Tag: procrastination

Juggling projects isn’t a good antidote to procrastination

Yeah, the title basically says it all.  I’m working on Genesis Earth 5.0 and Into the Nebulous Deep 1.0, and while I’m doing really well in the one, I’m not keeping up so much in the other.

First, Genesis Earth. Since I finished the previous draft more than a year ago, I thought I’d find a lot of problems, especially with my prose.  Instead, while a lot of the sentence/paragraph level stuff needs tightening, I’m finding to my surprise that the writing isn’t all that bad.

Today, I breezed through over 8k words, and that between running, donating plasma, FHE, and a bunch of other distractions.  If I put even a moderate amount of effort into this, I can have it finished before next week.  That’s good, because I had an agent at World Fantasy request to see it; if I can put it on her desk before Thanksgiving, that can only be a good thing.

But as for my other project, ITND 1.0…yeah, it’s not coming along as well as I’d hoped.  The reasons are stupid, too–mostly just lost momentum and writer’s avoidance.

Right now, I’m stuck in a scene where I’m trying to build romantic tension between two characters.  I feel like I have a decent handle on who they are…but for some reason, it feels a little too shallow.  Maybe that’s because I’m still discovering who these characters are, maybe it’s because I tend to go deeper than most–or maybe it’s just because it’s the kind of scene that’s hard to get into, but once you’re in, it really flows.  I just haven’t forced myself to write it–maybe once I do, these problems will go away.

I do feel like I’m doing a pretty good job setting up the story.  Last week, I ran the first chapter through my online writing group, and while it definitely had issues, everyone said that they would keep reading if this was a book they’d picked up off the shelf.  That tells me that at least I’m starting in the right place.

The characters, though, and the conflict…I worry that it’s not as deep or as hard-hitting as the first book, Mercenary Savior. I skimmed over that book just a couple days ago before sending it out to a friend from World Fantasy, and…wow.  I don’t want to brag, but I think I did a good job with that one.  A damn good job.

So can I pull off that kind of depth and impact in the second book?  That’s the fear, that it won’t live up to the first one.  And certainly, the rough draft won’t be as good–not by a long shot.  But the subsequent drafts?  I don’t know.

Maybe I should just write and worry about it later, though.  When I was in the middle of Worlds Away from Home, I constantly thought to myself how crappy the draft was.  When I got to the end, though, and looked back on how far the story had come, I realized that it had potential to be at least as powerful as Mercenary Savior–perhaps even more.  And to be honest, that came as quite a surprise.

I don’t know.  I hope I’m not just deceiving myself–it can be hard, when you’re toiling in obscurity, to separate the truth from your own self-deception.  But for now, things are going well–I’m making good progress in Genesis Earth, and while Into the Nebulous Deep has lost a lot of momentum, all it really needs is a good solid block of undistracted writing to get it going again.  Life is good.

Dog dead workdays and killing your characters

This post is going to be super quick because I’m dead tired.

Due to power surges and computer glitches, I had to work overtime today and yesterday at the warehouse, so I really haven’t had time for anything except writing and a little socializing at Leading Edge.  However, things are going well.  I’ll get the extra hours off on Friday, which means a big chunk of free time to do whatever I want.

I broke 3k words today in Mercenary Savior. It was awesome.  I love revision–taking something good and making it really shine.  Just hit some major climaxes and killed off a side character, which is always exhilarating if you do it right.

As a footnote to that, I’m reading George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, and I just reached the part where he kills off the first major character.  What’s more, he was my favorite character in the book so far!!! AAUGGH!  Why, Mr. Martin?  Why???  Yet I must confess, killing him was necessary to take the story to the next level of awesomeness <grumble>.

I’ve been thinking a lot about killing characters recently, and I figure the best way to do it is to recognize that everyone has to go sometime (in real life if not always in fantasy), and to write accordingly.  We tend to ignore our own mortality, when really, there can be so much meaning to it.  After all, to die for something is to make the ultimate sacrifice.  If you make sure your characters die for a reason–either heroic or tragic (or both)–then I think that’s the key to make it work.

The Book Academy Conference at UVU was great; I’ll do a writeup on that soon, probably over the weekend.  I probably won’t post the audio files, but if you want them, just email me and I’ll send you the link.

I’ve been waking up early each day this week, and it’s been great. I’m so much more productive in the morning, writing wise.  It’s like a computer: when you first boot up, your desktop is so clean. With only the startup programs running in the background, everything feels uncluttered.

