Category Archives: Writing

Focusing on what’s important

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It would seem I’m destined to do this writing thing in bursts over time. I don’t know how much I’ll be posting here and on the Unification Chronicles blog in the near future, nor how much fiction I’ll actually get written. But unfortunately, I have other priorities that usurp writing.

Last week, my mom had her thyroid taken out because the doctors couldn’t tell whether or not it was cancerous by biopsies alone and figured it was safer to remove it. We now know that it was cancer, and that the cancer had spread to the lymph nodes nearby. We don’t know if the lymphoma has progressed any farther, which of the 35 kinds of lymphoma it is, or which of the four stages it progressed to. They’re still testing to determine those things. My mom could be cancer-free because they already removed all the cancerous tissue, or it could be much, much worse.

So for a while, my top priority is to be there for my family, to support them and help out as much as I can. I’ll try to find time for writing, will have to find at least some time to prevent going crazy. But my grand scheme to write seven books in ten months has been thoroughly derailed by real life.

What writers can learn from Avatar

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I saw Avatar over the weekend, and loved it. I’m naturally inclined to like James Cameron movies. I think he’s one of the best storytellers working today. Not the most innovative writer, but the best storyteller. It’s an important distinction.

A lot of talk around this movie centers around the special effects, especially in 3D. Yes, they’re amazing. Yes, the 3D is used subtly, almost never throwing things “at” the audience, and provides an additional solidity to the CGI that you’ve never seen before. You feel like like you’re there, on the moon Pandora with the characters. And as Chuck Wendig points out, the 3D and CGI compensate for each other’s weaknesses, making everything seem just, well, real.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today.

A lot of the reviews and even snide comments on Twitter about the film mention is that the story isn’t anything new. They misunderstand something fundamental about storytelling and assume that this means Cameron is just “mailing it in,” using new visual effects to dress up a tired story that we’ve all seen before.

They don’t understand that the very best stories, by definition, are stories we’ve all seen before. That the very reason why certain stories have been told over and over and over for thousands of years is that they work. They resonate with us, down to an unconscious level. Was the plot of Avatar predictable? Sure. It’s basically “Dances With Smurfs.” But think for a second. How many times have you seen a story about a broken soldier who finds first companionship, then purpose, in the company of his enemy? Dances With Wolves? Pocahontas? Enemy Mine? How far back can you go?

If you really think about it, thousands of years. This story is one of the timeless tales you’ve heard before and will hear again. It comes from myth. Just like “coming of age”, or “the hero’s journey” or “pride goeth before a fall”, or any of the other fundamental structures hardwired into our primate brains. The story of Avatar was told around cooking fires in central Europe 10,000 years ago. The details change, but the story is eternal.

And that’s why the movie works. Because while the CGi gives you a sense of awe and wonder, and helps in the suspension of disbelief, it’s the story, and the characters of Jake, Neytiri, Gail and the rest that make you care. I was welling up several times during the film, a difficult thing when wearing essentially two pairs of Ray-Bans, and it wasn’t because of the CGI. It’s because I was caught up in the story, totally engaged and rooting for the characters.

Don’t mistake the simple for the inferior. All too often the best stories are those we know by heart.

Having written

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“I hate writing, I love having written.”

—Dorothy Parker

I finished writing the first novel in the Unification Chronicles series today. This is the first time I’ve actually finished a full-length novel since the spring of 1997, when I finished Between Heaven and Hell. Sounds like a big accomplishment, right? So why don’t I care more?

I used to completely identify with the Dorothy Parker quote above. (Hardly surprising, as she’s one of the godesses of snark.) I was all about the destination, in a hurry to get the journey out of the way. But in the last dozen years, a funny thing happened.

I became a writer.

Yes, technically, I was a writer in those early years, in that I wrote things. But I was always more concerned with what I was going to do after the book was written than actually writing it. In no small way, this is why it took me a dozen years to finish writing another book (even if that book itself only took six weeks to write). Because my focus wasn’t really on the writing. It was on other stuff. On what my life would be like as a best selling novelist, on quitting my day job, on getting to hang out in coffee shops all day.

Now, things are different. I’m older, and I’ve spent the last fifteen years writing consistently. Mostly nonfiction, but writing. Putting words together. In that time, I’ve developed a feel for the English language, taken a talent for writing and turned it into a skill. I still have a lot to learn, as evidenced by my already growing lists of things I need to fix when it comes time to revise the book, but that’s okay. The journey’s okay.

The fact that I’m not more excited about finishing my first novel in a dozen years could be best thing I could ask for in my writing career. Because the biggest reason I’m not more excited about finishing the first book in the series is that I’m already working on the second book. And the fact that I now derive more pleasure sense of accomplishment from writing every day than finishing a novel means I’ve learned to love the journey. I’ve become a writer.

The plan

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A big part of this blog, and Writing On Your Palm before it, has always been to document my journey as a writer and serve as either a cautionary example or inspiration to others. It occurred to me recently that I have a unique opportunity to do so much more.

When I was writing my first novel, one of my idols was Joe Straczynski, the creator and writer of nearly every episode of Babylon 5. I read every word Joe published on the internet during the production of the show, and I learned a lot about both writing in general and how television is made. But there was always more I wanted to know. I wanted to see the scripts. I wanted to sit in on the breakout meetings. I wanted to see the background of the story the way Joe saw it. I never got those things, because Joe is sane and had a business to run.

