Officially restarting the agent search today.
It's nice to see that some of your skills don't rust with disuse. My procrastination techniques are as fine-honed as ever!
Showing posts with label procrastination. Show all posts
Showing posts with label procrastination. Show all posts
Friday, February 10, 2017
Friday, February 13, 2015
Tax time again.
We always try to get ours knocked out in February, so it's not hanging over us. All I have to do is make sure the writing ledger is in order and show up at the appointment along with Damon on Monday.
I keep making tea and hoping it'll enable me to move ten feet into the chair in front of the desk with the ledger on it.
It's not working.
There's something about numbers, like a repelling force field.
Do as I say, not as I do. Keep up with your ledger during the year and have everything ready to go at tax time. So you don't have to go through this.
I keep making tea and hoping it'll enable me to move ten feet into the chair in front of the desk with the ledger on it.
It's not working.
There's something about numbers, like a repelling force field.
Do as I say, not as I do. Keep up with your ledger during the year and have everything ready to go at tax time. So you don't have to go through this.
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Organization
Outlining, drawing maps, creating timelines, organizing notes, diagramming political structures, and so on, can be massively helpful in sorting out plot and character problems.
Or they can be a displacement activity.
I defy anybody to be able to tell the difference, until afterward.
If you keep telling yourself not to do it because it's a displacement activity, though, odds are good it's exactly what you need to do; while if doing it leaves you with a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, odds are good it's substituting for actual work.
But what if you get both? Hmmmm....
All generalizations are false. Just do the best you can.
Or they can be a displacement activity.
I defy anybody to be able to tell the difference, until afterward.
If you keep telling yourself not to do it because it's a displacement activity, though, odds are good it's exactly what you need to do; while if doing it leaves you with a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, odds are good it's substituting for actual work.
But what if you get both? Hmmmm....
All generalizations are false. Just do the best you can.
Thursday, March 20, 2014
When you can't decide...
Risk it.
Sometimes, you're looking at guidelines and you think, Maybe this story I wrote awhile back would do for them. Or, maybe it wouldn't.
So, your reread the story. And it's better than you remembered; but you're still not sure, even after running a polishing cloth over it again while thinking about those guidelines. Okay, it's fantasy but it's subtle; okay, it's a YA but it's a youngish (or oldish) YA; okay, it's women's fiction but...
So you reread the guidelines, and this part over here makes you excited and that part over there is discouraging, and you've heard a rumor about this editor, but nothing in the guidelines or your knowledge base about the market absolutely precludes the story you have in hand.
Then you send it. Because you can't sell it if you don't send it. And if they don't like it, what's one more rejection, really? Especially when this is one time when you know "wasn't a good match" probably is the real reason for the rejection, so you won't go examining the rejection with a magnifying glass, inventing implications about how your work sucks and you should go dig ditches. (And you need to get over doing that, by the way. There's a thousand and five reasons to reject a manuscript, only one of which is "it stinks.") But if it does sell - well, that's a triumph as well as money, isn't it? The cost/benefit analysis works here.
I'm assuming, of course, that the story is good; that you have read the guidelines more than once; and that you are facing a true point of ambiguity, not a limitation that makes no sense to you. If you think your time travel story is fantasy because time travel is not scientifically plausible, but the editor thinks it's science fiction because the time travel goes to the future, that's a legitimate difference of opinion and you learned something about that editor for the cost of the time it took to submit. If you think your 3,500 word story is perfect for a project with a 3,000 word limit, and send it without cutting 500 words, that's a waste of your time and hope, because the person sorting through the slushpile (or, in this day and age, the slush e-mail address) looking for the inappropriate submissions that don't have to be read because they didn't follow the guidelines won't care what genre it is when she sees the word count.
Sometimes, you're looking at guidelines and you think, Maybe this story I wrote awhile back would do for them. Or, maybe it wouldn't.
So, your reread the story. And it's better than you remembered; but you're still not sure, even after running a polishing cloth over it again while thinking about those guidelines. Okay, it's fantasy but it's subtle; okay, it's a YA but it's a youngish (or oldish) YA; okay, it's women's fiction but...
So you reread the guidelines, and this part over here makes you excited and that part over there is discouraging, and you've heard a rumor about this editor, but nothing in the guidelines or your knowledge base about the market absolutely precludes the story you have in hand.
