That's supposed to be my foot. It's big, and apparently I wear bobby socks.

I’m at the end of my caffeine step-down. It’s just me and giant bottles of barely caffeinated Arizona Green Tea. Very delicious, but after two days I’m sleeping in the afternoons again.

Let’s just say this isn’t good for anyone, much less myself.

What does one do when they’re at the end of a goal? Picture weight loss. You’ve gone to the gym, you’ve adjusted your diet, you lost a significant amount of weight.

Then, the plateau hits. Steady weight, maybe even a little gain. Frustration, irritation, and the urge to give up all swirl around like a dust devil sending the corn flying on a late summer Iowan day.

Seriously, how do you deal with this?

Well, the weight thing is easy – change your routine. Eat differently, maybe change your splurge day, or add a meal that on the way down the scale would have been forbidden. Make your body guess a bit.

But caffeine? I don’t see the correlation yet. I can’t add caffeine back in…can I? The point is to get rid of it, but the naps have also got to go. I can’t afford to be sleeping during the only two hours I have with my family. I need to be awake and active then, making supper, helping with dishes (the worst), getting the kids through the shower.

I need a different afternoon routine, that’s for sure. Something to think of or do immediately upon arriving home so I don’t immediately think of drifting off. Something that, additionally, doesn’t cost any money.

Does anyone have any ideas?

If you can’t create, work.

So what am I doing? Yep, you guessed it.

Working!

Possibly some discussion should happen as to why I am not creating. It’s not a lack of creativity, per se. I did manage to write this morning and this afternoon – a massive 1,227 words in total. I hate to blame it on television again, so this time I’ll blame it on the iPad.

I had a really great idea on Sunday, actually. I was going to ground myself from my iPad. Take a week or the entire month of February (which has failed already because of course I managed to forget on the 1st that I was grounded) and not use my toy except for work-related items. The rest of my time is either writing or obviously disregarding a potential income stream, which of course for anyone right now is a bad idea.

Create without distraction, or work without distraction. Either one gets a writer closer to their goals.

For me, television is an incredible creativity vacuum. Not that the things on television aren’t creative, but they suck the creativity right out of me. I think this happens with a lot of people, even those who write with the TV on. I’m one of those people sometimes, but usually just during November when I’m unnaturally productive and my inner editor is on leave.

And yet today, unmotivated me turned to TV and came away refreshed. The seed of an idea wasn’t exactly there, but I was more receptive towards writing after watching an episode of the newest show I’m working through in my Netflix queue.

I’m really not sure how to work this out. Television as inspiration and as a vacuum?

It’s going to take me a minute to get used to this.

But it gives me the opportunity to ask – how are you best creative, whether it’s writing, crafting, computing, whatever? Are you a silence only person, or do you prefer to have music, television, or well-loved movies in the background? Share below!

Author’s Note: This unedited spew is the result of a 750words.com session – I’d like your opinions, good and bad, but understand if it’s just too much to read. I’ve got a second part to this, and it may actually be shaping up into a real story. Let me know if you would be interested in reading more!

She was sipping a tall drink the color of cotton candy and just about as sweet in a bar filled with romance and love. She sat alone, and at the bar, her small, rhinestone encrusted clutch sitting just above her drink like the stem of an exclamation point.

“I need another one of these,” she told the bartender, an attractive woman several years younger than herself.

“Sweetie, you barely started that one.”

She shook her head and fumbled with the clasp on her clutch. She pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and held it out between two fingers. “Another.”

The bartender shrugged to herself, and went to mixing another Very Pink Drink.

Abigail sighed with a huge intake of breath, inhaling all the wonderful scents. The place was probably designed to appeal to all the senses that two people in love would get turned on by. So they’d feel more romantic, buy more expensive wine to show off.

She could pick out vanilla and steak, actually. And a heck of a lot of butter.

And an overwhelming amount of cologne and perfume.

Abigail should be here with her own date. Bob was going to arrive just as soon as a cab could get him here from the airport. The date had been set for months, only hours after his flight had landed in Japan. He said he was lonely, and now that he was so far apart, he realized how much he loved her.

His heart shattered without her. He was in constant pain. He had called the restaurant just before he’d called her, the most romantic in town, the one you got a reservation at if you were going to propose, or celebrating your wedding anniversary.

He wanted to meet her there after his flight returned. The moment his flight returned. He would surprise her with something.

Abigail ignored her mother’s voice in her head, the one that told her not to slurp through her straw, and finished off her beverage as another icy glass slid across to replace it.

“Thank you.”

“Hon, can I ask you a question?”

Abigail looked at the young woman. She was so young. Barely in her twenties, where Abigail was creeping through her thirties.

She felt old.

“Sure. But don’t call me ‘hon’.”

The waitress ignored her second statement. “What are you doing here? You’ve been drinking for hours. You’re obviously not waiting for anyone.”

