1. Cloth Diapers

I know a lot of people are wary of cloth diapers – they are stinky and messy and hard to use and oh the laundry!!! Well, let me tell you: these aren’t your gramma’s cloth diapers. Long gone are the days of diaper pins and plastic pants. Cloth diapers today are just as easy to use as disposables, WAY cuter, and way, way cheaper. We got everything we will need to diaper Baby Caveman from birth until potty training for $300.  On average, a baby will use $1600 of disposables in a lifetime (and that is if they are out of diapers by two years, which is less and less the case these days). And really, the additional laundry? Easy Peasy.

(We use Grovia and Sunbaby diapers primarily and love both brands.)

2. Tummy Tub

(not my baby)

Hard molded plastic baby baths seem SO uncomfortable to me. Poor baby sits in a little tiny bit of water, that will inevitably get cold fast, since it is not deep enough nor enclosed enough to hold heat. I am sure there are babies out there that LOVE bathing in those things, but I have seen and heard too many stories of babies who hate bath time. Well, I would hate it too if I had to lie on my back on hard plastic to be bathed.

Baby Caveman love taking baths in his Tummy Tub. He sits upright with his little legs crossed beneath him. The water is deep enough that he is slightly buoyant and he loves splashing around and playing in the tub. Since the water provides a little feeling of weightlessness, he also enjoys pushing up with his feet and trying to stand (even this young). Also, the buoyancy really, really, really helps him feel better when he is super gassy. I love this tub.

3. Swaddle Wraps

New baby muscles are still figuring things out, so they often fire involuntarily. This means that right when Baby Caveman is falling asleep, an arm (or both) will shoot out violently, waking him back up. Again. And again. This makes for a rough time falling asleep at night.

Now I know you don’t need anything fancy to swaddle a baby – a normal old blanket will do. But Baby Caveman is like Houdini. I am a master swaddler, but he still gets his little arms worked out every. single. time. And has since day one. A swaddle sack helps me keep him wrapped tight so he can get to sleep. Though even with the strong velcro reinforcement, he still manages to get an arm out every so often.

4. Moby Wrap/Ring Sling

I am a big, big supporter of carrying babies as much as possible. They love human contact. It always makes me a little sad to see a baby who is fussy in a stroller. Pick the baby up! He will thank you.

That said, it is a little rough to lose use of your hands. That’s why I love my Moby and my ring sling so, so much (I am not linking to the ring sling, because the one I have I got used – that brand is $89 new, and that is ridiculous). Baby Caveman can hang out with me and I can still get stuff accomplished. It’s a win/win situation. I use the Moby when I know I will be wearing him for a longer period of time – it takes longer to get on, but he is more secured in it – and the ring sling when I know I will be popping him in and out of it regularly. The best part? Baby Caveman is able to nurse in either of them (it’s a little easier in the ring sling, but that has more to do with my chest size than the carrier), so I don’t have to be completely incapacitated while he is eating.

5. Bouncy chair/Bumbo chair

(still not my baby)

(this one looks a little like him, though)

Sometimes I can’t hold or wear Baby Caveman. He needs to hang out somewhere though, and these two chairs are great.

The Bumbo chair holds a baby upright, which is great for Baby Caveman since he loves to be able to see everything (he is chillin’ in the Bumbo right now as I write this, actually). A baby needs to be able to hold his head up real well for the Bumbo though. Baby Caveman does a great job – he’s been holding his head up since day one – but he is only 8 weeks old, so he gets tired and starts slumping to the side after a while. That’s when the bouncy chair comes into play. He can lie back in that one and hang out while I get some work done. I love them!

I have noticed a trend when I am writing first drafts – I generally get a few chapters in before I know who my main character is. I learn the narrator through how they relate to other characters and the surroundings. No matter how much pre-planning I do (which, generally, is not a ton), it turns out the same. For the first few chapters I don’t know who the main character really is.