Then you send it. Because you can't sell it if you don't send it. And if they don't like it, what's one more rejection, really? Especially when this is one time when you know "wasn't a good match" probably is the real reason for the rejection, so you won't go examining the rejection with a magnifying glass, inventing implications about how your work sucks and you should go dig ditches. (And you need to get over doing that, by the way. There's a thousand and five reasons to reject a manuscript, only one of which is "it stinks.") But if it does sell - well, that's a triumph as well as money, isn't it? The cost/benefit analysis works here.
I'm assuming, of course, that the story is good; that you have read the guidelines more than once; and that you are facing a true point of ambiguity, not a limitation that makes no sense to you. If you think your time travel story is fantasy because time travel is not scientifically plausible, but the editor thinks it's science fiction because the time travel goes to the future, that's a legitimate difference of opinion and you learned something about that editor for the cost of the time it took to submit. If you think your 3,500 word story is perfect for a project with a 3,000 word limit, and send it without cutting 500 words, that's a waste of your time and hope, because the person sorting through the slushpile (or, in this day and age, the slush e-mail address) looking for the inappropriate submissions that don't have to be read because they didn't follow the guidelines won't care what genre it is when she sees the word count.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Tax Time Again
We go see the accountant tomorrow. How romantic. It took me all day to put my ledger in order.
That's about a half hour of math fleshed out with 3.5 hours of avoidance behavior. (Mornings don't count. Mornings are writing time, not bureaucracy time.)
I made a profit! Three figures! This is important since if you take too much of a loss too many years in a row you get downgraded to "hobbyist" and lose your status.
There. If I can do taxes, you can too. Get started. And stop whining. Taxes pay for libraries! (Mind you, they don't pay enough for libraries...)
That's about a half hour of math fleshed out with 3.5 hours of avoidance behavior. (Mornings don't count. Mornings are writing time, not bureaucracy time.)
I made a profit! Three figures! This is important since if you take too much of a loss too many years in a row you get downgraded to "hobbyist" and lose your status.
There. If I can do taxes, you can too. Get started. And stop whining. Taxes pay for libraries! (Mind you, they don't pay enough for libraries...)
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Discipline is for the Disconnected
The trouble with discipline these days is, you need to have the internet open to do so many things that you don't want to do and need to. Which means you have access to all your distractions just when you need to shut them out most.
Remember when you could accomplish all your important writing tasks by the simple expedient of shutting yourself into a small space with just your typewriter, the immediate references you needed, and a dictionary? A print dictionary that you could put outside if you started looking up etymologies instead of writing your query?
I think the policy of requiring submissions via Facebook must be a nefarious plot to keep us from ever querying at all. But I also think it's more likely to swamp them in even more half-assed queries; because who meticulously revises and hones a Facebook post?
I used to be able trick, bribe, and bully myself into doing things, but I seem to be on to myself more and more these days and don't fall for it.
Remember when you could accomplish all your important writing tasks by the simple expedient of shutting yourself into a small space with just your typewriter, the immediate references you needed, and a dictionary? A print dictionary that you could put outside if you started looking up etymologies instead of writing your query?
I think the policy of requiring submissions via Facebook must be a nefarious plot to keep us from ever querying at all. But I also think it's more likely to swamp them in even more half-assed queries; because who meticulously revises and hones a Facebook post?
I used to be able trick, bribe, and bully myself into doing things, but I seem to be on to myself more and more these days and don't fall for it.
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Losing Track
Yesterday I went looking for the paperwork on my trip to the PaleoAmerican Odyssey Conference in Santa Fe next month, and couldn't find any. Since I'm not as organized about filing as I ought to be (I used to be great at it in soul-sucking dayjobs where I was desperate to fill my time) this didn't prove anything, but as far as Damon and I could reconstruct it, about the time I meant to register we had a sudden influx of demands on our money, and I put it off till a new payday, at which time the intention to register had transformed into a memory of having registered.
Property tax season is an unfortunate time to plop an extra $225 + airfare + hotel into the budget, and I was thinking I should probably not go (looking at my dismal money-making record for the year), but Damon, who will have to do all the money juggling, said if I didn't go I'd regret it, and he'd figure it out. So I'm registered, and have a hotel booked, but have not bought the plane ticket yet. (This is why creative people should marry supportive practical people.)
And digging in my paperwork reminds me that quarterly income tax is coming up in five days, too, so better to not let that get away from me, either. I actually have income to report and may even make a small profit on the year, hurray! But my, uh, ledger isn't up-to-date, so I'm not sure.
