Archive for November, 2009

Blaming my tools

I was going to talk about my new sooper seekrit plan to release and mar­ket Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles today, but I expe­ri­enced some tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties recently that I just have to rant about. We’ll get to the busi­ness plan stuff, I promise. Eventually.

But first, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

For quite some time now, my writ­ing sys­tem has been rel­a­tively sim­ple and has served me well. I have a note­book in Ever­note for each of my major projects. In each, I have var­i­ous sup­port mate­ri­als along with a note for the man­u­script itself. In this note, I have the out­line for the book in plain text and a .docx file attach­ment for the man­u­script. When it comes time to edit, I open the note, dou­ble click on the attach­ment and edit the doc­u­ment. Ever­note is smart enough to update the note/​attachment every time the file I’m work­ing on is saved (it’s in a temp folder on my hard drive, but that doesn’t usu­ally mat­ter). I also keep my progress spread­sheets in sim­i­lar notes and work on them in a sim­i­lar way.

Until yes­ter­day, this sys­tem worked flaw­lessly. I have Ever­note on every PC I use: my work desk­top and lap­top, my per­sonal net­book, my iPhone. It all works great. Right up until it doesn’t.

A while back, I upgraded my net­book to use the new Ever­note 3.5 beta. Keep in mind, here, that I used to be a pro­fes­sional soft­ware devel­oper. I would never trust my writ­ing to some­thing in the alpha stage of devel­op­ment, but a beta is sup­posed to be rel­a­tively sta­ble, just not fea­ture com­plete (see the Win­dows 7 beta as an exam­ple). Ever­note has made it clear that they will not be sup­port­ing 3.1 very long after 3.5 is offi­cially released, so I fig­ured I may as well start get­ting used to it. So I installed 3.5 Beta 4(!) and set about my work.

Yes­ter­day, the unthink­able hap­pened. Some­how, as I was open­ing the note con­tain­ing my man­u­script, the attach­ment for my man­u­script com­pletely dis­ap­peared! I wasn’t able to undo, and the desk­top synced the change back to the server, so I wasn’t able to pull the attach­ment from any of my other Ever­note clients. It was just gone. Noth­ing in the trash in Ever­note, just gone. 57,000 words of fic­tion, nearly 60 hours of work.

I scoured my hard drive look­ing for a backup or copy of the file. In the third place I looked, I found some­thing that looked promis­ing, and was able to get the file back. If that hadn’t worked, I would have been forced to recon­struct it from emails sent each day to my beta readers.

Psst, pro­gram­mers. Yeah, you. C’mere. You NEVER, EVER screw with the user’s data! A friend of mine pointed out that I was using beta soft­ware, but ANY bug that can irre­triev­ably destroy a user’s data should never have made it past alpha stage! I’ll accept a beta pro­gram crash­ing, but I will NEVER be okay with it trash­ing my data!

/​whacks Dave Eng­berg in the head

So I decided to take my data else­where. If I can’t trust Ever­note to never, ever lose my data, I can’t trust it at all. What else is out there?

A lot of peo­ple rec­om­mend Drop­box. So if fig­ured, sure, I’ll give it a go. I installed it on my net­book, and hey, so far, so good. The UI is clean and effi­cient, and it doesn’t seem to kill my Via CPU net­book (it pre­dates the Atom, we’re talk­ing stone age net­book). Doc­u­ments saved to fold­ers inside the “drop­box” folder on my desk­top are auto­mat­i­cally synced both to the cloud and any other PCs I have linked to my Drop­box account. Feels a lot like Microsoft’s Live Mesh, only about a kajil­lion times faster.

And it worked great until I got to work this morn­ing and tried to install it on my office PC. Ever­note works fine over my cor­po­rate proxy server. It uses the same proxy set­tings as Inter­net Explorer, set up in the Con­trol Panel, so it never even asked. It just worked. And while Drop­box claims to do the same, it doesn’t work. Nor does it work if I man­u­ally set up the proxy set­tings in Drop­box itself, which it does allow for (Seesmic for Win­dows doesn’t, which is why I can’t use it at the office). No mat­ter what I do, I can’t get Drop­box to con­nect to the cloud through our cor­po­rate net­work gob­lins. Stu­pid goblins.

