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Helpless in the face of luxury

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(I’m posting this to share my experience, not to solicit advice. If others want to share their experiences, too, I’d love it, but no advice, please.)

“It’s called willpower,” Colson Whitehead says in this PW article about… well, about many things, only one of which is the need some writers have of hiding themselves away in a hostage pit because they can’t handle distraction.

I’m one of those writers, and I freely admit that it embarrasses me. When the writing gets really difficult, I find it very difficult to focus on the problems and opportunities there, and all too easy to check my emails, or Twitter, or my LiveJournal friends list.

It used to be that I could hide at Starbucks. They charged for wi-fi and I’m too cheap to pay for my procrastination… then they backed down and offered it for free. Soon I was checking my emails, just in case something important came in, and are there new posts on LJ? Oh, what crazy shit has so-and-so said about books this time? An article on health care reform! It’s my duty as a citizen to stay up-to-date on politics, and besides I can read it while this funny video loads.

And don’t forget that I need things to blog about other than the usual I’m-tired-my-butt-itches crap. Links for the Randomness posts! Op-eds to disagree with! Movies to pick apart!

Except that I didn’t really need any of that. What I needed was time and quiet space to work. I don’t need a physically quiet space, but I do need one where my jump-around brain won’t latch onto something interesting and easy, like my Twitter timeline or the book I’m reading.

There was a Radiolab from a while back that talked about the bargains creative people have to make. It’s worth listening to, maybe while you’re doing dishes or something. For me, it’s helped me work out a new plan to increase my productivity: just like all those people who put A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE in their Netflix queue as something they’ll watch someday way out in the future while continually picking THE HANGOVER or DRIVE ANGRY for what they want to watch right now, it’s easy for me to plan virtue way in advance, but nearly impossible to grasp it in the moment. If I could be trusted to back up my own material manually, I’d crack the case of my laptop and pith my wi-fi connection. Since I can’t, I use Dropbox.

So I turn my laptop on the night before and set Mac Freedom for six hours. Maybe eight, but usually six.

That’s long enough for me to do my pages, then revise one of my old short stories for a self-pub collection I’m considering, and that’s it. I can reboot if I want to check my email at the library or whatever, or I can come straight home and wait for the timer to run out, at which point the household wi-fi handles all the backing up.

But that’s the best work around I can come up with at the moment. My brain has a hard time staying on task, and talking about willpower misses the point. If I’m hungry, tired, cold, or depressed, I can write. Adversity I can handle. What I have a hard time with, apparently, is fun, luxury, pleasure, and comfort. Those are the things that will ruin me.

Update: An article on the limits of willpower.

In which I work

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I’ve been a little unproductive lately. I’m not sure exactly why, but the pages have been difficult. Revisions have been difficult. Polishing has been difficult.

Yesterday I deliberately got a late start, set Freedom for 3 hours, and focused. It was good.

This morning I made sure to be up by 5 am. I set Freedom for the max: 8 hours. I hit the Starbucks and the library and tore into the notes (and polish) for Twenty Palaces.

And I finished more than half the book.

I dunno, you guys. Do you think the internet might by harming my productivity?

Progress on Twenty Palaces

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This morning I spent about half an hour on the phone with my agent going over her notes for Twenty Palaces aka “book zero” aka “the prequel.” They were mostly pretty straight forward and will not require much work to fix. One note, though, was a biggie. It gets at the heart of Ray’s actions and motivations in the last part of the book, and it’s yet another example of me failing at the craft because I wanted to make a point rather than keep to the characters.

Still, I took a long walk in the hot sun and I think I have a solid, sensible way to address it.

Now I just have to get to work. Good day.

Apparently, this is how I work:

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1. Shiny new idea!!! Must think about ways to make it good.

2. Think think think think.

3. I can’t stand the wait! Must start writing!

4. write write write

5. Holy crap, I’m just about at the end of the book and it’s only 34,000 words long? Why didn’t I think more before I started? If I don’t figure something out, I’m going to have to ditch all the work I’ve done on this shiny idea!

6. Think think think self-recrimination think think think.

7. Hey… what about [completely obvious thing]? Oh! Think think think think.

Spent the morning writing

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And you know what? It feels great.

I sorta expected my wife to push me to return to the convention today and make another go of it–socialize! network!–but no. Today has been work day, and I’m happy about it.

Anyway, regarding something said during a panel at Norwescon yesterday: Lou Anders was talking about ebooks, paper books, and pricing, and he said that one of the things keeping prices of paper books low was large print runs. If ebooks drive down sales of paper books, he’ll have to choose between a) smaller, more expensive print runs, which means higher prices, or b) the same old large runs of books, but with most of them stored in a warehouse and earning him a tax hit at the end of the year.

But I thought there was a c) that he was missing. If printers want to keep their businesses alive, they’re going to need to adapt to smaller print runs and downward price pressures. It seems like new technology would be the ticket here. (note: I know next to nothing about the current technology used by book printers, so clearly I’m typing this with my ass.)

I don’t mean printers in stores (although that would be tempting) because that takes forever. We’re a long way from having one or more of those in a store, handling large numbers of books at once.

But I suspect the price pressure from ebooks is going to hit printing presses especially hard. Is anyone familiar with the current state of their technology? So much has changed with printing at home in the last ten years (although obviously that’s very different) has book printing tech been changing too?

5 Things Make a Post

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1) I have three things left to do before I send Twenty Palaces to my agent: clean up some formatting issues like chapter headings, spellcheck, and check every instance of “him” in the script to see if I should have changed it to “me” when I went changed the book from a third person pov to a first person pov. So incredibly dull but I’m really catching some embarrassing errors, like “I jumped to his feet.” Oh well.

