progress

Willpower is not a virtue

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And by “not a virtue” I don’t mean that it’s a vice or it’s something awful. I mean, it’s not a wonderful thing that people have or don’t have.

Okay, so, I’m an NPR-listener. Yeah, I often hear this expert or that being interviewed… so many of them that they sometimes run together. Sometimes I’ll hear something that sticks with me and I have to go back to find it again. Like this interview with David Eagleman.

What Eagleman said, for those who don’t want to click through to the show, is that our brains aren’t this unified thing. We, ourselves, aren’t a unified identity. Different parts of our brain want us to do different things: Lose weight, exercise, sleep in, work hard, order the fries, watch that TV show… We’re full of conflicting impulses.

This is certainly true of me. I have long battled with myself over all sorts of indulgences, and different parts of me fight in different ways. When I get up early to work on my book, I feel a sense of accomplishment. When faced with the opportunity to eat something I shouldn’t, I feel a sense hopeless despair.

And in recent years, it’s been a tossup which part of my brain[1] would win, except for the despair. Hopeless despair has been a trump card in my life; I have a hard time beating it.

However! Lately I have stopped looking at myself as a complete whole. Lately I have tried to recognize that there are several different personalities living inside me, and that my brain plays dirty tricks on my to make me do things I shouldn’t. In essence, I’m accepting the fact that my own brain is often my enemy.

I’ve talked about this before: It can be hard to say no to food when the despair hits. It can be hard to get up early to work when I know I need sleep, too. But for the past few weeks, I have not been using willpower to win these internal battles. It might look like willpower, but it’s not. What I’ve been doing is keeping my goals in the forefront of my mind and treating all impulses that get in the way as an enemy attack. It’s not willpower to refuse to go over to my enemy camp.

It’s been working, too. For me, I mean. I don’t know how well this would work for anyone else.

[1] If you’re thinking of “parts of my brain” in an anatomical sense, you’re being too literal. I’m talking about competing impulses.

One Thing You Shouldn’t Say To A Writer

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“I’ll never buy one of your books!”

Seriously. Don’t say this.

It used to be that, whenever authors went online, people told them “Be careful what you say! Don’t be political! Don’t be controversial! You’ll drive away readers!” And people believed that, too, until it became clear that it just wasn’t true.

The truth is that most writers don’t care about some stranger who pops up and swears they won’t give us money. That just means they’re part of the largest set of human beings on the planet: My non-fans.

What’s more, it just makes a reader look silly. So if you are never going to read some particular author’s work again, go for it. Hey, blog about it or Twitter about it with your friends. But don’t bother telling the author, because they don’t care.

In other news, life has been determined to interfere with my revisions on A Blessing of Monsters but I’m making headway. In fact, I’d be nearly finished with them right now if I hadn’t come up with a startling new idea that really pulls things together.

Tomorrow is going to be another big working day. I’m tempted to go on an internet fast so I can wrap this sucker up.

I invent a new unit of measurement

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I call it the “bullshit.” As in: “I did one bullshit worth of work on my revisions today.”

Which isn’t fair to my revisions, because I found a minor inconsistency that I needed to hunt down and fix, and that stupid crap takes time. I would have had to fix this at some point, right?

Still, it’s frustrating to have this dumb stuff take so much time especially since it means I can only finish bullshit.

At first I was all “It’s Pixel-Stained Techno-Peasant Wretch Day again?”

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Because I didn’t have free fiction set to give away. What can I say? My son’s “novel” isn’t finished yet and most of my short fiction is already for sale as ebooks, either on my online store (which is still not working ten days after I asked for help from Shopp tech support) or B&N/Amazon.

Then I realized I’m still giving away free chapter of my novels. Chapter one of Child of Fire is here.

Okay, maybe that doesn’t really count. Go easy on me here, I’m behind on my current book.

Rental car acquired

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In a few hours my son and I will be taking off for Surrey and the Pokemon Regionals there. I won’t be dropping by bookstores or meeting folks: this trip is about my son and his fun. I do plan to work on my book while my son plays.

Anyway, progress on A BLESSING OF MONSTERS has been tough lately… right up until yesterday, when I had a great day. Protip: It’s hard to be motivated to write when you know every word is just going to be cut in the second draft. Yesterday I reached a part I knew I would keep, and things magically became easier.

With luck I’ll have time to write a bit later so I won’t lose the whole day. But tomorrow should be better.

In which I make progress

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I got to spend some time with A Blessing of Monsters today. I wrote about 1200 words, then wrote 100 anti-words. I wanted to do more at the end of the day but the scene I was working on had gone all wrong and my kid wouldn’t give me the space to think about it.