Even market research is more fun than filing and accounting, but you can't do the big fun stuff like this without them, so take a minute and look around. What have you lost track of lately?
Property tax season is an unfortunate time to plop an extra $225 + airfare + hotel into the budget, and I was thinking I should probably not go (looking at my dismal money-making record for the year), but Damon, who will have to do all the money juggling, said if I didn't go I'd regret it, and he'd figure it out. So I'm registered, and have a hotel booked, but have not bought the plane ticket yet. (This is why creative people should marry supportive practical people.)
And digging in my paperwork reminds me that quarterly income tax is coming up in five days, too, so better to not let that get away from me, either. I actually have income to report and may even make a small profit on the year, hurray! But my, uh, ledger isn't up-to-date, so I'm not sure.
Even market research is more fun than filing and accounting, but you can't do the big fun stuff like this without them, so take a minute and look around. What have you lost track of lately?
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
It's not Procrastination, it's Research
You know what drafting a guest post for Cynsations provides?
An excuse to go back and read ALL THE GUEST POSTS!
Yeah, not making visible progress this morning. But is visible progress the only kind? Hmmm....I'm good at this procrastination stuff, aren't I? Too bad I can't get paid for it.
An excuse to go back and read ALL THE GUEST POSTS!
Yeah, not making visible progress this morning. But is visible progress the only kind? Hmmm....I'm good at this procrastination stuff, aren't I? Too bad I can't get paid for it.
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
What's the Deal, Self?
I need to promote myself, and Sullivan. I know this.
I've gotten good advice from a friend. I need to follow it. I know this, too.
No danger to life and limb is involved. I don't have to leave the house to do it. I don't have to pick up the phone.
It should be driving hard. Why am I acting as if it's rat hard?
I've gotten good advice from a friend. I need to follow it. I know this, too.
No danger to life and limb is involved. I don't have to leave the house to do it. I don't have to pick up the phone.
It should be driving hard. Why am I acting as if it's rat hard?
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Holiday Blues
I got the editorial letter, and it was nothing to fret about - got it all done yesterday, with only a couple of points of disagreement. One of which was about the subjunctive and I will win that one. (Don't try to take away my Oxford comma, either!) I guess after more than ten years of polishing Sullivan was pretty close to publisher-ready. Which means I should be doing market research this morning. So here I am.
Ah, blogging - the ultimate procrastination tool. "I'm not really putting off doing market research, I'm maintaining my online presence!"
Market research is even harder this time of year, because of the heavy leaden certainty that, even if I find the perfect match, and send off the perfect query, no one will read it or ask to see a full till January. Christmas and New Year are almost upon us. People are reluctant to start things, are taking vacations, are clearing old business off their desks. The perennially overworked, overstressed, manuscript-inundated editorial staffs of absolutely everywhere have holiday and year-end stress on top of their normal load. The spammers have pulled out the big guns (spam traffic is way up in my blog comments and mailbox, too) and are swamping the filters, burying e-mail queries in amazing holiday offers, and dunning letters, Christmas cards, and packages have inundated the post office and corporate mailrooms so that traditional queries stand a good chance of being buried there, too.
On the bright side (?), I'm likely to see a number of rejections as people get rid of the stack of "meh" that's been building up. But so many people have gone to "no response = rejection" that I can't even count on that.
I can, of course, get my ducks in a row to send things out New Year's weekend, to get in on the bright shiny new ambition and determination to knuckle down that everybody has when they come back to work after the holidays. I tell myself that's what I'm doing.
And then I realize I've been staring at the same Publishers Marketplace entry for ten minutes and have been thinking about...no, that's too embarrassing, no need to tell the world what I was really thinking about. (And you are now imagining something much, much more embarrassing than the truth, so stop it.)
Yeah, so, it's hard for everybody.
Just do it.
Happy Christmas.
Ah, blogging - the ultimate procrastination tool. "I'm not really putting off doing market research, I'm maintaining my online presence!"
Market research is even harder this time of year, because of the heavy leaden certainty that, even if I find the perfect match, and send off the perfect query, no one will read it or ask to see a full till January. Christmas and New Year are almost upon us. People are reluctant to start things, are taking vacations, are clearing old business off their desks. The perennially overworked, overstressed, manuscript-inundated editorial staffs of absolutely everywhere have holiday and year-end stress on top of their normal load. The spammers have pulled out the big guns (spam traffic is way up in my blog comments and mailbox, too) and are swamping the filters, burying e-mail queries in amazing holiday offers, and dunning letters, Christmas cards, and packages have inundated the post office and corporate mailrooms so that traditional queries stand a good chance of being buried there, too.
