Posts Tagged ‘writing habits’

Red Goals and Timers

Sunday, November 27th, 2011

On the recommendation of one of my fellow local NaNoWriters, I recently installed a handy little program called TimeLeft. It’s a very straightforward program; it lets you put little floating timers on your desktop, which stay on top of everything and can easily be dragged to more convenient locations as necessary. It’s a deceptively simple software gadget. I’m trying it out as a means of helping me parcel out my writing time; Lifehacker recently shared a tip suggesting a 90/30 split of work time – 90 minutes working, 30 minutes taking a break. It’s a good idea.

Now, I’ve heard these tips – or versions of them – before. Work for X time, take a break. Use a kitchen timer. That sort of thing. It’s a good idea, and I’ve known for a long time that it’s a good idea, but I never implemented it until now. Why? Because my writing process is constantly in flux.

I know the way I write isn’t optimal — not for me, and probably not for anyone else, either; and I’ve determined, through trial and error, that trying to change everything at once doesn’t work (and fails to do so in a spectacular fashion). Sometimes I try new things and they don’t work. Sometimes I try three new things at once, crash, and throw them all in the bin, only to discover a year later that two of the things are helpful and one of them just doesn’t work for me. (I try to avoid doing the latter these days.) So really, it’s kind of that these tips came back around at the right time for me to work them into my process. And they help.

It’s worth noting that, though the proportions are right, actually writing for 90 minutes straight and then taking a 30-minute break is just flat not going to happen for me. It’s really not. I don’t work that way. I write a paragraph, I wander off and think about it, I write a page, I dig out an iron vein in Minecraft, I get distracted and dig out sixty more iron veins in Minecraft, I build a small fortress in Minecraft, I get an idea and write a sentence. That kind of thing*.

It’s really the middle part I need to get under control; I need small breaks in the middle of my writing to refresh my mind, but the benefit plateaus very quickly. Five minutes might not be enough; ten minutes should do the trick; fifteen minutes is not significantly better than ten minutes. The types of games I like best are open-ended games like Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas, The Sims**. It’s very rewarding to drop into one of those games for ten minutes and dick around***, and it’s very, very easy to accidentally spend six hours instead.

So: Timer. Check it. I set the writing timer for 90 and the break timer for 30. Any time I take a break I pause the one and start the other, and vice versa. Because I want time to play Minecraft later, I keep one eye on the timer, and after around ten minutes I pop out, with twenty more minutes if I want to stop and read an article or something later. Alternately, I set a third timer for ten minutes and run it alongside the break timer. Or, I lose track of time and use up all of my break, and now I have to write for seventy-five minutes straight. I’m still working out the bugs in the system.

Breaks, it should be noted, are mental health breaks – reading articles, playing minecraft – not things like stretch or bathroom breaks. (For those, I pause both timers.) Also, 750words counts as a writing activity, as do blog posts. Basically, the point of the writing blocks is to get rid of the writing portion of my red tasks.

This leads incredibly un-smoothly into my next bit, where I idly list my red tasks; the tasks I set to priority 1 (color-coded red) in Remember The Milk. The red tasks are the ones I try to finish before noon, and the ones that I won’t let myself play Skyrim until I’m done with them. Like, at all. Yeah, it’s pretty harsh. Right now the list looks like this.

  • Write:
    • 750 words unfiltered (at 750words.com)
    • 500 words public copy
    • 500 words pay copy
    • 500 more words pay copy
    • 1667 words on This Novel Will Fail (right now, I’m aiming for a lot more than that); this can overlap with the 500 tasks
    • Daily word count in Derelict (it’s alright if this is delayed until December)
    • Write one chunk of game design or background. I have this listed as about 500 words, but experience shows it to be closer to 250 – I’m actually going to change the tooltip on it right now.
  • Do a load of dishes (best done while Summer’s awake)
  • Do a load of laundry (best done while Summer’s awake)
  • Caffeinate (this part is really important, and, yes, sometimes I’m derp enough to forget)
  • Check email and clean out inbox (first thing in the morning, usually while my tea water is heating)
  • Usually, cleaning one of the rooms in the house (today is the living room)

This is obviously rather specific to this November. Right now it theoretically involves writing somewhere between 3000 and 4000 words, depending on whether I do any drafting in 750 words, whether I write a blog post, etcetera. Realistically it involves much more than that; I have 17300 words on This Novel Will Fail, and four days left. I’ll let you do that bit of math. Pray for me. Cast a spell. Send cookies. Do whatever it is you do. :)

