I'm not sure I'll actually keep this up, but Matt's idea inspired me to give it a try. Maybe it'll give me extra motivation to keep the fingers dancing across the keyboard. Or maybe it'll just be ego-stroking. Dunno. But I'll give it a shot.



Last night was more productive than I expected. I ended up doing revisions on a 2,400-word chunk of a YA fantasy I've been working on, only hitting a wall when a brief action sequence failed to click. As I did not expect to get that much work done, I'm pleased. This is a project I need to work on more aggressively, so I welcome productive spurts with open arms. I'm more than halfway through the revisions I need to do on the existing text, at which time I can begin writing the last half of the story.

I have to do a DVD review this weekend. Assuming, of course, I watch what I need to watch.

The artificial deadline of a journal has been very helpful to me. I know I'm going to post every day, and I really don't want to have to say, "Did nothing today", so it's definitely a source of motivation.

That was my thought as well. I'm very deadline-driven. I need those deadlines, in a lot of ways, and can produce vast amounts of text on short notice when pressed.

When not pressed, however, I am prone to engage in cat vacuuming.

Having other people rely on you or expect something of you can be solid motivation to get stuff done. I work on a deadline every day of the week, so the feeling is not alien to me. The difficulty is translating that to writing that does not have a deadline.

Now, I WILL have days when I don't get much done. If I'm doing music that day, maybe, yada yada. And often my creative time is consumed by both my paid and unpaid editorial duties, which unfortunately are very effective in sapping away your energy when it comes to working on your own material. But damnit, I kind of like this idea, so I'm going to give it a whirl. I set a goal for myself to finish this short novel by summer (July 1 or so) ... so I'll let this thread be a record of that attempt.

Thanks for the idea, Matt.

I'm doing mine more as a way to chart where I was at for certain points. I generally like to get something finished as quickly as possible anyway. I would hate to have to work on the same things for months. If I was one of those novelists who spends years on a book I might go insane. That much time on one story would be highly frustrating. Unless the bulk of the time was somehow spent plotting things out. Then I could possibly see the time being somewhat justified.

It'd still drive me insane though.

Pleased with the surprise production tonight. Did music stuff this weekend, avoided writing, felt a bit guilty, but tonight, knowing I had query letters to prepare for the Hitchcock manuscript, I sat down, opened a Sam Adams Honey Porter (yum!) and got shit done.

Finished A Wife On File (a short story) AND second drafted it. (Made lots of changes, too.) Pleased with the finished product. I have a round of shorts I hope to get out this week, and A Wife On File is now included. If I'm not a total asshole, I'll have Empty Office ready this week, too.

Goal = have letters and mailings ready by midweek. Get out at least three queries and three stories.

It can be, but you get used to it. A good way to mentally deal with large projects is to compartmentalize them; break it down into distinct milestones, and think only of the milestone you're working towards. It becomes very easy to get lost in the bigger picture, getting ahead of yourself and thinking in too large a scale when for the moment, you just need to get the work done. Turn that one large task into five or ten smaller tasks and it becomes much easier to handle without driving yourself insane.

I recently finished a book with a collaborator, the largest project I've ever tackled with another person. It took us just over a year to finish. Early on, he'd often talk about book signings and cover art and who we'd thank in the acknowledgments and all sorts of other stuff like that. This was when we had only a chapter or three done (out of a final 52 chapters in all). I always maintained, “We’ve no need to get too heavy into this stuff right now. Our first and only thought should be getting the book done.” And even then, I’d think, “get to chapter 10” and “get to chapter 30” and the like rather than get to the finish line.

It’s like driving across the country, you don’t count the miles until you get to California, you count the miles until the next state.

That’s my approached, at least. I find it too easy to drop huge projects, so I try to deal with them as many smaller, interconnected projects instead. States instead of countries.

Another productive night, and I'm happy about that. Got revisions nailed down on Empty Office and Ambulance Is Young, two shorts I hope to get in the mail ASAP. I thought Empty Office was in a finished state; re-reading it, I saw how wrong I was. I did some fairly extensive tweaks. Amazing what two years can do.

I was about to start in on finishing Family Vacation, but it got late, and I realized I just didn't have it in me. Damn me for not making notes! When I began the story I knew the ending, but somehow during the process I forgot what the intened ending was. Gah!

Anyway, also prepared five query letters for the Hitchcock manuscript. Need to get them in the mail today or tomorrow.

Good stretch so far this week. Yay!

