self discipline – One Thousand And One Parsecs

2019-07-25 Newsletter Author’s Note

This author’s note originally appeared in the July 25th edition of my author newsletter. To sign up for my newsletter, click here.

So Mrs. Vasicek has been sick with the flu for the past two weeks. She’s getting better, but we’ve both been less than productive, and any semblance of a daily routine has basically been shot. Turns out that having your wife around all day is a very distracting thing. Who would have thought?

All of this has got me thinking about habits and routines: how important they are, how to make them work, and how not to get discouraged. I’ve been self-employed basically since graduating from college nine years ago. I’ve worked a lot of side jobs, but nothing that I’d call a “day job,” at first because there weren’t any (graduating in a major recession is tough), and later on because I wanted to focus on my writing career—which so far, has been working out.

When you’re self-employed, you basically have to make your own daily routine, because there isn’t anyone else to make it for you. A lot of people struggle with this, especially after quitting their day jobs. If you aren’t careful, you’ll find yourself sitting on the floor in your underwear eating peanut butter straight from the jar (not that I have any experience with this, of course). But if you buckle down and push through that phase, you learn a few things.

First, you learn that even the best routines always fall apart at some point. It’s just the nature of the beast. The circumstances of life are always changing, which means that you’ve got to be constantly adapting to them. Hanging on doggedly to a favorite routine just for the routine’s sake is setting yourself up for failure. Goals are a mean to an end, not an end in themselves.

Second, guilt is not a very good positive motivator. It’s helpful to keep you from doing the things you shouldn’t be doing, but it’s a horrible way to get yourself to do the things you should. I’ve known a lot of writers who constantly beat themselves up for not meeting their writing goals, to the point where it’s practically a full-time job. For a while, I’ve been there myself. Not good.

The best way to make yourself more productive is to find ways to make it more enjoyable. Personally, I find that writing is most enjoyable when I’m immersed in the story that I’m trying to tell. Sometimes, the best way to get immersed is to take a break, and sometimes, the best way is just to sit down and write. It takes a while to figure out what works. I’m still trying to figure it out better.

Third, when making a new routine, make sure to keep your eye on the end goal. What good is eating an elephant one bite at a time if you’re eating the wrong elephant? That’s why, when your routine starts to fall apart, it may be better to rethink what you’re trying to accomplish and rebuild it from the ground up, even though it’s easier just to tweak it.

That’s where I’m at right now. I could just push my deadlines back a couple weeks and try to go back to how things were going, but there’s a lot of other business related stuff on my plate that I’ve been neglecting, and I get the impression that the best way to move forward with writing is to prioritize that other stuff and get it out of the way.

A new daily writing approach

So last summer, I decided to stop tracking my daily writing word count. There were a lot of reasons for this, mostly having to do with the way it led me to focus on the wrong things and beat myself up in ways that were ultimately counterproductive.

The trouble is, I’d structured almost my whole writing life around keeping track of word counts. Without an easy way to measure my daily progress, it was really hard to know whether I was being productive or not. As a consequence, I didn’t push myself as hard as I could have, and ended up bouncing around between projects without really finishing anything.

Well, I think I’ve figured out a solution to that. Instead of tracking daily word count, I’m going to use a countdown timer to make sure I spend at least X number of hours each day writing new words. Whenever I take a break to do something else, even if it’s writing related, I’ll pause the timer, then start it up again when I get back to writing.

I tried it out last week, using a program called TimeLeft. It worked out pretty well, I think. Definitely gave me a lot more insight into my writing process. I think it will help me to get some good habits back, like writing in the morning and staying focused for longer. It will also help to have something I can accomplish each day. It doesn’t matter how much I write, just that I spend the time actually writing.

To start out, I’m going to shoot for four hours of daily writing time. It might not sound like a lot, and without a day job perhaps it isn’t, but I think it’s a good starting point. Then again, if the guys at Writing Excuses are right, I might end up scaling back a bit. Either way, I’ll probably end up adjusting that goal over the next few weeks.

Other writing stuff I’d like to figure out this year:

How to juggle two projects at the same time. I’m kind of doing it now with The Sword Keeper and Star Wanderers: Benefactor, but it’s tough to keep one of them from getting the short end of the stick.
How to go for a week without checking my ebook sales. Kris Rusch had a really good post on this last week. I’ve tried it before, but I always end up breaking down and checking. Well, no longer!
How to write good short stories. I think I’ve put it off for too long. Yes, novels and short stories are different arts, but they’re both writing, and I’m a writer. Time to learn.