At some point in the day I even came up with a decentish title, but I didn’t write it down and now I’ve forgotten it. Ah well. It was probably brilliant.

Anyway, it felt good to take hold of the book again, even it wasn’t a firm hold. We’ll see what comes tomorrow.

Ray Lilly vs Tyrion Lannister

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Yesterday I wrote and turned in the Suvudu.com Cage Match between Tyrion and Ray, and I think you guys will be a little surprised at what I did with it. It was long, though.

Anyway, to my surprise it took me all day. I gave up one of my prime writing days for it, a day when I’m supposed to be finishing 2K words on A Blessing Of Monsters, so that’s bad.

And after this next cage match wraps up, I’m going to be turning off comments on the blog globally. The spam is just wasting my time and having my time wasted drives me crazy.

This blog post will not change your life.

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Ever since I returned home from dealing with my father-in-law’s death my WIP, A Blessing of Monsters, has been sorta stalled out. I’ve been making progress, but it’s been slow going, not nearly as steady as December and January.

Today I’ll be powering up Mac Freedom and going offline for most of the day. I just discovered a plot hole in the story (stupid magic spells) and I can’t just make a note to myself and go back to it later. The change means the relationships between all the characters have to change, and those relationships are what the book is about. So, vomit draft revision, which I hate but end up doing every time.

Not only has my writing been struggling, but the funeral caused a long delay in replacing my son’s eyeglasses. Folks might remember the end of last year when I put Lord of Reavers on sale through my site to help offset the costs. Thank you, everyone who bought a copy; I hope you enjoyed the story. With luck, he’ll have settled on a pair of frames he likes and I can post a pic by the end of the month.

I also have to do that Seattle thing where I wear shorts and an ugly sweater when I go for my walk. The landlord hasn’t gotten the washing machine fixed, and we’re coming up on… what? two weeks since we got back? I’m sure there’s a law stating when a washing machine has to be replaced or whatever, but I’d rather wait for a repair. Whenever we get something new around here, it’s the cheapest possible thing and doesn’t work well. Or it’s smaller. Or it’s just generally not good.

So we’re just looking at laundromats and laundry services, and I’m out of long pants to wear.

Finally, the Cage Match between Ray Lilly and Anasûrimbor Kellhus ends today at 5pm EST. I’ll be offline most of the day and will probably not see the numbers until after it’s over. It would be nice to see Ray vs. Tyrion, but if not I’ll be glad to work on my new book this weekend instead. And I’m glad the comment section has settled down and gotten less nasty.

But if Ray wins, I’ll bring in Annalise for round 2, and I’ll make the writeup lighter in tone.

And now I’m out of here. Hope you guys have a great day.

Two blog posts in one day??

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Unthinkable!!

Actually, I had no plans at all to write in my blog again, but fate intervened. Today was supposed to be a “large goal” day, but instead I hit the small goal only.

To explain: I try to do about a thousand words a day as my small goal, but on days like today, when I have no other commitments during the morning and afternoon, I slip out of the house as early as possible and try to do twice my usual goal. At least. This helps make up for the days when I typically can’t write at all.

However, today I was hit with a really bad histamine reaction. To what, I don’t know, but the itching was really bad and it slowly spread down my arms and then down to my knees.

This happens every once in a while, but we’ve been unable to find the trigger. It wasn’t clothes, it probably wasn’t food, and…

Really, what it seemed related to was sweat. I had started to move my body a bit, and the sweat on my torso started itching. From there it got worse and worse.

At one point I had my wife take a picture with the idea of posting it, but it was… er… too much. I didn’t want to gross anyone out.

My skin has mostly settled down now (thanks, Benadryl!), but it’s past time for me to take another long walk. I’m hoping I can make it home without peeling my own skin off.

On obsessing over email and twitter

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It’s amazing how deep I can get into checking email over and over, not to mention refreshing my Twitter client. The deadly thing about Twitter is that it contains links. Many, many links of tremendous interest, and before I know it, an hour has passed.

With emails, it’s more complicated, but there are some things I need to respond to right away and I feel guilty about waiting. These are not good choices.

Anyway I did a little test: I promised myself I would do 300 words before I checked email again. I turned off my wifi, wrote 500 words instead, then got back online.

No emails had come in. On Twitter, I had 11 new tweets, two as part of a conversation I was having. It took me all of three minutes to get through them, and I was ready for another 500 words.

In this way, empires are built.