Seeking Time: A Sort of Hiatus for Original Content

I'll be cutting back on blogging for probably the next six weeks while I help out a couple of family members. I have two blog posts in progress that I want to finish up and publish, because they are somewhat timely, and this cut back may lead to a Seeking Time post this summer, because what doesn't lead to a Seeking Time post? 

For the immediate future, though, I want to use what work time I have for nonblogging activity.

Looking forward to beginning here again.

The Reading History Project: What Are We Doing for Mother's Day? Mothers as Activists!

Mother's Day, in my humble opinion, can be fun if you have young children. Otherwise:

1. It's an opportunity for a lot of marketing.
2. It causes stress for moms over whether or not their kids will remember to observe the day for them and stress for kids, adult ones, anyway, over what they should do to observe it for mom.
3. It's a grieving time for many people who have lost their mothers or are in the process of doing so.
4. It's one more reminder for mothers who have lost children of what is gone from their lives. 

For some people, Mother's Day doesn't have a lot to recommend it.

The History of Mother's Day

Yesterday historian Heather Cox Richardson tipped her readers off to the fact that the originators of Mother's Day were interested in something else. She's supported by The History of Mother's Day: From Global Peace to Greeting Cards at The Smithsonian American Women's History Museum.

In 1870, Julia Ward Howe, responding to the American Civil War that had ended just a few years earlier and the Franco-Prussian War that was then being fought in Europe, tried to create an annual Mother's Day for peace. In the early twentieth century Anna Jarvis was successful in creating Mother's Day to honor her mother, Ann Jarvis, who just happened to have been involved with a mid-nineteenth century public health movement. She organized Mother's Work Days to, among other hygiene-related activities, collect trash. 

Mother's Day came out of reform movements.

Bringing Mother's Day Back to Activism?

Though a number of states allowed women to vote in local school elections in the nineteenth century, they couldn't vote on the national level. They had to find a different way to have a voice and did so by becoming involved with reform movements, the most prominent being abolition, suffrage, and temperance. 

I'm sort of over Mother's Day, myself. I feel it's a young woman's game. But this idea of Mother's Day and reform or activism brings a whole new level of interest for me. 

From now on, I actually will be thinking about doing something for Mother's Day. It may not be with any kids, though.

 

Seeking Time: The Unit System

Very early in my seeking time journey someone told me about an article in Poets & Writers by author Ellen Sussman in which she described something she called the unit system. 

She said she worked for 45 minutes of an hour, then spent 15minutes doing something that wasn't work-related. Then she'd go back to work for another 45 minutes. And repeat. The benefits, she said, were: 

1. During the 45 minutes that she worked, it was easier to stay on task when she knew she'd have a break in another X minutes
2. During those 15 minutes that she wasn't working, her "unconscious thought" could often continue working on a writing problem, which was helpful when she went back to work.

She had some science to support this work, research related to graduate students managing time for writing. 

Again, all you did was work for 45 minutes, break for 15 and then begin writing again for another 45 minutes. Later I would realize I am a minimalist. I love how minimal this work method is.

Like the Unit System

Over the years, I kept stumbling upon articles supporting working in what might be described as sprints or short units of time, like Sussman's plan.

• A study suggested recognizing "that you have a finite attentional window––and structure your workflow to be congruent with that capacity. This speaks to how we’ve talked about how work is a series of sprints––and to be our most productive and most creative, we need to unplug throughout our workdays." 
• Tony Scwartz recommends working in 90-minute blocks because at the end of ninety minutes, "we reach the limits of our capacity to work at the highest level." Then we need to renew. At his blog, Schwartz referred to the work pattern he suggests--90 minutes of work, followed by a break--as "mental intervals." Like the unit system but different.
• The fairly well-known Pomodoro Technique recommends working in 25-minute units of time, taking a 5-minute break, then going back to work for 25 minutes. Like 45-minutes but different.

All the above involve simple strategies. 

The Value of Small Units of Time 

For years I used the unit system daily. I will admit, the 45-minutes on, 15-minutes off system has failed for me the last few years. I still embrace small work periods, though, even without following a work, break, work, break pattern, for two reasons.

First, the idea that we should work in 90-minute, 45-minute, or even 25-minute units means we have accepted that we can do something in small amounts of time. We don't need to have a summer to write. We don't need a formal retreat, a three-day weekend, a day.  

