Travel Stress Tips

This isn't directly a Minnesota trip post, but it kind of ties into it and I thought I'd share.

I was listening to a podcast the other week and one of the tips given on the episode was to take bookend days around your travel. Basically, that means take the day off before you leave and the day off after you come back to reduce your stress level when you travel.

This is something I heartily endorse. When it's been possible, I've always taken an extra day off from work so that I have a day or two home after my trip. This gives me time to unpack, do laundry, and unwind from the hassle of either driving or flying. I learned this years ago and have done it ever since. It's the difference between going back to work exhausted (a lot of my vacations were to writing conferences, and as an introvert, those things left me drained) and going back to work relaxed. Or at least mostly relaxed. :-)

What I hadn't done in the past was take the day off before I traveled. Until this trip to Minnesota and that was an accident. I'd taken the Friday off before we left because my dad had a doctor's appointment. I didn't know then when, exactly, we'd be headed to Minnesota, but when everything fell into place, it turned out we were leaving that Saturday.

OMG! It was fabulous! I wasn't up until 2am packing for the first time in like forever. (I hate packing and tend to put it off until the last minute.) So we went to the doctor, stopped at the grocery store to get drinks and snacks for the trip, and had time to pack, and load the car and do the million other things a person needs to do before a car trip.

From now on, I am definitely (if I have the vacation time) taking off the day before. It was the best thing I'd done to ease travel stress in a long time.

It was after I came home that I heard the podcast and I had to laugh. Why couldn't I have heard that travel tip years ago? I'd been doing half of the bookending for years, but taking the day before had never dawned on me. Lesson learned.

Another Reason Why Word Bugs Me

I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft's Word. The two biggest issues I have with it are 1) it doesn't show me exactly where the format codes are, and because of this, when there's a formatting issue, it's a pain to fix. WordPerfect, BTW, will not only show you exactly where the format codes are, it will allow you to edit them in a split screen so that the formatting can be fixed.

And 2) Word tries to take over and do too much. It makes assumptions that might work for a business person writing a short letter, but doesn't work for a writer. I ran into a new case of this recently and I had no clue this feature even existed! This is despite the fact that I use Word all the time at work and frequently at home because whether I like it or not, it is the de facto standard in the world of publishing.

What is this new helpful feature Microsoft thinks I need? It's the Do not capitalize the next word after this word (with a period, of course). This feature isn't bad. I mean no one wants Word to capitalize the word following an abbreviation, but writers don't use many abbreviations in their stories.

Here's what happened. I end a sentence with tea. But when I type the next sentence, Word chooses no to capitalize "the." This irks me. I have tendonitis and pushing the shift key aggravates it. I count on autocorrect to take care of most capitalization for me. I put in all my characters names and place names to be automatically capitalized and Word takes care of the first word in the sentence. Only it doesn't always do that. I was irritated enough to find out why.

It's because if Word has auto-capitalized a sentence for me in the past and I hit backspace, the program assumes I don't ever want that combination capitalized. I know, big WTF. As a writer, I do a lot of backspacing because I think of better ways to say things.

If you're having this problem, too, go into your autocorrect and click Exceptions. You can check the words that Word has chosen to add to this bypass list and delete as needed. Also, you'll want to uncheck the box at the bottom "automatically add words to list" to turn off Word deciding to add words to the Exceptions list without your permission.

Lessons Learned

Another blog written in Minnesota: I learned a few things while I was getting my house ready to sell. I thought I'd share some of my (ahem) wisdom here.

First thing I learned (big time) was to get rid of stuff instead of hanging onto it. I spent monster time going through my house last year and clearing out things. I can't even tell you how many boxes of clothes and other things I gave to charity. I do know that I donated more than 3,000 books to the library.

With God as my witness, I swear I will never let things accumulate like this again. It felt really good to get rid of old things, even the books. I felt like this burden was lifted from me with each box that went out the door. I wish I'd had more time because if I had, I think I could have gotten rid of a lot more stuff.

Second lesson learned was that Mr. Clean's Magic Erasers are 1) Awesome! and 2) don't last very long, so have lots on hand for big projects. (I receive no consideration of any sort to mention the Magic Erasers and I bought the box myself.)

I don't know what is in those things and I don't care. There wasn't much the Magic Eraser didn't do well. By the way, beyond awesome for taking smudge marks off walls. Just have a damp cloth to wipe the wall afterward because it leaves a slightly white residue behind. I couldn't see it on my really light walls, but on even slightly darker ones, it was noticeable.

The thing is that I'd tried to get those smudges off by washing the walls. That lightened them, but didn't get rid of them. I didn't even have to rub very hard with the magic erasers. They handled just about every tough job I had. Highly recommended.

Third lesson learned: Don't store candles inside a white drawer without wrapping them in something first. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that the dye from the candles would permeate the wood and nothing—not even the Magic Eraser—could touch this problem.

The fourth lesson learned I guess ties back to the first. I'm happiest when I have fewer things in the house. I confess to dumping a boatload of stuff at my parents' house to get my house to look as good as it did and I like the less cluttered feel. When I find a house in Atlanta and start unpacking boxes, I'm going to make an effort to get rid of more stuff.

I know, it's silly to move it to begin with, but like I said, time in Minnesota is so limited that I just don't have any more days to spend going through things to get rid of it before it gets put on a moving truck. I will do what I can, but I want to make a concerted effort to shed more things.

Writing Organization Tips

I'm organizationally challenged. I've blogged about this before, but I have figured out a few things that help keep me on track when I'm writing. I used to rely solely on memory, and while this mostly worked, there always seemed to be this point in the story--usually about 2/3 of the way through--when I wasn't sure how many days had passed since the story started. Heck, sometimes I wasn't even sure what day it was anymore.

This necessitated coming to a dead halt whenever I finished whatever scene I was working on, printing what I had of the manuscript, and reading through. Then I would write in bright red marker through the entire thing what day and time it was at the start of each scene.

You see the catch, right? Whenever I needed to double check timing, it required flipping through the entire 300 pages looking for my writing. Not quick at all.

During Midnight Hour, though, I realized that not only did I need to keep track of what day it was, I needed to keep track of the lunar cycle as well. The story's timeline was heavily dependent on the moon. I knew early on that my usual print-300-pages method wasn't going to work here and I hit on the idea of printing out the calendar for this time frame (complete with lunar cycles) and recording what chapter/scene happened on which day.

This worked awesomely! And I finally had my quick method for checking on story time. I've done it for every book since then. There are a wealth of calendars available online and Mac--I heart Apple--has it all right on the system for me to print as needed so I no longer have to go searching the internet.

The other helpful trick is to find pictures, not just of my characters, but of their cars, their room decor, etc. I also have floor plans of their houses that I'll print out. This way, when I write the character turned left into the bedroom in chapter one, she'll still be turning left in chapter twenty. Some real estate agencies have great websites with all kinds of house stuff. Also, HGTV.com for decorated room pictures.