But now, I have the opportunity to provide just what I wanted. I can do something no one else has been nuts enough to do. Here’s the plan.

Step 1: Write and edit Unification Chronicles simultaneously

Regular readers know I’ve committed to writing all seven books of the Unification Chronicles series in ten months, to be finished by Labor Day weekend, 2010. But now that I’ve figured out how to write 2,000 words a day and still have time for my normal life, I’ve decided to aim still higher. I’m also going to edit the books in nearly the same span of time. Basically, while I’m writing 2,000 words a day of Book 2, I’ll be editing 5-10 pages of Book 1. This is possible because the 2k-per-day rough draft I’ve been turning out is surprisingly readable, not at all the unreadable crap I was expecting. Turns out you can write well and write fast at the same time (Mike Cane, I’m looking at you).

Step 2: Blog everything

Yes, everything. I’d like to announce The Unification Chronicles Blog, where I’ll be publishing every single thing I use in writing these books, documenting every step in the process. There you will find notes, research, plot outlines, even drafts posted as I write them, and before I revise them. I want aspiring writers to see the whole package. To be able to compare outlines to drafts to the finished product, and see how it all changes. I’ve set up a wiki for most of the structured information that doesn’t work as well on a blog.

Step 3: Sell the finished product cheap or free

Once I’m done with each book, each chapter will be available as a free PDF file or a free podcast (narrated by yours truly, and a straight read, none of this voice cast business). Each book will also be available on eReader.com, Fictionwise.com and Amazon.com as a 99 cent ebook. At the end of the series I’ll also make a 7-book omnibus edition available for $5.

For those that want something to put on a shelf—or don’t take my advice about how to read ebooks comfortably—I’ll also be publishing each book via either Lulu or CreateSpace—haven’t decided which yet—for just a little bit more than it costs to print. I’m not trying to get rich here. But I want to make sure that anyone who wants a printed copy can get one. I likely won’t be doing a printed omnibus edition, however, as it would simply be too expensive.

Step 4: Embrace the Chaos

One of the reasons I’m doing this is to establish a certain setting I plan to come back to again and again throughout my career. This is the Chaos. After the events in Book 5, I basically have kicked over all the anthills and set the galaxy on fire. Everyone is at war with everyone else, humanity is in pretty dire straits, and everything has gone to hell. Book 6 actually takes place during the Chaos, but it’s far from the only thing going on. It will take years, maybe decades of this to get to Book 7, Unification, where the heroes that survived Book 5 get back together and unify the galaxy. In those years are an infinity of tales.

But I’m not going to be the only one writing Tales of the Chaos. At least I hope not. I’m going to open up that setting under Creative Commons so that anyone can write stories set there. There will be a few limitations, like not using actual characters from my books, so the new stories don’t end up contradicting Unification—and even that will be negotiable, I expect to approve a few canonical stories I don’t write—but overall, it’s an open sandbox. Most of the stories will even be hosted on the Unification Chronicles site.

Step 5: The Audition

Once I’m done with Unification Chronicles—aside from Tales of the Chaos—I’ll keep writing, of course. Homeworld (my NaNoWriMo 2006 project) and Titanus (which I developed for Script Frenzy 2009 but decided I’d rather write as a novel) still need to be finished. As does Ghost Ronin, the first in a new adventure series. These, and the works that follow them, will in all likelihood be written with the door closed. I will seek an agent and get these and future works published traditionally. But here, the work I’ve done for Unification Chronicles will give me an advantage. Agents and editors considering my work will be able to see that I can write to a specific length, finish what I start, and tell a good story. They’ll have half a million words of my fiction as a work sample, and they’ll be able to see exactly how I research and write a book. And hopefully, they’ll see you, dear readers, and see that I can build a fan base and get people excited about my work. That’s why I’m giving Unification Chronicles away for free—or as cheap as I’m allowed to make it. Because if I pull it off, and do everything right, then I get to…

Step 6: Quit my day job and write full time

I want to make my living as a novelist. I want my only requirement in life to be continuing to tell the stories that make my life worth living. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been really good at, and with your help, I think I have a way to make this happen. I expect this to take time, but hopefully I’ll be a full time working novelist by the time I’m 45 (I’m 38 now).

Let’s get started.

The muse’s radio

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I’ve noticed a weird thing recently. No matter what kind of mood I’m in when I sit down to write, the quality of the writing itself is the same. It’s like I’m just a radio, and when it comes time to write the words just flow through my fingers onto my keyboard. It doesn’t matter what’s going on in my head, the words are the words. I’ve written funny scenes when I’m depressed, exciting action scenes when I’m tired. It just doesn’t matter. The book is what it is, and I’m just writing it down.

Of course, I know that can’t possibly be the case. I know that the quality of my writing is a function of my study and practice of the craft over the last two decades. I know that the story I’m writing now I wasn’t capable of writing ten years ago, five years ago. I know that at a neurological level, I’m making up a story, not recounting something that actually happened. I’m deliberately choosing each word I string after the one before it.

Only it sure doesn’t feel that way.

Blaming my tools

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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?

A big meal in small bites

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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.

Indiana Jones and losing your audience

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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.

The daily writer’s kick in the nads

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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.