In The Heartbreaking Ingenuity of the Mother-Writer at Literary Hub Olivia Campbell quotes author Alison Stine:  

"You can't be precious about writing if you have kids. You can't be fastidious or fussy. You can't always write at the cool coffee shop. I applied for a NEA grant at Burger King: They had free wifi and an indoor children's playground...I wrote my most recent novel draft during my son's remote school Zoom meetings. My first novel, Road Out Of Water, I wrote at the local skatepark, where my son belonged to the skate club."

Stine recognized that she could adapt small units of time to use for writing. It's not unusual to read of mothers who write working like this.

Additionally, psychologist Kelly McGonigal has talked about the what-the-hell-effect, in which people give up on a project because they feel bad about their lack of success with it. As in "It's 2:30, and I haven't written yet. The day is shot. What the hell. I'll try again tomorrow." With the unit system, we don't have to feel bad about ourselves for not starting work yet, because we realize at 2:30 we have two and a half hours before dinner to work. Or we have an hour before the kids get home. Even a half an hour can be helpful.  

I like the psychological impact of the unit system. It isn't just a way of managing time. It's a way of thinking about it. The thinking aspect becomes part of our view of ourselves and how we work.

That's the part that's kept me using it and maybe even kept me writing.

 

Friday Done List May 8

 A good week. At least, it feels like a good week.

Goal 1. Write And Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor 

• Truly worked on a humor piece.
• Finished a blog post that is going to become an essay.
• Worked on an essay for a project.
• Took a workshop on literary submissions in preparation for submitting a new short story.
• Finished reading an excellent history book for The Reading History Project.
• Started reading another history book for The Reading History Project.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Published a blog post. Will publish another this weekend.
• Promoted said blog post. 
• Spent way too much time reading on social media about Mac Barnett, whom I hadn't heard of this time last week.

Goal 3. Submit Book-length Work to Agents and Editors 

• Received a rejection. Rejection means you're working!

The Story Behind the Story: Minimum Word Counts

Frontier Myth vs. Frontier Reality was published this weekend at Books Are Our Superpower after a request for editing because the publication has an 800-word minimum for its essays. I believe the essay I sent was originally in the low 600s or 700s. It's up over 900 words now.

As far as short nonfiction is concerned, I've become a bit of a minimalist writer. I like the traditional essay in which writers begin with a thesis statement and describe the support they'll be discussing for it later on. 

My impression is that the Medium platform, itself, favors longer writing. (You may not be able to read all that article. You'll have to trust me.) Up over a thousand words and more, which, actually, isn't outrageously long. However, a lot of medium writers are new to writing, and they may not be that knowledgeable about how to put an essay together. They take their time getting to the point and the more words they use, the longer they take. 

I'm also a minimalist reader. I like writers to get to the point sooner rather than later.

The point I'm getting to here, is that in spite of my being a minimalist writer, I feel the revision I did because the publication asked for more words was better than what I originally sent them. Why is that, Gail? Well, in order to add words, I:

• Added details that supported the point of one of the paragraphs.
• Included a thread relating to "our history" that wasn't originally there.

I felt both those changes enhanced the essay. So what I'll try to do in the future is consider whether I've gone so short on the word count that I haven't included important material

Friday Done List May 1

I read an article about a woman who tracked every hour she spent writing for six months. What she found out was that a lot of the time she wasn't writing, she was doing writing-related activities. My first response was, Oh, no, I am never tracking my writing. That is asking for misery. But now I'm thinking, wait. There is a lot of writing adjacent work that writers need to do. No judgement!

Goal 1. Write And Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor 

• An essay submission I'd made last week came back requesting edits. Essentially, it was too short. So I did a rewrite that increased the word count. I think the essay was actually better afterward.
• The essay above has been approved for publication.
• I finished two blog posts that I plan to revise to submit as essays.
• I set up some files for the essays I plan to write from blog posts.
• I took a workshop yesterday that wasn't what I was expecting. However, I came away with some thoughts regarding the short story I recently finished and made a couple of changes to it today.
• I did just the tiniest bit of work on some humor pieces.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• I published a blog post last Saturday, which I also promoted.
• I wrote and published another blog post, which I also promoted.
• Read an article about AI and another about marketing books, for what good that will do me.

Goal 4. Begin Some Writing on the 19th Century Novel Idea

• Made some notes on this.

 

Seeking Time: Begin Again

I said recently that back during the fourteen years that I was writing about time regularly, "I was hungry for ways to get things done and sometimes even finding a few." 

One of my favorite fews is begin again.

Yes, Begin Again Comes from Meditation, Not Time Management

Begin Again is a concept from meditation. In Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics authors Dan Harris, Jeff Warren, and Carlyle Adler describe beginning again as the most important step in meditation. "The whole game is to notice when you're distracted, and begin again. And again. And again." Kelly McGonigal says In The Willpower Instinct that having to keep bringing your wandering mind back to your breath (beginning again) while meditating develops the brain. 

