Posts Tagged ‘Procrastinating’

Adding to other pointless internet based activities designed to help me with my compulsive work avoidance I’m now on Tumblr.

I’m not sure what i can do with it that I can’t do between my Blog, twitter, twitpic or flickr but I’m sure I’ll find something.

Probably just post some crap.

Same as everywhere else.

AKA – A long post about what I’ve been up to lately…

Due to unforeseen circumstances, it looks as though I may not complete NaNoWriMo again this year.

I say “may” because there is still time left, and if I were to write just over 5000 words per day for the next week I might finish… Though a daily word target like that is highly unlikely to be hit around here. I haven’t even finished cleaning my place yet.

But I have come up with a list of ways to NOT get it finished. Here is the top ten things to do if you don’t want to finish NaNoWriMo this year.

Number Ten – Procrastinate.

…Obviously. Putting things off is a great way to not get things done and there are so many ways in which to do this.

A few personal favourites include watching Tv, cleaning, twittering, or even just going for a walk. All of these are a great way to push work away for a good chunk of time.

When all else fails, I like to use coffee as an excuse to put things off for a few minutes. This works well as I love my coffee and it sounds quite reasonable to say “I’ll get started right after a coffee”

Number Nine – Quit your job.

This sounds like a good idea, and in most ways it is.

But it won’t help you if you’re looking for more time to write. With so much extra time there is no longer any urgency to get any of it done. There is always time to do things later, you have all day tomorrow to catch up and next week you can work extra hard all week to make up for what you didn’t do this week.

I quit my job a few weeks ago. For other reasons, not to make time for writing, but I did think that with all that extra time and with a little tenacity I might be able to get a lot done.

That was until I…

Number Eight – Burn your hand

A great way to keep yourself from writing is to incapacitate yourself. And what could be more laborious and slow than typing with one hand? I mean apart from typing with no hands.

Nothing. Exactly.

So that’s what I did.

This happened to me one night while saving a box of kittens from a burning building, I was set upon by a group of ninjas and robots… and robot ninjas. They were all packing microwave meals, overcooked and only seconds out of the microwave. They demanded the box of kittens and when I didn’t comply they began throwing the meals at me. I managed to dodge most of them except one, which gave me second degree burns on the fingers and palm of my left hand.

I swear all that is true… Except the building, the kittens, the ninjas, the robots and the robot ninjas.

Number Seven – Watch Television.

I know I put this under number ten as a form of procrastination but there are two reasons that it needs it’s own spot.

For one, Television is the enemy of creativity. It really is.

Just by having it on you’re slowing yourself down, but added to that it dulls the creative process. I’ve always found that days in which I watch less television, I get alot more (and better) work done. Unfortunately television works much like any addiction in that unless you cut yourself off from it completely, including all access to it, then it will slowly and inevitably creep back into your life.

And I’m not ready to do that just yet.

Maybe after this season of Dollhouse has finished…

And the second reason this got it’s own entry – I accidentally miscounted and when I realised I didn’t have something for seven this was the first thing I came up with.

Number Six – Get Tattoed

A great way to spend a sunday afternoon, having needles stuck in your arm and/or leg and leaving deposits of ink there. Ah, good times.

Got two done myself last week… After six years since my last tattoo, I finally got around to getting some new ones.

And if you wanted to waste a little more time you can do what I did and walk to the tattoo parlor. Then, once the tattooing is done, you can find out that you’re in some backwards place that doesn’t have eftpos and so you’ll need to spend some more time walking to the shopping centre down the road. All in all, I spent about an hour and a half walking that day.

** A haircut could be substituted here if you prefer not to get tattooed… Or you can do what I did and get a haircut aswell.

Number Five – Buy a new computer

Who doesn’t like a new toy? Especially a nice big-ass super-expensive one like this –

This is my spanky new bitchin’ all-in-one touchscreen multimedia high definition yada yada computer. Ain’t she sweet? The touch screen is fun to play with. It’s heaps big monitor-wise and it’s all new and pretty.

The best thing about new toys like this?

You can spend all day just setting it up. Installing all your favourite programs and getting all the settings to how you like them and so on. I’m still not finished doing all that.

Number Four – Have a personal life

I’ve been trying this out lately. Doesn’t seem to be working for me. I’ve learned that there is nothing better to get in the way of writing than to have a personal life. Especially one as disasterous as mine.

People lie, people betray, people confuse and humiliate, people leave voids and people leave sorrow.

And you can’t control them or understand them like you do the characters you’re writing.

Bastards.

