Time management envy

Imagine a life where you do your work - I know, you'd rather imagine one without work, but let's be realistic.

Anyway, so you work, you go to the gym regularly, every evening you make dinner from scratch with nice fresh ingredients and lots of yummy vegetables. You cleanse and moisturise twice a day, your house is clean and tidy and bed linen gets changed like clockwork. AND you have spare time to fill with hobbies and socialising.

That is what I want to be like. I am seriously envious of people that manage their time well enough to achieve all of these things.

Personally, I have a very low willpower threshold for boring stuff (like household chores) - so the obvious solution is to win the lottery so I can hire a cook and a cleaner. ;-)

There is yet time

Turning 30 passed me by without a hitch. We were busy buying our first house together and I'd recently changed jobs, so there was lots of things happening. Then the year after came the proposal and the wedding planning started for the year after that. However, things have been kind of slow since then and that was the main thing that hit me as I was about to turn 35.

I am boring!!

I used to always be so busy, doing this, that and the other. But when you work full time (at least in London) it is so easy to allow yourself to not do a lot. You get up in the morning, do your 1 hour commute, work, commute home for 1 hour, stick in a wash, have some dinner and then there's not an awful lot left of the evening. On the weekend you have to do all those chores that cannot be done during evenings - more washing, cleaning the house, shopping, mowing the lawn etc etc

And that's of course why WoW fits in so perfectly as a hobby. You play from your house, so no travelling to and from other places in the evening. It can take up as much or as little time as you want it to. I'm not saying WoW is a bad hobby, in spite of the end of expansion blues I still have a huge bucket list I aim to get through before Azeroth gets terra-formed by the coming Cataclysm.

But there are so many other things that I keep thinking I'd like to do, that I never get around to. Taking a course in something, writing, visiting the Fringe - once I started thinking about it the list kept growing.

There are lots of very good excuses for not doing these things, but they are just that - excuses.

Starting singing lessons was a great first step. Yes, with my slightly wonky work schedule it will require some planning to make it work. But in return I get to do something I really, really enjoy AND it gives me buzzy energy that makes me want to do more things.

Of course there is a limit to how much I can actually fit in. With working full time, commuting and doing all that boring adult stuff, I cannot be out and about most evenings of a week as I will then feel over stretched and exhausted. So I will keep my singing lessons, I will try to write something each week and once that is part of my routine I might consider adding one more thing to the mix.

Because, you know what, there is yet time - I don't have to do it all at once.

Scruples according to Lula

"You know what your problem is? You've got too many scruples. One or two scruples is okay, but you get too many of them, and it clogs everything up."

"I got some scruples, but I know when to stop. There's a point where you have to say enough is enough and screw scruples."

"There you go with the scruples again. You gotta learn a real scruple from a worthless scruple."

Lula is a recurring character in Janet Evanovich's books about Stephanie Plum, bounty hunter less than extraordinaire. She is one of my favourite characters in that series of books. From evanovich.com: "A black woman with a rubenesque body and a Vegas wardrobe that’s four sizes too small. She’s a former ‘ho working as a file clerk at Vinnie’s office and wheelman for Stephanie."

I stumbled across these books many years ago in an English-language bookshop in Rome of all places. They had the three first ones (One for the Money, Two for the Dough, Three to get Deadly) and I just loved the cover art and I bought all three on the spot.

Summary of the first book from Wikipedia:

"Stephanie Plum  is out of a job and there isn’t much work for an ex-lingerie buyer. After caving under pressure from her mother, Stephanie goes to her cousin, Vinnie, who is a bail bondman for some filing work. When arriving Vinnie’s assistant, Connie, tells her that the filing position has been filled. Connie tells her about apprehending people who skip out on their bonds, pulls a file out of her top drawer, and shows her Joseph Morelli’s file. Morelli is a vice cop who is wanted for murder one and has a history with Stephanie which includes two sexual encounters in high school and a hit-and-run when he didn’t call afterward. Connie suggests Morelli because Stephanie will get percentage of the bond that sings to the tune of $10,000. Stephanie has had to pawn off the majority of her possessions and her car gets repossessed, she thinks bringing in Morelli will fix all of her financial problems.