At the end of the day, though, it’s the exact opposite. You’ve got maybe a dozen applications running, and it’s all too easy to get distracted by switching from one to the other. What’s more, you just don’t have the energy to get things done.

The downside (if you can call it that) is that it’s only midnight and already I’m about to collapse.  Oh well–guess I’ll just have to go to bed earlier.

In closing, let me leave you with this really weird, slightly disturbing anime clip I found on youtube of a vegetable committing seppuko. I guess it has something to do with the rest of the post, seeing as I went on a tangent about killing characters. Anyhow, this is the friendship among vegetables…

Third Quarter 2010

This might be more than a little dorky, but I keep track of how much I write each day in a giant spreadsheet and do a blog post at the end of each quarter summing up how things went.  It’s October already, so this is the Q3 report.  Here goes:

In July, I was working part time at the call center and donating plasma while looking for work.  I look back on it now and it seems that I had a ton of free time, and perhaps that shows in the way my productivity climbed way up in the first part of the month…but then it fell back down and never picked up again.

Part of that might have to do with the difficulty of the story.  Around the middle of July, I wrote through my half-finished draft of Worlds Away from Home and started drafting entirely new material.  It was my first time composing a new story in over a year, and I found it pretty tough.  At one point, I had to bike down the Provo river trail and write on a park bench just to get the creative juices to flow.  It was difficult.

The first big dip in the beginning of August came because of my day trip to Saint George to interview Dave Wolverton.  That threw a fairly decent kink in my writing routine.  The second dip towards the end of August came when I was between projects (Worlds Away from Home and Mercenary Savior).

I’m not sure why I was never able to break 20k words per week, or why most of the time I was writing below 15k.  I got a new job in mid-September, but my writing productivity actually increased.  It’s frustrating, because I wish every day could be a 4k or 5k day, where everything is flowing and the story is awesome.  Blarg.

So anyway, with World Fantasy coming up in just a month (yikes!), my goal is to finish Mercenary Savior before the conference, which means I’ll have to do about 55k words in the next 25 days.  That comes to 2.2k per day, but I want to push that up to about 3k if I can.  No more Princess Maker or late night Halo!

Towards that end, I’m going to try out an experiment.  Starting tonight, I’m going to go to bed before midnight and wake up before 5:00 am in order to get in a couple hours of writing before work.  I hate coming home after a long day and thinking “man, I’ve still got to put in today’s writing.”

I’m hoping that this way, I’ll be able to get 1.5k/2k done in the morning, and another 1k or so in the evening.  I’m also hoping that this will keep me from wasting too much time, since I usually spend a couple hours past midnight each night procrastinating going to bed.  Not a sustainable way to live when you work 8 to 5.

One more thing.  I submitted to quite a few places during the last quarter, and while I generally got rejections from everyone, I did get my first request for a full manuscript (technically June 29, but close enough).  So things are looking up.

And that’s basically how things have been going these past three months: not too great, but not too bad either.  And now, before I bore any more of you to death with this post, I’m going to call it a night.  Take care and keep being awesome!

Confessions of a delinquent blogger

Man, so much has been happening, but now that I’m working an eight to five job, I never have the time to blog about it.  It’s 2am and I’m running on only four hours of sleep from the previous night.  Oh well, it’s a weekend.  Here goes.

I passed the 50k mark for the rewrite of Mercenary Savior. I’m surprised how much I’m changing the draft.  I’m especially finding a lot of slow chapter beginnings and thinly veiled expository lumps–not of scene descriptions so  much as  worldbuilding.  Gotta remember the iceberg concept (to only include about ten percent or less of your worldbuilding in your story’s narrative).

I interviewed a few more people for the article on the “class that wouldn’t die.” Good stuff, all around.  I met with Cara O’Sullivan today, and she had a very interesting comment about why there are so many LDS writers of science fiction and fantasy.

In her opinion, Mormon literary culture tends to push the more talented writers into sf&f because of the extreme lack of freedom in other genres of LDS writing.  In mainstream and literary LDS fiction, there are so many expectations for the writers: for example, that the story will have a clear message, or that it will contain a certain brand of Mormon sentimentalism, etc.  In science fiction and fantasy, OTOH, there’s much more freedom; therefore, LDS writers tend to gravitate that way.

I also had a phone interview for the wilderness job last Thursday.  I think it went well, but we’ll find out at the end of the month, I suppose.  Questions that caught me off guard include: “how do you define success?” and “how would you respond to something you heard secondhand about an employee from another shift?”

