Friday, May 30, 2008

I haven’t blogged for awhile. Actually, I took a break from book stuff for a month or so, other than a few phone calls and emails. To tell you the truth, the book was starting to feel like my slave-driver; I felt guilty any time I was not spending my spare time on selling or thinking about the sequel to The Orange Slipknot (my summer project). I had been hitting the marketing aspect pretty hard, so I decided to just relax, do other things in my spare time, and hopefully let all those contacts bear fruit.

I enjoy reading about how the brain works; I recently read something interesting about how to increase your creativity. Work on your project for awhile, then leave it for an hour, or a few days, go do something else. Relax, do something different and enjoyable, don’t think about your project. Meanwhile, your brain will be working on solutions, and next thing you know, ideas will come to you.

My school job will turn to summer vacation in another week, and I plan to spend a good part of my summer working on the sequel. I haven’t worked on it for a few months, devoting my spare time instead to marketing. So I am now rereading what I had written; I will then leave it alone for a few days before starting to work on it. I will trust my brain to be working on it in the background, kind of like my computer is working in the background as I type, updating my anti-virus system. Hopefully when I am ready to bring up that “program” (the sequel), my brain will provide me with the updates it’s been working on. It’s worth a try, and I like this idea better than forcing myself to work on a project so hard that it seems like a chore.

Meanwhile, I have been spending more time seeing grandkids, reading, surfing the Web, playing the piano, visiting with friends on the phone, riding horses, yard work, watching TV (mostly news and horsey stuff), and chatting with my horsey Internet friends. I took a vacation from working on my book so that when my REAL vacation starts, I’ll be ready to get back to work. That’s kind of a paradox, isn’t it?