Stephanie decides she wants to join up and blackmails Vinnie about an incident with a duck in order to let her try to get Morelli. With the help of some friends and the best bounty hunter in the business, Ranger, she slowly learns what it takes to be a badass bounty hunter. Along the way of trying to find Morelli Stephanie gains the unwanted attention of a heavy weight boxer that has a history of making women disappear, gains some hookers as friends, steals Morelli’s car, and enters into an agreement with Morelli himself. Then on top of all that she still has to deal with a pushy mother, a crazy grandmother, and a father who would rather not watch.

It's one hell of a way to spend the first two weeks on the job."

Stephanie is a great main character. She is actually quite normal in the sense that she barely knows one end of a gun from another and has to make things up as she goes along. From what little impressions I've had of New Jersey and the people that live there - she is a Jersey girl through and through. This means that she gets through scary and embarrasing situations on pure attitude (and a fair amount of comfort food). The other characters in the books are slightly insane in different ways, but it all kind of works - though I now probably have a very skewed idea of New Jersey life.

I've got every single Plum book that's been published and have just finished the latest one (Sizzling Sixteen). Unfortunately I have to say that they are not as good as they used to be. The problem is that each book is based on the same formula. Stephanie gets or stumbles upon a case that is way out of her league, but with help from friends and family (including her 2 beaus Joe Morelli & Ranger) she somehow manages to get through the ordeal and solve things.

There's nothing wrong with the formula per se, but it feels like the main characters are not developing any more. The last few books have all been the same. It is like the characters are in stasis. And that's a shame - because they are good characters.

I have seen reviewers of the later books on Amazon commenting on that you would kind of expect that after 16 books (and that's only the main ones, not counting novellas etc) - Stephanie would have more of a clue of what she is doing. The other main comment is - two guys want her and she can't make up her mind? After all this time surely they would have both moved on to someone else.

I can live with the fact that Stephanie is pretty much still as clueless as she was when she started, but I agree that the love life angle is getting very stale. I can understand that the author doesn't want to resolve it, because Steph in a stable relationship would be very different and it might not work out.

All in all, I highly recommend the first three books. The ones after that are good but I would caution against reading them back to back as with any formula-based books you can overdose. As for the later ones, it'll depend on how much you enjoy them I guess. I read them as they come out once a year and enjoy the light entertainment, but I do also miss the darker, more character-based plots from the earlier ones.

Moar gadgets or How I learned to love Apple

So the work purchase of iPads fell through. There aren't that many of us and some people didn't want one. *boggle*

Not that I would buy one, but if someone wants to give you a new, shiny gadget to use - there is only one answer. Surely?

With my singing lessons I've gotten back into listening to music so I decided it might be time to invest in one of them new-fangled empeethree majiggies. Now I am not an Apple fan (it all comes back to a very traumatic experience with an Apple laptop in university - it frowned at me. Long story.), but looking around iPods are kind of the standard fare when it comes to mp3-players. They may or may not be the best, but they seem to be the standard others are judged against. This feature on this player is better than the iPod, that feature on that player is not as good as the iPod. There are a lot of players out there and as a first-time buyer it is a bit of a jungle, so I ended up deciding to just get an iPod and be done with it. My husband used to have an iPod Nano and he was very happy with it and the audio quality. Seeing as he is very sensitive to audio quality and I'm not - that was good enough for me.

So off we went to the Apple store to buy a pair of iPod Touches. Out we came with iPods, bits of plastic to protect the screens, colourful back protectors and headphones (I hate in-ear headphones). After assembling them and having a play for a whole minute or two, we were both completely in love. The interface is so intuitive, what with the scrolling up and down, side to side and the resizing by moving your fingers together or outwards. The responsiveness of the touchscreen is spot on. There may very well be products out there that are better, but I love my iPod Touch to bits already.

And that is before even using it for what I bought it for - to play music...

Today I spent part of my commute watching an episode of a TV show on it and I was seriously impressed. I've always thought that watching something on such a small screen would be a bit pointless, but I was wrong. The quality was great, the picture was really sharp and I got completely sucked in - it came as a bit of a surprise when the train pulled into the station.

Loving it, would recommend it and I will probably get an iPhone when it comes time to replace my current mobile. Yes, I like it that much.