Finally, I recently got hooked on an old abandonware DOS game called Princess Maker 2. It is so freaking awesome. Basically, you are the father of this ten year old girl, and you have to raise her from childhood to adulthood.

There are so many possible ways to do this: build her fighting skills and send her on adventures, build her artistic skills and have her win dancing/painting contests, build her refinement and send her to court to build her social reputation, etc etc.  There are over 70 different possible endings, including some really weird and crazy ones!

And yes, I know, it seems strange that I’d go for a game this girly–but dude, you have no idea until you try it out.  It’s like being a father, but with magic and knights and dragons and stuff!  So totally awesome!

The flipside is that I spent almost the entire day playing this game.  Yeah…still got in 2.5k words, but I was hoping to put in somewhere around 6k or 7k.  Man, I haven’t been this addicted since Alpha Centauri. Will it last?  I don’t think it will, but then again, I don’t know.  The bigger question is whether this is a game I can play in moderation (like Star Control II).  I certainly hope it is, but I don’t know.

In the meantime, I’ve got five weeks to write 70k words.  Lets go!

Bed intruder song بالعربي

I can’t believe I just did this.

An Arabic speaker asked, in a youtube comment, for a translation of the recent Antoine Dodson rapist song meme.  Since I didn’t have anything better to do was already busy procrastinating, I went ahead and made a rough translation.  Here it is:

ومن الواضح أن لدينا في لينكولن بارك مغتصب
انه يتسلق في شباككم انه يخطف اهلكم حتى
محاول ان يغتصبهم فتحتاجوا إلى إخفاءوا أطفالكم ، إخفاءوا زوجاتكم
وإخفاءوا أزواجكم لان ثم يغتصبون جميع الاشخاص هنا
أنت لست بحاجة إلى أن تأتي وتعترف ، سنبحث عنك
سنوجدك, سنوجدك
فيمكنك ان تسار وتقول ذلك ،يا وحش
عندنا تي–شيرتك وبصماتك الاصابع وخيرها
انت غبي كثير ,ولا غبي كثير, انجد
حصل الرجل بعيدا متارك وراءه أدلة
أنا تعرضت لهجوم من قبل احمق في المشاريع
غبي غبي غبي غبي

And if you’re not confused enough already, here’s the song:

Now excuse me while I start being productive for a change.  Ahem.

Why am I so #$%! unproductive?

I don’t know why, but it’s a lot harder for me to write the first draft of something than it is to revise it.  Finishing my last novel was much, much harder than any of the projects before it, and my productivity is still suffering because of it.

The root problem, I suppose, is procrastination.  While I was writing my last novel, things got really tough towards the end, and I found myself procrastinating much more than I should have.  That led me to develop a dangerous habit.  Right now, as I move into the fourth revision of Mercenary Savior, I find that I’m still procrastinating even when the work is much easier (and more enjoyable).

Or is that really it?  Maybe I wasn’t procrastinating when I was writing my last novel–maybe I was taking frequent breaks to “fill the well.” Except now, those breaks have turned into full-scale procrastination, and I’m finding it very hard to get back on a regular schedule.

I’ve been doing about 1k to 3k words per day this past week, but I feel like I should be doing around 4k or 5k.  A lot of the time, I put off even starting until around 5pm, and stay up until late hours of the night when I should be sleeping.  It’s not a sustainable schedule, and I know it.

Part of it might have to do with the fact that I’m back at my parents’ house right now, taking a short break before returning to Utah.  I guess I should just stop worrying and enjoy my time here–I’m still doing well, overall, and there’s more to life than writing all the time.  Still, it’s maddening to feel unproductive.  Blarg.

Other than that, things are going great.  I’ve been spending a lot of quality time with my dad, as well as relaxing and taking time off from other pursuits.  Saw Inception and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and loved them both.  Read a couple of good books, too.  Life is good.

In unrelated news, my sister is about to have a baby.  Everyone in the family is WAY excited.  We love you, Kate and Danny!

Most and least productive days

Man, I don’t know how it happened, but I did not get a word in in my novel today.  No, wait, I know how it happened: my schedule looked like a piece of moldy Swiss cheese.

First, there was work, then plasma, then a few hours of free time followed by an interview for an internship with the Utah County Democrats (which went extremely well–more later), then Leading Edge, and then Dr. Strangelove.

So yeah.  No writing, unfortunately.  Gotta work on the self discipline.

