A Short Whine

One of the things they don't warn you about when you decide to quit your job and go freelance is that all people hear when you tell them that is, "I quit my job." In their imagination, you are retired and you now spend your days watching soap operas and surfing the internet.

They also think that you have no schedule or time constraints. While that is true to a certain extent in my case, what I do have to do is block out a certain amount of time every single day, including weekends, for either writing or research, or both. If it's research, I often have dozens of facts I'm tracking down, clues to follow up, and documentation to write. If I stop to run an errand or answer a social call, I can lose the trail. It sometimes takes as much time to pick it back up again as it did to find it in the first place. If it's writing, I may be in the process of typing out the best work I've ever done. (Hey, it could happen!) But a quick trip to the store can erase every word that was bubbling out of my brain as fast as I could type.

What's probably worse is that I have to battle my own, very short, attention span. I can start the day at the keyboard, firmly resolved to do whatever work is at hand, when suddenly I remember I need to shop for a good price on a flight, like I did this morning. I found a good price, but I had to sacrifice an hour of writing time to do it. For a person who frequently gets distracted just putting on her socks, this is a challenge. I'm working on staying on task, but it's entirely self-driven. When I was working for the man, the job at hand usually drove me in an orderly way. Now I'm working for my...ooh, shiny!

I know this post probably sounds like a big, whiny complaint. It definitely falls into the category of first-world problems of a very lucky sort. I am vastly, overwhelmingly grateful for this opportunity to carve out the life I've always wanted to live. I'm also very blessed to have wonderful people in my life to talk to and care for. Mostly, I'm writing this to myself as a reminder that I'm not a lady of leisure. If anything, I'm much busier now than I ever was when I had a regular job to use as an excuse not to do things.

There's a certain learning curve when it comes to acquiring the self-discipline to be regularly productive on one's own, and I'm still smack in the middle of it. I have to learn how to say, "No, not now, I'm writing," and schedule interruptions around that time, just as I would if I had a regular job. I also have to tell myself that. As I've been writing this, I've thought of at least ten other things I could do right this minute instead of what I'm doing. It's often all I can do to keep my butt firmly planted in this chair and my browser firmly planted in this window.

That whine dispensed with, my glamorous life has me back home from a very productive research trip for www.findinghenry.com. There really is some glamor in my life, since I got to go to Florida last week. Now I just need to decide if I'm going to dive straight into organizing the research and getting another post written, or finding the motorcycle jack and building a yellow submarine (yes, really!). Decisions, decisions...ooh, shiny!

Meeting Henry

I often joke about my "glamorous" life as a freelancer, hence the subtitle to this blog. But, today, my life is just a little bit glamorous, or it will be tomorrow. Tomorrow we go off on vacation, because nothing says "starting a new job" like immediately going on vacation.

Likewise, nothing says "starting a new blog" like starting a different new blog, but that's exactly what I'm going to do. This morning, while diddling around on the internet, interspersed with various glamorous pre-trip preparations, I was struck by a bolt of inspiration. This doesn't happen to me very often, so when it does, I need to jump on it. Most of my writing is a product of forced labor, and I'm not much of a task-mistress.

I love inspiration, because the minute it strikes, I can see all the preparation my mind went through leading up to the moment when inspiration dawned on me. Some people call this an "aha moment" because all the signs were there, but the light doesn't come on right away. When it does, for me, it can be blinding.

I've been a history buff for most of my adult life, dating back to when I saw the movie "1776" when I was a senior in high school. This dates me, I know, but my graduation was the USA's bicentennial, and everything was red, white, and blue, even our graduation gowns. I didn't get to walk to "Pomp and Circumstance" because the composer, Sir Edward Elgar, was British. But I digress.

My favorite era of history has always been the American Revolution, closely followed by the antebellum period, which for those not that into history, is the pre-Civil War era. One of the eras I didn't pay much attention to was World War I. Someone my age could hardly ignore World War II history, since there was so much aftermath that still goes on, even today. After all, the internet rule is that once you mention Hitler during an internet argument,  you automatically lose.

Just recently, however, my husband John and I began watching the PBS series, "Downton Abbey". For those not familiar, "Downton Abbey" is set in pre-WWI England and proceeds to the war in the second season. We were instantly hooked and I highly recommend it to anyone. It's a fascinating look into the lives of the nobility and serving class of the era.

I've always known that my great-grandfather, Henry Etherington MacLennan served as an Army doctor in the Great War. I also vaguely knew he lost an arm in the war and that he served in France. I never made the connection between what he went through and the book, "All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque, which I read a long time ago. But shortly before she died, one of his daughters, my great-aunt Faith, sent me a box that contained a fairly large amount of his memorabilia and papers. At the time, I glanced through them, thought they were very cool, and then put them away in a box for later perusal.

That later perusal ended up being yesterday, several years after I received them. I was attempting to organize my office, a never-ending and usually fruitless task, when I came upon the box again. It was starting to fall apart, so I decided to re-box the contents for "later perusal". As I roughly sorted the papers into postcards, pictures, letters, and documents, I realized that Henry must have written home to his wife and daughters nearly every day he was in France.  And that I was sitting on a potential treasure trove of historical perspective, at the very least family history, and quite possibly a personal peek at world history as well.

So, here's what I'm going to do. I'm terribly bad at grand projects of an enormous size. But I really want to get to know my great-grandfather through his papers. I also feel that in my role as one of the repositors of family history, I should transcribe all these papers into digital format in order to preserve them for future family historians. So, I'm going to do it as a blog.

I'll start with the little I already know about Henry, and fill in as I remember more and find more things in my archives and digging around on the internet. I'll transcribe a little at a time, and give background from my great-aunt Helen, who was another daughter of his and a prodigious writer. The title of the blog will be "Meeting Henry", and those of you who wish can follow along on my journey into my family's past.

I'll still be writing "Dubious Luxuries", of course, because that's my here-and-now life and observations. But it's looking like Henry deserves a blog of his own, and I'm going to do my best to give him one. My family has always focused on the accomplishments of its female members, which are somewhat legendary and will be interspersed with Henry's since they're related. But I think it's time for at least one of the men in the family to stand up and be recognized. Stay tuned for the first post!