On the bright side (?), I'm likely to see a number of rejections as people get rid of the stack of "meh" that's been building up. But so many people have gone to "no response = rejection" that I can't even count on that.
I can, of course, get my ducks in a row to send things out New Year's weekend, to get in on the bright shiny new ambition and determination to knuckle down that everybody has when they come back to work after the holidays. I tell myself that's what I'm doing.
And then I realize I've been staring at the same Publishers Marketplace entry for ten minutes and have been thinking about...no, that's too embarrassing, no need to tell the world what I was really thinking about. (And you are now imagining something much, much more embarrassing than the truth, so stop it.)
Yeah, so, it's hard for everybody.
Just do it.
Happy Christmas.
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Idea Garage Sale, Reversed
So, I'm scheduled to be part of a coordinated blogging effort on behalf of the Andre Norton Award, as detailed at Erin Underwood's blog. My contribution will be on the 11th.
I volunteered from a sense of civic duty, but I don't have a clear idea of what I want to say on the topic. I'm sure I have something relevant and at least mildly interesting knocking around my head, but I don't know what it is yet.
So instead of putting up a garage sale idea, I'm browsing. Fiction ideas aren't the only ones out there. Anybody have anything they've always wanted to hear discussed about the Norton award, YA and MG speculative fiction, or anything related to them that I might be better qualified to discuss? Go ahead and run it by me.
Otherwise, there's no telling what I'll come up with.
I volunteered from a sense of civic duty, but I don't have a clear idea of what I want to say on the topic. I'm sure I have something relevant and at least mildly interesting knocking around my head, but I don't know what it is yet.
So instead of putting up a garage sale idea, I'm browsing. Fiction ideas aren't the only ones out there. Anybody have anything they've always wanted to hear discussed about the Norton award, YA and MG speculative fiction, or anything related to them that I might be better qualified to discuss? Go ahead and run it by me.
Otherwise, there's no telling what I'll come up with.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
The Unsung Benefit of Journalling
"Keep a journal" is standard writing advice; but I don't think I've ever seen explicitly stated the benefit that I most commonly get from it.
So, you're having an off week/month/year, you can't keep you Butt in the Chair (which is the whole secret to writing well), you can't find anybody to send your work to and/or have stopped believing in that work, daily life/health crap/your latest fandom/ eat up your time and block your way to productivity, everything is stale, flat, and unprofitable. So you dig out the old notebooks, file folders, backup disks, or whatever and go browsing through stuff from better days.
And what do you keep reading? Gripes about how you're having an off week/month/year, you can't keep you Butt in the Chair, you can't find anybody to send your work to and/or have stopped believing in that work, daily life/health crap/your latest fandom/ eat up your time and block your way to productivity, everything is stale, flat, and unprofitable.
My old journals are full up of grumpy wheel-spinning so boring I can't read it without laughing at myself.
And yet - at some point, all that wheel-spinning turned into productive work, by some alchemical process I still don't understand, but have come to trust. No, this part of it's not any fun. But it, too, shall pass away. As long as I keep coming back to the blank page and those summaries of where each complete work is in the mail out/reject/mail out cycle.
So, you're having an off week/month/year, you can't keep you Butt in the Chair (which is the whole secret to writing well), you can't find anybody to send your work to and/or have stopped believing in that work, daily life/health crap/your latest fandom/ eat up your time and block your way to productivity, everything is stale, flat, and unprofitable. So you dig out the old notebooks, file folders, backup disks, or whatever and go browsing through stuff from better days.
And what do you keep reading? Gripes about how you're having an off week/month/year, you can't keep you Butt in the Chair, you can't find anybody to send your work to and/or have stopped believing in that work, daily life/health crap/your latest fandom/ eat up your time and block your way to productivity, everything is stale, flat, and unprofitable.
My old journals are full up of grumpy wheel-spinning so boring I can't read it without laughing at myself.