So that’s two highly regarded file sync solu­tions blown out of the water by my par­tic­u­lar cir­cum­stances. I don’t trust Ever­note any­more — even after down­grad­ing it back to 3.1, because I know I can’t keep 3.1 indef­i­nitely — and I can’t use Drop­box on the PC where I spend half my wak­ing hours. So what’s left?

Sadly, the only thing that comes to mind is good old Sneak­er­net. I have a 2GB thumb­drive on my key­chain, and for now, I’m just going to put every­thing on there, and peri­od­i­cally use Microsoft’s Sync­Toy to back it up to the Drop­box folder on my net­book. That way I can access my files on any PC — well, any PC that uses Microsoft Office 2007, because I’m not giv­ing up Word; I’ve tried Google Docs and found it lack­ing — and as long as I remem­ber to run Sync­Toy every so often, they’ll get backed up to both my net­book hard drive and the cloud. It’s an inel­e­gant solu­tion, because it relies on my markedly unde­pend­able wet­ware to remem­ber to back it up, but that’s all I’ve got. Every other solu­tion I know of doesn’t meet my require­ments: sup­port my cor­po­rate net­work, run on both the iPhone and Win­dows, and be safe and dependable.

How do you store your work­ing manuscripts?

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November 30, 2009 · Filed under Technology, Writing

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-​11-​29

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November 29, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized

A big meal in small bites

I’ve heard it said that writ­ing a novel is kind of like eat­ing an ele­phant. And how do you eat an ele­phant? One bite at a time. Same thing for a novel. 80,000 – 100,000 words seems like a lot, seems insane to write that much when you really look at the num­bers, but it’s a lot eas­ier if you take it in small bites. When I first heard that pro­fes­sional nov­el­ists like like Stephen King and James Rollins write 2,000 words a day, I thought that was fine for them; they didn’t have day jobs. (Actu­ally, Rollins writes six pages a day, but when you con­sider that the aver­age dou­ble spaced man­u­script page in a pro­por­tional font like Times or Cam­bria runs a bit over 300 words, this comes out to 1,800 words, or 2,000 if you aver­age 333 words a page. Close enough.) There was no way I could write that much and still have a job and a rea­son­able social life.

Actu­ally, folks, it’s not just pos­si­ble, it’s rel­a­tively easy. Here’s how.

I have a spread­sheet that I mod­i­fied from the one Tobias Buck­ell uses to track my progress as I write. It has all kinds of useful/​encouraging infor­ma­tion, but the real beauty of it is that I only have to enter two num­bers each day: total word count for the whole man­u­script and the hours I spent writ­ing for the day. It cal­cu­lates every­thing else for me. In par­tic­u­lar, for any given day, it tells me:

  • My cur­rent word count for the day
  • My “tar­get” word count for the day, defined as yesterday’s total plus 2,000, round­ing up to the near­est thou­sand. So if I fin­ished at 51,212 yes­ter­day, than today’s tar­get is 54,000.
  • The num­ber of words remain­ing to get to my min­i­mum of 2,000.

Cur­rently, with a word count of 51,521, those num­bers are 309, 54,000 and 1,691. Now, here’s the magic. No mat­ter what I’m doing, one of those four num­bers is going to be within a cou­ple hun­dred words of a mul­ti­ple of 500. So I don’t have to look at the goal if it’s still far away. I’m 2,479 words away from my goal of 54,000 today. I don’t want to think about that. What I want to think about is that I’m only 191 words away from hit­ting 500 for the day. That’s it. 191 words. That’s less than a page. I can write a page, can’t I?

And that’s the secret. By con­stantly updat­ing my word count into this spread­sheet, I always have a quick, eas­ily attain­able goal. A small bite. Let’s say I write some more. (brb)

Okay, now the man­u­script is up to 51,741 words, putting me at 529 for the day, 1,471 to go until my 2k min­i­mum. Now both of the lat­ter num­bers are 471 words away from hit­ting 1,000, and that’s more than a page. Not much more, but it’s a big­ger bite. But hey, I’m only 259 words (less than a page) from hit­ting 52,000! So that’s the next mile marker. I’ll write to 52,000, then update my word count again and look around. Maybe check the Twit­ter. I aver­age roughly 1,000 words an hour, though I can dou­ble that pace if I close my eyes and just ham­mer away with­out wor­ry­ing about punc­tu­a­tion or spelling, which means 259 words is about 15 min­utes. Who doesn’t have 15 min­utes to write?