That’s just about it for now. Hopefully, it will turn out well.

Some thoughts on internet access, self-discipline, and productivity

As many of you probably know, for the past four months I’ve been living in a small Georgian village in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. It isn’t as remote as some places in this country (like Tusheti, where some people still practice pagan animal sacrifices), but my internet access has been limited, especially compared to the 24/7 access I had back in the States.

I knew that coming in, and was actually looking forward to it. I had the option to buy a USB stick from the phone company that would give me service, but I wanted to experience living off the grid for a while to see if that would increase my writing productivity. Long story short: it didn’t.

In order to use the internet, I have to take a marshrutka (small passenger bus) about half an hour to Kutaisi, where the most convenient place to get wifi is McDonalds. I can usually go for two or three days without internet, but so many other things in my life (work, family, publishing) are tied up in it that it’s not a good idea to go much longer.

Since each trip takes a huge chunk out of my day, it’s become a lot harder to keep and maintain any sort of momentum on any of my writing projects. Also, cutting out the internet hasn’t increased my self-discipline at all, it’s just driven me to find different ways to distract myself.

In the end, I think I actually would have been more productive if I’d ponied up the 70 GEL and bought a USB stick from the phone company. I certainly would have saved a lot of money, considering all that I’ve spent on these trips to Kutaisi. But at least I’ve learned a few things from the experience.

First, I’ve learned that all of the high-priority things that I absolutely must do on the internet only amount to an hour or two each week. And even for most of those things, it isn’t a disaster if I put them off for a day or two. It’s possible to structure your internet time around everything else in your life, rather than vice versa. In fact, that’s almost certainly a better way to live.

Second, the enjoyment I get from recreational internet usage maxes out after about two hours. Anything beyond that, and I become something of a zombie. It’s a weird feeling when you run out of things to do on the internet, but when you realize that you don’t actually enjoy scrolling down an endless list of photos and status updates, it’s a lot easier to pull back and say “no.”

Third, you don’t need social media to sell books. I made more in book sales in the first week of this month than I did in the first quarter of this year, and my Facebook and Twitter pages are a wasteland. It might help you if you already enjoy that sort of thing, but it’s not an absolute requirement for success. Certainly, you don’t have to open a vein and spill everything.

Fourth, exercising good self-discipline doesn’t mean cutting something completely out of your life, but learning how to properly manage it. The internet isn’t an either/or thing, it’s a matter of finding and maintaining the proper balance. In the future, I plan to do what Dean and Kris recommend, which is to have two computers: one for internet usage, and one for writing.

Fifth, for me personally, it’s actually healthy to have a couple of harmless distractions available while I write. I deleted all of the games off of my computer about a month ago, and I haven’t been able to write more than a thousand words a day ever since–often, much less. Before, whenever I hit a rough patch, I would play a quick round of super-melee in Star Control II and come back to it with fresh eyes. Without that, I find myself taking my butt out of the proverbial chair and wandering around until I find something else to do, which inevitably takes more time and energy. A lot of games (Tetris, Spider Solitaire) are addicting and should be nixed, but for me personally at least, opening up something that isn’t a time-sink can actually help to keep me going.

That’s just about all I can come up with now. I’m sure there are other lessons to be had, but these are the major ones. I’m coming back to the States on the 31st, and should be back in Utah in time for LTUE and Conduit. It’s going to be interesting living with 24/7 internet access again; hopefully, it won’t be too hard to adapt back.

Writing Resolutions for 2012

As I write this post, I’m riding on the California Zephyr through western Colorado, going to my parents’ house in Massachusetts before heading out overseas on an adventure that I have no idea where it will take me before the end of the year. It’s an interesting time to make New Year’s resolutions, because so much is up in the air at this point, but two things are for certain: I will continue to write, and I will continue to publish.

A lot has changed for me since 2010. Around this time last year, I was still in query-writing mode, looking for an agent, and getting a little desperate for work. I eventually found work at an alarm company, which lasted through the summer until I realized it wasn’t helping me advance towards my long-term goals. And as for the query-go-round, I made the tremendous paradigm shift into indie publishing around the same time, eventually publishing three novels, three short stories, and one novella. Sales haven’t been spectacular, but they have been earning me a trickle of money that amounts to a few hundred dollars by now. Not quite a living yet, but if I keep at it, it might just become that.

