Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Happy Hour


I love this hour of day, when the kids have just gone off to bed; maybe they are still awake, C looking through a book and N playing with her toes, but they will drift off to sleep soon. Now that it is getting close to summer, the days are longer and the sun lasts until my magic hour, so I can look out the front door window and see down the hill, or stand outside for a moment -- no bad mostquitoes yet.

I am on day 5 of South Beach Diet Phase 1, which means that at this point I would trade my kingdom for a piece of bread. Only in certain moments, though. It is nice to make forward progress so I will take the cravings.

A good side effect so far (granted it has only been five days) is that I feel like I might be a bit milder. I had a lot more patience with the kids today. Of course, that could mean that tomorrow I will be on edge, but let's hope not.

I have made some progress with simplifying -- there have been several times in the past week in which I could have chosen a complicated way of doing something and a simpler, less glamorous way, and I picked the simpler way, and it turned out better every time.

Aside from that, the planets finally aligned and I got some research time, and I am working on an article. I am nervous about coming out with this goal, but I might as well -- I want to be a freelance writer! I have done some research on how to start, and what it looks like is that I need to develop about a dozen articles, and shop them around to local/small markets, and keep submitting them all until somebody accepts something. So I am working on my first article now. What I think a good goal for me, at this point in my life and with my other obligations is to make a goal of creating one new article every month, and keeping everything in submission until something gets accepted. I think the format will get easier for me as time goes on.

I had a funny thing happen as I was getting ready to go out to the library on Monday -- I got nervous! Why would I be nervous? I spend hundreds of hours reading and researching for my thesis and education, and I know my way around the research process. In fact, to be honest, I really enjoy it. I could go into a library and emerge twelve hours later, stumbling, starving. I realized I was nervous because this is something I really want. This might not seem like a big deal, but connecting with a real desire is something scary for me at this phase in my life. There are so many things that can derail even a simple plan; to have a multi-step plan seems almost foolish or dangerous. But this is something I want, and there's no better time than now to pursue it, and I have to move forward with some intellectual pursuits or the next thing I know I will end up in PhD school, and (no offense to any of my friends working on or having earned their PhDs!!) I think I would rather eat a raw horse than go through that.

So I will be updating here on my progress. Chances are this progress will be dull ("Sent out another article today... still waiting...") but if I start now and keep trying, eventually one day I will have learned enough along the way and I will be successful.

Right now I am writing an article that I care deeply about, and I will shop around for a market for it, but after that I want to start with a market and write for it instead. I am thinking of profiling a few local farms for the Eastside Chronicle -- they told me I can submit anything whenever I want, so that might be a good place to get clips and start writing.

Wish me luck!

2 comments:

  1. Is raw horse allowed on the South Beach diet?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Actually yes. Lean protein.

    ReplyDelete