See how this works? Each step is easy. So easy, in fact, that you don’t notice how long the jour­ney is at all. And that’s the key to get­ting 2,000 words a day, every day, in a life filled with job oblig­a­tions, fam­ily needs, movies to watch, Hulu, Twit­ter and every­thing else that takes up your days. You squeeze in these tiny bites of writ­ing here and there, scat­tered in between all the other stuff. Most days, you have more down time than you real­ize. I’ve learned that if I mix in a 500 – 700 word sprint at Chipo­tle over lunch — a quar­ter to third of my quota — with a bite here and a bite there, I can get up to 4,000 words in a work day with­out my actual job suf­fer­ing at all. I’m still work­ing the day job as hard as always, but I’m spend­ing my down time writ­ing rather than surf­ing. And if I can do 4,000 before I go home, then there’s really no excuse not to get at least 2,000.

This Excel-​based work­flow, geeky and accountant-​like though it might be, has done two invalu­able things for me. It’s instilled a ded­i­ca­tion to write every day, but if I don’t there will be a big gap in the spread­sheet, and it’s taught me how to get my words in dribs and drabs, but still get them. I’m not afraid of 2,000 words a day any­more. I know I can do it. I know that on a good day I can dou­ble it. And so can you.

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November 27, 2009 · Filed under Writing

I won NaNoWriMo 2009!

NaNoWriMo 09 Winner

50,000 words down, 510,000 words to go…

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November 25, 2009 · Filed under Personal, Writing

Indiana Jones and losing your audience

I got to think­ing about “Indi­ana Jones and the King­dom of the Crys­tal Skull” recently, because I do things like that. I think there’s an inter­est­ing les­son here in how to lose an audi­ence, if you think you’re doing okay. The fourth Indi­ana Jones movies was panned by crit­ics and fan­boys alike, even though lots of peo­ple in charge of spend­ing lots of money thought they were sit­ting on another golden install­ment of the beloved fran­chise? Why didn’t it work?

Oh, and there are — obvi­ously — spoil­ers here for the movie. I shouldn’t have to say this, because if you know who I am and you’re read­ing this blog, you’ve either seen KotCS or you made a very delib­er­ate deci­sion not to. Either way, you’ve been warned any­way. For the record, I liked the movie, prob­a­bly because I saw past what most peo­ple com­plain about and accepted it for what they were try­ing to do. But let’s look at three key ele­ments of the film, why they should have worked, and why audi­ences didn’t buy them.

Stunt: Nuk­ing the fridge

Why it should have worked: Because audi­ences in this fran­chise have bought it before. Not this par­tic­u­lar stunt, but con­sider this. If you love the orig­i­nal movies and thought KotCS was a trav­esty, that means you already accepted Indy, a civil­ian lounge singer and a ten year old boy jump­ing out of a crash­ing plane with­out para­chutes, land­ing on the top of a moun­tain in a rub­ber inflat­able raft, slalom­ing down the moun­tain with­out injury, going off a cliff, falling again, this time into white water river rapids, rid­ing through those all with­out drown­ing or Indy los­ing his hat, before wash­ing up on the river­bank just as the waters calm to find an Indian shaman who would like to speak to them about some miss­ing magic rocks. You bought that, but Indy rid­ing out a nuclear test in a solid steel, lead-​lined box is too much to believe?

Why audi­ences didn’t buy it: Because it was a nuke. Those of us who grew up in the Cold War, or even had par­ents who grew up in the Cold War, have come to asso­ciate nukes with instant vapor­ized death. Even though we know this was a test, and there­fore prob­a­bly not at full weaponized strength, even though we’ve seen pic­tures of the rub­ble at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, prov­ing that there is rub­ble, ie. stuff that didn’t get vapor­ized, after a nuclear blast, even though we know the fridge was lead lined and Indy could have escaped with only mild radi­a­tion expo­sure — which we saw him get treated for — it’s still a frig­gin’ nuke.

Les­son learned: Just because some­thing in your story is pos­si­ble, that doesn’t mean it’s plausible.

