Once upon a time, I was catching a ride home with a friend after writing group.  The group had spent a good twenty minutes going on about the various flaws of the piece I’d submitted.  I held in my hands several pages of notes.

“I can’t believe that chapter was that bad,” I said.

My friend was shocked.  My chapter was fine, he told me.  In fact, he quite liked it.

I couldn’t believe it.  The group had elaborated on the problems of my chapter  for as much time and with as much enthusiasm as they had another submission, which I felt needed a lot of work.  In fact, I realized, they went on about the problems in everyone’s work with this same passion every week.  Good stuff, bad stuff . . . all the criticism was punctuated equally.

“How then,” I asked, “am I supposed to know how much work I need to do, if we all critique everything with equal fervor?”

(Okay, I didn’t really use the word fervor.  I probably didn’t use any of these words.  I just counted the number of years since I had this conversation, and it took me two hands.)

Huh, my friend said.  That is a problem.

And on that car ride, the levels system was born.  What we needed, we decided, was not to tone down our excitement about various critiques, but to find a way to label them, so the writer can tell whether a problem is small or large.

When we critique, we always start with good things.  No matter how many problems a piece may have, there are always good things to be said.  Listing them first helps to set a positive tone to the discussion, and helps the writer not to feel despair when the problems are numerous.

Then come the Level Three comments, or the problems that, if you encountered them in a published book, would cause you to put the book down and walk away.  In an ideal world, there won’t be any level threes.  (But sometimes there are.  That’s why we have writing group.)

Next come the Level Two comments, or other things that bothered you about the piece.  And last are the Level Ones–line-level problems, funny typos, and issues that you want to mention but that you really don’t feel that strongly about.  (Level Two is best defined as everything that is not Level One, or Level Three.)

My writing group has changed a lot in the intervening years since my friend and I invented the system, but we still use it, and I still love it.  I don’t mind when the group carries on enthusiastically about my typos or miswritten lines.  I know they are Level One problems.  I dutifully write them down, but I don’t have to feel like I need to rewrite the chapter over it.  I can begin to sort the comments everyone feels strongly about from the ones that are just idle conversation, right from the beginning.  (It also helps keep us on topic–inevitably when the conversation wanders, someone will ask, “what level are we on?” and we get back to work.)  I get better feedback, I’m better able to organize my thoughts for others, and I can begin to decide what magnitude of changes need to happen when I get ready to revise.

It makes my organizational heart happy.

*I know I’ve blogged about this before, but I’m pretty sure the post is lost somewhere in the depths of my livejournal, so here it is again.  Sorry if this is a repeat.

Mirrored from Janci Patterson.

I finally finished painting my Ultraforge treewoman–one of my two favorite minis of all time.  I kept putting off finishing this one, because it intimidated me, so it’s been in varying stages of completion for over a year.

Mirrored from Janci Patterson.

It’s been a rough month around here. Suffice it to say that if there is one thing that Drew and I collectively suck at, it’s transitions. And living with a small person who is in a constant state of development puts us in a near constant state of transitioning. We’re getting the hang of it, slowly.

But trying to catch up on that hurt my work productivity. And I had a project that needed doing. It sat for several days. I kept prioritizing it last, which of course was the problem.

I get this loop going in my head sometimes. If I didn’t get the work done that I wanted to do today, that means every day will be like today, and I’ll clearly never get it done. Cue despair.

But there’s still work to be done. It’s still sitting there. So I whine about it.

And then I just do it. And you know what? Once I start working, I remember that I’ve been doing this for years. I’ve completed many, many projects. Why should this be the one that never gets done?

There’s no reason. So I just do it. And then it’s done. Time to move on to something else.

Maybe someday I’ll learn to just do it without the whining first. But I’m not counting on it.

Mirrored from Janci Patterson.

There’s this idiom we use in English when we aren’t going to be able to accomplish something. We say we don’t have time.

If there is a literal time constraint, this may be true. I may not have time to run to the store before writing group starts for example.

But often we use the phrase to mean that there isn’t space in our lives. “I’d love to garden,” I might say, “but I don’t have time.”

This, of course, is not literally true. Some people garden. Everyone has the same number of hours in the day. Therefore the time exists. Gardening is just not a priority right now. (I actually gardened yesterday. But you get the point.)

That’s what an idiom is, of course: a phrase where the understood meaning is different from the literal meaning. But with this particular idiom, sometimes its easy to start believing it is literally true. Whatever it is we don’t have time for, we feel we are incapable of doing it, because more time is not something that any of us can acquire.