And yet - at some point, all that wheel-spinning turned into productive work, by some alchemical process I still don't understand, but have come to trust. No, this part of it's not any fun. But it, too, shall pass away. As long as I keep coming back to the blank page and those summaries of where each complete work is in the mail out/reject/mail out cycle.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Some Things Don't Change
In a lot of ways it was easier to get things into the mail when all I had to work with was outdated print resources speaking in general terms. These days I keep up with the deal news from Publishers' Marketplace and read all the high concepts of all the new deals and think: "Agh, that sounds awful! The person who bought that won't want to even look at my stuff," or sometimes, "Agh, that's the high concept of the book I'm trying to mail! The person who bought that has already bought the only lesbian western he's going to be allowed to buy this year!" about every single entry.
Which isn't true, or not always, and in many of those cases I need to suck it up and send the query anyway, but I know that in the same way that I knew, in high school, that I could get the research paper in on time, with all the footnotes placed correctly, and get a good grade. It was intellectual knowledge only. I didn't believe it in my gut, which was convinced the only way I was going to get an A was if I could write the paper amusingly enough that the teacher read it indulgently and overlooked the glaring errors in footnote formatting (which I was doing on a manual typewriter - don't miss that!), bibliographic depth, and interpretive subtlety.
Which was a pretty constructive misapprehension on my gut's part, now I come to think of it. Now I'm older I know that lots of people wrote stone-cold boring papers and got A's, while I was getting an A+, a red-pencil smile, practice in good writing habits, and the enmity of my peers (which would have been mine even if I'd written poorly so, to heck with it) for being a teacher's pet. My gut is much less useful in parsing the current market.
I guess we don't get better at everything as we grow older.
Which isn't where I planned to end up when I sat down, but it'll do, since I'm crashing kind of hard.
Which isn't true, or not always, and in many of those cases I need to suck it up and send the query anyway, but I know that in the same way that I knew, in high school, that I could get the research paper in on time, with all the footnotes placed correctly, and get a good grade. It was intellectual knowledge only. I didn't believe it in my gut, which was convinced the only way I was going to get an A was if I could write the paper amusingly enough that the teacher read it indulgently and overlooked the glaring errors in footnote formatting (which I was doing on a manual typewriter - don't miss that!), bibliographic depth, and interpretive subtlety.
Which was a pretty constructive misapprehension on my gut's part, now I come to think of it. Now I'm older I know that lots of people wrote stone-cold boring papers and got A's, while I was getting an A+, a red-pencil smile, practice in good writing habits, and the enmity of my peers (which would have been mine even if I'd written poorly so, to heck with it) for being a teacher's pet. My gut is much less useful in parsing the current market.
I guess we don't get better at everything as we grow older.
Which isn't where I planned to end up when I sat down, but it'll do, since I'm crashing kind of hard.
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Happy Birthday, Ms. Jones! + Miscellaneous
Today is Diana Wynne Jones's birthday. I suggest you celebrate by reading - Archer's Goon, say. Or Drowned Ammet, which does some things in the plot and character interrelations that'd make Dickens gasp in admiration for the way she makes none of it feel at all contrived.
Speaking of birthdays - the older I get, the less I want to pick up the phone. This bugs me. For instance, since our Paypal and Amazon accounts were set up by Damon, I need to protect us from confusion and potential legal and financial difficulties by getting a separate e-mail account to anchor my business use of those companies. The simplest thing to do is pick up the phone and ask our internet provider what the easiest way to do that is. But I keep putting it off.
And, a house-repair mystery: In the mud and powder rooms downstairs, we have developed two sets of absolutely straight, parallel seams of paint bubbling. It looks like a bad tape and float job along the borders of a drywall panel. But when the workman took the paint off, he revealed no tape and no abutting panels, but an amazingly straight and consistent crack in the drywall. He suggested that the crack and the paint bubbling were due to a leak; but the plumber finds no trace of such a thing.
So what the heck have the Borrowers been doing in my walls to create this effect?
I have concluded that real life exists to keep us from being too productive.
Speaking of birthdays - the older I get, the less I want to pick up the phone. This bugs me. For instance, since our Paypal and Amazon accounts were set up by Damon, I need to protect us from confusion and potential legal and financial difficulties by getting a separate e-mail account to anchor my business use of those companies. The simplest thing to do is pick up the phone and ask our internet provider what the easiest way to do that is. But I keep putting it off.