Stunt: Aliens

Why it should have worked: KotCS is set in the early 1950s, when Roswell and UFO hys­te­ria was just start­ing to build in a big way, so aliens and alien arti­facts were com­pletely appro­pri­ate weird­ness for Indi­ana Jones to find his way into. The arti­facts in ques­tion were in South Amer­ica, where leg­ends and spec­u­la­tion about “ancient astro­nauts” who helped the Mayans, Aztecs and Incas build their civ­i­liza­tions go back decades, well into Indy’s time.

And frankly, you had no prob­lem believ­ing Mola Ram could reach into that guy’s heart, show it to him, and the guy con­tinue liv­ing until he burned up. You had no prob­lem with the Lost Ark of the Covenant melt­ing all those Nazis. And you had no prob­lem with Indi­ana Jones not only find­ing the Holy Grail — an achieve­ment missed by both cru­sad­ing knights and Monty Python, unless you believe the French — but also using it to heal a mor­tal wound to Sean Connery.

Why audi­ences didn’t buy it: Because even though aliens were appro­pri­ate to the time and place of the story, they weren’t appro­pri­ate to the char­ac­ter. We have no prob­lems deal­ing with Indi­ana Jones fight­ing off spooky magic and reli­gious stuff, but we asso­ciate aliens with sci­ence fic­tion and high tech­nol­ogy. Some char­ac­ters can get away with genre bend­ing, but the more estab­lished you become in some­thing, the more rigid the walls around your char­ac­ters. If Tom Clancy wrote a novel where his high tech mil­i­tary folks encoun­tered Love­craft­ian Elder Gods, it would fail just as big.

Les­son learned: Know your genre and where the bound­aries are. This was a big one for me, as one of the biggest changes I’m mak­ing to the Between Heaven and Hell books this time around is estab­lish­ing right up in Rev­e­la­tion that the immor­tals are immor­tal because of the nan­otech­nol­ogy in their blood, along with a few adap­ta­tions to their DNA. In short, I’m estab­lish­ing the story as sci­ence fic­tion right up front, so when we end up in space fight­ing dinosaurs by book four, it’s not as much of a leap.

Stunt: Old Indy

Why it should have worked: Well, we were okay with an older Sean Con­nery in Last Cru­sade, right? This was sup­posed to be a pass­ing of the torch from Indy to his son, played by Shia Lebouf, con­sid­ered by many to the the next gen­er­a­tion Har­ri­son Ford anyway.

Why audi­ences didn’t buy it: In Last Cru­sade, Con­nery did com­par­a­tively lit­tle actual fight­ing. We knew he was capa­ble of it, at least those of us who remem­ber his James Bond, but Henry Jones acted more as an advi­sor and sound­ing board for his son. But this didn’t work in KotCS. Instead of an older Indi­ana Jones guid­ing and groom­ing young Mutt as his suc­ces­sor, Indy kept doing what Indy does. And that’s take a beat­ing, which means for much of the movie, we got treated to the uncom­fort­able expe­ri­ence of watch­ing a man in his 60s get beat up.

In MMO terms, Indi­ana Jones is a tank. His pur­pose is to take dam­age, not deal it. Think about it. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, for all of Indy’s brav­ery and copi­ous dam­age absorp­tion, what did he really accom­plish? He failed at every sin­gle point of the story, and the only dif­fer­ence he ulti­mately made was that the Ark ended up buried in some gov­ern­ment ware­house rather than buried in the desert sands. He didn’t really stop the Nazi’s at all. They stopped them­selves by open­ing the Ark prematurely.

And so in KotCS, when Indy con­tin­ues to fail with style rather than let­ting Mutt take the brunt of it and teach him the fam­ily busi­ness, the audi­ence had the same “who are you try­ing to kid” reac­tion that we get when we see a gray haired quar­ter­back take the field rather than know when to hang it up. Yeah, you know who I’m talk­ing about.

Les­son learned: Think not about your char­ac­ters, but how they’ll be per­ceived. Sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief is a frag­ile thing, and once your audi­ence has a “oh, for cryin’ out loud” moment, it’s very hard to get them back. Think about your story before hand and make sure you’re coax­ing the audi­ence into play­ing along, rather than dic­tat­ing to them how it’s gonna be.

