365 photo Project - Day 150

Taken: May 30, 2010, approx. 10 p.m.
Location: Healdsburg, Ca

When my husband and I sold our house in Santa Monica and moved up here, we figured it wouldn't be long before we'd be able to buy something new up here. That was almost four years ago and our dream of owning property again seems as unlikely as ever. We're both freelancers. When we work, we do quite well but we sometimes go for long stretches without getting jobs and that sucks. Big time.

The year we moved up here was the Hollywood strike year. Up to that point, I'd had a pretty good run. As some of you know, I've been fortunate to work on some pretty iconic TV shows, including 24 and the Law & Order franchise. I even developed a few shows, though none of them made it on the air. Still, I didn't expect to be having so much trouble finding work after so many years of doing so well.

Lucky for me I have my novels and the shows I did write for, continue to provide residuals. Yet, it's been difficult. Hollywood is one of those industries that opens doors wide and closes them fast. You have to be smart and good an agile, you have to have a thick skin and you can't take any of it personally. There is a long list of Hollywood success stories that came after long stretches of not being able to find work. You can't start a career in this business without understanding you are going to have a dryspell at some point. It happens to almost everybody.

The most important thing to remember in those lean times, is to keep writing and creating and to never lose faith in your own talent. I'm one of those people that believe cream rises always. I believe in hard work and I mostly always believe in myself. I admit, though, it's been tough to keep the faith these last few months and that's why I've been writing so hard and so much lately. I want to reclaim what I had and I want it before it's too late, whenever the hell that is.

I feel close, too. Closer than I've felt in a long time. I know I've never wanted anything for myself so much, that's for damn sure.

365 Photo Project - Day 137

Taken: May 17, 2010, 10 p.m.
Location: Healdsburg, CA

I slept through the night last night. First full night's sleep in more days than I can remember. It felt good to wake up with the lightness of a good rest. Sometimes I forget how important it is.

I used to take naps every day. I read an article how a 20-minute nap around three in the afternoon could do wonders for your energy,  rejuvenate the mind and body and so I decided to try it. I had this job on a weekly paper in a small town outside Washington, D.C., which was about a mile from my house. So I got to eating lunch at my desk most days, then sneaking home for an hour in the mid-afteroon for a 20-minute nap (yeah, I timed it). Afterward, I'd go back to work and feel like a new person. I don't know if it was my youth or the nap or the fact that I exercised like a mad person back in those days, but I remember feeling sharper, quicker, more on my game, especially when I took that quick little power nap.

Plus I loved the feeling of crawling into bed in the middle of the day, letting sleep was over me. Those first few moments when my eyes got heavy and I started to fall into dreamland were addicting they felt so good. Over time my body got so used to the routine, I could fall asleep around 3 p.m. on cue. The tough days were the ones when I couldn't break free to get my 40 winks. I'd have to drag myself through the afternoon like I had lead in my shoes.

I used to write in my head when I slept. Whole sentences, paragraphs, pages would appear to me in my dreams. Not all of it was usable but it was a big part of my writing process. It's how I wrote the opening page of my first novel.  I wonder sometimes if getting older makes us slower not because we're older age-wise, but because all the small stuff suddenly seems so important. We have bills to pay, responsibilities. people who rely on us. In some ways I feel I've let this steal my creativity, like boxing it up on the top shelf or storing it in the attic.

Could it all be because I don't nap anymore?

Writers have to work almost every day. Believe me, it's not easy. And by not easy, I'm not comparing it to digging ditches. It's just hard to maintain faith in yourself. This is something I talk a lot about here. It's possible, I'm having a crisis of creative confidence.  Even saying this, I know I'm making progress. I'm putting myself out there and I'm writing. Every day. But it's a bitch when you know in your heart you're making progress and yet you've nothing to show for it.

Then I think perhaps I'm thinking about it all wrong. I should listen more to my writing hero, James Lee Burke. You can't be worrying about all that extraneous shit. Focus on the work. Take it one day at a time and believe in your vision and see it through and you'll know when it's done. When it works.

Jim Burke is a smart man. I've got his words on my wall over my writing desk and in a real sense, I feel I'm starting to recapture that post-nap euphoria of my youth.

Trust the work, keep my head down and plow ahead.

Watch out world, I'm coming.

365 Photo Project - Day 77

Taken: March 18, 2010, 10:30 p.m.
Location: Healdsburg, Ca

Was just too tired to write anything last night. It was a full and rather pleasant day but a long one and I was exhausted by the time it came to thinking up something clever.

I did spend my evening a 13-year-old, the son of a good friend, who I've come to adore in the mere two years or so we've known each other. He is a sweet and kind kid, smart and funny. Like many boys his age, is also a sports fanatic, most notably for baseball (I only sometimes hold his love of the Yankees against him. After all, he got it from his Mom.) And, like most boys his age, he is obsessed with trades and free agency and all ways of player movement. I was about to say "in my day" which is going to make me sound like my Dad but, um, back when I was his age, trades were the exception not the rule. We didn't have a 24-hour-news-cycle-countdown-to-the-last-nano-second-of-the-trade-deadline with everybody from ESPN to the sports blog-o-sphere speculating on who is going, who is going where and for who in return.

Not that it has in any way dampened my young friend's love for the game. I'd rather hear his speculation any day. For one,  he never takes money or salaries into account and his proposals are far more creative that anything that actually does happen. Makes me wonder what professional baseball would be like if 13-year-olds got to run every franchise for one day. That would be something to see.

But see, we have the love in common. I've been a sportswriter, have lived through scandal after scandal, have seen my share of the parade of knuckleheads, both in uniform and out, have witnessed the worse of sports, on occasion from a front-row seat. But I'll never lose the love. I'm just not built that way.

I'm one of those people who, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, still believes in the purity of the game, remains loyal to my favorite franchises  (Mets and NY Giants) even as they have not always showed the same loyalty in return. I know all that bad stuff exists but when the games start, I just don't allow myself to go down the dark alleyway of cynicism. I will not enter the House of What's Wrong With Sports Today. I prefer to believe that the game matters to most guys who play it and they do their best, they try hard and they try hard to win.

Sports is really the last refuge of the true gladiator, those aforementioned knuckleheads aside. There's almost always a winner and a loser and the outcome is as concrete as you can get -- even if some matches dominate "what if" discussions for generations (that's part of the fun too). The scoreboard tells the tale and every game is like its own mini story of drama and intrigue, life and death. I often wonder, actually, what life would be like if it worked more like sports. Do your job well and get paid, be judged on merit and ability, not by the what you look like or where you're from or who gave birth to you or who you happen to love. Now, that would be something.

The image today is another one of my experiments. It's an ostrich egg, set against a white background and lit from above. I used the K100D with internal flash and turned the image to B&W in Photoshop.