Abigail sighed again. She was past feeling pain, now. That question just an hour ago would have caused the lump in her stomach to crawl back up her throat, choking her as her tears would have blinded her.

She didn’t feel drunk, but she was. She just felt nothing. So answering the question was not difficult in the least.

“I am celebrating my new-found freedom,” she replied, lifting her glass and saluting someone who was not there. She gripped her straw with her newly manicured and styled fingernails.
Done for Bob.

“You don’t look like you’re celebrating.”

“And you don’t look like you’re old enough to drive,” Abigail returned in a failed attempt to insult the girl who would probably replace her in Bob’s arms.

He would love her. She was taller than average – model height. Slender, athletic even. And she had a job.

“Seriously, sweetie. What’s wrong?”

The alcohol not only loosened her tongue, it broke all the locks. So she told her. How she had gone to the doctor for something stupid, a bit of bleeding that was just a bit longer than her regular period. She shouldn’t even have gone. But she did, and the doctor put her through a million tests, and then he told her he was going to have to take out her baby maker.

“Wait, ‘baby maker’?”

“A hysterectomy,” Abigail clarified. She shouldn’t have to use five syllable words in her condition. “Get me another.”

The bartender didn’t move. “So? Your man didn’t stick around?”

Abigail snorted. “Oh, he was in Japan, remember? Doing important work for his important job. No, he stuck around. Made reassuring phone calls and told me everything was going to be all right. Of course he had always dreamed of having his own children, but he could always adopt.”

“You mean you could,” the bartender said when Abigail stopped. “You could adopt a child together.”

Abigail shook her head. “No, he never said that. He said ‘he’ could always adopt. He never said anything, ever, about doing it with me.”

“What an asshole.”

Abigail smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. In fact, it didn’t even reach her lips. It was a wry, dead smile in her head that didn’t express joy or happiness or love, or anything at all.

“He changed his status on Facebook when he got back into town today.”

“Wait, what?”

Abigail played with the straw and the last bit of drink left in her glass. “He was going to come meet me here right after his flight landed. But instead he changed his status on Facebook to ‘Single’ and posted something about getting his things out of our apartment, but he hoped I enjoyed the reservation. He heard the food was ‘awesome’.”

“And he was too much of a coward to tell you this to your face.”

Abigail nodded. “Way too much.”

“It’s a good thing you can get back at him, just a little.”

Abigail stared at the bartender. She could barely focus her eyes to read the woman’s name tag – “Elise”, it said.

“Wait, what?”

“Revenge. Some say it’s best served cold. You know,” Elise grabbed Abigail’s glass and started mixing something non-alcoholic, “I’ve always wondered if that saying means that you should only get revenge when you can be cold and emotionless about the entire thing, or whether you’re just supposed to wait until everyone’s forgotten about revenge and do it then.”

“I never thought about it.”

“Well, I have. Personally, I think it probably means that you’re supposed to wait a long time, then not get pissed, just get satisfaction. But I rather think that in this case, we should grab our chance while we’ve got it.”

Abigail shook her head. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Elise clucked her tongue. “Of course you don’t.” She set a glass of water with lemon down for her customer. “You’ve been drinking poison all night. What you fail to realize in your misery is that our restaurant requires anyone reserving a table to give a credit card number. If you fail to appear for your reservation, you’ll be charged whatever – a hundred dollars or something – as a penalty. We are very much in demand, you see,” she said with a wink.

“I still don’t get it.”

“I’m not done. So since you’re here, since Bob is such an asshole that he waited until you would most likely be away from your apartment – like a coward – to break up with you and remove himself from your life, you should still take advantage of his earlier generosity in getting you an opportunity to try the best food you’ve ever had.”

Abigail blinked.

Elise sighed. “His card is on file. You can still eat dinner, and he’ll pay for it. If he’s dumped you like this, he’s probably too much of a pussy to challenge the charge on his credit card if you stay and eat.”

Using small words helped, and the fog that had settled on Abigail’s brain cleared momentarily.

“And I could eat the most expensive thing on the menu,” she replied with a smile that actually showed on her face.

“And you could order one of everything, if you wanted, and just sample it all.”

“Elise,” Abigail said with another salute, this time raising her glass to the girl across the bar, provider of sinister and wonderful ideas, “you’ve got a date.”

So I was getting someone’s computer, iPad and iPhone all hooked up together. The first step, remove all evidence of duplicates, which means plugging in the tech to the PC, going to iTunes, and making sure that iCloud is doing all the synching, and iTunes isn’t doing any.

Would you believe that right there is where things went wrong?

I told iTunes not to sync Outlook stuff anymore. The PC updated the iPad. After that I checked the iPad calendar. Things hadn’t moved on up yet, so I checked Outlook.

All. Gone.

Contacts, Calendar, all went boom.