The general form of the red list – that is, during months when I’m not trying to kill myself – looks a bit like this:

  • Caffeinate
  • Check email and clean out inbox
  • Write:
    • 750 words unfiltered
    • 500 words public copy (may overlap with 750)
    • 1000 words pay copy (may overlap with 750)
    • 1500 words current novel (may overlap with 750, 500, and/or 1000)
    • 250 words/1 chunk game design (may overlap with 750, 500, and/or 1000 if prose)
  • Perform 4 general and 1 specific household chore (often dishes/sweep/vacuum/laundry/room)

Which means on a general day I’ll get a decent amount of housework done, write somewhere from 1750-3000 (or more) words of various types, drink coffee, and check my email. These are my before-noon tasks, which gives me about six and a half hours to get it all done and be on schedule – noting that it’s not the end of the world if it takes me until sometime in the afternoon, it just means I’m probably not emptying Google Reader today.

Unrelated: The time is now Oh God O’Clock in the morning, and I missed the ding at the end of my writing timer on account of it blending into the music or something. Bugs, I tell you. Working on them.

* This all assumes that I’m doing this during a time when Summer is asleep. She usually wakes up around 7:30, and can generally be persuaded to take her morning nap about ten, so on a good day I can probably get two writing blocks in during the morning. Realistically her morning nap is unreliable, so if I get a second block in I can roughly double the amount of time and halve the productivity of it because I’ll be busy entertaining/feeding/cleaning/chasing Summer.

** It took me forever to realize that that’s not a vastly disparate list of games at all, and that the factor I love about them is the open-endedness. Sometimes I’m thick that way.

***Except for The Sims. Ten minutes is almost long enough for your save to load in that game.

Current Music: Cake’s albums Comfort Eagle and Fashion Nugget, with a bit of Three Doors Down before that because the albums together come to about 85 minutes. I basically love every song on these albums. Every song on these albums is on my favorites list. Er, no, wait, now Cake is over and we’re on to Billy Talent I and II, all of which are also on my favorites list. Going to bed now.

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I’m not an outline writer, honest!

Monday, November 29th, 2010

It occurs to me that yesterday’s Daily Lynx post might have given someone the horribly erroneous idea that I’m an outline writer.  I have nothing against outline writers; I’m sure they’re very nice people.  Indeed, I have nothing against being mistaken for one, but I felt like talking about my relationship with outlines.

In my experience, I flat-out can’t write from an outline — certainly not the first draft.  Derelict has an outline, but I cobbled it together after the fact: it’s a tool used mainly for revision.  The first draft was entirely discovery-written.  Then  I looked at the story I had, put together a rough outline of how it was, and used the outline to start working on high-level story changes before letting them propagate down.

That said, I’m planning on putting together an outline ahead of time for my next major project, currently operating under the name Wings to Chase These Dreams (or Wings if I don’t hate my fingers at the moment).  Part of this is due to the unnecessarily complex structure I’m messing with for it, but part of it is just to try writing from an outline.

Current music: A playlist featuring Flyleaf and Panic! at the Disco.

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Writing Again

Saturday, June 12th, 2010

Let it be known that, at 89,110 words, I am shutting the current draft of Derelict down and doing a ground-up rewrite.  (Oh, and I think I’m over my writer’s block.)

I don’t like to blog about writer’s block when I have it.  It’s almost like writer’s block is some sort of shameful thing which, if I was a REAL writer, I’d be able to overcome.  (To some extent this is the case.  Being a professional means having deadlines, and staying a professional means keeping them.)

I’ve been blocked pretty bad on Derelict for a while now.  I’m not anymore.  Part of this is that I now have a decent laptop on which to write, meaning I can write wherever the flip I want.  Part of this is that I’ve started working on other projects I have in my head.  You’d think working on three completely different books at once would mean that I’m getting less done on the main project, but in this instance that’s not the case.  (Mostly because anything > 0.  Results may vary when I finish being not blocked.)  Another part of me being un-blocked is that I had a nice chat with my sister-in-law on the topic of writing, and that got me thinking about it again.  (I wrote about a thousand words that night for the first time in months.  Yay.)