And, a house-repair mystery: In the mud and powder rooms downstairs, we have developed two sets of absolutely straight, parallel seams of paint bubbling. It looks like a bad tape and float job along the borders of a drywall panel. But when the workman took the paint off, he revealed no tape and no abutting panels, but an amazingly straight and consistent crack in the drywall. He suggested that the crack and the paint bubbling were due to a leak; but the plumber finds no trace of such a thing.
So what the heck have the Borrowers been doing in my walls to create this effect?
I have concluded that real life exists to keep us from being too productive.
Thursday, July 5, 2012
Devil Program Redux
Apparently, I can only make one-word bookmarks. Careful experimentation and observation indicates that I lose the "add" option as soon as I hit a space key. This is a) stupid and b) not mentioned anywhere in the "help" tab that explains how you use bookmarks.
I apologize to no one for my pure and holy hatred of this program, with burns with the white-hot flame of a thousand suns.
You think I'm joking. People always think I'm being hyperbolic about this program when I'm merely coldly accurate.
I will now turn off the internet so I don't keep finding more important things to do than wrestle with it, like reading LOLcats, sim blogs, and the results of googling my own name.
I apologize to no one for my pure and holy hatred of this program, with burns with the white-hot flame of a thousand suns.
You think I'm joking. People always think I'm being hyperbolic about this program when I'm merely coldly accurate.
I will now turn off the internet so I don't keep finding more important things to do than wrestle with it, like reading LOLcats, sim blogs, and the results of googling my own name.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Don't Ask Me, I Just Notice Things
Isn't it odd, how few people take an accurate view of their own activities?
"I'm not a writer," One says. "I only keep a journal, and a couple of blogs, one for knitting and one for my game...and a couple of newsgroups I'm a regular on." Exclusive of e-mail contacts and writing memos at work, this "not writing" she does adds up to a production of about 10,000 words per week. One is a writer; One is writing. What she's not doing is striving after publication, and what do you want to bet that's because she thinks she's not a writer, not because her writing isn't publishable?
"I'm a writer," Two says. "I go to all the conferences and subscribe to all the blogs and I can't find an agent." But if you ask to see what Two has written, she won't show you anything. Instead she'll talk about the 15-volume paranormal romance/family saga she has planned. Two is not a writer. Two has a hobby of attending writing conferences and reading writing blogs, but in actual writing she produces maybe seven hundred words a year. She types out more than that, but mostly they're a rechurning and rearranging of words she's already written. She repeats herself a lot. If she does have a work in progress, it has been the same work at the same approximate level of progress for the last 15 years.
It does not puzzle me that people have an ideal image in their head of what a real writer (or artist, or seamstress, or knitter, or parent, or...) is, and can't bring themselves to think of themselves in those terms if they don't match the ideal image - which, face it, nobody does. That's why it's called an ideal. We all do this. For some of us ideals are goals we strive for and for some of us they're impossible cloud castles whose impossibility both oppresses us and frees us from the labor of trying to reach them.
It's the other class of people, the ones who assume that they've met the ideal by fiat; that by labeling themselves as a writer (or artist, or ...) and socializing with writers and talking about writing, they've become a writer and the actual work is doing itself somehow. I don't understand either how they think this is going to work, or how they can maintain their belief in the assumed identity in the face of all the stuff that they don't do.
Fortunately there's a middle ground of people who can see themselves clearly and adapt their behavior accordingly. But it's hard to get there, and harder to stay. The evolutionary benefit of this behavior is not obvious to me; though it's true that, in a social setting, there are certain ideal identities that, if assumed and imposed with sufficient force on the people around you, do provide a distinct advantage. A lot of politics through history has boiled down to people with delusions of competence taking credit for the actions of blind chance or of uncharismatic people with real competence. But in daily life it's annoying as heck and ought to make us more likely to starve or be murdered by someone who is frustrated by our continual failure to produce anything solid.
People are weird. In the end, we just have to live with that.
"I'm not a writer," One says. "I only keep a journal, and a couple of blogs, one for knitting and one for my game...and a couple of newsgroups I'm a regular on." Exclusive of e-mail contacts and writing memos at work, this "not writing" she does adds up to a production of about 10,000 words per week. One is a writer; One is writing. What she's not doing is striving after publication, and what do you want to bet that's because she thinks she's not a writer, not because her writing isn't publishable?