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November 23, 2009 · Filed under Writing

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-​11-​22

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November 22, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized

The daily writer’s kick in the nads

I had a good day yes­ter­day. I had a great day, yes­ter­day, really. I added 4,310 words to Rev­e­la­tion, bring­ing the total to 32,000 even. Last night I went home, yam­mered on the phone to my writ­ing part­ner for a while, and then watched NCIS and NCIS: Los Ange­les with the com­plete and utter aban­don of some­one who demol­ished their word count goal for the day.

And then, this morn­ing, I got kicked in the nads.

I get kicked in the nads every morn­ing. Because every morn­ing, no mat­ter how well or how poorly I did the day before, I start at zero again. My word count today is zero, at least so far (it’s early still). So as great as I felt about myself yes­ter­day, today I’ve got to start push­ing that stu­pid boul­der up the hill again.

And yet, days like yes­ter­day show me that it’s not so bad, this daily kick in the nads. All I need to stay on sched­ule today is 2,000 words, and I did over twice that yes­ter­day. And I did that with­out get­ting up early and writ­ing for an hour before work, and I did it with­out tak­ing my lap­top to Chipo­tle for lunch. I’m become adept at squeez­ing the words out of the slack spots in my day, find­ing time to write wher­ever and when­ever I can get it.

And this is the habit that I’ll take out of this year’s NaNoW­riMo, the habit that will enable me to write this seven-​book series in a year. Just like my plot and char­ac­ters have turned out dif­fer­ent than I thought, the writ­ing habits I’m devel­op­ing are dif­fer­ent than what I expected. I intended to instill in myself a “get up at 6 and get the writ­ing done, day in, day out” habit, but it turns out my life doesn’t work that way. My life is a chaotic jum­ble of so many things — hell, even my job in tech sup­port is basi­cally to be inter­rupted — and I sup­pose it fits that my writ­ing habit would develop as a way to jam lit­tle chunks of writ­ing into that chaos any way I can. To get the words in dribs and drabs if need be, but get them. 200 – 300 words here and there adds up.

Just so I can get kicked in the nads again tomorrow.

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November 20, 2009 · Filed under Writing

Brainstorming with the hive mind

Yes­ter­day I was floun­der­ing a bit in my writ­ing. I still really had no firm vision of act 2 and all I did know — that Batarel was try­ing to kill Daniel and Jack was try­ing to catch Daniel and Daniel was try­ing to be nei­ther killed nor caught — didn’t seem like it was much to go on. The more I thought about it, the more it sounded like a Benny Hill skit. And that wasn’t what I wanted.

It occurred to me that part of the prob­lem was that I didn’t know how Daniel was actu­ally going to kill Batarel. In the orig­i­nal book, the immor­tals could be killed by reduc­ing them to tiny pieces and then burn­ing the pieces. A run of the mill RPG could do this in one effi­cient step. But this time around, post-​9/​11, with grenade launch­ers so com­monly avail­able around the world, that seemed too easy. But because I was too close to the source mate­r­ial, I couldn’t think of another way to do it. So I asked Twitter.

jef­fkirvin
How would you kill some­thing that had nanites in its blood that repair dam­age (injuries, aging) almost as fast as they hap­pen? #research

kdaleau­thor
@jeffkirvin Pet­rify instead of kill… fig­ure out what the nanites use for fuel and dis­rupt it in a defin­i­tive, fast way… umm *runs out*

nlow­ell
@jeffkirvin suf­fo­ca­tion #research

Alli_​Flowers
@jeffkirvin Sim­ple. Watch Star­gate and see how they finally did it.

kdaleau­thor
@jeffkirvin Com­puter virus vs. nanites… oppos­ing nanites… remove all blood (if they’re only in the blood)

dmc­duck
@jeffkirvin Irra­di­ate the nanites? Large mag­netic force?

instan­te­ter­nity
@jeffkirvin Acid? Emp? Impact? Maybe dis­able the nanites before you can do any­thing else? Depends on how dras­tic an injury they can fix.

crimsonsky76
@jeffkirvin Try­ing to fig­ure out how to kill your immor­tals? I guess the whole “There can be only one” thing doesn’t work here, huh? :)

nick­o­laswriter
@jeffkirvin Seal them in a vac­uum and deny them access to raw materials.

dgawlik324
@jeffkirvin the the new Outer Lim­its addressed this once…shock ther­apy to fry the lit­tle bastards…

crimsonsky76
@jeffkirvin How about a virus — worked against the orig­i­nal Vis­i­tors in V and the Borg. Sounds like you’ve made them too pow­er­ful for less.