What finally fully unblocked me, though, is a product of my becoming partially unblocked.  Digging through the document again, I’ve come to the conclusion that Derelict needs a much larger rewrite than I was originally planning.  Simply put, I’m gutting the oldest parts of the plot.  The characters and core idea of the original short story are being carried forward; the plot, which I’ve been trying to make into the plot of the first part of the novel, isn’t.  It just doesn’t fit anymore.

So, today I’m starting a new file for Derelict.  This file currently contains — hang on, lemme count — yeah.  This file currently contains zero words.  I am going to rebuild Derelict in it, and it will grow quickly at first; I would guess that somewhere around 60% of the old document will fit into the new one with a minimum of rewriting (albeit some significant rearranging).  Some scenes will have to be discarded entirely.  (Some scenes I was pretty sure I was going to discard when I wrote them, but that’s the nature of the beast.)  There will be quite a lot to write anew, but I’m looking forward to it.

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General Updatery

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

Hopefully it will come as no surprise that my NaNoWriMo push this year is about where it was when I mentioned I’d try for it.  I did allude to the insanity of the plan, after all.

What surprises me is the backup I found the other day.  I was looking through my flash drive backups for something else entirely, and found a backup of nothing but my programming folder — which was, it should be noted, the only significant casualty to my flash drive dying earlier this month.  It was an up-to-the-day backup, too.

This borders on being a religious experience.  I think Great Cthulhu wants me to continue work on that roguelike.

In other news, life is pretty awesome.  Things are looking up in general; my kid is doing great (save for some acid reflux and colic), and has begun occasionally sleeping as much as four hours at a stretch.  (This is actually better for Kat than for me, as I sleep like the dead.  She doesn’t.)

And, I now have a signed copy of The Gathering Storm.  A friend of mine got it for me and shipped it down, for which I am now eternally indebted.  I’m reading the book now, and of course it’s great.  It also has me thinking.  See, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson have a funny place in my writing/reading history: they’re the two writers who, more than any others, got me writing.

I’ve wanted to be a professional writer for a long, long time.  My earliest major writing project would have been when I was about ten, when I decided to write a sci-fi trilogy.  For years, that project (called Trikan) was the largest body of cohesive text I had managed to assemble.  (I’m looking it over now, and it’s . . . er, not as bad as I thought it would be, actually.  It’s also eight thousand words long.  Go, younger me.  But it’s still never seeing the light of day.)*

After Trikan, there was a lengthy period when I didn’t get any really significant writing done.  It was Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time that inspired me, the summer before I left for ASMSA, to get to work on a big project again.  That was when I started the project formerly known as The Storms of Heaven, and when I wrote most of the novella Ghost Ship — which astute readers (and people I’ve trapped in conversation long enough) may recognize as the work that formed the basis of Derelict.  If I hadn’t read The Wheel of Time then, there’s a pretty good chance these would never have gotten written.  It was a pretty influential work for me, to say the least.

Fast-forward to last year.  Having heard of Brandon Sanderson via his connection to The Wheel of Time, I picked up the books of his that were out at the time (Elantris and Mistborn: The Final Empire — I didn’t spring for The Well of Ascension until it came out in paperback.)  I read them.  I loved them.  And they inspired me to write again.  If I had to pick a single influence that got me started on Derelict in its full novelish glory, I would pick Brandon Sanderson.

I didn’t make these connections until recently — not as such, anyway.  The knowledge was there, in the back of my mind.  The reason it comes to mind now is because now I’m reading The Gathering Storm, which is by the two authors who have influenced and inspired me the most.

I wonder what’ll happen this time.

*Interestingly, the science vessel from which the characters of Trikan hail was named the Blue Star, and the salvage vessel from which the characters of Derelict hail is the Blue Star IV.  I was not aware of this, and to my knowledge wasn’t aware of it at the time that I wrote Ghost Ship.  Funny how the mind works.

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I keep telling people I’m not insane

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Well, what with having a new job, a new kid, assorted bills, and a novel to revise, I’ve decided that this is a great year to give NaNoWriMo a shot.  Last year when NaNoWriMo arrived I was about ten or twenty thousand years words into Derelict, and still calling it Ghost Ship.  I briefly entertained the idea of trying for fifty thousand new words on Derelict that month, but ultimately decided not to.