My dream since 2009 has been to make a full-time living telling stories that I love. With all the opportunities made possible through ebooks and indie publishing, I have great hopes of accomplishing that within the next few years. However, I do think it’s going to take time, which is why I’ve decided to go abroad to teach English for a while. It’s the perfect kind of career for young people going through a transitional time in their lives, and I think I’ll find it a lot more enriching than bouncing around dead-end warehouse jobs until the writing starts to take off.

I can’t foresee exactly where this path will take me, but I can take accountability for the things within my control. So with that in mind, here are my resolutions:

1: Independently Publish At Least Two Books in 2012.

This shouldn’t be too hard. Journey to Jordan is already in the queue; all I have to do is make a final self-editing pass and figure out how to insert the photos. Besides that, I have the direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home, Heart of the Nebula, which I should be able to revise, polish, and publish before the end of the year, perhaps as early as summer.

Besides these projects, though, the queue is conspicuously empty, which is why I’ve come up with the following resolution:

2: Constantly Work on Producing New Material.

This is a big one–in the past, I’ve taken time off from new projects to work on major revisions, and as I mentioned in this post, it’s slowed me down a lot more than I would like. I’ve never been able to juggle two projects for more than a week, but this is a skill I should probably learn if I’m going to do this professionally.

I hesitate to put a concrete number like “four completed novel drafts before 2013” because this is an aspect of my writing process that I still need to explore. If I peg myself to a number, I could as easily find that I’ve set it too low as that I’ve set it too high. The important thing at this point is to learn the self-discipline.

3: Read and Review a New Book Every Week.

This is a tricky goal that I’ve tried and failed at before, but I really feel that reading voraciously is going to help my writing more at this point than working on craft or attending conventions. Those are good too, of course, but there’s something about reading and analyzing other works, both inside and outside of your chosen genre. I’ve been slacking off on this a lot lately, and if I’m not careful, my writing will get worse because of it.

With my Kindle ereader and low-priced ebooks, I have a lot of reason to be optimistic about this goal, even though I’ll be on the go for most of the year. It’s like having an iPod for books–and with the sampling system, I don’t have to worry so much about whether or not it’s worth buying the book. Simply download the free sample, and if I’m still interested by the end, click and continue.

4: Experience at Least Three 10k Days.

This ambitious resolution comes from a post I wrote earlier in reaction to this post here. Basically, I want to boost my productivity and break through some mental barriers that have been in place for the past few years, and pushing myself to do a couple 10k sprints will hopefully help to reset my stride at a much higher rate.

At first, I was going to say “three consecutive 10k days,” but with all the uncertainty accompanying my travels and new TEFL career, that doesn’t seem like a good idea at this point. If/when I’ve saved up enough money to take a few months off from everything else, then I’ll set a goal like that.

5: Attempt to Write a Novel in a Week.

This is more of something I want to do for fun, just to see if I can. Apparently, Michael Moorcock used to write novels in three days, and while I’d like to try that too, a week seems like a more realistic goal. At 40,000 to 50,000 words minimum, I don’t even have to break 10k/day to do it. 🙂

So those are my writing resolutions for the next year. As always, I’ll continue to write for this blog, hopefully with a lot more book reviews in the coming months. In the meantime, though, this post is getting long, and I’d better get back to writing.

Happy New Year everyone! Here’s to 2012 and all the possibility it brings!

Managing excitement and an idea for an epic fantasy novel

After getting about 40% through Star Wanderers 1.0, I hit a wall and decided to put the project on the back burner for now. The beginning part, which I’m hoping to shop around as a novelette, has some issues with it and those are keeping me from making any real progress in the rest of the story.

I wish I could just wave my hand and pretend as if I’ve already fixed those problems, but my creative process just doesn’t work like that. I guess I’m more of a discovery writer in that way, because I can only build on stuff that I’ve already written. I have to figure out my characters as I write, otherwise they just fall flat.

It’s discouraging, because I feel like I don’t have enough control or discipline over my creative process. Other writers seem to be able to pick up a project and finish it, even when that project is commissioned by someone else (editors, franchise owners, etc). But with me, if I can’t get excited about a project, I can’t finish it.