It’s kinda funny, because I have no problem knowing all the secondary characters right off the bat, and I can paint them vividly, but the narrator is never the same. Never, never is my main character as vivid at the start as the secondary characters.

Once I know who my narrator really is, then I can go back in edits and insert that personality in the earlier chapters. But now I am writing something live and online, and while it is still a first draft, it would be nice for me to discover that character a littler faster so my wonderful readers aren’t left hanging and wondering who is telling this story to them for too long.

So, dear friends, I ask you: how do you discover your characters? I want to know how others go about learning who their narrator is, so take it away in the comments and let me know!

So, this friend decided she was going to do just that. She saved up her money, and she moved to DC. She didn’t have a job to go to, but she had some money saved to get her through until she could find one. Unfortunately, it’s a tough market out there, and more and more time passed without her finding work. In the end, she ran out of money, and moved back home where she could find work.

Around the time she realized things were not working out for her in DC – that her dream was not going as planned – she posted something along these lines on her Facebook page:

I really thought hard about her question. Because we always want to encourage people (especially our children, I imagine) to go for their dreams. But failures happen. What do we do when we reach for our dreams and fail?And how to we encourage others to go for their dreams when we couldn’t achieve our own?

Then it hit me: this friend did not fail. Sure, she took a risk and it didn’t go the way she had hoped. But in taking that risk in the first place, she negated the chance of failure. Because true failure comes in not trying.

So many of us don’t really try – don’t put ourselves out there – because we are afraid we will fail. Yes, there is a very real chance in every endeavor you take that things will not turn out the way you want. That is what makes things worth doing – if they were guaranteed, there would be no real reward. We challenge ourselves and push ourselves and try just a little harder because we want the best possible outcome. We do everything we can to get that outcome. But if we don’t, that doesn’t mean we failed. It means we tried, and it means we can keep trying. We can forever keep going for what we want in life.

Because I am such a fan-girl, I am going to quote a Sarah Dessen book here. This is from the last book of hers that I read (I blew through the whole thing on Christmas day…it was fabulous), Keeping the Moon. The narrator’s mom is a motivational weight loss guru, and she is sometimes over-the-top, but what she has to say here applies to each of us in every endeavor we take on:

I don’t believe in failure, … Because simply by saying you’ve failed, you’ve admitted you attempted. And anyone who attempts is not a failure. Those who truly fail in my eyes are the ones who never try at all. The ones who sit on the couch and whine and moan and wait for the world to change for them.

Don’t let yourself fail because you are afraid to try. Just don’t.

Keep trying. Always, always keep trying. Don’t let that nagging fear that you will fail hinder your attempts. When you feel the fear creeping up on you, stop and ask yourself:

What would you attempt if you knew you COULD NOT FAIL?

"No man is happy without a goal, and no man can be happy without faith in his own ability to reach that goal." ~L Ron Hubbard

We all know that the beginning of a new year is a time when many, many people are setting new goals and re-evaluating old ones. A week ago, I laid out my writing goals on this blog; many of my writer buddies did the same on their own blogs. Since so many goals are being thrown about right now, I figured today would be a good time to lay out a couple ways to help you actually reach your goals.

Both of these methods have been time-tested by Yours Truly, but more than that, they have been proven time and time again by years of research. (I have a friend who used to teach goal-setting seminars regularly. He could probably site actual studies for both of these. Heck, I probably could too if I wanted to take the time to find the studies. I don’t. Just trust me here. )

1. Set achievable and measurable goals.

Technically, this is two separate bits of advice, but since they go hand-in-hand, I am passing them off as one. Hey, it’s my blog and I can do what I want.

1a. Set goals you can achieve.

When you start out your goal planning, you need to take time to really, honestly evaluate your strengths and weaknesses and take those into account when you set your goals. Don’t set yourself up for failure by giving yourself a goal that you know in the back of your mind you just can’t reach. I am not saying you shouldn’t challenge yourself – you absolutely should, and, really, that is part of the point of goals. But you should also be realistic with yourself.

