Jane Yolen's On-line Journal: An Appreciation

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Recently I noticed that I hadn't seen anything from Jane Yolen on Facebook in quite some time. Long enough to realize that that wasn't a good thing. So I wasn't surprised when her family announced that she died yesterday. The news made People Magazine, because she was, is, and will continue to be Jane Yolen, but the Locus obituary is much better.

Once upon a time, Jane Yolen kept an on-line journal. It hasn't been available for a while now, so you'll have to take my word for it that it once existed. At the end of July, 2004 I first wrote here about it. 

"I've noticed that Jane Yolen has started an on-line journal. It doesn't seem to be a traditional blog, but a traditional journal maintained on-line. I admire what she's doing, but I don't know if I'll be reading it much because...she does too much work. Her work habits are far better than mine, and I don't want to keep reminding myself.

On the other hand, maybe this is just what I need."

In just a couple of days, I was hooked.

"I believe I owe this surge of creativity and ambition to my personal writing coach, Jane Yolen. Though we have never met--though she, actually, has never even heard of me--her online journal with its descriptions of her superhuman work habits shames my "inner Jane" and makes her work harder.

Hey, Jane, there hasn't been an update in a couple of days. I'm going to crash and burn here if I don't hear from you soon."

 By September, I was obsessed. 

"My many, many, many fans know that I am somewhat obsessed with Jane Yolen's On-line Journal, mainly because Jane is a maniac for work and I, well, I'm not. I hoped that reading Jane's journal of her work life would inspire me to make a greater effort. If anything, it's made things worse. The time I should be spending working, I'm spending reading about Jane working."

I sometimes called her my "writing coach." I sometimes called her my "spiritual advisor." I sometimes called myself her "stalker." In 2005 I was worried about her husband's health. Over time, I was more than a little freaked out that in addition to, say, knocking off a few poems, receiving some rejections,  and meeting with her agent on the same day and having multiple books published in a year, she was able to have people over to eat or meet them at restaurants or go shopping and she was able to maintain a second home in another freaking country.

My obsession continued until the beginning of April, 2007. 

"I haven't been reading Jane Yolen's journal the way I used to. In the past, I found her impressive work ethic and output inspiring. Now reading about what she's doing just makes me feel like a layabout. A lazy, disorganized, self-centered, kept woman."

And then I went on for a couple of paragraphs about what I'd just read at Jane's journal about editing. 

Gail and Jane in the Real World

I did meet her briefly in the carbon-based world a few times.

 Soon after my first book was published in 1996, she gave a talk at the University of Connecticut, and I asked her a question about how she had managed writing when she had young children. She said she had two things going for her. 1. Her husband was a professor and was available to take on parenting tasks more frequently than other fathers might be. 2. She'd started publishing before she had children and thus thought of herself as a writer before she thought of herself as a mother.  She wasn't saying she put work first but that she didn't have to create a writer mindset or identity after she had created a mother mindset or identity. It was natural for her to fit her kids into her already established work life instead of having to fit work into an already established mother life. Believe me, I totally understood what she was saying. Being a mother while being a writer or being a writer while being a mother is still not natural for me. I got started in the wrong order.

I would see her at another event at the University of Massachusetts where I attended a program she was running. She began with an apology, because her husband was ill and she had been distracted when preparing her presentation. Then she proceeded to give what I felt was a fine college-level lecture, because that was what she was capable of when she wasn't at the top of her game.

Maybe sometime in the 2000s, the early teens, I actually shook her hand at some small gathering, again at UConn. I mentioned that we'd run into each other a couple of times over the years, and she looked at me intently and said something like, "I hope I was pleasant," which I thought was just lovely.

I am certain someone took a group picture of us at the end of that event. I know I had it, but I can't find it now or remember exactly when it was taken or why we were all where we were, which would help me to look for it. I am afraid I may have deleted it because I remember thinking it made my ass look big. I suspect Jane didn't give a damn about her ass, which left her with more time for all the things she did give a damn about.

I never read a great deal of Jane's work. It was Jane, herself, who drew me, the fact that she existed. In a nod to Michel de Montaigne, if you press me to say why I was obsessed with Jane Yolen, I can say no more than because she was she, and I, sadly, was only I.

Time Management Tuesday: Morning Pages For Organization?

This past winter, as part of a feeble attempt to create a minimalist office, I've been weeding out and then discarding many, many...many...years of writers' journals. Or workbooks, as I sometimes thought of them, according to something I read in one of them last night. This will be the subject of another blog post, some time in the future. Who knows when?