In my dabbling in meditation I have never seen begin again used as anything but a positive. 

That's Right. We've Done Nothing Wrong

I consider beginning again on a par with the writing advice to keep your butt-in-chair or write every day. The main difference is that beginning again doesn't involve guilt. Butt-in-chair and write every day carry with them a sense of othering. "Keeping your butt in a chair is what we writers do." "To be a writer, you have to write every day." 

But, remember, most of us are the kinds of writers who can't support ourselves with our writing. We've got a day job to keep us alive. For many of us, there are kids, sick relatives, moves to be made, newly diagnosed illness, depression over our lousy careers, existential dread...Those things are all going to happen and keep us, at least at times, from keeping those butts in chairs and writing every day. Kelly McGonigal has said (again In The Willpower Instinct) that self-criticism undermines motivation and self-control, leading us to give in, to give up. Feeling we are less than because we're being judged for not being able to live like writers are supposed to live is unlikely to be a positive for us.

Beginning again can be. We can get past those life issues or find a way to deal with them and then we can begin again.   

You Can Look Forward to Beginning Again

When we've done the begin again thing a few times, we find ourselves looking forward to it. Maybe it's because beginning again means whatever was standing in the way of our writing is over or we're managing it now. Maybe it's because we like sitting at our laptop in whatever passes as our workspace and know we'll enjoy getting back there again. Maybe it's because we're writers, and writers like nothing better than being able to begin writing again.

To paraphrase Dan Harris and company, "The whole game is to begin again. And again. And again." 

The Reading History Project: Yes, I Am Obsessed with Frederick Jackson Turner

Frederick Jackson Turner is a historian who could be said to have gone down in history pretty much for what amounts to an essay, The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893.*   According to Colin Woodard in How the Myth of the American Frontier Got Its Start in Smithsonian, Turner arranged to have Significance of the Frontier in American History published in the American History Association's annual report, taught his thesis to graduate history classes, and lectured about it, but he never wrote a book on the subject. Yet in Does Turner Still Live? Considerations on the Popular Afterlife of The American Frontier by Walter Nugent in The Athenaeum Review describes the essay's influence up until the 1970s and '80s.

I first heard of Turner's essay in high school. I got a totally wrong impression about what the thing was about that I carried with me for many years. So many years. This is my misinterpretation:

In The Closing of the American Frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner said that the frontier served as a place for Easterners who didn't fit in where they were to move where there weren't so many social restrictions and they could get along better. Turner was concerned about what would happen when there was no longer an American frontier and society had no place to send these people.  

Let's be clear, Turner did not write anything called The Closing of the American Frontier. In the nine pages of excerpts that I read from the essay he did write, The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893, I found nothing about the frontier being used as a dumping ground for Easterners who didn't fit in in Boston and Hartford. 

Did I come up with this myself, as a result of watching too may Westerns on TV while growing up? I have to say, I'm wondering about my high school history teacher now. Was this some kind of Turner interpretation when he was at UVM back in the day? Is it a Turner spin he came up with himself, as a person who reads history?

Also, why did I remember this, particularly since it was wrong?

At any rate, Turner's actual essay, The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893, was embraced for generations. Though Turner didn't write a book about it, himself, he and Significance of the Frontier turn up in other historians' books to this very day.

What Jackson Really Said About the Frontier

In Significance of the Frontier, Turner argues that

 "Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development."

This experience, happening over and over again as the people on the East coast moved West, settled, then moved further West "promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people." 

He describes conflicts between East and West, saying, "The East has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the frontier, and has tried to check and guide it." Nonetheless, "Steadily the frontier of settlement advanced and carried with it individualism, democracy, and nationalism, and powerfully affected the East and the Old World."

The frontier experience made all of America what it was, not just Western America.

Note that Turner writes about the "existence of an area of free land." He mentions it more than once. And how does he define "frontier?" "...the meeting point between savagery and civilization."

I will also point out here that these days the word "colonization" carries some negative connotations involving oh, taking land from others, enslavement, destroying cultures, and other things of that nature.

What Others Have to Say about Turner

A Historian of His Times. In These Truths: A History of the United States Jill Lepore describes what was going on in the field of history in the late nineteenth century when Turner delivered his paper. History, like other fields then, was professionalizing. Turner was one of the first Americans to hold a doctorate in history. He read his paper at a meeting of The American Historical Association, which had only been founded in 1884. Lepore says: 

"...historians borrowed from the emerging social sciences, relying on quantitative analysis to understand how change happens."  