A couple examples:

*A writer sets a goal at the beginning of the year to write two new manuscripts during the year, as well as editing the draft she has waiting on the hard-drive. That draft took her a full year and a half to write.

Now there is nothing wrong with wanting to write two books in a year, if you are the kind of writer who can write that quickly. Likewise, there is absolutely nothing wrong with taking eighteen months to write a first draft. Not everyone can be a speed-writer, and it is important to write at what speed works for you.

The problem here is that this writer is not the kind of writer who can churn out two manuscripts in a year. She writes slower than that, and that’s just fine. But by trying to give herself a goal that doesn’t mesh with her style and speed, she is setting herself up to fail. And nobody feels good when they fail. A better goal would be to work consistently and constantly on a new manuscript. Or even to try to shorten her first-draft time by writing a full manuscript in the year. But just one. Two is too far away from her abilities.

**Okay, personal example here. Geek Husband and I got a Wii Fit Balance Board for Christmas. I am super excited about it, not just because I like the Wii Fit, but the little Raving Rabbids games that use the board are hilarious and fun.

Anyway, a couple days ago, Husband and I decided to set up and calibrate the Wii Fit. Now, really I shouldn’t be calibrating it right now, being super pregnant and all, but we were having fun, so I went ahead and set my profile up anyway. As I expected, it was all like “whoa, dude! Your BMI is way too high.” It didn’t matter that I said, “Duh…pregnant…” The Wii just doesn’t understand that.

Then the Wii asked me to set goals to improve my health. I totally said I was going to lose at least 15 pounds in the next month. The machine tried to warn me that losing that much that fast isn’t really healthy, but I stuck to it. Wii Fit doesn’t have to know I am cheating.

Okay…there is a point to this. The Wii suggested that my end-target goal weight should be 135. I am only 5’6″, so really, that is a decent weight. Except I know that for me it isn’t. See, even back when I was really fit and on the dance team and exercising all the time and stuff, I weighed 150. That’s just how it was, and it didn’t bother me at all. I was in great shape, and, not to brag or anything, but I think I looked great too.

So, since I have been at optimal health (I mean, I wasn’t competing in Ironman competitions or anything, but I was healthy), I know what optimal health looks like for me. And 135 pounds is NOT optimal for me. It is too low, simple as that. Setting a goal weight of 135 would be setting myself up to fail, fail, fail.

Um, yeah, make sure you set goals you can actually reach.

1b. Make goals measurable.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery said (among a lot of great, great things…seriously, nearly all my favorite quites come from either him or Saint Francis of Assisi), “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”

Having a goal is very different than having a wish or dream. A wish is something that you would love to have or achieve, but which you either can’t control or haven’t set into action a plan to reach it.

A goal, on the other hand, is something you are actively working toward. Something that you should have set up to be able to tell whether you are getting closer or not.

How do we set measurable goals? Make sure when you are goal setting, that you ask yourself questions like How much? and By when? These are questions to which you can provide solid, concrete answers.

I am going to use a quick example that was shared by a woman at church Sunday. She said she had originally set a goal to bring more peace to her home (she has a bunch of teenage boys – it gets quite hectic). So, more peace at home was something she wanted.

But then she realized she didn’t know how to go about reaching that. That’s because what she had set up was a wish or dream. She didn’t have a way of quantifying the peace. So she broke her dream up into manageable goals: to get through dinner every night without losing her patience; to speak kindly and calmly when she was becoming frustrated. These things she can easily measure. Now she has solid goals to work toward. Good for her!

2. Take things one day at a time.

Rarely do we set goals that span only one day. We generally look more long-term than that, which is good. The whole point of goals is improving ourselves with an eye to the future, so we should be looking forward. Even so, we need to remember that, no matter how long-term a goal is, we need to take it day-by-day.

Personal example: Just last week, I declared that one of my goals for this year is to write every day (except Sunday). Then I didn’t write Thursday or Friday. I had reasons, and they were solid enough for me to not write, but still I did not reach my goal those days.