Fortunately, even if I can’t always control which project I’m excited about, I always seem to be excited about something. After finishing the last revision for Desert Stars, I felt this unusually strong urge to work on Into the Nebulous Deep (which, after the last post, I’ve tentatively decided to rename Heart of the Nebula). I totally didn’t see that coming, but I’m glad that it did, because that project is getting due for its first major revision. It’ll probably be a quick one, just to fix some major known issues before sending it off to first readers.

As for new projects, I’m not quite sure what to pick up next. I’ve got a feeling I could give Edenfall another shot, though it’s dubious at this point, and I still have a bit of lingering excitement over the untitled Gaia Nova novel that involves Roman, Danica, Rina, and Stella’s son.

At the same time, though, I have a really cool idea for a fantasy novel involving magic swords. The idea is that the swords are actual characters, with the ability to think, feel, remember, and communicate with those who wield them. They can only be wielded by those whose minds have been melded to them, however, kind of like the Dragonriders of Pern.

As the swords get passed down from generation to generation, they pass on their skills and memories, so that those who wield them become legendary warriors. However, all but one of the swords goes insane, turning their wielders to evil. The one sword that remains has refused to take on a new master, even though war and destruction sweeps the land. A prophecy states that the one who wields this sword will eventually defeat the evil of the others, but when the good sword finally does take on a new owner, it ends up being a farmgirl / tavern wench (I haven’t really decided).

I don’t have a lot of experience writing fantasy, but this story is starting to really excite me. If I can combine it with a few other ideas and read some good fantasy novels to get into that mood, I think I can make some good progress on it.

So yeah–I have plenty of projects to work on, so things aren’t that bad. I just need to find one that I can really get into for the next couple of months; if I keep bouncing around from project to project without finishing any of them, that’ll be bad.

Q1 report, 2011

So in terms of writing, this was a pretty decent quarter. Nothing too prolific, but definitely making progress on my writing goals for 2011, which include:

1) finish at least two polished novels,
2) finish at least three new rough drafts,
3) start at least four major new projects.

The spike in the graph from the beginning of the month is from the final revision of Bringing Stella Home, which was pretty much just a final polish. After that was finished, I had a little difficulty picking up the next project, but once I did, I was able to be pretty consistent.

In mid-January, I picked up Worlds Away from Home and worked on that until the beginning of March. This was a pretty huge overhaul, especially for the end, but it still needs a lot of work. Basically, this draft was just to get it to the point where I could send it out to my first readers without being eternally ashamed.

After finishing WAFH 2.1 in the beginning of March, I launched right back into the sequel for BSH, Into the Nebulous Deep. I figured it would be good to have the sequel in hand, in case I decided to go indie with BSH, as well as to practice writing sequels.

All throughout March, the writing was surprisingly steady, but recently things have kind of gone off kilter. Maybe it’s all the increased distractions (job interviews, EPIK application, the TEFL course, other random crap), or maybe it’s just that I’ve become less disciplined, but I don’t feel like I’ve been writing very consistently in the last little while. And the graph doesn’t really show that, because I recently started a few other projects which have sort of taken the place of ITND.

The first of these is currently untitled, but it takes place in a post-apocalyptic version of our world which I’ve code named “The Blight.” I don’t want to say much about it, but it’s REALLY REALLY REALLY cool…trust me. Think lone man, wandering the ruins of civilization two hundred years after its fall, trying to make a life for himself when everyone else around him dies at a ridiculously early age because of this blight that has swept across all of humanity.

I’m having a TON of fun building this world, and the story is practically writing itself. In the interest of finishing what I start, though, I’m going to sideline it until ITND is completely finished (which should be by the end of April, inshallah…).

The other project is a novella version of BSH, basically taking just Stella’s viewpoints and telling the story of her capture and eventual ascension to the Hameji throne. This project shouldn’t be too hard–basically, I’m just frankensteining it from BSH, with a few tweaks. My main reason for writing it is to have a novella-length work that I can release as an ebook, possibly to generate interest in Bringing Stella Home.

Speaking of which, in March I released a couple of short stories as ebooks on Amazon. It’s a little early to gauge how well they’re doing, but I’m learning a lot from the experience, and the sales are gradually trickling in. Once I release a few more works and start promoting them, I expect the sales will grow.