But as far as figuring out what the heck I’m going to do with the next 6 months to 1 year of my life, today was remarkably productive.  I recently applied for a paid internship with the Utah County Democrats and the interview was today.  I think it went really well, too–the board members seemed quite impressed.  I was dressed up, showed up early, and answered every question by pointing to something specific from my work or volunteer experience.  Finally, a job that I’m actually qualified for!

Honestly, when I went, in, I wasn’t too sure if this was something I was interested in doing.  I didn’t have a very positive experience in DC with the internship, and the back and forth of partisan politics really grates on me.  However, there seems to be a big difference between national politics and local politics–local stuff seems much more down to earth, with less of the rhetoric and bickering.  A lot more hands-on, grassroots kind of stuff, without the constant abstractions or the hyperfocus on career priorities that turned me off so much to Washington.

Politically, I’m currently an independent, leaning more to the right.  Surprisingly, that seems to put me in good company with the Utah County Democrats.  One of the guys on the board described them as center / right of center–basically, a moderating influence in the face of right wing nutcases like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh that are so deplorably common out here.

The internship pays a $2,000 stipend for 4 months of work: 10 hours per week at first, moving up to 20 hours per week closer to November.  For this part of the country, that’s decent money.  Plus, if the candidate I work for gets elected, it may open job opportunities in Salt Lake City.

The catch?  That I’ll no longer be able to be a political independent–that I’ll be picking sides, in such a way that the other side may never consider me credible again.  At least, that’s how it works in DC: there’s Team Republican and Team Democrat, and if you work for any organization even loosely affiliated with one of the teams, no-one on the other side will ever have anything to do with you.

But…then again, that may not be so bad.  I don’t agree with everything the national Democratic Party stands for, but neither do the Utah Valley Democrats.  In fact, the Democrats here mirror my political views almost perfectly.  Plus, I suppose it’s easier to change things once you’re on the inside.

I don’t know.  I’ll definitely have to think about it.

So yeah, as unproductive as things were writing-wise, they were actually quite productive in other ways that mattered.  It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the next couple weeks; I sense more than a few major decisions coming up (gah!).

Weird slump

Man, I’m going through a really weird slump these days.  Yesterday, I wrote 2.5k words, and today, I only wrote 1.5k words–this, in spite of the fact that I’m only working about three hours a day.  It’s kind of frustrating.

Maybe it’s the fact that I’m right at the end of this novel.  I’ve got 10k words to go, only 12 scenes, but I’m kind of burned out on it.  I already know it’s going to need another revision after this one, and while I’m trying hard to fix things, it’s more on the overall story level, not on the detailed polish level, where I usually thrive.

The real truth, though, is probably that my days are split up so weird.  I work from three to six, and most days I have obligations in the evening (Leading Edge, Institute, FHE, etc).  To add to that, Tuesdays and Thursdays I donate plasma in the mornings, which usually takes up a couple hours.  When you’re already in the mood to procrastinate, it doesn’t help it when your free time comes in 2 to 3 hour chunks.

Oh well.  At least I’m still producing.

CONduit starts tomorrow, and I am totally stoked.  Last year was excellent, and I’m looking forward very much to this year as well.  I don’t think there’ll be too many agents and editors there, but there will be a ton of other writers, most of whom I expect I’ll see at other major conventions across the country.

Speaking of conventions, I’m thinking very seriously about attending Dragoncon this year.  When I spoke with Dan Wells at the Provo Library event a couple weeks ago, he told me that DragonCon is going to be big for writers this year, on account of Worldcon being in Australia and World Fantasy being in Ohio.

I’ve got a friend in Atlanta who can put me up and/or has friends who can as well, so housing shouldn’t be too difficult.  My Dad’s giving me the old Buick, and it’s got lots of space, so I could probably fit four or five people in it.  If we took turns driving, we could probably make it out there nonstop, and membership only costs like $80.  At ten tanks of gas split by five people, plus maybe $100 for food and other expenses, it seems like a pretty good deal.  Anyone interested?

If I’m going to Dragoncon this year, I suppose I should make it my goal to get Mercenary Savior polished and ready for it.  That should be enough time–a month or two to let it sit, then a couple months to polish it.  Definitely doable.

In the meantime, I’ll be finishing this draft this weekend, inshallah.  I’d like to finish it on the bus to Salt Lake, but I doubt that’ll be the case.  10k words is a lot of writing, and I’ll be busy all day at the con.  I’ll let you know how it goes, though–stay tuned!