How does Turner begin The Significance of the Frontier in American History? With a quote from the 1890 Census. 

"Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports."

He was using a quantitative analysis of something from the present rather than something from the past in his material but by turning to something so scientific he was marking himself as being from and of his period. In fact, the AHA meeting where he presented his paper was held during the Columbian Exposition in Chicago where all kinds of new things were displayed. They had a Ferris wheel! 

A Historian Who Said Something People Liked.  Megan Kate Nelson writes about Turner in the recently published  The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier. She's not the only writer to point out that Turner's reading of his essay didn't immediately take the academic world by storm. She says that pre-Turner most historians believed the United States became the United States because of European influence. In fact, Turner may be talking about that when he refers to "germs" in his paper. "Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment."

But according to Nelson popular perception of the "Great West" supported Turner. Novels featured Indian fighters saving white families, painters romanticized Western landscapes, and government policies (providing that free land Turner talks about) encouraged people in the East to go West. Turner was preaching to a choir that already believed in a frontier story they thought explained them even if they'd never been West of the Mississippi. Or West of anything. That's mythic.   

A Historian Whose Thesis Is Now Dated.  Remember I asked you to note that Turner writes about the "existence of an area of free land" and defines "frontier" as "...the meeting point between savagery and civilization?" 

Well.

In Thinking About History Sarah Maza says,

"Turner's vision of early Americans marching into "free land" is today discredited by our awareness that in most cases the lands European pioneers trekked into and grabbed already had owners, namely indigenous peoples, and were not theirs to claim by right or destiny."

Nowadays we are also likely to recognize that areas described in the past by Europeans as "savage" and "uncivilized" did have civilizations, they were just not civilizations familiar to Europeans and therefore deemed savage. 

A Historian Who May Have Been Ready to Move on Even If American Culture Wasn't 

In How the Myth of the American Frontier Got Its Start, Colin Woodard says that Frederick Jackson Turner eventually rethought his frontier theory. 

"...he had been relying too narrowly on the experiences in his own region of the Upper Midwest, which had been colonized by a settlement stream originating in New England. In fact, he found, the values he had ascribed to the frontier's environmental conditioning were actually those of this Greater New England settlement culture..."

Turner is supposed to have spent years working on a project that didn't treat the frontier as some kind of unifying force but instead involved the differences among America's various sections. But, Woodard says, Turner was a procrastinator. The work was never completed.

Instead The Significance of the Frontier in American History continued to be taught for decades, promoting a belief in American characteristics involving individualism, democracy, and nationalism.  

______________________________________

*This link directs you to nine pages of excerpts, which is all I read.

Friday Done List April 24

Goal 1. Write And Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor  

• Some basic revision of the prose poem I began in a workshop last week.
• Made a submission!
• Revised a blog post I'd forgotten about into an essay for submission.
• Submitted the essay I just told you about.
• Wrote a blog post I hope will become part of a series/arc I'll publish directly at Medium. A case of using the blog for actual writing/first drafts.
• Wrote a draft of a blog post for the Reading History Project that I hope to revise to submit to a Medium publication.
• Finally got a little market research done. Swung this because I had to spend time in a waiting room while someone had a medical test. Got on the office's WIFI!

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• 
  
  Someone made a lovely comment on BlueSky about Happy Kid! Which I then reposted and wrote about on Facebook.

Goal 3. Submit Book-length Work to Agents and Editors 

• Made a submission!

 

Seeking Time: A 24-Hour Readathon? In My Day, We Did 48.

I learned of Dewey's 24-Hour Readathon, which is happening today, nine minutes before it started. For a hot second I considered being all impulsive, dropping everything, and taking part. Believe me, I have way more than 24-hours of reading to do. But in my search for time, I'm try to stay on-task, and the task this Saturday involves some invasive plants at the back of my yard and a wide array of additional activities both work- and personal-related. Taking a day off to read will have a bad impact on how I use my time next week.

But a community reading binge is very attractive. I know, because I've done them.

The 48-Hour Book Challenge

I believe I have a couple of readers still with me from back in the day when there was a children's lit blogger community. And for ten years that community took part in The 48-Hour Book Challenge. We didn't just read for 48-hours. We blogged about what we were reading. We were fierce.

Karen Yingling of Ms. Yingling Reads ran a #MGReadathon in 2022 that I took part in. I don't read many children's books these days, so I don't know if that's still happening. 

I think there are definite benefits to binge reading, and I've been trying to work what I think of as a targeted weekend reading retreat into my life for months. I'm struggling to find the time to do that.