Now, if I am only looking at the long-term here, I could say straight out that I failed at that goal. I mean, I set out to write every day, then in the very first week I skipped two days. I failed. But that mindset will get me absolutely nowhere. So, instead, I picked back up Saturday like I had been writing all along. I did not think back to the two lost days, I just put my fingers on the keyboard and moved forward. And now I am back on track.

The thing about being human is: we are going to slip up and make mistakes. Our best-laid plans sometimes don’t work out. We forget things and we get weak and we let things slide. There will be days when you stray from your diet something fierce, and there will be days when you don’t do that thing you promised you would (or you do that thing you promised you wouldn’t). That is the nature of being human.

When you make a mistake that sets you back from your goal, there are pretty much two ways you can handle it: you can consider yourself a failure and throw yourself into an attitude of destruction or you can acknowledge the mistake and move forward.

Taking things day-by-day sets you up to do the latter. If you mess up one day, start the next fresh and keep going for your goal. Don’t let yourself get into a defeatist attitude because of a slip-up, because they are bound to happen. Take each day as it comes and do your best each and every day. That’s all you can do!

And now this post is officially WAY longer than I intended it to be, so I am off!

1. Budget, budget, budget!

Losing a big chunk of income each month takes some serious adjustment. It might be tough at first to not spend money the way you have become accustomed to. Remember, in order to chase your dreams, you will have to make some sacrifices. It will be nearly impossible to cut down as much as you need to without declaring beforehand what you are trying to do. By spending the time to work out a budget for yourself and your family, you are letting yourself know exactly where money goes so you can figure out how to manage it better.

I suggest writing your budget down. Make sure you make a note of all your monthly expenses – rent, utility bills, car payments, gas expenses, groceries, etc. Also make sure to budget some money in for fun and entertainment. If you leave this completely off, you will not be able to stay within budget. That’s just how it is: people have to have fun occasionally, and while it doesn’t have to be expensive, if you don’t allow yourself any fun money, you will end up splurging and going over budget. I don’t allow much for fun spending (and the paltry amount I allow includes any movies/events we go to as well as eating out), but just having that amount set aside helps me stay within it. We only do things that fit within that budget.

It will take a couple months to tweak your budget to exactly where it works for you. I strongly suggest you find ways to shave some money off your budget (planning a week or two’s worth of dinners at one time will help your grocery bill – promise) so you can put the excess into savings. Having a healthy savings account will really, really help cut the anxiety of not having your monthly income any more.

2. Schedule, schedule, schedule!

As a stay-at-home-writer, you are in charge of your own scheduling. There is no boss breathing over your shoulder to make sure you accomplish all the tasks you need to. Because you have to answer only to yourself, it is easy to get distracted and waste your time playing on the internet, doing projects around the house that are completely unnecessary, and pretty much anything else that will help you procrastinate writing. It is strange how that works: no matter how badly you want to write, if you let your guard down, you will procrastinate said writing. Does it make sense? No, but it absolutely happens.

The best way around this problem is to schedule your days out, so you have a guide to follow. Every night before I go to bed, I pull out a card (actually, a concert ticket – I have a huge surplus from an over-order on an event a couple years ago that I am trying to get through), and a pen. I jot down every non-writing thing I need to accomplish the next day, leaving nothing out: seriously, I schedule time for meals (and meal prep), showering, blog reading, and cleaning. Once I know what I need to accomplish, I set to work doling out time to all my tasks. I try to guess how long I will need for each thing, and make sure I am cutting time close, so I don’t have a lot of dead-time. I will schedule my entire day down to the minute (well, okay, down to 15-minute increments). Maybe it sounds insane to do so, but it helps me stay on track and keeps me from straying off schedule and wasting all kinds of time.

Put all your non-writing tasks together, so you can complete them and then move onto writing without having to have a bunch of writing interruptions throughout the day. I try to schedule everything I have to do first thing in the morning, so once I finish, I am completely free to write for the rest of the day (well, at least until I have to make dinner). Then, when writing time comes around, I turn off the internet access on my computer (yeah, I HIGHLY advise doing this, too), and get to work.

