My husband will go back to work full time.  We're doing a complete switcheroo, but since my husband will work 3 12-hr shifts, we'll have four days a week when we are all home together as a family.  I cannot wait for January to come.  But in the meantime, I've been thinking it would be a good idea to plan out some things I want to accomplish once I'm home full-time.  Normally, I'm great at lists like these.  I've spent much of my adult life making lists of my dream schedule, goals I want to reach, and what I would do if I won the lottery.  But all of a sudden, I've got a case of list-block.  All I can come up with is doing Bikram Yoga again and organizing the baby books and photo albums.  I mentioned this to my friend Kim, and even though she's on the other side of the world, in New Zealand, she gamely whipped out a list FOR me.

1. Yoga
2. Create a children's gardening book to go along with husband's gardening. You could have different sections for different ages.
3. Create a children's cookbook to go along with the children's gardening. Maybe model it after that 3-ingredient Buddhist cookbook you found awhile back.
4. Teach a kids' art class or volunteer at pre-school.
5. Learn how to make wine
6. Redecorate a room in your house (or create a new "Julie space" for yourself in the basement)
7. Plan for the next 5 years - what kinds of lunches and snacks are you going to send to school with the kids (don't lie, you know you're going to think about that)? How much are you going to have to spend on school supplies and clothes? (or wait, is that just something nutty that I would do?)
8. Study massage
9. Knit and/or sew blankets and clothes for homeless shelters
10. Learn how to give yourself a pedicure
11. Take language samples from son and transcribe them-just kidding. (this is an inside joke for anyone who's taken a phonetics class)
12. Put a dent in that list of movies you've been wanting to see and books you've been wanting to read
13. Join a book/wine club
14. Sell Amway
15. Bet on the ponies
16. Teach daughter how to ride a tricycle/bicycle; teach son how to cut the grass
17. Learn how to make candles, lotion, lip balm, etc. (that's actually fun)
18. Take ballroom dancing lessons with husband
19. Plan half-day or full day trips to places around Omaha (cultural events, festivals, etc.)
20. Volunteer to play with the animals at the Humane Society

Kim's ability to whip out a list has me wondering about what is happening in my life to stop me from creating my own.  Of course, it would be easy to blame it on motherhood, or "mommy brain" as I'm fond of saying when I screw things up.  But I think it's my writing that has stopped me from making lists.  Because my life is so busy, I don't have a lot of free time.  So when I'm working on a book, as I am now (Murder With Art - 32k words and counting), I have to spend all my free time on that book.  When I have down time I'm writing.  If I can't write (because I'm lying in bed trying to fall asleep, for example) I'm planning the next scene or rejiggering the plot.  In other words, my book writing is stifling my creativity.  I literally can't make time for other big ideas because my book writing is sapping all my resources. 

When I was single, with tons of free time on my hand, I had plenty of ways to fill my creative resorvoir.  Julia Cameron wrote, in The Artist's Way, about renewing creativity with artist dates.  The idea was to do something special, all on your own.  Go button shopping.  Take a long walk.  Visit a junk store.  But these things are not so easy to do in my current existance.  It's kind of sad to say that my best chance at reviving my creative resources will be when my book is done.  But when this book is done, I'm starting on the sequel to The Truth About Dating.  I've already got the outline.  The book is just waiting to be written. 

So what I've decided, for January, is to start putting up some boundaries on my writing.  I'm going to continue to write, obivously, but writing my books will be limited to a set amount of time.  The rest of the time I'm going to try to blog and write letters to friends. And read.  For now, one of my major goals will be to read. 

Winter
1.  Enjoy my children, who are very young and won't be that way much longer.
2.  Yoga.
3.  Catch up on photo albums and baby books.
4.  Learn to do all the cat's cradle tricks.  Jacob's ladder, etc.
5.  Learn to crochet via You Tube.
6.  Start doing more blogs, esp a series I might call Lame Parenting.  After all, the pressure's going to be ON once I'm home full time!
Read. 
7.  Write - novel, letters, blog.
8.  Figure out why my computer says it's got updates every time it's shutting down.

Spring
1.  All of the above.
2.  Flower gardening
3.  Finish sequel to The Truth About Dating
Summer
1.  All of the above except...
2.  Take a break from books until Fall or even longer. 

I'll keep you posted!

The Truth About Dating, live on Kindle!

http://www.amazon.com/The-Truth-About-Dating-ebook/dp/B0045U9RJQ/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1287237042&sr=8-2

This week my novel, The Truth About Dating, went live on Kindle. I posted it after hearing an interview on American Public Media’s The Story with a writer, Karen McQuestion, who, after years of false starts with literary agents, posted her novels on Kindle. Within six hours she had a sale, and eventually, a movie deal. That’s when a publisher came calling.