You may remember me saying a few months back that I would take a month off from Derelict and start drafting Wings.  That didn’t happen — something about moving taking time or something — so I’m starting fresh with drafting it now.  And when I’m done drafting Wings on a given day, I’ll move on to revising Derelict.  I figure I can find the time to do all this in the period I’ve been catching myself playing Civ IV.

(Then I’ll find time to play Civ IV when I’d normally be eating.  That should work out about right.)

Unfortunately, I’m already a couple of days behind, so if you’ll excuse me . . .

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Midnight Run

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

I just got back from a run around the block.  I feel pretty good.  It’s 2 in the morning.  I ran barefoot.

I’m not crazy, promise.

I’ve always had a tendency toward moving when I write.  I sit down and write for a moment, and when I need to think, I get up and pace.  Or something.  I used to be like a jack-in-the-box back in ASMSA and college late at night — when I was writing something in my room, whether it be personal or academic, I would pop out of my room and frantically pace up and down the hall for a while — sometimes less than a minute, sometimes much longer — and pop back in to write.  A page or paragraph later, whenever I hit the next tough spot, I’d be out again, up and down the hall, until I had it worked out.  I’m sure I drove my dorm-mates nuts, but there just isn’t space in a room for the kind of high-speed high-intensity pacing I prefer.

So I was trying to write earlier, and, finding that the writing wasn’t coming, I decided to read a little bit of my backlog while I thought.  (Incidentally, I highly recommend the Read It Later firefox extension — it saved my life.  I can mark something to read later and tell myself I will, instead of feeling a desperate need to read it before it gets away.)  I ran across a Lifehacker post on how running barefoot might be good for you (also cool shoes) and thought, heck, I love being barefoot!  I’ve been meaning to take up running for a decade now!  Sure, why not!  So I half-ran, half-walked around the block.  I’ll regret it tomorrow, but it was worth it.

This isn’t the first time I’ve actually gotten around to doing some running.  For a short while I and my friend Morgan (the blog’s down now, but it won’t always be) were running about once a week, way back before she left Little Rock . . . like almost a year ago, wow.  Time flies and all that.

So what’s bugging me about writing?  Well, I figured out part of it: I need to delinearize my revision process.  I figured out a long time ago that writing the first draft in order just doesn’t work for me — sometimes I have ideas for the middle or end of the book way early, and if I don’t write them (a) they’ll get away and (b) I won’t get anything else written, either.  I’m not an outline writer, though; I’m sort of a nonlinear discovery writer.  End tangent.

Somehow, I forgot that important lesson when I started revising.  I think it’s because I really wanted to finally have something to show to my very patient friends and family, so I got the first chapter all fixed up (something I’ve wanted to do for a while anyway) — and then I wanted to keep showing stuff off, so I immediately threw myself into the second chapter.

This won’t work.  I know how the beginning goes, but the late beginning all the way through to the end are going to suffer reorganization, sometimes drastic, of scenes.  I can’t just go through and look at each chapter individually, making the prose prettier.  I need to rewrite a ton of stuff, write new material in places, and just completely relocate scenes from, in some cases, very nearly one end of the book to the other.

There’s still some stuff I need to work out.  Which route I’ll take at the end of the second part.  Certain details about the climax.  Whether or not I’ll give a certain treacherous character an antihero plot arc in the late book.  But ultimately, I’m in much better shape after that run.

Current music: Nena, 99 Luftballoons, everybody’s favorite german feel-good nuclear holocaust song from the 80s.

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My Writing Process — Such As It Is (Part I)

Friday, July 24th, 2009

I don’t know what my writing process is – or rather, I do, but it’s constantly changing. I have yet to settle on something I like that works for me in both the short and long term. Part of that’s probably due to my schedule – which is about to change – but not all. Since I’m putting Derelict in a drawer for a month while I start my next book and work on Zosias, I thought I’d talk about how I write, have written, and plan on writing.

I think it’s worth mentioning, at this point, how Derelict got its start. (It’s kind of funny, I’ve always thought.) In the summer of 2004, I was enjoying my last summer vacation before moving to Hot Springs for the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts (ASMSA). I had recently acquired the first computer I could call my own, an Emachines laptop (because I didn’t know any better). There were two main reasons I wanted a laptop: because I figured I would need one at school, and because I wanted a laptop to write on. I had done some writing on the family computer in the past, but for some reason the static environment in the computer room just didn’t do much for my muse. The fact that the computer was running Windows 3.1 probably didn’t help a great deal.

