The title of this piece is "4 and Twenty Blackbirds". And even though I don't have a studio full of penguins, I do have a head full of distractions. I'm working hard at working hard on my WIP today. My week wrangling the 2nd and 3rd graders is over and so there should be no excuses not to be oh, so very productive, right?

Yeah, right.

Here are my 4 and twenty distractions making writing very difficult today:

1. It's sunny. Here in Portland we have two kinds of weather - raining and NOT raining. The word "sunny" is considered foreign and used about as often the the word "thence".

2. There's chocolate ice cream in the freezer. It calls to me and I have to say "Lalala, I can't hear you"- a LOT.

3. Email. When was this ever considered a time saver?

4. Telemarketers. The thesaurus suggests lice, vermin, foot fungus, bad clams and ecoli as synonyms for the word "telemarketer". At least my thesaurus does.

5. Dutch, the old man wiener dog who won't stop barking at the sky.

6. Twig, the terrible min pin puppy who keeps pulling paper out of my recycling and playing shredder.

7. Email. New messages! Ooops, nope. Can't read Chinese. At least I think it's Chinese.

8. Twilight Zone marathon on SyFy - awesome...

9. Suddenly wondering where my purse is. Must find and pat to reassure self that all is well.

10. More sky-barking.

11. Realizing that min pin paper shredding has morphed to rubber band chewing.

12. Crawling around studio floor looking for any more stray rubber bands.

13. Deciding keyboard is filthy and mostly likely rife with telemarketers, I mean vermin. Must clean.

14. Facebook!

15. Another email. Whoever told these people that I possess that particular body part and its in desperate need of enhancement is misinformed.

16. Min pins give sweet kisses.

17. Old man wiener dogs have gas.

18. Search for air freshener, see the vacuum. There's no time like the present.

19. Nancy.... I'm waiting in the freezer, basking in my chocolate dreaminess....

20. Lalala.

21. Check editor and agent blogs for latest market news.

22. Check other places for latest lol cats and cake wrecks news.

23. Convince self it's research.

24. Did I mention it's sunny today?

Falling in love is a wonderful thing. You feel all flibberty-gibberty, think more things are funny, are convinced food tastes better, and all of a sudden the throngs of people out in the world, the ones you normally see as freeway lane hogging, latte line crashing, cell phone yelling boors are suddenly beautiful human beings - BECAUSE YOU'RE IN LOVE.

As writers we get to feel that way a lot. There's that oh so special moment when a spotlight shines down from the heavens onto your monitor and angel choirs sing your very favorite song as you read over your work in progress. This might be good you think, hardly daring to breathe. And then everything goes into soft focus. It IS good. It's fantastic.

And this is what you want to shout from the rooftops: I'm totally in love with Chapter seven!

Or Chapter 3 or 33 or whatever.

But here's the deal with love. You need to put your heart out there to feel it. Sometimes that works out, I know it does - I've seen all the Meg Ryan movies.

But sometimes all putting your heart out there does is place it directly in the path of an oncoming steamroller. Ouch.

That glorious chapter you brought to writers' group or submitted to an editor? What happens if they're not feeling the love at all? What if their response is to dump it, dump it right now and run away as fast as the wind?

A normal reaction to such a scenario is to feel your heart breaking into teeny tiny pieces as you reread your beloved. They just have to be wrong, you think wildly. Can't they see how wonderful this is, how much I desperately adore it?

But then you sleep on it. And the next morning, in the harsh light of day, maybe you have a "Maggie May" moment. Maybe then you do see the warts and the halitosis and the bad toupee of that formally oh, so glamorous piece of writing.

You piece your heart back together with chewing gum and old 32 cent stamps and then dump it, dump it right then and run away as fast as the wind, all the while thankful that you received the feedback.

And then you start writing again, this time seeing your work for what it is, not for what you delude yourself into thinking that it is. That is until the next time...

you fall in love.

It's been HOT, HOT, HOT in Portland. Yeah, yeah, I know it was even hotter around the country this last couple of weeks but we're just not used to it. Most people, and I count myself among those "most people", don't have air conditioning and I realized (on a 98 degree day) that I didn't own a single pair of shorts. Consequently, I ended up wearing a tennis skirt on an early morning trail run with my sister.

Look at me everybody! I'm running! In a dress.