"I'm a writer," Two says. "I go to all the conferences and subscribe to all the blogs and I can't find an agent." But if you ask to see what Two has written, she won't show you anything. Instead she'll talk about the 15-volume paranormal romance/family saga she has planned. Two is not a writer. Two has a hobby of attending writing conferences and reading writing blogs, but in actual writing she produces maybe seven hundred words a year. She types out more than that, but mostly they're a rechurning and rearranging of words she's already written. She repeats herself a lot. If she does have a work in progress, it has been the same work at the same approximate level of progress for the last 15 years.
It does not puzzle me that people have an ideal image in their head of what a real writer (or artist, or seamstress, or knitter, or parent, or...) is, and can't bring themselves to think of themselves in those terms if they don't match the ideal image - which, face it, nobody does. That's why it's called an ideal. We all do this. For some of us ideals are goals we strive for and for some of us they're impossible cloud castles whose impossibility both oppresses us and frees us from the labor of trying to reach them.
It's the other class of people, the ones who assume that they've met the ideal by fiat; that by labeling themselves as a writer (or artist, or ...) and socializing with writers and talking about writing, they've become a writer and the actual work is doing itself somehow. I don't understand either how they think this is going to work, or how they can maintain their belief in the assumed identity in the face of all the stuff that they don't do.
Fortunately there's a middle ground of people who can see themselves clearly and adapt their behavior accordingly. But it's hard to get there, and harder to stay. The evolutionary benefit of this behavior is not obvious to me; though it's true that, in a social setting, there are certain ideal identities that, if assumed and imposed with sufficient force on the people around you, do provide a distinct advantage. A lot of politics through history has boiled down to people with delusions of competence taking credit for the actions of blind chance or of uncharismatic people with real competence. But in daily life it's annoying as heck and ought to make us more likely to starve or be murdered by someone who is frustrated by our continual failure to produce anything solid.
People are weird. In the end, we just have to live with that.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Bleah
I got discouraging news Monday, and now that I need to be knuckling down to Getting Stuff in the Mail (which I hate to do anyway), I'm grumpy enough that all the recent sales I read about for marketing research sound dreadful, which makes me feel that My Day Has Passed and I Will Never Sell Again in This Market. (I feel this way about once a month, on average.)
But I'm going to get stuff in the mail anyway. As soon as I finish draining the lime out of the water heater and get a load of gentles in.
This is no job for someone who requires external pressure to get things done. Or for someone who isn't willing to use housework as a procrastination tool.
But I'm going to get stuff in the mail anyway. As soon as I finish draining the lime out of the water heater and get a load of gentles in.
This is no job for someone who requires external pressure to get things done. Or for someone who isn't willing to use housework as a procrastination tool.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
The Obsession Questionnaire
Our culture is suspicious of enthusiasm. A kid who is crazy about dinosaurs or a game; a teen who is always on social media; an adult who spends all his free time perfecting his imaginary world - all are likely to be told that they're overdoing it, that they're obsessed, that they're wasting their time and should be doing something else.
And, okay, sometimes that's true. We've all heard the horror stories about the couple who let their real baby die while they looked after a virtual one, the gamers who died because they couldn't get off the game, the artists who starve or sponge off their relatives, the writers whose marriage breaks up because writing takes precedence over the marriage, the little old ladies who cannot stop crocheting doilies.
But think about Professor Tolkien, using his spare time to create, first imaginary languages, then vast complex worlds, mythologies, and cultures to provide the context of those languages. Could The Lord of the Rings have become a global phenomenon if he hadn't built it on this foundation of apparent wasted time?
No. No more than Michael Jordan could have been paid to play basketball if he hadn't played and played and played for years before he ever went pro. No more than Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers could have become the perfect dance duo without dancing till their feet bled.
Before you sell a book, you have to write one. Before you get hired to illustrate, you have to put together a portfolio. And before you do either of these things, you have to spend a lot of time doing things with no obvious relationship to reality. Things that look, to people who aren't doing them, like obsessive time wasting. And you have to do it knowing that there is a very good chance you will never be paid for anything related to what you're doing, even if you get very good at it indeed.
After all, the demand for doilies will always be less than the supply churned out by people who like to crochet.
So how do you tell when you're crossing the line?
Well, look around you.
Is your family healthy? Can you remember their names? Do you know who their friends are? Have you spoken to everyone who shares a residence with you in the last 24 hours? Did any of these conversations involve subjects other than your Project?
Is the cat happy?
When you hear a loud crash and smell smoke, do you get up and take steps to understand what happened?
When did you eat last? Was it real food, or junk? Who prepared it?