At the time, I was on my first read-through of The Wheel of Time. It got me thinking. I’d always wanted to be a novelist, right? What better way to get my start than a massive multi-volume epic like the one I was currently engrossed in? (I got better, I promise.) The first chapter of the story (entitled The Storms of Heaven, a name that sounds a heck of a lot like Jordan’s The Fires of Heaven) went great. But after that I found myself suffering from a pretty big problem: the second chapter. I concluded that I needed to develop the world more to continue on the main story, and started up a short story called Ghost Ship in order to do just that.

Around the time Ghost Ship hit 10,000 words, I accepted that maybe it was going farther than the so-called “main story.” In retrospect it wasn’t that bad: the original draft of Ghost Ship reached 11,783 words, while Storms reached 8,803 words, 7166 of which were in the first chapter.

In retrospect, my problem with Storms wasn’t what I thought it was. I kept trying to come back to it because I loved the characters in it – I still do, in fact. They’re neat characters, with a lot of potential, even if the old version of Rose does trip some Mary Sue-sensors in my head now. And I’m happy with the premise. The problem was that a bunch of neat characters, and a means for getting them in the same place, isn’t enough to carry a novel – much less a series. What I needed was a plot, and that, in a nutshell, is why Ghost Ship beat the socks off of The Storms of Heaven. Going into it I thought, “I need a clear idea of what this story is about, so I can get it written at short-story length.”  (Look how that turned out.) And if most of the characters were cardboard cutouts, if literally every other scene was solid exposition, well, at least the thing got written. By the end of that summer it was too late for Ghost Ship to fit into a short story, but it could have been a decent novella. I was almost done with it as such when I left for ASMSA. It was probably within three or four thousand words of the end – and there it would stay, because by golly, ASMSA keeps you busy. What time I wasn’t devoting to schoolwork (and hanging out with large numbers of fellow geeks for the first time in my life), I was devoting to the process of meeting and falling in love with my then-future wife. I would occasionally pull out Ghost Ship to tinker with, and I made dozens of false starts on other works, but it would be quite a while before I got serious writing done again.  Years, in fact — because the next serious writing I did was when I picked up Ghost Ship and began expanding it into the novel that is now Derelict.

Let me back up, though, to that summer before ASMSA. I think it bears studying, since the hypothetical topic of this post is my writing process. Let’s look at how I worked during that summer that I got so much done.

First, I didn’t have anything resembling internet. I had access to it at school and the public library, but not at home. I had plenty of books, but I don’t really think of those as a distraction from writing – ultimately, they tend to work as inspiration. (When I’m reading a lot, I want to write. When I’m playing a lot of video games, I want to create them. When I watch a lot of anime, I want to write, score, and animate one. For the sake of my sanity and that of those around me, I try to do lots of reading.)

Second, my schedule was essentially free. Most days I stayed home all day while my folks went to work. Sometimes, probably about once a week, I would go into town with them. But most of the time I just stayed home. Given a completely free schedule, I would usually settle in to start writing at the kitchen table with my laptop around the time my parents went to bed – about 8-10 PM. I would write until my mother woke up at four the next morning, spend some time with her in the morning, then maybe write another hour or two before going to sleep for the day. I’d wake up in the afternoon, often with an hour or two to spare until Mom and Dad got home, and I’d pretty much just do other stuff for a while, often involving hanging out with them.

And I got a lot of writing done. In retrospect, given that this process went on for around a month, and I got around 20K words written, that means I wasn’t actually churning out words at a very rapid pace – writing anywhere from six to ten hours a night, I got less than a thousand words a day in general. It wasn’t my typing speed – I was easily in the mid-60 WPM range at the time, and I’m not any more. It was mostly that I just dawdled around in my writing. Didn’t stress out about it, didn’t try to force it, had all the time in the world to write however much I wanted to and pretty much took my time. For years, I would look back on that summer – my last free one – with longing, as a sort of idyllic time when life was good. In some ways, that represents my ideal writing process: write by night, sleep by day, perform some human interaction in the afternoon, get paid enough for my work to not worry about anything else.

I didn’t expect this to take so long. Possibly because I didn’t think about it too much, who knows. Either way, I’ll save the rest of this for next Friday. (Look at me, I have a buffer!)

