After spending a scary and intense four days in the hospital with my son (emergency appendectomy), and following a week of deeply emotional book stuff (which I blogged about here), and in anticipation of summer vacation during which both my personal and work time are severely curtailed, I declared last week to be AMBER WEEK.

What, you ask, does Amber Week mean?

It means that each day I asked myself, “What do I want to do?”

The sad truth is that often for busy people, especially busy moms, we so rarely ask this question that when it is posed, coming up with an answer can be downright flummoxing. I always have a to-do list a mile long, and my kids always have needs. Why bother with the question when what I want is often the bottom of the pile priority-wise?

During Amber Week, I kept asking the question. Sometimes finding an answer came easy. Yes, I want to go to yoga with Liz! Yes, I want to go for a run in the forest! Yes, I want to have someone else clean my house for a change! Yes, I want to take a nap!

Sometimes the answer was harder to find. Would it feel better to go for a run or pull weeds in the garden? Do I want to knock off the things that have been on my list for four months or go pick strawberries? It was interesting to prioritize with my own satisfaction in mind rather than a deadline or pleasing someone else or dousing the fire burning most furiously.

Often–to my great satisfaction–I found that I wanted to work, which right now means editing essays for THE V-WORD.  How lucky is that? My work as a writer is what I want to do most of the time.

It got me thinking about the lesson of Amber Week.

There are always going to be to-do lists, deadlines, and needs to meet. Can I reframe those things in the light of my satisfaction?

I weed my garden not because weeding is so fun but because I want to have yummy vegetables. I drive my kids to soccer four days a week not because I like driving so much but because I want to see the joy on their faces as they bound off the pitch at the end of practice. I want to work on my books not because writing is easy but because the process exhilarates me.

It might not work for everything. (Hard to imagine a way cleaning up kid puke, for example, is satisfying other than that it is gone.) But the lesson of Amber Week is to focus on what feeds my body, my heart, and my spirit. If the task or commitment isn’t fun or doesn’t serve some larger purpose that matters to me, then it has no place in AMBER WEEK.

Or AMBER LIFE, for that matter.

There were many things that spoke to me in the book Quiet by Susan Cain.  One of them was the dichotomy between introverts, who are often motivated by threat, and extroverts more motivated by rewards.  She discussed this concept in terms of evolutionarily stable strategies, a theoretical framework in which multiple behavioral strategies can exist in a population of animals as long as each strategy is the best strategy for different situations at different times.

Cain asks if extroversion seems so great, why wouldn’t natural selection have made us all extroverts?

Her hypothesis is that extroverts, who tend to go after big payoffs (maybe a juicy mammoth), tend to have success except when they don’t bother noticing that saber-tooth cat over the rise.  The strength of introverts is that they take the time to assess threats and make careful decisions.  If the introvert in the hunting party holds everyone back from attacking dinner, nobody becomes dinner.

Reward or threat?  What’s your primary motivation?  Going all out or playing it safe?  That doesn’t mean introverts don’t take risks, but they will be likely to think through their moves carefully.

Why am I babbling about this?  Well, I think that this framework explains my response to recent conversation with my agent.  A phenomenon that Laini Taylor has called mistrusting the yes.  Anyway, my agent and I were discussing the novel I’ve just finished which she is taking out on submission.  My lovely agent has high hopes for the book, and she said some very nice things about my writing.

So when we got off the phone, why did that blushy-glowy feeling trickle out through the bottoms of my feet so quickly?

We get a lot of rejection in this business.  Writers have to inure themselves to it.  Like Laini, many of us come to doubt that yes is ever coming, and when it does, we wave our fingers dismissively at it.

Like many writers, I’m a classic introvert—threat motivated.  As soon as I got off the phone with my agent, I started looking for predators.  I reminded myself that it would take a long time for editors to respond to our submission and many of them will say no.  I sent the book off into the world—because I’m not afraid of risk—but I also got real about possible outcomes.

Yet I don’t think this makes me a negative stick-in-the-mud.  Instead, my introversion makes me resilient.  A single no won’t shut me down as a writer.  Not even ten nos will.

I’ll keep writing.

The challenge for me—the real risk-taking—is learning how to savor the yeses when they come.

I asked a question: will you write for my book?

I got an answer: in a heartbeat.

I burst into tears.

Let me tell you, this book—The V-Word— has me by the heart and throat.  It is being born into a world where girls are bombarded by sex at every turn and yet no one is really bothering to ask them what they want or how they want to feel.  We’re all sexual beings.  Exactly how looks and feels different for each of us, but we all have to find our own way to be with our sexuality.  The subject is vital, and the book feels important and scary at the same time.  It matters, and I want to do it justice.

To do it right, means that I find women to contribute essays that are honest and frank and real.  I spend hours crafting emails that I hope convey the importance of the book, the vision I have for it, and why I think each person I contact is exactly the right person for the book.  It is harder than writing a novel.  I pour so much of myself into each one.  I was embrace what Amanda Palmer calls the art of asking—the way we make ourselves vulnerable, which opens a path for us to  connect on a deeper level.

And it is hard.

So when a writer, whom I admire for the way she lays everything bare, the way she refuses to allow dishonesty in her writing, responded: in a heartbeat.

I burst into tears.

The art of asking.

The gift of responding.

The power of stories.

I am grateful.