Can you see the floor of your house or is it so covered with dirt and junk that you have to follow little paths through it?
Did the work you are contracted to do - either as part of paid employment or as part of your obligation as a member of your household - get done? Was it done well, or did someone have to come after you and do it over?
How many projects, of any kind, did you in fact complete during the past year? How many did you start? How much of this ratio (which is bound to be depressing in and of itself) is due to your own choices?
Under what circumstances do you choose The Project over:
Your health?
Your loved ones' health?
Making money?
Spending time with your loved ones?
Housework?
Does the way you conduct The Project allow you to do so in conjunction with the above priorities?
Answer those questions, and be honest with yourself.
If you actually have a problem, the answers will point you straight at it. But you probably don't. You've probably just internalized the idea that if you like it, and you're not getting paid for it, it must be bad for you.
Also, feeling guilty is the least fun and constructive way to procrastinate.
Get over it.
And, okay, sometimes that's true. We've all heard the horror stories about the couple who let their real baby die while they looked after a virtual one, the gamers who died because they couldn't get off the game, the artists who starve or sponge off their relatives, the writers whose marriage breaks up because writing takes precedence over the marriage, the little old ladies who cannot stop crocheting doilies.
But think about Professor Tolkien, using his spare time to create, first imaginary languages, then vast complex worlds, mythologies, and cultures to provide the context of those languages. Could The Lord of the Rings have become a global phenomenon if he hadn't built it on this foundation of apparent wasted time?
No. No more than Michael Jordan could have been paid to play basketball if he hadn't played and played and played for years before he ever went pro. No more than Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers could have become the perfect dance duo without dancing till their feet bled.
Before you sell a book, you have to write one. Before you get hired to illustrate, you have to put together a portfolio. And before you do either of these things, you have to spend a lot of time doing things with no obvious relationship to reality. Things that look, to people who aren't doing them, like obsessive time wasting. And you have to do it knowing that there is a very good chance you will never be paid for anything related to what you're doing, even if you get very good at it indeed.
After all, the demand for doilies will always be less than the supply churned out by people who like to crochet.
So how do you tell when you're crossing the line?
Well, look around you.
Is your family healthy? Can you remember their names? Do you know who their friends are? Have you spoken to everyone who shares a residence with you in the last 24 hours? Did any of these conversations involve subjects other than your Project?
Is the cat happy?
When you hear a loud crash and smell smoke, do you get up and take steps to understand what happened?
When did you eat last? Was it real food, or junk? Who prepared it?
Can you see the floor of your house or is it so covered with dirt and junk that you have to follow little paths through it?
Did the work you are contracted to do - either as part of paid employment or as part of your obligation as a member of your household - get done? Was it done well, or did someone have to come after you and do it over?
How many projects, of any kind, did you in fact complete during the past year? How many did you start? How much of this ratio (which is bound to be depressing in and of itself) is due to your own choices?
Under what circumstances do you choose The Project over:
Your health?
Your loved ones' health?
Making money?
Spending time with your loved ones?
Housework?
Does the way you conduct The Project allow you to do so in conjunction with the above priorities?
Answer those questions, and be honest with yourself.
If you actually have a problem, the answers will point you straight at it. But you probably don't. You've probably just internalized the idea that if you like it, and you're not getting paid for it, it must be bad for you.
Also, feeling guilty is the least fun and constructive way to procrastinate.
Get over it.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Excuses, excuses
Ah, Tuesday morning! Recovered my energy after a weekend spent clearing brush and at the washateria (good lord, it costs $4 to use the big machine these days!) and I should be ready to sit down and tackle my hook.
The framers are downstairs making ten kinds of racket. Thai, who disapproves of workmen, is in my face (and my hands, and my keyboard). Filing awaits. I have accumulated game work, and house work, and this blog post, and the new Neal Shusterman book, and a hold came in at the library, and the Sims2 expansion I bought on e-bay came in yesterday...
Honestly, you'd think the universe had something against my writing queries, it makes it so easy to not do it!
The framers are downstairs making ten kinds of racket. Thai, who disapproves of workmen, is in my face (and my hands, and my keyboard). Filing awaits. I have accumulated game work, and house work, and this blog post, and the new Neal Shusterman book, and a hold came in at the library, and the Sims2 expansion I bought on e-bay came in yesterday...
Honestly, you'd think the universe had something against my writing queries, it makes it so easy to not do it!
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