Honestly, I do not know what happened. I don’t think this happened to me when I synced everything, but then I don’t use my calendar as much as this particular person does. And if it had gone boom, my attitude is more “oh well, I’ll rebuild it” rather than “oh sh–, I’m f—ed”. But the person I was trying to help, well, I think they pretty much live off of their Outlook Calendar.

Oh, oh dear.

I’m working on something that hopefully will fix the issue, but if not, and you don’t see me posting for several days…

It would be safe to assume the worst.

>.<

Update: I managed to restore the lost items – a five hour process that had the reward of me not getting fired. YAY!

Throw things

Think about how miserable you are and how you’ll never amount to anything, because if you can’t write a blog post, how in the hell are you going to write anything worth selling?

Cry

Flail

Bork something (I love that word – apparently it’s some variation of break, screw up, or cause to crash)

Pray for inspiration

Buy lottery tickets in hopes of winning The Big One and be able to quit your day job and devote every hour of every day to writing in hopes to bash the (writer’s) block

Write a list of things you could do instead of sitting there wondering what to do, as an object in motion tends to stay in motion (which is probably why I’m doing a lousy job of coming up with something to write today – I wrote nothing yesterday)

Write nonsense until something good comes along

Do some brain dumping at 750Words.com

Go read someone else’s blog and use it as a writing prompt

Write about something in the news

Decide that 187 words is pretty good for not knowing what to write, and call it quits

What I am dwelling on is the novel idea that my plan (which is working, by the way) to cut out caffeine will most likely also be the best plan to get my daily wake-up time to be 5 am instead of 6:30 am.

It’s stepping down, slowly but surely, to change the habit. While others may work best going cold turkey (and I must admit I like that idea much better myself), slowly stepping back from the problem is actually working much better for me.

As evidence to that fact, I am now in week two of my diet soda phase in my cut out caffeine resolution/goal/thing. I stepped down gradually from serious energy drinks to highly caffeinated soda, to where I am now, and the next steps will be canned green tea and then flavored water and water.

I don’t feel deprived. I’m not even frustrated that I can’t have the energy drinks I used to down (sometimes) twice daily. I’m not saying it’s going to b easy once I get to the non-caffeinated days, but it will certainly be easier to deal with after already given up so many other forms.

So why not make this process work with other things?

Like waking up earlier so I have dedicated time for writing. Currently I wake up after my husband is done in the shower, at 6:30. At this point he has to take off immediately, and while I have more time than I used to have to get ready for work, I don’t have a ton of time. Certainly not quiet time without the kids to actually try to be creative.

I’ve tried to make the direct switch to 5:00 before, but that alarm goes off and I just hit that snooze, and that’s the end of it. But 15 minutes…I could force myself to get out of bed, or at least be awake, 15 minutes earlier for a week or so. Definitely. And then waking up when DH needs to get in the shower, maybe for another week.

And so on and so forth.

I will definitely post notes on my progress, in case anyone is either interested or wants inspiration to tackle this themselves.

Good luck to us both!

I’m not sure why, but I decided to add a category on my site for short bits of fiction. You know I like to write, right? I guess my reasoning says that sometimes I just don’t know what to write, but I want to be writing regularly. Why not give myself an out, so to speak?

When I don’t know what to write, I’ll just make it up!

I bet everyone wishes they thought of this first. Or maybe they have more to talk about and don’t have to struggle for interesting content all the time.

Regarding the picture – when I was in grade school, they used this bird with glasses and boots to teach us the difference between fiction and non-fiction, and it was one of many tricks I used to keep things straight and gain passing grades throughout the years. Yes, I’m passing them all on to my kids as they resurface.

Yay!

Right?

At any rate, I’m here and since I’m a little bit cranky about this new turn of events, I decided to be a little less formal with things. You might notice. You might not.

As I choose my new window dressings, I had a hard time finding an adequate layout. Not that I had a hard time picking my favorite from among hundreds – I had a hard time finding one at all! I’m just so hard to please when it comes to my layouts.

It made me think about how this blog, while it is an attempt to draw in readers and eventually become a platform to publicize whatever books I may decide to publish, it’s really all about me. It’s about how I like it to look, it’s about how I want it to function…I’m not thinking about visitors or SEO or how to integrate Twitter so I can get more followers.

I’m thinking, how can I get a big footer in my layout? I like big footers.

That is not at all to say that I don’t care about you, dear reader. I do. I really do. I want more people to read, so I want to create good, regular content (the winning combination for any blog, by the way – just in case you’re curious) that will keep people coming back for more.

I’m just not worried that you won’t like how it looks.

I’m off to make more adjustments tonight. Things will start to really take shape over the next few days, and as long as my hosting company keeps things running smoothly and doesn’t slow my site down to the consistency of molasses, I think we’re all good.

I will see you here in two days! (See? Schedule, good!)