Current music: Better than Ezra, Greatest Hits album. I have it because of their song Desperately Wanting, which is rather nifty. As it turns out, it’s not the only one.

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Whelp, I guess it’s time for the next draft.

Monday, July 20th, 2009

Sooo I didn’t put up a post last Friday, or any time since then.  Thought about it a couple of times, but I make no excuses: I never said the Friday updates were a sure thing.

I’ve decided to officially close this draft of Derelict.  There’s enough stuff changing about the story that I really need to go back and get everything in shape, and excepting the ending and the New Sirius climax, most of the book’s pretty much written.  But I really feel a need to fix some things I’ve known I need to revamp for a while before moving on, and I also want some time off from it for a little while.  So I’m going to do the classic stick-the-manuscript-in-a-drawer-for-a-month thing and work on other stuff before I get started on the next draft.

What other stuff, you may ask?  Well, I’m glad you potentially did.  Most of my creative time this following month will be spent on two things: Zosias, and my next book.  Since I don’t think I’ve discussed either in any detail here, I’ll tackle them in order.

Zosias is a tabletop RPG I’ve been developing for a while now.  By “a while,” I mean it started as a D&D 3E campaign, before there was any need to call it 3.0.

It’s grown a bit since then.  By “it’s grown a bit,” I mean that I’m now the lead designer of four, and that I eventually plan to build a PDF publishing company with it as the founding product.  It’s no longer a 3E campaign but a separate, SRD-based ruleset using the OGL.  The SRD was, of course, based on third edition, so there are similarities — but due to the character of Zosias, and the nature of the OGL, there are necessarily quite a few differences.  And that’s all I’ll say for now, other than that it’s extremely awesome.

My next book.  It’s no secret (so I might as well tell you): My ideas are like kudzu.  I’m not one of those people who has to scrounge for ideas.  (Don’t ask me where they come from.  The answer is somewhere between “I don’t know” and “everywhere, with no regard for my sanity.”)  As far as ideas for novels go, other than Derelict, there are (off the top of my head) about . . . well, five stories that I’m definitely going to write and one that I might tear apart for partial integration into other tales.  Two of those stories are huge multi-volume tales: Allerdan is currently planned as a seven-book series, and there’s not doubt that I have a heck of a lot of material for the world of Derelict.  As in two direct sequels before getting into a main series of at least three, probably more than twice as many, books.  One story is planned as a series for middle-grade or YA, but is mostly just a rough idea right now.  and Old Nick might be a trilogy.  So conservatively, I have my next fourteen books planned out to at least the concept-and-shreds-of-plot stage — assuming that I scrap The Shroud, only write the main series in the Derelict universe as a trilogy, never write the potential YA series, and cram Old Nick into one volume.  And not counting Derelict, which is relatively close to done.

Those are just the ones for which I have a solid core idea, at least a small cast of characters, and a skeleton of a plot.  If I write one of these books a year, I’ve got my next fourteen years of writing planned out.  I’m pretty sure I can think of some more stuff to write in fourteen years.  So I’m not worried about that.

Tangent over, let me tell you a little about my next book.  While I have a pretty good idea of Derelict‘s working title, this new book is going by Wings to Chase These Dreams right now, which frankly sounded a lot cooler a year and a whole lot of repetitions ago.  Let’s just nickname it Wings for now.

Derelict is a space opera (or possibly a fantasy in space).  I put Wings firmly in the fantasy category — though technology is far ahead of what you normally see.  That is to say, the technology level is probably around that of America circa 1960-80, though with a lot of major and minor differences.  Wings is also very much a coming-of-age story.  While Derelict has several LGBT characters, it takes place in a society where that is essentially a non-issue.  Not so for Wings.  The protagonist is a lesbian in a society that is downright hostile to homosexuality: and so Wings becomes something of a civil rights story as well.  There’s a lot of other stuff going on as well — I’m really enjoying developing the world’s magic system, for one — but I think I’ll discontinue further rambling for now.  Suffice to say that I’m really, really excited about the book, and I’ll be working on it for a little while in the following month, before I pick up Derelict for that next draft.

Live long and prosper.

Current music: Alien Ant Farm, Smooth Criminal.  Full disclosure: I like this remix better than Michael Jackson’s original version.  And that’s all I’m saying, because frankly — and no offense to the guy — I’m tired of hearing that name.

