WordFlix

Tea party

By HD Silversmith

Will an exploration of tea be the key to my writing this year?

I'm a coffee fiend at heart and rather infamously so among my friends and colleagues.  Lately, though, my love for the scents and accouterments that are part and parcel of tea-drinking in different cultures has surfaced.

Since the end of last semester I've had fantasies of sipping cups of soothing herbal tea in the evenings as a way of shifting gears from the stress and worry of the day and easing toward a restful night's sleep.

That fantasy has expanded to include visions of myself writing yards of eloquent prose in the afternoons, clicketty-clacking away at my keyboard.

Yeah, well, okay.  I did say fantasy.

The fact is, while I love the scents of caffeine-free herbal teas, I prefer the taste of really strong black teas. Naturally I do:  you couldn't call my tea palate refined or even educated at this point.  I also tend to over-steep all varieties, which creates a bitterness in even the best teas.

You got it: I'm pretty tea-illiterate.

But I'm endeavoring to learn and explore.  I'd like to cut back a little on my coffee consumption (not so much because of the caffeine, really -- I like caffeine, people  -- as to expand my gustatory options).

Toward that end, I asked for and received the sweet little teapot, pictured above, made by Bee House, for my birthday from my husband.  I love its design, its size, and the pale yellow color (though Bee House offers other models, sizes, and colors), and I'm experimenting with various teas I've bought and been given by friends.

Last night's cup of a green tea?  Not steeped long enough and rather insipid as a result.  This morning's cup of Irish Breakfast tea?  Waaaaay oversteeped.

But this is only the beginning.  And when I finally sit down to write with a little pot of ingeniously selected, perfectly brewed pot of  tea and my cup at my elbow, the prose will flow.

I know it. ;

NaNoWriMo survival kit

By HD Silversmith

This is a fun thread on the NaNoWriMo forum.  Here are the contents of my so-called kit thus far:

Thumb drive (because I'll be going among a PC desktop at home, a Mac laptop (huge, not very lightweight) at work, and a netbook for write-ins at cafes and the like)

yWriter5 free writing software on all three computers (I'm loving this -- perfectly designed for NaNoWriMo)

NaNoWriMo stickers on all three computers (gotta get into the spirit, dontcha know)

NaNoWriMo desktop wallpaper (varied) for all three computers

Unlimited coffee and lattes and month-long self-permission to drink as much of it and as many of them as I like (er, but I already give myself these things anyway)

Good-for-me-snacks (to fuel the body --> baby carrots, protein)

Bad-for-me snacks (to reward set word counts --> chocolate, trail mix, etc.)

Green water bottle

Composition book for notes and the perfect pen (have yet to locate the latter, though I like Pilot G-2 .07 gel writers)

Post-It notes (for just in case)

Chris Baty's No Plot? No Problem!

Writing totems: Where the Wild Things Are stuffed animal (Bernard) at home, and a piece of yellow jade for the road, burning candle

iPod NaNoWriMo playlist (must compile this) and earbuds

Writing-friendly clothing: NaNo t-shirts plus leggings, thick socks, warm scarves, and fingerless gloves

Baseball cap with "Just write it" pin

That's it so far ...

Any additional suggestions?

DeLonghi EC270 15-Bar-Pump Espresso Machine

By HD Silversmith

It came! 

After a couple of weeks during which it was back-ordered, my new espresso machine arrived yesterday afternoon.  Thank you, FedEx.

It replaces a Krups espresso maker that was about 1/4 to 1/3 its price (depending whether you calculate according to retail or discounted Amazon prices).  The Krups machine made good espresso (I'm not a snob, though I am an addict), but it just didn't hold up over time.  I was on my second iteration, it broke, and I figured it was time to upgrade at last.

My initial effort at an espresso and a latte yesterday?  Let's put it this way:  I need to get the espresso-to-water ratio right for this particular model.

But then? I'll be on my way.  I'm just positive that at-home lattes will enable me to get tenure and be a writing powerhouse.

(Or at least keep me effectively caffeinated in the endeavor!)

But I digress

By HD Silversmith

So I’m exploring my own alternate writing space at a local Starbucks this afternoon, as today is a furlough day for me.

In heading to a coffee shop, I decided not to fritter away the entire day with contraband work-related email. We’re forbidden from doing any work on the days that we’re furloughed, lest we sue the university later for not reducing our workload along with our pay and our time assignments -- or at least that’s my uncharitable-but-probably-accurate assessment of the matter. Despite official policy, however, the workload of everyone I know has actually increased, and so doing some work is necessary. To insist otherwise is a complete fairy tale.

(And yes, I’m documenting it all in the event that my union or I needs such documentation down the line.)

But today is the Friday before a long weekend in honor of Labor Day, and I knew I’d just resent the hell out of life if I both worked illegally and got paid less for doing so for too long a period today. Most of the work can wait until tomorrow (which, yes, is a weekend day -- welcome to academia -- but not a furlough day, so I will not resent working then).