Not the kind of productive night I had desired. I scoped out a few dozen prospective markets for some short stories that are ready to go and tagged up the Writer's Market with sticky notes, sorted out a slew of stray files on the laptop, reorganized the WRITING directory and backed it up to two other locations, and packaged up four query letters.

Important stuff, but no actual writing.

I had intended to do another revision on The Sky Girl so I could add that to the submission rotation, but that didn't happen. Maybe tonight. That'd be swell.

I just completed revisions on The Sky Girl, and I'm very glad I did, as I feel as if the changes greatly improved the text. That makes me happy, as The Sky Girl is maybe my favorite of the short stories I've written. It had been, oh, two years or so since I looked at the story. Bringing it up to date with my "voice" seemed to go okay, and I figured out how to tackle issues I could not quite wrap my words around the last time I worked with this. Yay!

You two should just get a room.

Boring work tonight. Wrote a DVD review. Should go live tomorrow, Tuesday at the latest. Thrilling.

It has been a very slow week. Deadlines at my real job has left me with little desire to work under self-imposed deadlines on the not-real-job stuff. I need to get back in the swing, though, as someone was very generous with their time and gave me some great commentary on a pair of stories I'd like to get out the door. Revisions time! I also have to go to Kinkos today, print out a manuscript and get it FedExed out ASAP. The publisher who requested it mentions a six-month read time, so at least I won't have to deal with this particular item for a little while.

If I'm not a complete asshole, I'll be abl to say "I worked on X" before the week is out.

Well, I rewrote my resume and penned a quick cover letter for a package I'm mailing. That's something, right?

So, not a terrible evening last night (with some of the last 96 hours thrown in for good measure).

YAY! Did revisions on 2,200 words of YA fantasy novel. Still a lot of work to do yet, but Yay!

NAY Aside from cover letters and other bullshit, tonight is the first night I’ve gotten something done in days. Not good. Typical, but not good. I’m trying to do better in 2007. I suck.

YAY! Found a handful of hand-written pages I had thought lost. They feature a key scene for an ongoing project, important stuff to the story, and I really didn't want to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. Found them with some other papers.

YAY! You know who. You helped. Good stuff. Thanks, man.

Did not write last night. Worked on music instead.

Officially in the midst of one of my dead streaks. Disappointed in myself for that, but it happens. Always has. Finishing some music instead. I expect once work slows down, outside writing will pick back up.

dead dead dead dead all of us dead

Right there with you, unfortunately.

My laptop died.

Didn't realize it's been this long ... but it has been. The combo of music + broken lapstop (it resets itself and erases all files upon shutdown) and = little writing of late.

But the urge has come on STRONG the last few days.

Haven't updated this in a while. So I guess I should.

Well, I'm about 1/4 of the way through a second/thirdish draft of a local history book I've written. My personal deadline is to finish the draft by February 1. Thus far I've been sticking firm to that (I started just before Christmas). It's not a particularly long book, but it is dense with information. I am confident it will get it picked up.

Today I finished the first draft of a short piece for an unexpected project that fell into my lap, something I'd sure like to see work out; will second draft it this week while in between working on chapters of the book and cross my fingers. I don't know if I've quite hit the mark yet.

There is that comic column I picked up; I've posted links; it's fun to do.

The last few DVD reviews I've done (Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Ultimate Edition, Gilmore Girls: Season 7, The Three Stooges Collection) have not yet gone live thanks to issues with the site. Wrote them nearly a month ago, too. I don't even remember if I did a good job! Oh well.

Sometime in the next couple of weeks I'll be getting together with my collaborator on the Hitchcock project. We're looking to make some revisions to the manuscript. I sure am sick of that project by now.

Local history--that sounds interesting! Can you tell us anything about it?

Sure.

It's about the town where this happened:



It's about Lakehurst, a tiny little village on the northern edge of the New Jersey Pine Barrens.

Once a small bog iron mining community, then planned as a center of railroad commerce for central New Jersey -- that fell flat on its face -- then for a time as a summer resort for the wealthy until finally settling into place as Nowheresville, Pine Barrens, NJ, it's pretty easy to miss at just one square mile. As the town itself shrank in population after its resort status collapsed, the adjacent military base grew. It was the "airship capital of the world," the site of the Hindenburg disaster, called by some the birthplace of military helicopters, and a lot more. The village is now a sleepy little town of 2,500. It's a pretty interesting place that I've managed to tie into a broader regional history -- the Jersey railroad wars of the 1860s are kinda neat -- as well as Naval history.