The way Kindle works, you upload your book, set your price, and get a percentage of every sale. If you list your book from $2.99 to 9.99, you get a 70% royalty. This is amazingly high. Any other price gives you 35%, which isn’t bad either. I decided to set my book price at $1.00. After all, I wasn’t expecting to get rich from my book sales. I just want people to read it. A low price seemed like a good way to get people to take a chance with an indie author.

Posting the book was a lot harder than I expected. Amazon doesn’t really give you much help, but after a week or so of trial and error, I finally figured out how to convert my manuscript to html and upload it. I had a great cover, done by graphic designer Jennifer Digman.

When I finally went live, I put a bottle of champagne (actually, cava, from Barcelona) in the fridge. I was going to celebrate when I made my first sale. No one knew that my book was posted (except my husband). I started manically checking my sales sheet. It was like biting you nails or any other bad habit. I couldn’t stop, and nothing sold. After two days, I told myself, OK, no more checking for one week. But the next day, I had fallen off the wagon and was logging on to check. And lo and behold, I had a sale. I had sold a copy of my book!

I called my husband from work. He said, “I’ll have the champagne ready when you get home.” But then I started wondering if some family member or friend had stumbled across my book and bought it. Plus, it was a Wednesday night. Did I really want to drink a whole bottle of champagne on a work night? I called my husband back and said, “Let’s save it for the weekend.” Then, just before I left work that day, I checked one more time, and this time, I also clicked on the sales report for the UK. Two sales in the UK! I had sold three books, and two of them in the UK! I called my husband back. It was time to celebrate!

When I got home, he had made my favorite food, popovers. And mac and cheese. And we opened the cava and toasted those strangers who decided to take a chance on an author they’d never heard of before! The kids had juice. And of course, they wouldn’t eat the homemade mac and cheese because they prefer the instant Kraft kind that you cook in the microwave. Kids always help keep your life in perspective. I’m Julie Christensen, author, seller of three books, and mother of fussy eaters. Amen!

Motherhood, novel writing contests, and timing

Timing is everything. On the same week I came back to work from a three month maternity leave, my novel, The Truth About Dating, advanced to the quarterfinalists of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. Out of 10,000 submissions, I made it to the top five percent. Winning the first round of that contest really took my mind off leaving my children behind to go to work. Over the next month, with the first three chapters of my novel posted on Amazon, 61 people wrote reviews. Some were by friends and family, but many were from strangers. I loved checking for new reviews and reading them. I started to believe that a day might come when I wouldn’t have to leave my children behind to go to work. I could envision a life where my work was upstairs, in my study, writing. I held on to that vision when my husband called me at work to tell me that our three month old son had rolled over (accidentally, of course), and when my 21 month old daughter wouldn’t let me kiss her hello when I came home in the evening.

Yesterday, Amazon announced the top 100 semifinalists and my name wasn’t on the list. A month ago, I celebrated my 41st birthday on a Sunday, went back to work on a Monday, found out I’d made the quarterfinalists on a Wednesday. And yesterday my roll in the contest was over. I was just a 41 year old mom who was back at work, leaving her kids behind for 42 ½ hours a week. I found out the news, and twenty minutes later I was at work, fitting hearing aids on a patient. I’m lucky to have the kind of job where I can lose myself in what I’m doing. I was so busy, fitting the aids and teaching my patient how to use them that I completely forgot about the contest until an hour later, when my patient walked out the door. I stayed busy all day, and didn’t allow myself any self pity until I started my walk home.

“I’ll just be sad for the ten minute walk,” I decided. I listened to Tori Amos through my MP3 player and indulged in a little self-pity. A few blocks from my house, I spotted my husband, walking toward me with my son and daughter. My daughter was toddling along, holding his hand. When she spotted me, she screamed with glee. Then she started running toward me. I thought of all the blessings I’ve had this year. I birthed a healthy baby. I and my family are healthy. Bush and Cheney are out of the White House. Pallin is not in the White House. In the middle of an enormous economic crisis, my and my husband’s jobs are secure. I wouldn’t trade any of these things for winning the Amazon contest. Which doesn’t mean I wasn’t terribly disappointed, but sometimes it helps to put things into either/or compartments in my head. I turned off my depressing music and picked up speed as I headed toward my family. When I reached my daughter, I bent down to pick her up. She pulled her head away from my kiss and started to cry, reaching out her hands toward my husband, saying, “Daddy. Daddy up.”