Category Archives: Writing

Slow goaling in a room of my own

I’m writing this from a special place – in my “writing room,” sitting at my “writing desk” – a handmade wooden desk that David built for me. What makes this space so special is that it is fundamentally a structure. A structure that if I didn’t necessarily need it, I desperately wanted it.

I’m feeling vulnerable to share this, but pleasantly grounded by this calm space. Rather than write something celebratory, what I really wanted to share with you is that I’ve been avoiding writing this blog for many reasons. One is because I felt like I let myself down. And I felt like I let you down too. I announced grandly my goals for Birth of Adventure, you supported me and subscribed, and then after a few months of publishing at a regular pace, I fizzled out.

Once I lost my regular writing momentum, it was harder to start again. For example, when I returned with a post this past September, I hoped to continue. I wanted to bring you the stories and capture the experiences of our trip to Scotland that originally inspired this blog, but it felt awkward after so much time had gone by. Like I was a friend who shows up uninvited at your house with a slide deck of trip photos that you never asked to see. I was also, as I shared before, just plain exhausted.

Even though I’m not so vain as to think anyone was lying around waiting for the next Birth of Adventure blog post, I felt icky about it. It reeked of high expectations I’d set for myself that were dashed.

High expectations is what brings me to the other point of this post. Hands up if you’ve felt less ambitious this year, felt less driven or you have had less of an inclination to set resolutions, or audacious goals for your personal and professional transformation.

This was the first New Year’s Eve in 20 years that I didn’t write a completion of the past year and set goals for the new year. I didn’t intentionally disregard this annual tradition. I just didn’t feel like doing it.

I know I wasn’t the only one feeling like this. I heard from so many people that they didn’t want to chase ambition this year, for a multitude of reasons.

For the first few weeks of January I decided I was going to reject personal goals completely. No resolutions, nothing to achieve, let life come as it may. But I noticed that I was still inching towards something.

I still want to finish my book. It has a story, and message, and characters that I really want to share. I completed the first draft in December during a writing retreat, and it is a huge project ahead of me to revise and polish it.

I want to feel better in my body, and that only seems to come through moving more, stretching, going to yoga, walking, swimming. When I went to see my chiropractor/yoga teacher in November for back pain, she told me (and this is the truth) that I had “lazy butt syndrome”. Well, actually it was “sleepy glute syndrome” but same thing. My body is physically crying out for me to move it more.

I want my house to be cleaner.

I want to connect more with friends and family.

I want to write this blog, not only to practice writing and storytelling, but as a reserved introvert, I enjoy it, and this is one of the best ways I can connect and share with others.

And so maybe the answer wasn’t in rejecting the goals per se, but throwing away all of the hype and pressure I put on myself around achieving them.

This feels like the perfect moment for a Buffalo Bills fan analogy. Just like Buffalonians watching Josh Allen come out on the field, I have anxiety that I will mess up at the same time that I have illusions (or delusions) that I will definitely win the Super Bowl. In writing terms, I equally dream of publishing my book and ending up on the New York Times Bestseller list and making Twilight level money as I dread having 150 agents reject the finished manuscript and tell me I’ll never be a writer, or if it got published, then selling less than 10 copies and being wildly panned by critics.

And so, right now, in my personal endeavors, I’m trying out “soft goals”. I still know what I want, and will intentionally act on what I want, but I’m not putting any pressure on myself to achieve anything.

One soft goal is to set days and times when I will write – the blog or the novel revision – throughout the week. I learned that one successful novelist has a simple goal to write for at least 11 minutes a day. Sometimes she writes more, but she’s satisfied with 11 minutes. That’s the kind of energy I’m bringing to this soft goal. No hard goal for how many pages, or number of blog posts. But I will show up and write whatever I can accomplish in those times.

Another soft goal I have is around movement. I already enjoy hanging out with my friend Melissa at the Jewish Community Center for swimming and sauna chats when we can, and another soft goal is to sign up for a yoga class two times a week except for when I’m working those nights. My family just started the 100 push up challenge last week. I tested in the 0-5 category (I can do 4 modified push ups, and nearly 1 regular push up) and since that’s the lowest level there is only up from here. There is no hard goal for weight loss or pressure to reach 100 push-ups, but if I master a regular push up at all I will be very impressed with myself.

Tying this back to the beginning, I mentioned that this writing room and writing desk were a structure that I wanted. I realized that when I was stressed I got into a habit of hunkering onto the couch after work and once there, I’d be too cozy or too deep into a TV show to do anything else productive. And then thinking the words “productive” made writing or movement sound like hard work that should be avoided at all costs, even though those were two of the things that would actually have made me feel less stressed. I found I needed to give myself time and structure to do the things that were good for me. Getting away to North Carolina in December for a writing retreat was what finally dragged me to the finish line of the first draft of the novel I’d been working on for 5 years.

And so when David and Ben renovated the guest bedroom/office (our now adult girls’ former bedroom) I decided to think of it not as my home office, but as my own personal retreat space. I asked David for a writing desk and he took great care to build me something that would be functional, beautiful and inviting, right down to the finest details.

And today I tested it out. I’ve spent longer writing in this one sitting than I have in over a month. The true measure of success is that I came back to this room after dinner – even though the couch and TV beckoned. It’s so nice in here, when David popped in to check out how it was going, he got sucked in and almost fell asleep on the comfy daybed.