Small­medium
@jeffkirvin A wooden steak in its heart or a sil­ver bullet.

Not all of these sug­ges­tions were usable, but they got me think­ing. Some of them, like the EMP idea, were bril­liant, but won’t work in Rev­e­la­tion because our heroes don’t know why the immor­tals are immor­tal yet. They won’t learn about the nanites until they get to exam­ine some demon blood in Cru­sade, the next book in the series. But there were enough valid tac­tics and false pos­i­tives to give me some ideas on how Daniel could have sev­eral try/​fail cycles in Act 2.

Thomas Edi­son once said, “I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have suc­ceeded in prov­ing that those 700 ways will not work. When I have elim­i­nated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.” Daniel and com­pany will be doing the same in Act 2. They’ll be try­ing to find a suc­cess­ful way to kill a demon. And they’ll be try­ing not to get killed them­selves in the process. Add to that my real­iza­tion that they no longer have any rea­son why they have to stay in DC, and get an Act 2 that looks like this.

  • Daniel and Co. go on the run
  • Jack gets a lead that Daniel is still in the metro area, won­ders why
  • Daniel and co find Batarel’s house emp­tied and for sale, seller is some anony­mous hold­ing company
  • Batarel fol­lows the RV from his house
  • Jack inves­ti­gates
  • Batarel attacks, gets beheaded, puts head back on, heroes escape to Baltimore
  • Jack inves­ti­gates
  • Heroes try to drown Batarel
  • Jack inves­ti­gates
  • Elec­tro­cu­tion in Philadelphia
  • Jack inves­ti­gates
  • Radi­a­tion in New York
  • Jack sees evi­dence that Batarel isn’t human
  • Blow up, but not com­pletely, in Newark
  • Jack finds Daniel just as Daniel attacks Batarel in a Beth­le­hem Penn­syl­va­nia steel mill
  • Dissolve/​Melt/​Burn/​Vaporize
  • Daniel, Jeff and Jack kill Batarel while Susan films it

There’s still a lot of stuff miss­ing from this. I know that Susan needs to play a big­ger part, and I’m think­ing she’ll be blog­ging about the entire expe­ri­ence as well as upload­ing videos to YouTube as soon as I can fig­ure out how she can do that with­out tip­ping off the FBI to their where­abouts (I think this is why they hop from one major metro area to another; it would be too easy to track her sig­nal in a rural envi­ron­ment). I’m also think­ing Jack needs to nearly catch Daniel at some point, shades of that scene in “The Fugi­tive” with Har­ri­son Ford and Tommy Lee Jones in the drainage pipe.

I also like a lot of the lit­tle touches, like try­ing to elec­tro­cute Batarel in the home town of Ben Franklin, and end­ing it and meet­ing the Archangel Uriel in a city called Beth­le­hem (not far from where I went to high school, as it turns out). Lit­tle things like that, which weren’t ini­tially intended, tell me that the story is tak­ing on a life of its own, that it’s an organic thing unto itself. A good out­line doesn’t pre­clude organic writ­ing, it just pro­vides a skele­ton on which to base it.

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November 18, 2009 · Filed under Technology, Writing

No, really, I should be writing

I’m not blocked, I know exactly where my story should be going, and when I do sit down to write, the words that show up, how­ever grudg­ingly, are good ones.

And yet, I logged a grand total of 192 words over the week­end, 5 (yes, five, and that only to ful­fill the Max­i­mum Geek Ulti­mate Writ­ing Chal­lenge demand to write some­thing every day) Sat­ur­day and 188 Sun­day. My man­u­script cur­rently sits at 22,616 words, short not only of my 2k per day pace (30,000 as of yes­ter­day) but even the eas­ier NaNoW­riMo pace (25,000 as of yes­ter­day). I now need over 2,200 words a day to come in on sched­ule for this book.

Before I go into the fol­low­ing, I want to let my read­ers know I already know the solu­tion to my prob­lem. Butt in chair, fin­gers on key­board, write. It’s just like eat­ing less and exer­cise for weight loss; there really is no other way.

