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Z.A. Maxfield

Happily. Ever. After.

Happy New Year!

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Ready for a new beginning?

It’s January 7th already!

It seems like I haven’t been out on the interwebs forever. Part of that is because my family has been home for two weeks, and part is because we not only have holidays here, we have three birthdays right after Christmas. Busy, busy!

But now that everyone’s back to work, I have breathing room to think about what’s going on in my life.

I hate making New Year’s resolutions. I never keep them. I don’t expect that after the first of a new year I’ll suddenly become a gym-goer, or a radically clean homemaker. It’s way too much pressure.

What I can do is continue making the small changes I started a few years ago. Cook more healthy food. Tidy things on a schedule, move a little more each day than I really want to. Look forward, not back.

I’m not gonna lie–I lost ground at the end of the year with regard to some of my goals. I held on to healthy eating by my toenails, and my 80-20 rule (eighty% of what I eat is supposed to be nutritious) got flipped around to maybe 20% nutritious and 80% Lord Have Mercy. And that’s on a good day. I really do need to get more exercise. I have yet to put away the holiday decorations. But I don’t see any of that as a drastic change. It’s all more of a course correction.

I don’t see my life in terms of what I’m not doing right. I’m all about enjoying the people and things I love. My life is about loving a journey that isn’t always going to go in a straight line.

Every day, I learn new things. Thanks to a Christmas gift from my family, I’ve become a proficient sous vide chef, so we’ve been enjoying a LOT of perfectly cooked fish. I have an Insta-pot, so we can make healthy meals in a flash. I have a local gym membership, and I might decide to actually go. Or I might lie in bed for a whole day reading, and I’ll feel good about that too.

What I believe is every day is a wonderful opportunity for a fresh start. Every day can be the beginning of a brand new journey. All it takes is one step.

Where do you want to go today?

 

 

 

Downsizing

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As fall approaches in what could arguably be called A Most Difficult Year, I am downsizing to a new house. This is bittersweet for me because I love my old house so much. It’s the house where my kids grew up, the house that has their little handprints in the cement. There’s no real reason for me to feel so sentimental about a place, though, because I’ve lived in many houses, and if you’re lucky enough to be able to take the people you love with you, it’s all good.

My oldest son and daughter have graduated from college. Alexander lives in Escondido now–he’s healthy, happy, in a stable, long-term relationship, and has a great job. My daughter has a great job, but she prefers to live at home because she’s not stupid and rentals are ASTRONOMICAL here.

The twins are still in school so they too, still live at home. Maxfield wants to be an actuary, and Zachary is still undecided what he wants to do, but goes to school and works very hard. The important things will travel with us. Memories. Love. Laughter. Pictures. Films and DVDs of them on Christmas mornings and in talent shows.

No, it’s more that there’s another chapter of my life looming, and I’m not entirely sanguine about it–getting OLD. I feel old. Sometimes, I find myself acting old. I haven’t yet uttered the words, “‘Get off my lawn,” but I’ve been close once or twice.

To that end, I have decided to be like one of those countries in rampant inflation that simply lop off a zero from their money system. I plan to add a decade to my imaginary life span. I am downsizing in every way possible. Eating healthy. Exercising regularly. I plan to live simply, and find a way to bring health and happiness to others too, because that’s what I’ll be missing most from that middle part of my life–the chance to be the nurturer.

To be clear, my kids are in no position yet to have children, so my grandmother days are still ahead. I guess I’ll just have to look elsewhere to do good.

In the meantime:

Hawai’i Five Uh-oh will be out in November 13, 2018

Built To Love will be out in December 18, 2018

House on Fire should be ready by January 15, 2019

And stay tuned for Three Vlog Night, the third installation in the loosely related but in now way serial Plummet Series, and Hellion in the Making, part of the My Cowboy series, coming soon!

 

 

Generosity of Spirit – My List

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Generosity of Spirit has been the rule, not the exception in the author community as I’ve experienced it. I have been privileged to see my name on lists of authors who have helped with other authors’ careers, and I want to make my own list, here.

At first, I was tempted to put our willingness to help one another down to the obvious–writers cannot stop talking about writing or they’d have to do it.

But that’s not all this is about, is it? Because I have a theory that every real writer starts out as a reader. And for them, books aren’t simply commodities that can be packaged and marketed like the latest celebrity perfume, using a hint of this. A touch of that. People like this color this year so why not use that on the box?

Every reader/writer wants books to be good.

Most important, every real writer wants to do the impossible: Write the book no one has ever written before, so brilliantly that it breaks all sales records, without being a commercial success, because ew. Amiright?

When writers talk ideas are born.

There’s no reason your ghost written-in-a-week novel, dressed up with a fabulous cover, stuffed with fifty backlist titles, can’t be good. But the statistical chances of it being as good as a novel by a proven author are unlikely.

Marketing those books, buying ads, generating sales is hard work. So is day trading, or running a Ponzi scheme. So is grinding Texas hold ’em in Vegas, don’t ever let anyone tell you the life of a professional gambler is easy. But buying a book someone wrote and putting your name (or a fake name that pays into your PayPal account) on it, has to be the ultimate delusion.

Books enlighten us, inform us, and direct our future actions. They create empathy for our fellow travelers on this planet, even if those people are not like us. They are own-voice stories, and fiction, and fantasy. They speak of faith, and ethics–of the possible dangers of rigorously applied morality or cutting edge science, because writers can make hard concepts easy to understand. They invite discourse. They challenge perception.

Like cameras, they kill fascists.

And in my experience, writers have preferred lifting their fellows quietly, relentlessly, and lovingly rather than attempt to gouge or steal or bully or set attack dogs on their colleagues.