Today what I want to write about is what I've been finding in the 2002-03 journal and how it relates to a post I stumbled upon this week from Melissa Wiley, writing at Medium, though in the childlit blog world she is known for Here in the Bonny Glen.

I have to say my mind has been on hover these last few weeks, and I haven't been doing much with it. So going through old journals is a perfect not much thing to do with a hovering mind. Then one day I went on to my Feedly bloglist, thinking that would be not much I could do with my hovering mind, too. And I found Melissa's post that connected with something I've been seeing in this particular journal of mine.

This is one of those it's-supposed-to-happen things.

Morning Pages And Distractions

So Melissa's Medium piece is called Digital Decluttering: A Diary, which is all about getting a grip on digital distractions. Definitely a good read for people trying to manage time.What became particularly interesting for me, though, is that Melissa started doing the morning pages recommended by Julia Cameron in The Artist's Way. "Three pages of longhand stream-of-consciousness writing every morning before any outside input—no screens, no conversation, not even a book," Melissa says.

As it turns out, in my 2002-2003 journal/workbook I write often of doing morning pages. In fact, I was doing them in the journal, using morning pages to free-write on projects I was working on. If recollection serves me, that's  not what you're supposed to do with morning pages. I was also using them to whine about my life. From what I can make out in the journal--there is a lot of chaotic material in there--I was trying to do them for six weeks, because I'd read that six weeks of a behavior is a habit. Hahahahaha. Sure.

In Digital Decluttering, Melissa  says "In these daily writing sessions I found myself lamenting my diminished attention span, my unread bookstack, my wasted time."

I did, too!  "Yesterday was a serious bust..." "Disastrous few days." "Yesterday didn't go too well."

Melissa used morning pages to help her stay organized. "The cardinal rule of Morning Pages is they have to come first, before you do anything else," she wrote...in bold.  "...I began moving to my studio to write my Morning Pages and then I’d roll straight into work on the book." Morning pages made it possible for her to skip checking in on the news and social media first thing instead of working.

I was trying to use them for practical, organizational reasons, also. "In order to justify the morning pages, they really have to increase my work output. My output professionally. I also have to justify them family-wise, by becoming more productive in the house." "Well, working on morning pages is a better thing to do before TKD (taekwondo) then surfing the Net. I guess."

But We Really Didn't Like Morning Pages

Towards the end of her Medium post, Melissa says, "Morning Pages had been effective at helping me shift some habits. But I never liked writing them; after a few weeks they felt routine and dull. I kept up the practice because it had borne good fruit. But I was thrilled to exchange them for something that suits me far better: a daily practice of reading poetry first and then opening my notebook to see what happens."

I'm not sure how far I was into my six-month plan (as I indicated earlier, my journals are pretty chaotic), when I wrote, "I'm really beginning to hate this. I'm not feeling any more creative. Nor productive. Must find ways to get more done. Like what?"

Melissa's use of morning pages led to a work practice she finds satisfying.  I don't recall what morning pages led to for me. Perhaps the next journal will reveal something.

Remember, this was in 2002 or 2003. I started Time Management Tuesday at the beginning of 2012. Yes, it is a sad statement that I was still struggling with productivity ten years later. But I'm one of those people who believes that the struggle is everything, so...Hurray! I was still struggling!

So What Is My Takeaway From This, Gail?

Go ahead and check out Melissa's post, particularly the section toward the end about poetry, and think about whether plunging into some type of writing...any kind of writing..., either first thing in the morning or first thing in your writing time, will help you stay focused on work.

Only Picture Books, All The Time

A few days ago, I learned of the Debbie Bibo Agency, a literary agency in Milan that handles only picture books, many from countries that are not the United States.

What really grabbed me about this agency's site is that I was able to read a number of the French covers. "Why, Gail," you may say. "These are children's picture books. Shouldn't you be able to work out the titles for that reason alone?" Pas moi.

About an hour and a half after writing the paragraphs above, I found a journal (I am fond of all kinds of journals) I'd kept in French in an attempt to remember new French vocabulary. I also found a twenty-five-year-old letter in French from my great-aunt Anna. (Ma Tante Anna, as my Canadian cousins would say.) I'm afraid I'll have to struggle through those, so let me have the French picture books, d'accord?

Quote from moi journal francais: Demain je voudrais fair cuire les gateau sec. "Tomorrow I would like to make cookies." To paraphrase Ethan Allen, I am the same woman still... and in any language.