In the absence of deadlines and time constraints, we all have the time to do anything we want. But most of us don’t have the time to do everything we want, because there are just too many interesting or important things in the world to do.

Enter priorities. Whether we think about it or not, we all prioritize our lives. If I spend time doing one thing over another, I have prioritized it. I like my life better when I think about my priorities and make sure I’m spending my time accordingly.

In general, my uber-priority list looks like this:
1) Take care of my health. (Because I can’t do anything else if I don’t do that.)
2) Take care of my family.
3) Write.
4-6)Maintain our business. Maintain our house. Maintain my relationships with friends. (The order of these last three rotates.)

Notice that writing is not number one. My life would be horribly out of balance if I put writing before my health or my family. I do put it above everything else, though. This is why it gets done at all.

Last year I realized I needed to cut some things out of my life, because I had too many scheduled weekly events to juggle. I knew I had to cut back, but I didn’t know how much. So I made a list of all the specific events in order of priority, and started hacking at the bottom. I dropped a writing group. I dropped a roleplaying game. When that wasn’t enough I dropped another writing group.

I also dropped to part-time attendance at my bi-weekly social writers event. Fortunately, I did not have to axe that one completely. When I dropped to part-time, I finally found that the balance of scheduled time, work time, and down time felt right. And I stopped cutting.

It hurt. It hurt a lot. But I knew what my priorities were, so I did it. And my life became much happier for it, in the long run. (Who needed three writing groups anyway? I was doing that many because I loved the people in each. But keeping up with friends is not as high a priority as my health, my family, or my writing. So the groups went.)

I kept my list. It still has all the same things on it, some crossed out, some left alone. But if my life becomes calmer or crazier, I know what to cut next. I know what to add back in. I know what I want, and I can make my habits match it.

And that’s a powerful thing.

Mirrored from Janci Patterson.

Mirrored from Janci Patterson.

I have ARCs! And they are beautiful.

Just look at those spines all lined up together. It’s a real book!

There’s something about looking at the text all laid out like that. Even though I’ve been over the book dozens of times…it feels newer. The most amazing thing to me is that it’s all laid out and pretty–and I didn’t have to do that. Seriously. Someone else paid attention to my words and turned them into a real book. After all these years of making all my own changes…there is nothing quite like that feeling.

I am so excited to share this book with you. Five more months! (We’ll do some giveaways before that, I’m thinking. Stay tuned.)

Mirrored from Janci Patterson.

Keeping files consistently backed up is a pain.

I’m pretty good about it–I back up to an external hard drive regularly and to DVD yearly, and I email manuscript files to myself whenever I remember.

But if my computer were to crash randomly, all that wouldn’t realistically keep me from losing days or weeks of writing work, which depending on those days or weeks could be at best painful and at worst disastrous.

I’ve known for a long time I should be using dropbox or a like system.  I swear everyone uses one of these things but me.  But I’m always skeptical of new things that promise to simplify my life.  In my experience, the best way to keep my life simple is to depend on as few devices and services and gadgets as possible, and not to fix things that are not broken.

But my backup system was inadequate, and therefore broken.  Finally fear of data loss motivated me to sign up and try it.

And while I still have no desire for a smart phone or an ipod or an e-reader or a gps, I discovered that dropbox is totally awesome.

All I did was download the thing, and then link my shortcuts to all my important files to pull from my dropbox folder instead of my hard drive.  Now every time I type a sentence (and obsessively hit ctrl-s), that sentence gets saved to a server somewhere.  Better yet, I can access all my work on both our desktop and my laptop, which makes working with our budget and work schedule files much easier.

And I never have to think about it again.  That’s my kind of simplification.

Mirrored from Janci Patterson.

Mirrored from Janci Patterson.

One matter that needs to be settled in every writing group is how to decide who to critique first each week.  I once had a group who decided this by a round of rock, paper, scissors.  The game could go on for five or six rounds sometimes, before we had an actual winner.  Some people enjoyed this.  I did not.

Another group critiqued in order of arrival.  That worked well when we weren’t meeting at anyone’s house, because no one was necessarily first.  That same group once chose according to whose birth date was closest to the current date.  A skype group I was in chose based on whose submission was up on a certain group member’s screen when it was time to start.

By far my favorite method, though, is the one used in my current group.  We roll a scatter die.

The arrow points to the first person, and then we proceed clockwise.  Simple, quick, fair and we get to roll a die.  Can’t ask for better than that.

Mirrored from Janci Patterson.

Mirrored from Janci Patterson.