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Flash Drives

Friday, July 10th, 2009

For the longest time, I’ve had this troubling problem with my laptop. You see, it’s extremely useful to be able to write anywhere. In fact, my first computer was a laptop precisely because the family computer was in a location that, frankly, was rather poisonous to my muse.

Unfortunately, writing anywhere on my current laptop has proved to be something of a challenge. For starters, the computer has a few issues. Nothing major, but its battery always reads at 5% charge – no matter what – and doesn’t last long at any rate, so it pretty much has to be plugged in most of the time I’m using it. Also, it occasionally has this problem on boot where the backspace, u, and a few other keys don’t work until I reboot. My account name on the laptop is Cthulhu, so you can see how this might be a problem. (My laptop’s name is R’lyeh, in case you were wondering.)

All that’s fairly trivial, though. That’s not what stops me. It’s not that my laptop runs Ubuntu, and as such doesn’t run most of my favorite Windows-based writing aid programs (not easily, anyway). It’s not that the aforementioned programs run slowly, though that’s a factor.

It’s that my files aren’t with me. They’re at home. I can transfer one to my laptop’s desktop via flash drive, modify it, transfer it back – but that’s a pain, because when I get home I have to set up my laptop, plug it in, turn it on – desk space is at a premium for me right now. I usually just end up making new files on the laptop’s desktop and transferring them in bulk every few days or so. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a nice, compact way to carry all my files with me from computer to computer?

The answer, of course, is a flash drive. And it’s not like I don’t have a few. I mean, they’re literally giving them out with boxes of cereal these days. (Seriously. 1Gb flash drive with 8 proof-of-purchases. Don’t remember the brand, but it was there.) The problem with my flash drive, see, is that it’s sticking out the front of my desktop, where it happily stays 24/7 holding my most important files and, well, not really doing anything else. Because I’m afraid of losing the bloody thing. Or breaking it (a justified fear with my most recent one, whose USB plug is at an angle with the rest of it). And then my precious, irreplaceable, neurotically-backed-up files would be gone forever. Except for, you know, the backups. (In all fairness I don’t back up stuff as much as I should, but it’s often enough.)

So I’m compromising. Today I dug up my old 512-meg flash drive, a nice compact Sandisk with a pretty blue light and, more importantly, a lanyard. This is, in fact, the very flash drive that I got back in high school and used until, oh, a couple of months ago when I “upgraded” to the 4-gig, lanyard-less, already-broken-necked flash drive sticking out of my desktop right now.

And you know what? Works like a charm. I loaded up a couple of files and spent the first half of my break digging through some of the more interesting stuff I’d left on it. Then, I wrote about a hundred new words on Derelict during the last ten minutes of my break. It’s sticking out of my desktop now, merely awaiting a quick file transfer. It’s like having an old familiar friend back.

Best of all, I finally got over my guilt for replacing the poor thing.

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Wouldja look at that, it’s Sunday morning

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

. . . when did that happen?  Seems like I need to be putting up a post so it’ll be ready for two days ago . . .

I blame my work schedule.  I actually just got home from work half an hour ago, having worked the closing shift both Friday and Saturday.  Working the other end of the day confuses my internal clock like there’s no tomorrow.

I also blame my brain.  I have the short-term memory of an aging goldfish.  I’d promise not to miss a Friday update again, but, well, I can’t really guarantee that.

So here’s what’s on my mind right now:  Scheduled writing.  Kat has been encouraging me to try scheduling writing time for a while now, and in theory it sounds great.  I’ve been dragging my feet, though, because I’d ideally want to be scheduling my writing at the same time every day — and when 4:45-13:00, 9:00-17:00, and 17:00-1:00 are all likely shifts, that’s effectively impossible.  (Unless I want to try writing from 1:30 to 4:00 in the morning every day.  I’m saving that for a last resort.)

Nonetheless, Kat finally convinced me to give it a shot.  (It might have had something to do with me wailing piteously about not having written anything today for about the fiftieth time.  No guarantees.)  So we went through the next couple of weeks and wrote in on the schedule some writing time, ranging from 2-4 hours, every day.  Yesterday was the first day of the test run, and, well, it went great.  I finished my writing goal (1000 words) about 45 minutes early even with a break for a relaxing bath in the middle of my writing time.  We’ll see if it holds.

Well, it is now officially time to write.  I bid you all well.

Current music:  Ludo, Broken Bride (whole album)

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