January-in-February

1.

1-2-3 was not a disaster, in terms of discipline. I mostly kept up with it.

2.

I do think it’s a disaster in terms of what I got out of it.

Which I think is nothing.

3.

I already have an account that I set up to email my entries to. I’ll try to 1-2-3 when the mood strikes me.

Just don’t think it’ll be very often.

I hate wanting to write but not yet being ready to write.

1.

I cut half of what I had in two days.

Because I wasn’t brave enough to do it all in one.

2.

Things started picking up speed again yesterday.

3.

Today was 788 words.

I like the number 88. It looks like two infinity signs rotated 90 degrees.

I also sent off something to someone. So we’ll see how that goes.

4.

I’m not sure that I’m going to continue with 1-2-3.

I’m not sure if I should.

1.

Little plot arcs! Everywhere!

I can feel the climax building and building and building. I can actually see where I am going.

2.

I’m into the third chapter now. :)

And tomorrow, I will most probably hit the 5k mark – which would mean that I’ve been writing, on average, double the 250 minimum I hope to meet each day.

3.

Today was the first 1k day of this draft of TLOL. That’s always a nice milestone to meet.

The Twitter people who told me I was crazy for trying to cram 20 years worth of plot into 80-90k? They are still probably right, but I shall try anyway.

4.

1-2-3 is going surprisingly well. It’s so much a part of my schedule now that I was planning to do them tonight too.

I might do that. The thing is, I can’t tell if the heebie-jeebies started because I started 1-2-3. So maybe they aren’t so good for me.

Focus

1.

Some people call it in the zone. Writers like Justine Lee Musk call it ‘writing deep.’

In one of my favourite books, S.L. Viehl’s Blade Dancer, a trainer at the assassin school the protagonists are studying at comments that Sajora (I don’t have the book with me, so it might be Jakol instead) has found the ‘sword within herself’ (again, the book’s not with me, so this is most probably a paraphrase.

For me, it boils down to this: Don’t Think, Just Do.

2.

This latest exam period, I discovered just how difficult some people find it to reach that state of mind, and how much more difficult many people find it to stay there.

3.

You need to push.

For some people, it’s all rather Zen.

I think of it as The Push – I suspect this I stole from Lilith Saintcrow’s The Society series, because one of the protagonists is able to ‘push’ people into doing stuff.

Having said all that, I tend to think of life as a war rather than a path, etc.

4.

You can learn how to Push yourself.

Successful creative people aren’t just creative people. They do things that help support what they create.

For a writer, this might include PR, web design, networking and bookkeeping.

I think something that successful people often are able to do, but is rarely talked about, is the ability to direct creative energy outside their preferred outlet of expression.

5.

You can do wonders if you just have the energy and the willpower to get it done.

And if you can commit that much for writing, you can do the same for the rest of your life.

1.

I may have done something really silly today. But it will make me read more fiction and right now, that’s a really good thing.

And god, please don’t let me accidentally send an email from the wrong account.

2.

Night 1-2-3 pages are definitely better for me. Infinitely better.

I still don’t make the full half an hour, but I think I could get there someday.

3.

I settled for the solution I already had. I figure that since I didn’t yet have another solution, if there was one, it still needed to cook and I might as well ‘practise’ some more.

I think it’ll work out though. My sooperwoman wears her new sooperpower more comfortably than the previous, fuzzy one.

I’m keeping to a one page a day or so minimum too. Some days are easier than others, but none of them painful.

4.

I like that. I think from now on, I shall call my female protagonists sooperwomen and male ones soopermen. It sounds much better than the heroines and heroes of romance, and not nearly as clunky as XX/XY protagonist.

Main character is more inclusive, but it doesn’t really touch on the fact that most – okay, all – my work so far tends to revolve around a love story.

1.

This re-write has run into another snag.

My sooperwoman needs a new sooper dooper power that still meets the parameters I’ve already set out.

I could fiddle a bit with the parameters, but I don’t think I have much breathing room. On the other hand, the alternative is to throw this out altogether and start over.

2

I do have a partial solution that I can use if I can’t come up with something better.

It’ll tie everything up better with another book that I may write someday, but I’m not about to toss a significant amount of plot out just to make it fit better with that book – which, in any case, stands alone.

There’s never anything such as a perfect solution though. Or rather, they exist in your head but cannot be applied exactly so in real life.

Rather like economics.

3.

I’m not looking forward to yet another period of unwriting. Don’t think I have a choice, however.

4.

I suppose I can always stitch in the interim.

I am half-way through Winter White, and have just started Prairie Moon’s The Red and the Black, which puts me happily at 3 starts into The Year of Starts.

1.

It snowed today.

Reconsidering my plans to study in Canada now.

I have no idea what I was thinking (maybe that it IS February?) but I decided I’d be warm enough in just a sweater. Which I was. Nearly.

But…snowgasm! In a Sweater! At least it didn’t settle.