Twenty people without whom I would not have a career*, are:

***I knew I’d forget important people. Edited to add the amazing Heidi C. and Marie S. who came into my life with Coffee and Porn (figuratively speaking.)

  1. Terry Black
  2. K.A. Mitchell
  3. Josh Lanyon
  4. LB Gregg
  5. James Buchanan
  6. Louisa Edwards
  7. Samantha Kane
  8. Deidre Knight
  9. Treva Harte
  10. Laura Baumbach
  11. Kris Jacen
  12. Belinda McBride
  13. Lynn Lorenz
  14. Heidi Cullinan
  15. Marie Sexton
  16. Damon Suede
  17. Caitlyn Willows
  18. Christopher Koehler
  19. Amy Lane
  20. Rhys Ford
  21. Louella Nelson
  22. Debra Holland

*Many more are not listed here as I gave myself a not so hard limit of ten… headdesk.

The Epic Saga Continues…

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I bought a vacuum cleaner as my prize for finishing my super secret project. It’s a canister vac with a HEPA filter. Part of the reason for this is–you may remember my decluttering? First we did the garage, then the office, then the kitchen?

We are not done. The first rule of declutter club is once you’ve figured out where something goes, you don’t rest until it’s there. But we were foolish, and old, and one can no longer work a twenty hour day. And now we have to regroup, rediscover what was in boxes we thought we marked, and go from there.

Unfortunately our 8-hour cleaning days (the only time we can afford to spend doing this) aren’t enough to finish a project. So there are things…making me crazy. On the other hand, we’ve unearthed closet floors we haven’t seen in ages. We’re getting a good look at what was underneath all that clutter and it’s not pretty. Why do things stick to the bottom of the game shelves? How long has that been leaking? Which long dead dog do you suppose left that half chewed rawhide bit…

It’s not like I was hoarding, or buried alive but I was living in a little bit of foolishness. That, “I’ll get around to that when I have time mindset” was taking over. Plus, nobody pays me to dust, just saying. With three kids in college last year? I was working!

My old upright vacuum, which seemed to worked for carpets, but not at all well on our wood floors, isn’t doing its job. It weighs a ton, plus, every time I vacuum I get a sinus infection.

I wanted a really expensive German deal. I got a Kenmore. I hope that people in America made it but I doubt they did. LET THAT NOT BE THE last sacrifice I make to common sense. Nobody needs an $1100.o0 vacuum cleaner. Even if it’s on sale.

So, today we will pull that out of the box. I have my eye on using it on the walls and floors and under all the furniture in our bedroom. Most people feel like doing their big cleaning in the spring, but I guess I’m kind of contrary. I want my house clean and warm and welcoming, with the fireplace going and a clean kitchen full of the vivid scents of stew and baking bread in the winter.

 

 

On the Plannerfront…

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I coulda been a contender!

I signed up to do the Best Self Planner Graduate Challenge where you show your planner every day on their Facebook group page, and right away, I ran into trouble.

You see… I made a mistake in my planner. In ink. And it took me several days to figure out what to do about it–copy blank pages, carefully trim them to the exact page size with scissors, glue them in, and start over.

But I was on the road, so that took a while… Belinda picked me up a pair of  scissors and a big fat glue stick, but then I got worried about where to put the glue. And page pucker, and whether that was the best glue for the job  and exactly how to apply it–all over like wall paper glue? Or in spots?

I never believed that this was too much trouble to go through because I knew that without starting over, I’d be unable to use my book. This was not a preference but a priority… This began on the 29 of July. It is now the 18th of August. I guess I wanted to say something about this because there are times when all of us have obstacles–whether of our own making or outside our sphere of influence.

There are times when it appears almost laughably easy to fix a problem. To an outsider, there might have been a hundred solutions, buy another journal being the most drastic, I guess–and because I considered that, and because I got really worried about how long the journal would take to arrive, I did not do that.

Let’s count. July 29th – August 18. I was paralyzed by perfectionism for… 21 days?

Can I just say I have an above average IQ and I’m educated and I have the advantage of being aware of my problem and having several hundred solutions at my fingertips, and I still couldn’t solve it for 21 days.

While my productivity during that period was high, it was high in spite of the fact that I’m not using my planner and not because of it. And that was 21 days wasted in recrimmination too–why are you like this? Just buy another goddamned planner, or tear out the pages and move on, or copy the pages and paste them in, or get your hands up, middle fingers out and wave them in the air…

Eventually, the argument always devolves – you’re losing ground in a terrifying world and you won’t survive…

I felt that if I didn’t meet the goals I would have written down, I’d be letting the planner down, and it’s such an awesome little tool. The responsibility to prove that my little planner is amazing is crushing me.

O.o

I’m pretty sure this is not unique to me. Talk to me about it.

 

De-cluttering week two.

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Week Two –

The kitchen. The good news? I have the ladies coming again, Deb and Sharon, and they will force me to keep only one of everything, I hope. I have a bit of a sickness for kitchen things and clothing. And the ladies are about to find out exactly how deep that runs and exactly how brilliant I am about storing things. There isn’t a square inch of space in my kitchen that is unused. So that means the amount of things I’m able to store (before things start piling up on counters) is immense.

That’s one of those good news/bad news stories, though. It allows me to forget what I own, or lose it, which forces me to buy a second one if I can’t find it. I know this is a first world problem. That’s why I’m determined to set a lot of things free today. I’m determined to donate anything useful and either recycle or upcycle or responsibly discard anything that isn’t.

It’s a brave new world, chez ZAM. Possibly, the start of a brave new way of looking at life.

If you’re playing the home game, go declutter something and tell me about it in the comments! It’s never easy to admit that things have gotten out of hand is it? In my case, they’ve gotten out of hand sporadically, and will probably get out of hand again.

The only way out is through!

Be well!

ZAM

surprise

What she said…

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