We’ve all heard the platitudes. “Life is too short.” “Live the dream.” “Carpe Diem, Sieze the Day.” But have you really thought about what that means?

One of my co-workers at my day job … a woman I’ve worked with for fourteen years … died on Saturday from a sudden heart attack. This a woman who’s held down two jobs for as long as I’ve known her, and who was planning on taking her first-ever cruise sometime next year, after her second grandson was born in March. I’m glad for her sake that her death was so quick, and that it happened while she was actually out with a friend, having fun, rather than sitting at her desk or behind the Quick Check counter, but still …

In honor of my co-worker Liz, ask yourself the following questions:

• What have you put off that you truly would love to do?
• Are you spending your days doing something you love? Or at least, not spending them doing something you hate?
• What goals do you have for “someday” that you could be doing now?
• Are you spending enough time with the people that you love?

And then, the next, most important question?

What can you do about it?

Here’s the other thing about my Dad that confuses me. (Well, there’s more than two, but I’m trying to focus, here.)

When he reads for pleasure, he likes mysteries, or those adventure kinds of stories where the hero saves the world because he uncovered the enemy’s secret plan just in time.

If you give him a book that simply tells a story, though … he’s bored. He wants a plot that’s working to solve something, or to figure something out, otherwise it’s too mundane; there’s no point. Okay, I can appreciate that. I like books like that, too. Yet, if I hand him a book that tells a real-life story of defeating a terrorist plot, or saving the world by deciphering a code just in time, he says that’s boring, too, because it’s history.

Sigh.

No point? Boring?

Obviously my father doesn’t understand the point of a good story … It’s not just that they are entertaining, but they are about problem-solving.

The detective is presented with a twisty murder and must follow the clues to find the killer. The FBI agent catches wind of a plot to destroy the Capitol building and races against time to prevent it. How is that different than reading about the problems the Allies faced in deciphering the Enigma Machine in WWII? Or how we finally stopped the global flu pandemic in 1914? The way those stories play out fascinate me.

Puzzles aren’t limited to mysteries, though.

Even in “quieter” stories, characters in books face problems every day.

They may not be life-and-death, but there are always puzzles to solve. How to make ends meet. How to raise the children after the husband takes off. How to rehabilitate the troubled dog you brought home from the shelter. How to keep your close-knit group of friends together after college. How to find the girl who left the shoe in the ballroom.

The best stories have some kind of conflict, something that need to be solved or fixed or prevented.

Sure, that can be a person with a gun or a vengeful serial killer, but they could also be the character’s own memories that prevent them from succeeding, or the dysfunctional family that comes to him for help every minute of the day.

The trick as a writer (and not just a fiction writer) is to find the problem and tell how the protagonist solved it.

Because, obviously, keeping my father entertained is hard.

I decided that the best way to get back into the mind set of writing was to … well, write, of course … but not just any writing.

So many things have been turned upside down these last few weeks. First, finding someplace to live, then packing a house full of stuff, weeding out about a third of my library (sniffle), and then moving and settling into our new home …

It’s no wonder that my mind can’t focus.

Of course, I let the marketing/promotion side of things slide in the last couple of weeks leading up to the move. (Why drum up more work just in time for me not to be able to find my computer, much less someplace quiet to write?) So, at the moment, I don’t have any paying clients. That’s good and bad. Bad because I could really use a paying client or three right now to offset moving costs, but good because it’s giving me the breathing space to find my writer’s footing again.

The best place for that?

Going back to the beginning.

As much as I love writing marketing pieces, doing copywriting, webpages, and other elements of the copywriting business, the first thing I ever wanted to write was a BOOK. When I was about eight, I wrote and laboriously typed a story scandalously plagarized from Julie Andrews’ “The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles.” (Luckily, I never tried to sell the book since the plot was remarkably similar, though much, much shorter.) But I did have it “privately” published … which is to say, my Dad brought it to work and photocopied it for me, folded it in half and stapled it together with the construction paper cover I drew for it.

And yes, I still have it.

In terms of more serious writing, though, my first love was fiction. Not poetry, not short stories, but full-blown novels.

So, the other day, I found my first few footsteps back toward “real” writing by working on my ongoing novel. I only got a couple pages written, but still … sitting at my computer, typing words into meaningful sentences. Writing progress is being made. Mental space for writing is being staked out.

I’ll give my brain a couple days to revel in the fiction, but then the vacation’s over and it’s back to work. I’m just grateful to finally see a path in the woods.

I have a problem.

We moved two weeks ago.

That might not seem insurmountable to you, but this is the first time (not counting dorm rooms in college) that I’ve moved in 34 years, and I think my system is still in shock.

I knew, of course, that the first week or so would be, well, impossible for me to concentrate on writing anything (not to mention finding the computer). Tweets, sure. 140 characters I could manage. I found the energy to blog about the actual move (18 and a half hours!) over at my other blog.

But … writing? Real writing?

I haven’t been able to summon the energy.

Not the physical energy, so much, as the mental energy. The emotional wherewithal to plumb words to throw at the keyboard.

These last two weeks, I’ve been, well, nesting. It’s the only way I can describe it. I’ve been unpacking and arranging things; organizing; setting up. I’ve been spending time in the kitchen, cooking up rich-smelling delicacies like homemade tomato sauce, vegetable soup, and cakes. I’ve even been sitting at my spinning wheel, twirling lengths of wool roving into bobbins of yarn–being more productive there than I have been in months.

But anything remotely work-like? Productive in a commercial way? I can’t quite summon up the energy.

This is a real problem. (Not least of which because that 18-hour move cost well more than the original estimate so money is, if possible, even tighter.)

So, folks, give me some advice. What do I need to do to get my groove back? How do I find the mental focus to do marketing and promote myself and my business when all I really want to do is curl up with my dog and a good book (and some homemade goodies) until things start feeling normal again?

My father is a puzzle to me. He watches sports for entertainment, for example, and when I protest that I prefer watching something with a story, he tells me “It’s all about stories.” He believes (I’m guessing) the strategies and the occasional player biography means that watching the events of a game unfold makes it a story.

This logic of his makes no sense to me.

Saying that a football game is a story is like saying a rainbow is a poem. It can inspire one, certainly, it can become one, but it is not one while it is happening.

The story is what happens later, when you’re TELLING what happened. The event itself is no more a story than the list of to-do items in your schedule is a journal. (Although I’ll grant that the instant replays can qualify as anecdotes–little, mini-stories.)

A story isn’t a story until you define it by the explanation of what happened and why.

Think about history. You can look at it and figure out how the pieces fit together to make the Battle of Gettysburg or the discovery of penicillin possible at just that moment in time. While it’s happening, you might get that little frisson up your spine of “We’re making history, here” but what you’re doing is participating in the events that become history.

When you tell it to other people, it becomes history–before that, it’s just current events. A sporting event in progress is just a game. You don’t know the story of the game until it’s over.

Mind you, I’m not saying there aren’t any similarities.

When you watch a sporting event, you do have many of the features that make for a good story–you know who the main protagonists are, and are usually rooting for one of them. You have the rush of adrenalin at knowing something is going to happen, but not knowing how it’s going to play out. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the people in charge are trying to plot for every possibility. Presumably you’re interested in the outcome, or you wouldn’t be watching at all. And, of course, you want to know how it turns out.

But it’s still not a story. It becomes a story later that day when you tell a friend, “I saw the best game today! Our guys were down 5-to-2 and it didn’t look like they could possibly win, but then…”

See, Dad? Even the most exciting event–the birth of a child, a marriage proposal, a successful defense of your country, the final game in the World Series–is just an event.

It doesn’t become a story until you tell it.