On future furlough days (I have eight more of them this semester), I plan to work on my own writing and research -- also considered part of my university workload. The way I figure it, though, my professional reputation extends beyond the walls of my university, and it has no right to limit it, in my view. (Hey, I warned the university in writing that I was signing the so-called agreement to furlough under duress. Not ethically binding, to my mind, at least in terms of these details.)

And this is how I come to be sitting with my laptop at a coffee shop this afternoon, sipping a latte and eating a not-terrific brownie -- which is nevertheless better than not eating any chocolate at all.

What coffee shop would you spend some furlough time in? ;)

How do you begin your writing day?

I'm asking because, just now, I forgot part of my (unremarkable) routine and made haste to correct my mistake. 

And then that question popped into my head:  what do other people do to prepare for and ease into their writing day?

(Maybe you don't have a full day.  Maybe you're lucky to have an hour or two every few days.  Doesn't matter -- I'm still curious.)

The thing I'd forgotten to do this morning was to stream music through my iTunes program (it's playing right now).  In general, I pick the same touchy-feely-New Age-meditational music every morning because I used to do yoga to it (note the past tense: bad, bad, bad HD!), and I'm like Pavlov's dogs: by association, the music itself still has the ability to put me in a receptive, relaxed state and to open me up to the possibilities of language.

And coffee. I relax over a first (and second and third) cup of coffee as I think about and move into my day.  (Okay, that may seem as if it undermines all that calming, streaming-music stuff ... but it doesn't, not for me.)  I'm a self-confessed coffee lover and caffeine addict, and coffee is one of the very real pleasures of my day. If I don't overdo it, I find it helps me think more clearly and take on the challenge of writing.

There are other things I do, too, but these two are non-negotiable.  

I'd like to add exercise back into the mix, though given my schedule during the academic year, it will probably not be something I do first thing in the morning.

What do you do to prepare for and to focus before you begin to write?

Writing as anxiety and comfort

I woke up around 4:00 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep. 

I wanted to write.

I didn't particularly want to say anything wise or witty or even worth reading.  I just wanted to  ... write. I wanted to feel my fingers moving over the keyboard (as in yesterday's writing exercise, actually), and to experience the sense of familiarity and -- safety? -- that this activity brings me.

Maybe "safety" isn't the right word. 

When I'm writing academic pieces or creative nonfiction, it's not about being safe.  It's about finding the right words to express an argument or a theme. It's about working with language (and letting it work upon me) to give shape to my own unique voice and ideas.  It's about expressing something that's real and true to me, with intellectual and emotional integrity.

And that involves risk-taking.  Hell, it doesn't just involve it.  It demands it. And it can be challenging, intimidating, and even downright scary sometimes.

But this morning's writing -- right here, right now, as I sip my first cup of coffee -- is very much about safety.  It's about still being in my nightgown, watching the brightening of sky through my study window. It's about  listening to the slow, soft music that's streaming through my computer's iTunes program  and a chance to contemplate the day ahead of me.  It's about the sense of peace that writing here brings me, knowing that in the back of my mind I'm processing the upcoming tasks and projects of the day at the same time -- but I don't have to give them my full attention quite yet.  They're simply percolating for the present.

Writing is my challenge and my sanctuary.  And if that sounds just a wee bit melodramatic, it absolutely is, because as I was typing those words, the final line of My Cousin Rachel (Henry Koster, USA, 1952) with Richard Burton and Olivia De Havilland, sprang into my mind ... 

As I recall, there's Richard Burton in a billowing cape at the edge of a churning ocean, back to the camera, sea-drenched boulders in front of him. Agonizing over whether his cousin Olivia De Havilland, whom he loves, is actually evil or if he's misread her and caused terrible things to happen (see how I'm avoiding spoilers?), he speculates inconclusively (and in voice-over, soliloquy-fashion), finally intoning, "Rachel ... my blessed, blessed torment!" as the film fades to black.

Or something like that.

I wouldn't say that writing ever my torment, though, even in my most blocked, angst-ridden moments. In fact, this morning it feels like a blessing, a sort of quiet space where I can come to write who I am and get in touch with that before the craziness of my day begins.

A blessing, indeed.

Caffeine is my drug of choice

It didn't always used to be. 

Food in general filled that category.  But since losing a lot of weight (with the help of duodenal switch surgery -- best decision I ever made), it's definitely coffee.  Fully caffeinated coffee.  I like it strong, with half and half, and a packet of Splenda.

Even better?  A latte -- first, because of the taste and second, because I can count the milk in it toward my daily protein requirement (which is high, given the aforementioned surgery).

Coffee wakes me up in the morning and soothes me as I settle into my writing day.  It's stimulating and comforting at the same time, though folks rarely write about the latter attribute of coffee. 

As I write this I've had my first cup of the morning, and shortly I'll pour myself a second cup and turn to create some java-inspired prose.  In fact, coffee is most definitely part of my writing routine.

It's a good way to start the day.