———

Granted, neither of these tips will work if you don’t actually stick with what you plan. Sometimes stuff happens that throws off your budget and/or your schedule, and you have to be ready to accommodate surprises, but for the most part, stick with what you have written down. It will help you save money (and stress) and will keep you on track to get your novel finished.

I know some people automatically bristle when they hear the words budget or schedule. I mean, something that regimented goes against everything a creative soul wants to do. I used to be the same way – I couldn’t possibly imagine chaining myself down so much. But then one day, I did it. It wasn’t easy at first, but now I can’t imagine life without my budget and schedules. Now I actually have FUN planning them out.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

Write.

Yep, that’s it. One word can sum up the very best advice I have ever received about writing.

But, of course, I am not a woman of so few words, so I will expand the best bit of advice I’ve ever been given with the best bit of advice I have to give (aside from passing on the whole *write* bit, of course). Are you ready for me to be all profound-like? Here goes:

Have fun.

It is easy to stress out about writing: will people like this? Is it good enough? Is this going to be the book that will finally land me an agent? A book deal?

But you know what? Stressing is no fun. And one of the biggest joys of being an unagented, unpublished author is the ultimate freedom it gives. When else can we write anything and everything without responsibility? When else can be experiment so freely without having an audience to keep in mind?

So have fun with your writing now, before you have to worry about deadlines and brands and images. Try a little bit of everything that interests you without concern of how it turns out. Because at this point, who are you trying to impress?

Just have fun!

What are your favorite reading and writing links?

I read a lot of blogs. Seriously, my Google Reader is working overtime. Sometimes I think I read too many blogs, but I just can’t bring myself to pull any of them off the reader (I will admit to skimming some of them and only reading the ones that really jump out at me).

Remember last week when we talked about procrastination? Well, I have  learned that reading blogs is a super procrastinatory tool, which is why I am only sharing ONE link with y’all today. Because, come on, I don’t want to be partially responsible for your superb ability to not get anything done.

I thought about not putting any links in this post and just directing you to my sidebar and the YA Highway blog, but I do have one site that just begs to be shared.

YA/MG Author Barry Lyga has a wonderful series of writing advice up on his blog. If you are a writer (or are even contemplating writing a book), these are must reads. His advice is honest and funny and to the point. He covers topics in great detail that many others simply gloss over. I absolutely love reading Barry’s blogs and have learned so much about my own writing by listening to what he has to say. I admit that I have not read any of Barry’s books, but after stumbling across and reading his blog, they have been added to the top of my to-be-read list.

So, I thought I would write one. Yeah, I’m helpful like that. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it. I give you:

Write a Novel in 15 Easy Steps

1. Get out your trusty computer. Sure, you can use pen/pencil and paper if you want. Or you can etch it into stone, if you would rather. For the sake of efficiency here, I am going to say go with a computer.

2. Turn off the interwebs. Seriously. The #1 surefire way to not get a darn word written is to be connected to the internet. On the World Wide Web, distractions abound. Mere mortals are unable to ignore the siren calls of websites. Luckily cutting off access to the internet mutes these calls and allows one to focus.

3. Open your preferred word processor. If you want to be compatible with most of the publishing industry, go with Microsoft Word. If you value your sanity, skip Word and instead find something that saves in Word format, but is infinitely better than Word. I use AbiWord, but there are a lot of good alternatives.

4. Stare at the blinking cursor.

5. Manically write 900 words.

6. Delete 894 words.

7. Use the restroom.

8. Stare at the blinking cursor.

9. Get up and get another glass of sweet tea.

10. Return to the computer and stare at the blinking cursor.

11. Write 504 more words; decide it would be better from another point of view.

12. Erase 510 words.

13. Stare at the blinking cursor.

14. Write one word.

15. And then another.

Lather, rinse, repeat (a lot) and there you have it – a novel!

And now the real fun begins.