Maya Rushing Walker's Blog, page 5

How DONE is never done

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Last night I clicked the checkbox for “completed” on my weekly Wattpad serial and leaned back in my chair.

I was done.

In short order, I amassed a handful of “likes” and comments. People were glad I was “done,” it seemed!

I was glad, too. Except that when I sat down to tinker with that last chapter, there was a nagging sense that I was not actually done, and would never be done. It made me nervous. Should I click that checkbox and delude people (inadvertently!), or should I hesitate and think about it some more?

I filled in some obvious gaps in the last chapter. There was one place where I had changed a material decision in the hero’s life, so that had to be mentioned and then explained. There was another where the events in the narrative seemed to be in the wrong order—or were they? I couldn’t remember if I’d made those changes to earlier chapters.

Was I going to confuse people? Hmm.

One of the virtues of being older and not younger is that you know your own follies and faults all too well. And, if you are lucky, there are people in your life who know them even better than you do. My particular obstacle is always going to be, as Seth Godin calls it, “shipping.” It’s hard for me to share what I’ve made. I’m always afraid of rejection, ridicule, humiliation. It’s performance anxiety writ large, on a giant stage.

So I clicked the checkbox and let my baby go.

Next week I’ll send her off to a copy editor and if all goes well, it will hit the shelves at the end of August.

Progress Report 2: 30-day phone detox

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Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash

I completed week 2 of the 30-day phone detox, and I'm feeling terrific!

Week 1 was the “technology triage,” and involved some exercises in self-awareness. I was already pretty aware of the fact that excessive phone use makes me unhappy, but I appreciated the opportunity to really dig into how much I wanted more space in my mind and life. I deleted social media apps and installed a tracking app; I resolved to be more present.

Week 2 was about “changing your habits.” Again, these were all things that I already knew were good ideas (shutting down notifications, setting up no-phone zones). I skipped a couple of them because they weren't relevant. I already decline to look at my phone during dinner, for example. But I was blown away by the power of just moving all your apps off the first screen of the phone. WOW. That was huge. It took me a long time to rearrange everything to my satisfaction but the result is a soothing, EMPTY screen. I did the same thing on my ipad!

Because I didn't do all the steps meticulously, I've left myself some room to go back and get perfectionist, if I want. Right now I'm astonished at the difference it has made to do maybe 75% of the tasks on the list. I'm reading more and wasting less time.

Now, how do I persuade my teenagers to do this also?

New Story Grid Blog Post

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I've got a new article up on the Story Grid website!

It's called, “Look in the Mirror: 10 Principles for Authors.”

I started out to write an article comparing writing a novel to training for a marathon, and it morphed into something a little different. But the gist of it is that we all have that better version of ourselves inside of us. All of us are actually high-performance athletes, chefs, singers, or whatever…inside. It may not show on the outside. And we may not see ourselves in that role, and that serves to bring us down when we daydream about the things we'd love to accomplish.

But if you look in the mirror WHILE YOU ARE DOING IT, while you are writing, cooking, singing, or dying on the treadmill, you get a glimpse of the better version of yourself. So look in the mirror and see what you are, and see what you can become.

Weekend Music 2: East Village Opera Company

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By Abby621 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...

This is the East Village Opera Company.

It seems to be on hiatus right now, and not a lot of information is available about the group, which performed wonderful mashups of rock and opera back in the earlier 2000s. Their Facebook page has had postings as recently as 2017, but their domain name is up for grabs, so I'm not sure if the group will ever get back together.

I was fortunate enough to find a five minute docu-video for the group!

I first learned about East Village Opera Company from an NPR radio story back in 2006. It's hard to fathom how long ago that was. I had four kids under the age of ten, and we had just started commuting an hour away to a swim team that would prove to be a competitive turning point for my older two kids. Our long car rides back and forth daily to the pool were endured with the help of some new technology–I had just acquired an iPod Touch. I was homeschooling my kids and used the Touch and the sound system in our van to give my kids the music education that I felt they needed to have. When I found the East Village Opera Company, it was magical, an incredible opportunity to show my kids how the arts are meant to grow and stretch and transform.

The group treated these timeless, over-the-top arias as modern pieces that deserved the treatment that popular music of today would get.

If you're an opera fan, you are in for an amazing treat! It's hard to find music videos for this group but I've got a few for you below.

The piece referred to by group founder Peter Kiesewalter as “silly” but a beautiful piece of music, it's to die for:

And last but not least, the gorgeous “Flower Duet:”