2) Here’s my Norwescon schedule:

Friday: Whatever I want.
Saturday: Whatever I want.
Sunday: Stay home and hang out with my son.

Hah! I’ll be there as a regular attendee, mainly to look around and see whatever this is to be seen. It’ll be my first convention, so I don’t expect to know anyone. If you’re going to be there and you see me, please feel free to say hello. I look like this. Also, I have a terrible memory for faces and names, so don’t be offended if it takes me a couple of seconds to “place” you.

3) Seattle is enduring the coldest April on record. I’m sorta sick of it.

4) Revisions on Twenty Palaces have taken control of my life. I can’t wait to send them off, if only so I can go back to responding to comments promptly (as opposed to passive-aggressively complaining on my blog, like this post) and reading books. Honestly, I can’t wait to spend some hours every day reading.

5) This NY Times article (only available if you haven’t used up your 20 articles/month) isn’t the first time I’ve heard that fidgeting has a powerful effect on weight gain and loss. I’ve been using my standing desk more often (thanks to the Topricin my wife just bought me) but I attribute most of the weight I’ve lost recently to the fact that I’m getting the sleep I need. I still have a long way to go, of course.

A quick note about Twenty Palaces books

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For a while I’ve been working on a project I haven’t wanted to be specific about, but what the hell. The deal is, I’ve been revising the Twenty Palaces prequel (cleverly titled Twenty Palaces) in the hopes of…

Actually, I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it. When I review what’s coming up this summer, I don’t really see a window when I could release it independently (unless I was intent on messing up Del Rey’s plans for the summer–more on that later). Maybe this fall?

Anyway, I’ve been working like crazy on the book, cleaning it up and fixing the story. The scene where Ray creates the ghost knife! His first meeting with Annalise! What exactly he did that made her hate him sooooo much!

It’s been fun, and it’s been instructional to see how screwed up this book really is. Sorry, everyone I ever queried about this! At some point, I’ll have to write a new story of how I got an agent and landed my contract, because now that I’ve seen the book that didn’t sell, I know I’ve been telling the story all wrong.

Today

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Today, while I worked, my wife and son rode their bikes more than fifty miles. They’re about to collapse into sleep, while I’m feeling restless. I want to work more on my book, but I know I should go to sleep.

Just thinking about it gives me a weird feeling I can’t quite articulate.

Five Things Make a Friday Post

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1) Quick question: Should I do another August book giveaway to promote Circle of Enemies? I’m not sure it did me any good last time, as far as drawing in new readers, but it was nice to give away cool stuff.

2) My wife and son are spending the day on their bikes, riding the Burke-Gilman trail as far as they can go. That means that, instead of spending the day writing at a Starbucks and the library, I’m going to work at home, sans interruptions. Kitchen floor: swept.

3) What have I been working on? I should be able to let you know very soon.

4) Taxes are nearly done. At this point it’s about printing them, e-filing and transferring the money to the correct account. Also, I was a complete idiot about them this year. Here’s why: I’d been stressing over the bill. Now, we had the money in savings, but I was stressing over it because it would cut quite deeply into our cushion. It was only last night, late, that I remembered that I had a CD with no early-withdrawal penalties set aside specifically for taxes–and it has triple what I need to cover the bill. Phew!

5) I’m not gluten-free anymore. I did lose a little weight, but it was mainly because we didn’t have food available when I was hungry. Me with low blood sugar? Not a good husband. Not a good parent. Besides, it’s unsustainable and unhealthy. Also, it didn’t stop the allergic reactions on my face. (This is an FYI: no diet advice, please.)

Yesterday was one of those difficult days

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Sometimes being a writer is easy and fun. You know what comes next in the story and you’re excited to get it all down, all the nuance and confusion, all the sudden unexpected turns of plot that seem just right.

I don’t have a lot of those days, myself. I suspect I struggle more than most writers; I’m certainly slower. I don’t talk about it online as much as I used to but yesterday, as I was doing some revisions, I realized a major complex scene was completely wrong and ridiculous. It turns out I’d established a much easier solution to the Problem At Hand early in the book, and why were they going to so much trouble when they already knew the easiest possible solution?

Discovering this sort of plot hole so late in the process fills me with despair.

A week or so ago a bunch of Tor authors, including Beth Bernobich, were doing a chat on Twitter, and I offered up a question that I thought the readers might be interested in: paraphrasing myself because of poor memory, I asked: “What’s the most surprising thing that’s different now that you’re a published author?”

All three writers gave pretty much the same answer (“There’s an awful lot of additional work involved!”) but for me it would be different. For me, the surprising change is that, as far as the writing goes, nothing is any better.

In non-writing aspects of my life, things are absolutely better. It’s great to have readers, and incredibly smart pros offering me revision notes, and to see my books in stores, and the money, too. All of that is better.

But in terms of sitting down at my computer and putting words on the page, there’s no extra confidence, no sense of validation, no ease or comfort. If anything, the struggle has extra headaches added to it: deadlines, personal and professional expectations, so on and so on.

So this morning, instead of getting out of bed, I laid there under the covers for an extra hour, thinking about the characters, what resources they had, what they needed and what they would never, ever do. I think I have the scene ready, and it’ll be better (not so “Hollywood” if you know what I mean) and shorter, too. What’s more, it’s a less tragic ending than I’ve been writing, which makes a nice change.

I’ll write it out later today or tomorrow. I’m nearly done with this thing (which for me means… what? two more weeks of work?) and then I can go back to something more fun. And hopefully I won’t have to freak out on Twitter again.