Spending some quality free-time together . . .

We’re still at home in the yurt, and learning a lot about our use of resources, our relationship with technology, and much about nature since we’re living so close to the rhythms. Our life is going through a slowing-down process, and this involves moving through many changes. We haven’t driven our car for five days. We eat more deliberately. We pay a lot more attention to what we purchase at the grocery, since trash and recycling takes much more effort to deal with.

One of our biggest challenges has been our computers. At our last abode, we started to get a bit addicted to them. We’d surf frequently, spending time on science sites or belly dance sites. We were intaking a lot of second-hand knowledge, which had certain advantages, but knowledge was so easy and direct that we began to let it impinge on the attention we gave to each other and Mirabelle. The laptop would even find its way to the dinner table sometimes as we researched something interesting or I wrote back to a life coaching client or Metamorphosis client. There were more and more moments when we were just ‘zoned out’, paying more attention to the computers than to each other.

Part of our yurt experiment has been about separating ourselves from the computers, to make our relationship with them more deliberate. It’s worked — we come up to the office at our friends’ house each day and use the computers very deliberately, answering our emails, checking our blogs, and then getting to our writing.

It’s the writing that’s the problem. We’ve decided to put some of our works up on Amazon as e-books, and have begun writing a new book in the young adult genre. With the creativity flowing, we are hungering for more computer time for reasons other than surfing — we’re in one of those ‘binge writing’ times when we could easily put down six or eight hours of writing a day.

It’s an interesting experiment to slow down during this creative process. We get to talk about the book a lot more, since we limit our office time and if we bring the computer to the yurt for extra writing, the battery only lasts a short while. More talk is equating to a more developed world, plot, and characters, which is good. But it also leaves us wanting to do more actual writing.

We’ll see how this develops. So far, it’s difficult but exciting, and we’re feeling like it might add up to a much deeper, more engaging, and even, perhaps, more salable book than we’ve written in the past. Time will tell.

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