How my Blackberry helped me get started writing

Time
I keep having ideas for blog posts and for fiction stuff, but I rarely used to get them written. One issue was time. When do people find the time to sit down and just write?

At work I am at the computer all day long, but as the word might indicate I am working. I did try using my lunchbreaks for writing rather than my normal round of checking up on certain forums, websites and Google Reader. It quickly became clear that trying to get into the flow while trying to finish lunch in a timely manner did not really work (and there's the whole breadcrumbs-in-keyboard and mayo-on-mouse issues).

I do have a computer at home, a lovely 3XS Black Widow one which allows me to play WoW with high fps and low lag. So you can guess what I end up doing when I'm at the computer at home. ;-)

So one day I was on the train and very bored. My DS was out of juice, so no Sodoku, and I didn't have a book with me. On impulse I picked up my Blackberry and opened up the MemoPad. I'd had this idea for a blog post floating around my head, so off I went.

Turns out the Blackberry is ideal for writing on the go. It is small and you can get away with writing one-handed if necessary. That means that even when squashed onto a busy commuter train with no personal space whatsoever and using one hand to cling to a pole for when the driver stands on the brakes - you can still write. It's amazing! All that time I spend on trains, tubes and buses can be used for something useful.

Writing vs editing
The other issue I've always had with writing is that I am a bit of a perfectionist. I'll start writing and then get stuck because that word didn't quite sound right or maybe that paragraph needs to go further up. Kinda ruins the flow.

When you are writing you are not trying to create a masterpiece ready to go to print. You are just creating a first draft. It is all about getting the ideas from inside your head and onto paper. To allow things to flow, unhindered by self-criticism. Only once you have captured your story is it time to tame it.

That is when you take off the creative writing hat and put on the critical editing hat. You go back over the story correcting spelling and grammar, but more importantly you critically assess the writing. That is the time to ponder the exact word that would best describe the hero's tone of voice in scene 5, chapter 10. To move things around to create a better flow, to trim a bit here and plump up a bit there.

You do NOT interrupt your writing flow for these kinds of things. I know I am not supposed to do it, yet I keep getting bogged down with it while writing. I lose the flow and the story withers and dies under the weight of self-criticism. It is a hard mental shift to make. To allow yourself to write in cliches, using sub-optimal words - for the sake of allowing the story to be born, to have a chance to live and thrive.

The Blackberry has helped me with this too. I think maybe it has something to do with the fact that you see so little of what you have written on that small screen. It is somehow easier to let things just flow and do what they want when it disappears off the screen so quickly. It is quite liberating.


Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Withdrawal and writing woes

Withdrawal
My singing lessons are on hold for the moment as the music school is closed for the summer break. It's only been 2 weeks since my last lesson - I'm suffering from withdrawal already.

Speaking of withdrawal, one of my favourite TV series is also on a  break, so I have been filling the void by avidly reading ... *gasp* ... fan fiction. I know that there are very varied opinions on fan fiction from people that despise it via those that don't understand why anyone would write or read it to those that love it.

Fan fiction
Personally I adore fan fiction, probably because I have been creating it since I was a wee youngster - only I've never written it down. I've been a voracious reader from a young age and I have a very vivid imagination. I would get really caught up in the stories I read and then be really disappointed when they ended. So I made up more stories set in the worlds I'd read about. Once I got older and was introduced to long-running TV-series, some of those worlds captured my imagination as well. I never bothered writing any of it down, which I quite regret now as it would've been fun to look back on. And I definitely would never have dared mention it to anyone for fear of people thinking I was really weird for getting so caught up in the stories I read / saw.

But the last couple of years I have found these repositories of fan fiction out there on the intarwebz and have marvelled at how many others there are in the world that enjoy it too. I find it fascinating how different people pick up on different things just in one episode of a show and it sets them off on a storyline that can keep going for many chapters. Sure, a lot of fan fiction is romantically inclined, whether between existing characters or existing character plus original character. But why is that a bad thing? There is a reason the romance genre in books and movies has always flourished - it is obviously popular.

