Category Archives: Procrastination

Just take the next step

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When I think about the vast landscape of what I haven’t written yet it feels daunting.  There are so many authors out there writing way more than me. I can picture them writing away at this very moment outpacing me word by word.

It takes a lot of stories and a lot of submitting for authors to gain even a small presence. Having had some success, I also know that you have to write a lot of bad stories before you finally unearth the good ones.

It’s a lot like the feeling I get when I have a big TODO list. it’d daunting, I just know I will never get through it all.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”

That mindset has helped me, no only with my TODO lists, but with writing as well. There is a power to realizing that I really only need to focus on the very next story. After that, I really only need to focus on submitting it. After that, move onto the next one. We eat the cow one hamburger at a time, as the saying goes.

If you are like me and often feel buried under the weight of what you haven’t written, step back from the overwhelming wide view and narrow it down.

It’s not: look at all I have to do!

But rather

What’s next?

Let me know in the comments below what’s next for you.

-James

Rampant Stagnation

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I have been having a hard time feeling good about writing. I don’t feel good about doing it and I don’t feel good about what I have written.

I know that sounds depressing, like each night I go to bed curled up in the fetal position rocking myself to sleep with the barrel of a gun in my mouth, but that’s not the case at all. It’s really more of a matter of “this is where I am at” kind of thing.  I am still in good spirits, I’m just not getting anything worth while done with regard to writing.

Is it writer’s block?

No, I don’t think so.   It’s more like writer’s laziness.  I still have plenty of ideas; it’s just that none of them seem fleshed out enough to start writing. For example: I have one where I think it would be cool to do a story about a terrorist attack against the Space Elevator .  I just love the idea of a carbon nanotube rope leading into space and being held in place by a geosynchronous mass.  A Space Elevator could lead to rapid and cost effective deployment of satellites and space missions, not to mention making the prospect of a trip into space within reach of regular Joes, like you and I.

But somehow it just ain’t sexy enough.  Maybe because it  isn’t really a story idea, but rather a setting with a vague concept.

It’s like I am still waiting for that big “Ah-ha!” idea to hit, and so far I’ve just got a bunch of maybes

I also get sidetracked very easily. I am now fighting an urge to code another video game.  I program games using Dark GDK, which works with Microsoft’s C++ Express.

I recently had the idea to take photos of my nephews in various kick and punch poses, and integrate these photos into sort of an 80’s style side-scroller “Super Mario” style game.  I think my Nephews would really enjoy playing as themselves in a tailor-made video game.

I so want to be the cool uncle who does stuff like that.

But that’s a huge commitment; probably at least 100 hours of programming time to get something worth playing. And then there is the risk that it may not be that cool to them.  The “I’m in the game factor” can only go so far when I’m also competing against the Wii.

Then I get ideas for the game like how I could somehow make it educational, but real subtly so they wouldn’t know. I could do something like putting Classical music in the game instead of the normal techno crap.  But I know making it educational is the deathblow to any video game.  Ask any kid what the top twenty video games are, and none of them will list anything even remotely close to “Math-blaster”.

I resolve to get something written today, even if it’s crap, but currently find myself looking at cutting edge video cards for a fantasy desktop computer build.

James

TO DO I Didn’t.

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I take a nap on Saturday at about 2:00 in the afternoon. Although, I guess you can’t really call it a nap when it lasts six hours.

I end up staying up all night and feeling pretty worthless, partially because I only did two out of twelve things on my weekend “TO DO” list (dishes and laundry), but particularly because I hadn’t written any fiction in a while.

I make a pot of coffee so I don’t go back to sleep, as sleeping would throw off my cycle off so bad that I might not make it into work on Monday.  It’s happened before.

I am about 2/3 of the way through the coffee when something, maybe the hallucinogenic mix of caffeine and over-tiredness, gives me an idea for a story. By 9:00 AM Saturday I’ve banged out a 2300 word short, which makes me feel a lot better about myself. I feel so good in fact that I continue to ignore my TO DO list, and get in two games of Starcraft II before I finally fall asleep about noon.

This time I keep the nap to a more respectable five hours and feel rested enough to mow my lawn (TO DO #3), but not quite good enough to weed trim (TO DO #4).

I read a bit of Terra Lemay’s live journal. She talks about how she keeps a log of the number of words she writes, and even has a cool little graph.  I find that to be a stellar idea and add a worksheet called “Word count” to the Excel writing file I have set up to track my submissions.

I enter in my one word count data point and wonder if this is going to be the type of thing I stick with, or if it will end up like the treadmill, a dusty embarrassing reminder of how, if I were a racehorse, I would be summed up as “good out of the gate but dies at the first turn”.

I feel pretty tired Sunday at midnight, but do manage to get in two more hours of StarcraftII before finally hitting the sack.

James