2.

I haven’t written pretty much since my exams ended. What’s up with that? So I’ve started on TLOL again.

I would have done so earlier, but it really irritates me that WriteWay does not allow you to open 2 WIPs at a time and I haven’t yet had the time to go print it out.

3.

1-2-3 isn’t going very well. I didn’t do it

I’m just finding it to be such a chore. Damn it.

Habituating

1.

How perfect would it have been if I had managed to make this the first post with this tag.

Alas.

2.

There are a lot of studies that have concluded that willpower is a finite resource.

I won’t link to them here, but I do believe it is true.

It makes sense. Everything else is finite. Why wouldn’t willpower be too?

I do, however, also think that willpower is like stamina. If you use it enough, if you work it enough, you’ll have more of it. Similarly, if you use it for running mostly, your stamina goes longer if used for running.

That is, you can also use efficiency more efficiently.

For instance, once you get used to writing every day, it’s easier to write every day. You need less willpower to write every day, so you can have more willpower left over to do other stuff.

3.

Efficiency can also be achieved in another: setting attainable (but not too attainable) goals that are well-defined, i.e. not nebulous.

You don’t want to waste willpower fiddling over how you are going to achieve your goal.

If you say you want to write x amount of words a day, that’s easy. BICHOK.

If you say you want to read more craft books, make that…I don’t know, one every month. I think one every two weeks would be pushing it, but what do I know? I read economics blogs for fun.

4.

This year, there are two things I would like to add to my daily life. 1-2-3 is one of them, and the other is stitching pretty much every single day.

Primarily, the reason is that I need to relax more. I just don’t like waking up about a quarter of the way to a panic attack. Or sitting in a lecture and trying to Zen my heartbeat into a more normal rate.

Now combine the two, and exchange lecture for exam? That’s called a catastrophe waiting to happen.

5.

So new and better habits.

So I can be a better, improved version of me.

1.

Morning pages have yet to happen.

I am thinking about turning them into night pages. To empty out my head so I can start afresh in the morning. Maybe it’ll help me sleep.

For now, lunch pages seems to work. We’ll see when my schedule fills up a bit more.

2.

TLOL continues to percolate. I’ve essentially reworked the plotline for the third act, but I still need to fix the first.

I have found my not-so-pretty protagonist’s defining trait, so the first act must change. The plot works, but not the way it is currently written.

3.

MO has titles. Now it needs writing. I will probably work on this in parallel with TLOL, because it has so much in common.

Themes, worldbuilding, timelines even. I think the characters in MO will appear in TLOL and vice versa.

4.

The weather…OMG the weather!

It was freaking chucking it down yesterday. An actual Snowgasm in February! What. The. Fuck?

Talk about January-in-February! Which is, thankfully, going much better than the weather.

Self-Improvement

1.

I have a fetish for it.

I like to be able to say ‘I’ve done this in ____.’

It’s less that I want to be a better person, but I want to be better prepared to take over the world to seize every opportunity that comes my way, and just to do things better.

2.

In 2007, it was learning to be more extroverted.

That one was hard.

But it was a good year for that. I think it made my first year away from home a lot easier than it would have been otherwise.

3.

2008 and 2009 was meditation.

The reason why it was the same in 2009 was because 2008 was a bust.

So was 2009, come to that.

4.

Which is how we ended up in 2010.

I’m looking for my replacement for meditation, if that makes sense. A way for me to clear The Space in My Head. Hence 1-2-3 and The Year of Starts, to enable more Stabbing Fabric with a Needle.

I decided that this year, I am going to attempt a multi-pronged approach. 1-2-3 is active, whereas stitching every day is passive.

We’ll see how this one goes. 1-2-3 is a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. *bangs head*

5.

I periodically do this with my gadgets too.

I have given up on Outlook. Chrome has to go. Word doesn’t quite fit my writing needs so now I have WriteWayPro. Twitter is better with a Twitter client rather than on web. So forth.

I may settle for Google-izing my laptop in the short-term*, but I doubt I’ll actually do that. I don’t like Chrome. I really don’t like Chrome.

6.

I think that everything can be improved. It’s just a question of whether the improvement is worth the time you spend getting there.

I am, after all, an economist. Marginal marginal marginal!

*Defined as for the next year to eighteen months, as I’ll almost definitely switch out my current laptop for another, or at least get a secondary.

1.

I did get around to 1-2-3. Just at lunch time rather than the planned breakfast time.

I expect that I’ll be doing it at the same time tomorrow as I have a 9 o’ clock start and I’ll be out late tonight.

2.

TLOL still suffers from the Heebie-Jeebies.

3.

I may start messing around with my M.O. Which because I think I’m funny, I have tagged Modus Operandi.

Even though it actually stands for Magnum Opus.

4.

But I’m still in social butterfly* mode, so you know, unwriting and not much work will be done.

*That’s why the start mentioned in yesterday’s post has yet to happen.