I am grateful to David for creating this beautiful space and structure for me. And I am grateful to you for reading. If you related to anything I shared, or if you have thoughts you want to share with me, I would love to hear it.

And for my friends and family, you know you have a guest bedroom waiting for you when you’re next visiting Buffalo.

Birthing a Novel and the Birth of Adventure Birthday

This year for my birthday I gave myself the gift of a writing retreat. 

Four days away from all distractions, with no obligations other than to finally finish the first draft of my novel – the novel I started writing in 2017. Five years ago.

It is a luxury and when the opportunity arose, I jumped at it. I packed up my bags and met my friend Jes (also writing a book) and we spent the past weekend in a cabin in North Carolina, tucked away amongst the trees with a babbling brook alongside the porch. 

Each day and evening we wrote, with a few breaks for movement, rest, food, and one ambitious day, a hike in the mountains. 

Yes, it was idyllic.  But even if we were in less idyllic surroundings, the biggest gift of this writing retreat was to give myself time and space to write. Something I find difficult at home when I’m amid responsibilities that feel more pressing and important. I also find it hard after a workday to motivate myself to pick up my computer when the cozy couch and my spouse are nearby looking much more appealing.

I joked with my family that I felt like Colin Firth’s character in “Love Actually”, typing away in his cottage in France, minus the housekeeper-love interest of course. (And with my laptop instead of a typewriter, I had no need to make copies.)  I wanted this experience for myself – to see if getting away from it all would help me to finish what I started so long ago.

As I shared above, my goal for the weekend was to finish the first draft of a middle grade novel that I have been writing off and on for five years. Even if I’m the only person who ever reads this novel, it means a lot to me, but for many reasons I’d been unable to finish it.

To be fair, I’ve written other things in that time. A little over a year ago, I launched my blog Birth of Adventure, and ran a contest for friends and family to subscribe leading up to my birthday.

The blog came about when I had been feeling restless and anxious about my impending empty nest– reflecting on closing a chapter in my life and the uncertainty of what my next chapter would be like. In the empty space that opened, I wanted to fill it with something I’d be excited for – and I saw traveling and writing as what I wanted to let back into my life.

So, looking back a year later, how did I do? Between November 2021 to March 2022, I published 11 blog posts. Not too bad. I took the dream trip to Scotland I’d been planning for a year. And then I stopped blogging. As I shared in my October post, I got tired. Instead of writing publicly, I turned inward for some quiet. 

In that space, the novel beckoned to me again. I picked it up and dusted it off. And made slow progress. Snail level progress. I joined writing communities with Highlights Foundation. I took writing classes. I worked on story development. I wrote a full outline. And then I enrolled in a class called “Just Do It”, which told me to just do it. 

So my birthday gift to myself was the time and space to finally finish writing the first draft. I was so close I could feel it.  I’d written 150 pages, and felt I was about 15,000 words away, but reaching the finish line was eluding me.

You may wonder why I care so deeply about the story? Part of it is a love letter to my mom who I lost 16 years ago. The novel is about a 13-year-old girl named Charlotte who deals with the grief of losing her mother by casting herself into a self-imposed exile – broken reluctantly by a new neighbor – with friendships and hijinks included. It is set in my neighborhood on the West Side of Buffalo, with a cast of friends inspired by some of our close family friendships. It includes Girl Scouts of course – Charlotte’s troop of friends – and there is plenty of adventure and food, some of my favorite things. I hope that a grieving child might find comfort, recognition and hope in this story, and that others will feel empathy and be reminded about the importance of friendship.

With a story that I care so deeply about, why did I keep stopping? One, I was getting stuck in the middle – I knew the beginning, I knew the end, but I didn’t know how to connect those together. The outline solved that. There was a bigger issue. I felt that if I was a writer, then beautiful, flowing, articulate words should pour out of my fingers like honey. And crappy, hack-ish, meandering words were clunking out of my keyboard. What if I finally finished this novel and learned I’m a terrible writer? What if I’m not like Diana Gabaldon whose first “practice” novel Outlander became a major bestseller and a series?

In the “Just Do It” class, our teacher told us that all that mattered was the words getting on the page. Finishing the draft. The beautiful, articulate words could wait for the second or third or fourth draft. Something in her message sunk in, and I gave myself permission to write a crappy first draft.

That was my birthday gift to myself – the gift of time, and space. The gift to get it done. The gift to finish something that was my dream, even though on most days I acted like it was a task or expectation imposed on me. Writing this novel has been hard. I don’t always like to do things I find hard. 

In our cozy cabin this weekend, I sat in front of the computer. I plodded through, unflinching at the parts that were hack-ish, amateurish, hokey, cheesy, you name it. I embraced it all. I threw the clay down, knowing that ahead of me would the fun part of revising and polishing until it becomes something that I’d be willing to share even if not comfortable to share.

And I’m proud to say …….

I finished it!!!! 

When the weekend started I was at 150 pages, and I finished the weekend with 220 pages. Some of the writing I loved, some made me laugh, some made me cry. A lot made me cringe and was very, very crappy. But it is done!!  Instead of staring down the road at a never ending abyss, I now have a foundation of clay to mold.

After I take a nice long break over the holidays.

Sometimes we follow our dreams, and the dream turns out to be hard. I appreciate you taking the time to read this and hope you continue to take on the things you’ve been dreaming to do as well.

Best, Alison