It was in at least the high 80's this weekend when I had a garage sale along with a couple of old friends. I got rid of most of my clutter (see preceding post) and now I can see the floor of my studio again. That's good. My friends sold just about everything and that's good too - because they're leaving the Portland area and moving to a smallish town in the mountains of Mexico.

Mexico is far from Portland.

Before this weekend, this exhausting weekend, selling stuff and helping them pack up the stuff they're not selling, it hit me just how far away they're going. And not just them but Knock Knock, their old man wiener dog that is a doppelganger to my old man wiener dog, Dutch. They've been on play dates together their entire lives. Suddenly, the event of this move stopped becoming the thought of the event and became the feeling of the event.

That made this weekend even harder because I felt sad. Sure, there were lots of happy moments and crabby moments and some outright hilarious moments, but all were tinged with that hint of sad. We were all experiencing loss.

Afterward, in my clutter free studio I opened my work in progress and read through the almost finished first draft yet again. But this time I was looking for something specific. Was I telling exclusively about the thoughts around the events that unfold in my story or was I having my characters feel those events as well? And more importantly, was I giving a reader the opportunity to experience those feelings?

And glory be, I did find some spots where a character would have naturally had some pretty strong feelings about something. So this time instead of speeding through these scenes I hung with them a little longer, and kind of validated their feelings by letting my characters experience the emotions more fully. Hopefully, that'll also translate to the reader's experience too.

This morning, the weather's turned back to more normal Portland - cloudy, cool and marine air sending little freshets of breeze through the brittle leaves of the dying tree in my back yard. Yep, another loss...

I'm so very excited that my friends are living their dream by embarking on their Mexican adventure.

I'm very sad that I won't be seeing them like I've been used to the last 20 something years.

Today, I'll write in my much more comfortable studio, thinking about feeling - also knowing that a change in the weather is always just around the corner.

Clutter.

I like to think of myself as a fairly neat person. I rarely have more than one scary item that gets shoved far to the back of the refrigerator. I make the bed, hang up my coat and put away my shoes. So if I can manage to keep the living area of my house squared away, why doesn't that happen in my studio?

My studio, otherwise known as the Troll Hole or on bad days, the Pain Cave, serves a few purposes. My drawing table takes up a fair amount of room as does my flat file for storing artwork. I also do most of my writing there, so my computer and desk hog up another wall. Then there's my teaching and my file cabinets for files and course materials. And I also pay my bills at the other desk at the other wall. Add to this a TV, a stereo, overloaded bookshelves and you got yourself a clutter magnet. No, not merely a magnet - a black hole sucking in the randomness of my, well, I guess it's the randomness of my own personal creative process.

I've tried to be organized around my workspace - really. And I am so totally jealous of people that can do that. But at the moment, my paper recycling's overflowing (the old man wiener dog was taking a nap in it earlier this morning), I still have a pile of printer cartridges to take back to Office Depot, files waiting to be filed are piled on my computer tower and I see that Twig, the terrible Min-pin has added 3 of my socks to her collection of dog toys littering the floor. Added to all of that, for some reason, I decided my studio was the perfect staging area to get ready for a garage sale this weekend. Genius, pure genius.

But here's the deal. Even though clutter drives me bat crazy insane in the kitchen, living room, bathroom or bedroom. It doesn't seem to distract me from my work. In fact, I've been more productive this past year than in any other. And because I've been so busy, I haven't had time to muck out the studio. And so on and so on. So which comes first? Creativity or Clutter?

Take that, "chicken or the egg" riddle maker-upper.

I recommend to my writing students that they keep a journal. And I practice what I preach - sort of. In the midst of my clutter are my "journals" which are completed crossword puzzle books - piles and piles of crossword puzzle books. For some reason, when I'm puzzling over an entry, that's when I get inspired, solve a creative problem, or figure out just what a pirate pig would look like. The margins of these books are filled with doodles, poems, snippets and idea gobbets.
They're clutter-tastic.

I have no idea if the way I work is different or weird than other people's methods. I actually don't really want to know because my clutter problem's most likely here to stay - the creative part at least. The other stuff? Garage sale! So if you're in the market for a tea pot collection, a Pez collection, collected pottery, art, Russian nesting dolls, collectible toys, I'm dumping it all this weekend.

Did I mention I married a former art gallery owning collector to beat all collectors?

Clutter, the gift that keeps on giving.