So in the last three months, I’ve finished one polished novel (Bringing Stella Home), started two new projects (Sholpan and untitled (the blight)), and made progress on polishing Worlds Away from Home. I wrote / revised through 170k words, about 30k to 50k of which were all new material. I also ventured into indie publishing and released two short stories on Amazon, which are earning me a buck or two each week.

Overall, it hasn’t been as prolific as other quarters, but it’s not been too bad either. Now to finish ITND and make some progress on that freaking nashostomo…

Slow but steady

Okay, quick post before I go to bed.

Things are progressing in this novel, slowly but surely, as you can see from the wordcount. Unlike past weeks, I’m not pushing myself too hard, mostly because I’ve got a lot of schoolwork right now and if I were to spend much more time on this novel, I would neglect a lot of the more important stuff. Even though my course load is relatively light this semester, I’m a senior and I’m really not as motivated to do this stuff as I used to be. I get done what needs to get done, but just barely.

I have been successfully getting up early, however. And I’ve discovered something very interesting: I’m more productive when I have less free time. Thursday, I didn’t have class until noon, so when I got on the computer at about 6:30 to write, I opened up the email, opened up facebook…and, by the time I had to leave for class, I had only written about 430 words. Disgusting. But today, when I had class at 9:00 am and still had my Arabic homework to do, I got in about 700 words in half an hour.

I still have a lot of self discipline to learn, I guess. 😛 The scary thing is that my idea, up to this point, has been to keep my time open in the summer so that I’ll be able to write. Err…yeah. We’ll see how that goes.

I’ve been getting a lot of comments back from my alpha readers on Genesis Earth, and it’s been REALLY fun! Even the criticism–as long as it’s helpful criticism, I really appreciate it. This one girl in my ward asked me if she could be an alpha reader, then read the whole thing in only a couple of days. She had a LOT of positive comments–in fact, almost all of her comments were positive–and she said she really loved it! So much so, in fact, that she said she was having withdrawals, so I sent her The Phoenix of Nova Terra v1.2. Hopefully, getting her comments back will give me motivation to pick up that old thing and rework it…goodness knows it needs it. Needs it bad.

My first two novels, The Phoenix of Nova Terra and Genesis Earth are completely different in some ways, but very similar in others.

<spoiler alert>

They both have an important romantic element, and they both have generally positive endings. The book I’m writing now is something of a tragedy, at least at it’s core, and there is a completely different dynamic there. No love stories, no happy resolutions–lots of pain, lots of violence, lots of grappling with difficult issues.

</spoiler alert>

I suppose it’s good to try out a lot of different things early on in your writing career. That’s what I’m doing. At the same time, though…I get feedback on the one novel, and I kind of want to work on it instead of the one right in front of me! And when I think about what I did right in the one I finished, I look at the one I’m currently writing and I think “man, this is crap.” Of course, I keep working on it because I recognize that I ALWAYS think “man, this is crap” at some point before I’m done. Knowing that doesn’t make it easier, however.

Jason from the FLSR writing group said something interesting about that, however. He said that writing a draft of a novel is like climbing a mountain: you do it three times.

The first time, you climb it in your mind as you plan it out. You’re excited and motivated, and busy with all the preparations.

The second time, you actually physically do the work of climbing. It is long, hard, and frustrating, you get lost a few times, the summit is anticlimactic, and the return is boring. You can’t wait until you’ve finished and it’s all over.

The third time is when you look back on the experience after you’re safely back down. No matter how excruciating the climb was, you look back on it fondly and remember all the best parts. You thrive on the memories and wish that you were back up there, standing on the summit, enjoying the experience.

Right now, I’m on my third climb for Genesis Earth and my second climb for Bringing Estella Home. I can remember how miserable I was when I was still in the middle of Genesis Earth–for a while I seriously thought about throwing the whole thing out and doing something else. However, now that I’ve been letting it sit for a while, I’m getting really, really excited about it! I can hardly wait before I can get back and write the second draft.

But that’s not going to happen until I finish Bringing Estella Home. And, no matter how difficult it gets, I swear I WILL finish this book! I’m a chapter away from act III, and that’s too deep into the thing to quit and start something else! This book WILL be finished–if not by April, then by sometime in May!