Monthly Archives: February 2010

Procrastinate Productively

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[This post is 916 words - about 4 minutes for an average reader]

Writers are well known for their procrastination. Many call it “block”, and while the traditional definition is probably accurate in some cases, I’d venture it’s usually just that there’s other stuff to do.

It’s taken me a while, and a few readings of Getting Things Done, to get my life’s priorities sorted. But now that I have, I feel I can give a good definition/explanation of Productive Procrastination. It’s simple, really, but it does take some time and self-awareness.

Productive Procrastination is when you put off doing a task by doing another productive task. See, like I said, easy enough. There are 2 keys to being able to pull it off though, which are harder than just coming up with and understanding the definition.
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What To Write on Your Way to A Million Bad Words

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Do I get to count blog posts?

An interesting question from a reader over at Barry Lyga’s blog (via Jo Treggiari):

I used to think keeping a journal was pretty good writing practice, and it is in a way, but I don’t think it’s all that helpful for my fiction. To get better at fiction, I have to write, well, fiction.

Okay, so not really a question. My apologies. And even more sorrowful, Barry says:

Your blog doesn’t help you all that much towards your million bad words!

I will give you that writing a blog is not writing fiction. (Unless you’re blogging about a fake life, perhaps, and making up stories – something which I’ve considered, but discarded because it seems like you’d either have to write a whole bunch of blog posts ahead of time, or be really good at making stuff up on a daily basis; anyway…) I would argue that my blog (at least, the one that I post to on a consistent basis; not so much this one) has helped me tremendously in getting through my million bad words. Or, perhaps, if you don’t buy that, then I’d contend that by practicing on my blog and developing a strong voice over there, I’ve cut down on the number of bad words I’ll have to pump into crappy drafts of fiction pieces before I write The Great American Novel. (And by TGAN, I mean Awesome Space Opera Pulp Adventure)

The funny thing is, though, that I agree with the reader in saying that a journal isn’t that helpful for fiction. My argument in that case is that a journal is personal and not intended for public consumption. A blog, on the other hand, is specifically intended to be read by other people – just like a novel or short story. A blog post has to be (or should be if it’s not) written and edited carefully before it’s posted on the World Wide Web where the entire web of the wide world can see it.

Also, since blog posts are shorter in length than novels or short stories, and authors usually try to write them in a correspondingly shorter time span (or perhaps with shorter deadlines), they force the writer to create a higher quality first draft so that further revisions are limited. Otherwise, the blog post may never get published (trust me on that one), and when it does, it might be woefully out of date. (Clearly this is more true of certain kinds of blogs, but I am certain it applies to all blogs as a meta rule) While the subject matter may not be directly transferable to the world of fiction writing, this ability to quickly turn out words and create higher quality rough drafts is as useful in both cases as, say, being able to run fast is to both bobsledding and football.

Shamefulness Knows No Bounds

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Hope for the Hopeless. Or Clueless.

Jim Macdonald posted a letter from Publish America over on the Making Light blog. According to this letter, authors “published” by Publish America can now have up to 5 copies of their book sent to Random House (for the mere cost of 10 copies of the author’s book).

For those who might actually think this sounds like a good idea, here’s another idea you can do at much lower cost: Finish your novel, order a copy from a POD (Print On Demand) company, and mail it to Random House yourself. A brief check tells me that it would cost $7 to print a 200 page book on Lulu. Add another $3 to mail it yourself, and another $3 to mail it to Random House for a total of $13.

The cheapest sci-fi book I see on Publish America is $12.95. If you order 10 books (the minimum order to get the extra copies sent to Random House) at 50% off (they provide a coupon code) + $1.99 shipping per book, that’s $64.75 + $19.90 = $84.65.

Do-it-yourselfers save about $70 and probably have the same chance to get their book published by Random House as the PA authors.

[Review] Transition by Iain M. Banks

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The Good: Amazing prose that seamlessly shifts between characters creating a distinct flavor for each whether in first-person or third. The setup of with the self-declared unreliable narrator adds a more experimental feel to it, while also adding some additional intrigue. The excellent prose is also used to make info dumps interesting, and while these dumps are helpful, they’re delayed and spaced out in a very professional, clearly thought-out manner. The writing alone in this book makes me want to read Banks’ “space-operatic” works (Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games to start with).

The Bad: Banks is guilty of proselytizing for a few causes at points during the book, the most obvious of which is the use of torture as an interrogation technique. Honestly, I could have done without pretty much the whole Philosopher character in the book (the who does the torturing). I realize he is important in a few places, but for the number of pages dedicated to him and his background, I feel like there should have been more tie-in with the book rather than just serving as a platform to say that torture is bad. But then, I’m one of those people who doesn’t really like to examine society through the lens of a future world and would rather read and write adventure (or perhaps “pulp”) style fiction.

A Final Note (on my review in general): I am not going to review books that I feel are just mediocre or otherwise not worth reading. You can feel confident that if you see a book review here, it will be because I feel the book is worth your time to read (and this comes from a self-proclaimed slow – although actually fairly average – reader). I may consider reviewing a book that I had to put down in order to warn people away from wasting their time. But there’s enough negative media in the world already, that my goals is to focus on the good books and leave others to tell you what not to read.

New Twitter Follows

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This is very good timing from Writer’s Digest, because I just started a Twitter Account for Fanatical Pupil yesterday: Writer’s Digest Blog: Best Tweets for Writers

Good timing because I followed a bunch of people that Twitter suggested as part of the writing community, but some of them kind of tweet like crazies. Good marketing for them, I suppose, but it was overwhelming me a bit considering I’d only started following 9 people. Seems to have calmed down a bit now, so we’ll see how it goes with the 4 new people suggested in the Writer’s Digest blog post.

Writers: Get Open Office 3.2

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I’ve been using Open Office as my MS Word alternative for a long time, and while it’s not quite as slick as Word (and I haven’t even used the “ribbon” versions of Word yet), it’s getting better all the time, and has the added bonuses of being free and able to export to PDF with the click of a button.

My major gripe with Open Office, though, has always been it’s super slow start up time. I honestly used this as an excuse for not writing on many occasions. Instead, I would waste my time looking for a different word processor that would start up faster and still feel as solid and easy to use as OO (and be free). I never found one.

And now I don’t have to.

In Open Office 3.2 (see list of features), they’ve reduced the time it takes to open up a document from around 10 seconds to just about 6. And often times it feels like less than that. And even more importantly, it feels fast enough that I know I won’t have to wait for it to start up just to get to work.

An Aside

I just wanted to add that the reason I use Open Office instead of Word even though I have Word installed and registered on my computer is because I’m using a work computer. I use it for all my personal computing (only when I’m not working, of course), but if, for some reason, I were to lose the use of this computer as my writing instrument, I would be able to replace it cheaply and easily. I could get a cheap laptop for $300, download Open Office, download my files from DropBox, and be off and writing.