One complaint I've seen is that people only write fan fiction, romantically angled ones in particular, to get to put a character in there as an avatar of themselves. Again, to me that doesn't seem like a bad thing - as long as the original character is a good one that fits in. In fact modelling a character on yourself can be an easy way to get going with writing. And one has to consider that fan fiction is written because the author enjoys it, not because they get paid for it.

Wish fulfillment proxies
I won't deny that I have seen a lot of original characters that are complete wish-fulfillment proxies. They have the beauty of a model, the body of a porn star, the intellect of Stephen Hawking, the martial art prowess of Jet Li, can shoot like a sniper, the cooking skills of Nigella Lawson AND everyone likes them. They have no flaws, are just amazing at everything and the canon characters just don't know how they got along without the original character around.

Now browsing around a bit I came across the term Mary Sue that seems to be used to describe this phenomenon. There are even tests out there that are supposed to tell you whether your character is a Mary Sue. My main problem with the Mary Sue concept is that it seems to focus inordinately on whether the character is an avatar of the author rather than whether the character is a wish-fulfillment proxy.

In these tests a lot of questions are about whether the character has a name like the author's, dresses like the author, has the same interests as the author. To me this is completely irrelevant. What matters is the quality of the character development and the writing in general. At the end of the day I'm never going to meet the author, so how would I know that the character's hobbies are based on theirs?

Easy mistakes to make
Writing a main character that is over-the-top unbalanced is a common mistake made by novice writers. It is, hopefully, all part of the learning process. But it is very unhelpful for the development of the writer if the focus of the critique is on similarites between the character and the author rather than on the balance of the character itself.

As a reader I have encountered many stories where I really enjoyed the idea, but it got pulled down by certain common mistakes / cliches. And in most cases it is such a shame as the story itself was good - the character/s just needed a little more rounding off and / or the writing needed a bit of polish.

A balanced character
The key problem I have seen is that of the balanced character. Someone can be good at something without having to be the best in the world ever. A character that happens to have a good singing voice and enjoys singing is fine. A character whose voice is so amazing that they really should be a superstar and regularly mesmerises people with their angelic song - a bit OP*, as we say in gaming circles. (*over powered)

On the flip side, someone can have emotional baggage that makes them struggle to form long-term relationships - but it doesn't have be in the form of abuse / violence / being kidnapped by slave traders. We humans are quite capable of being complex emotionally without having endured things that would have you spending the rest of your life in a padded cell gibbering incoherently.

Descriptions
Descriptions are good, but another common mistake is to pile them all on top of each other. The author probably has an incredibly clear image of what the character looks like and it is easy to get carried away when trying to put across this to the reader. You don't want to start the story with a paragraph (or more) listing the character's hair colour, eye colour, body shape, clothes and every single accessory. Think long-term - you want to drip-feed the reader descriptions over time. You are not trying to give the reader a colour photograph, you want to give them a rough sketch focussing only on the important details - their imagination will do the rest.

The crew
The final thing on my list is not to do with the character itself, but how everyone else in the cast is written around it. One of the questions on the Mary Sue tests is whether all other characters like the original character. The question is relevant, but a bit too broad I think. When you meet a new person it is highly unusual that you will instantly like them, but it is equally unusual that you will instantly dislike them. Most of the time our feelings for a new person will be neutral and when we feel neutral, don't-really-know-you-yet towards someone new, we will usually be nice to them. Unless there is a very good reason to trust / distrust them, of course. So being treated ok is definitely not a sign of a wish-fulfillment character. It is the over-the-top reactions to the character that might signal that - whether it be positive or negative.

So, ehm, end of lecture I guess... I got on a bit of a roll with that one. ;-)

(Yes, I might just be working on a piece of fanfic - but after unloading all my opinions I may not dare let it out in public view. It is after all a lot easier to edit others' work than creating your own. :-) )

Failing at Mix & Match

I wonder if I am alone in the world to fail at the mix part of Mix & Match? I don't think I have ever owned a shampoo from one brand at the same time as a conditioner of another. If I don't get on with my face moisturiser, I will go look for a better moisturiser - and then buy the matching facewash. I just cannot help myself, it just Doesn't Compute.

I may soon be getting an iPad (in spite of the hideous name) and I am concerned that it will trigger a need to buy lots of Apple products. Could get expensive...