But in the inter­est of show­ing what not to do — as ever, it seems my pri­mary pur­pose in life is to serve as a cau­tion­ary tale for oth­ers — and to take cer­tain excuses off the table for myself and other writ­ers, let’s take a look at why I didn’t get much done over the weekend.

Rea­son: Too tired.

Expla­na­tion: I have sleep apnea, a breath­ing dis­or­der com­mon in heavy­set peo­ple, that causes my air­way to close off while I sleep and stop my breath­ing tem­porar­ily. This is usu­ally treated with a CPAP, or Con­stant Pos­i­tive Air Pres­sure, device, basi­cally an air pump feed­ing a hose attached to an air­tight face­mask that forces my air­way open by sheer air pres­sure, like a bal­loon. Fri­day night I expe­ri­enced a tech­ni­cal prob­lem with my mask and rather than get up to fix it, I just decided to do with­out it for one night. As a result of the sub­se­quent oxy­gen depri­va­tion, I was groggy and slug­gish all day.

Why This Doesn’t Count: I gor­ram well know bet­ter, and should have fixed my CPAP. I could argue that I’ve been push­ing myself too hard for the last two weeks and my body was just insist­ing on get­ting some rest, but I’m not sure I buy that.

Rea­son: So much inter­est­ing stuff on the Hulu, Twit­ter, Google News, Instapa­per, etc.

Expla­na­tion: While I didn’t get much writ­ing done, I did spend a big chunk of the week­end, when I wasn’t catch­ing up on TV shows I’d missed dur­ing the week, read­ing Twit­ter, RSS feeds and saved articles.

Why This Doesn’t Count: Do I really need to explain this one? Writ­ing is sup­posed to come first. Yes, the Patriots/​Colts game last night was amaz­ing. No, I had no busi­ness watch­ing it until I had my 2,000 words. Same for Twit­ter, Google Reader and all my other time sinks. I get a lot of use­ful stuff out of those. But writ­ing needs to come first.

Rea­son: Fear of success.

Expla­na­tion: One of the shows I was watch­ing Sat­ur­day instead of writ­ing brought up an inter­est­ing point. The char­ac­ter kept stalling in open­ing his own busi­ness because as long as he didn’t actu­ally try and fail, it was still a dream rather than yet another thing he screwed up. I’ve often felt the same about my writ­ing. Despite con­crete evi­dence to the con­trary (see pre­vi­ous arti­cles about char­ac­ters com­ing up with bet­ter ideas than what I had in mind for them), I tend to think that the sto­ries are bet­ter in my head and that I dam­age them, some­how, by writ­ing them down.

Why This Doesn’t Count: This is, of course, com­plete wooly-​headed bull­shit. I know damn well that the sto­ries improve dur­ing the writ­ing, and then improve more dur­ing edit­ing. Get­ting them out of my head is only the first step in the process. And besides, even if they were per­fect in my head, if I don’t write them down, so what? Who else will ever know?

Rea­son: Expec­ta­tion that I can catch up.

Expla­na­tion: I know I’m capa­ble of 3k days. I know I’m capa­ble of 6k days every so often. So what dif­fer­ence does it make if I take a few days off? I can make it up later.

Why This Doesn’t Count: I’m sure this one sounds damn famil­iar to any­one who ever had to write a term paper. And it’s largely the same rea­son­ing. I know I’m a fast writer, so I can trust that speed to save me later. Although just like in The Grasshop­per And The Ant, this never actu­ally works. Things come up, and Murphy’s Law dic­tates that the closer you get to your dead­line, the more dis­trac­tions you will have. Yes, math­e­mat­i­cally, if I do 3k per day for six days, I’ll catch up on the 21st at 42000 words. Is that really going to hap­pen? Maybe. Maybe not. But I shouldn’t be in this posi­tion in the first place.

Ulti­mately, none of these excuses mat­ter. Either I make writ­ing my num­ber one pri­or­ity, or I don’t. If I don’t, I’m not going to make it very far as a pro­fes­sional writer. So do I want it, or not?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, this arti­cle is 883 words, and while I’m fully com­mit­ted to keep­ing this blog going, I really should be writ­ing fiction.

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November 16, 2009 · Filed under Writing

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-​11-​15

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November 15, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized

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