Number Three – Work on plot

Stop and think about your plot. Are things flowing as you want them too? Is the right information revealed at the right stage? Which scene goes next? Is the story moving to slow? Or too fast? And so on…

This is a great wait to slow down your writing. And if you really think about it, it may stop you altogether.

I did this. I decided to do a bit of plot planning, starting with listing all the scenes/elements that I wanted in my story. I came up with a list of 105 things, and it’s still growing… much more slowly now but still it’s growing.

Here’s a wordle of the list -

(because I haven’t posted a wordle in a while)

Anyway, working on the plot always seems to lead to –

Number Two – Starting from scratch.

Yeah, I’ve started to do this…

Well, I will when I’ve finished with everything else on this list. I’m still working on the plot a bit more. I’m going to put all of the elements/scenes that I listed in order and then write more on each one… and all the rest of it. You know how plotting is.

Writing is like eating soup with a fork, only you keep missing the bowl and stabbing yourself in the forehead.

Number One –

Instead of writing the story, write a top ten list about how to fail at writing the story.

To be fair, it’s not exactly a top ten list. It’s more of a ‘first ten things I thought of that I’ve been doing lately instead of working on NaNoWriMo’ list…

There are probably more that I could think of but I have some writing to do… So I’m going for a nap now.

Where have I been? Where have I been?

I could ask you the same thing!!

Things haven’t been going so great over here at Del Casa De Jeremiah. I guess I’ve been having something of an existential crisis. You know, why are we here, what does it all mean, why does that chick want to be ‘just friends’, Where is my coffee ??

The same old stuff.

Although, it has been perfect weather for being miserable. Raining a lot of the time, overcast when it’s not. You can just take your bad mood, your heart ache and just wrap it around you like a warm blanket. Just make sure you put on your thick socks of rejection and the beanie of what ifs, otherwise you might catch a cold. And that would be depressing.

It seems to be the end of the Frog and the Potato.

Oh, internets, what am I supposed to do now?

. . . . .

. . .

.

At least it’s easter now, which gives me a good excuse to break diet and eat lots of chocolate.

In other news, there really isn’t much news.

I haven’t been writing a great deal. I even gave consideration to quitting writing, although I’ve come to realise that this too is an impossibility. It hurts me so, but still I love it.

I’ve gone back to the drawing board on the novel front. After finishing the first draft I tried to run through it to start picking out problems and so on, preparing for the second draft when I realised that it was a first person narrative all along. There are a few minor scenes that I like which won’t work in a first person narrative but alas, as the old saying goes ‘kill your babies’.

So I’m back to the mapping out of the plot, deciding whether or not to stick to the linear storytelling or go for a more ‘Chuck Palahniuk begin with the ending’ style. or something else entirely. I’m not exactly sure which, but it’ll most likely be somewhere between linear and something else entirely.

(Oh, it’s just begun to rain.)

What else have I been up to? What else, what else, what else?

There is some stuff coming up in the near future. If I stop moping around and get to it, it’ll be sooner. But what are the chances of that happening in this beautiful weather?

I think that’s about it for now. Let’s get to work people!!

(Well, you do that. I’m going back to the couch and my pillow.)

Well it’s been quite a February hasn’t it?

I returned from holidays at the end of last month to find my hours at work cut down to barely nothing. I’ve started “looking for a new job” – I put that in quotes because I haven’t technically started yet but I’m sure I will soon. Things are much more expensive when you have no money.

I’ve put my time to good use… At least some of it… Okay, a few hours of it.

I’ve finished a new short story. It’s been a while since I’ve written anything. I got real good at super-mega-procrastination over the last couple of months and it feels good to get back into the swing of things. The hardest part was trying to avoid all my old bad habits, most of which seemed to have reappeared. I need to make sure I keep up the practice from now on…

Anyway the story is called Oneirophasia – and you can read it here.

It’s a strange little story. A little different than any of my others.

It’s actually based on a dream I had a few weeks ago. One of the more coherent and vivid dreams I’ve ever had and when I woke up I wrote down everything that happened. Unlike most of my dreams, like the one where the nurse was cutting all her limbs off as a gift for me, or the one where a ninja kept poisoning my cordial… this dream had more of a story-like structure. So I thought I’d give it a shot as a new life as a short story.

It’s actually very close to they way I dreamed it. But the prose is all mine.

Hmmm…

What…else…have…I…been… doing in February?

Oh!! I went to the… no, no, that was on Tv…

Oh!! I’ve been quitting smoking. It’s been going pretty well too. I’ve cut down to about half of what I was smoking a few weeks ago. Yesterday I had the least smokes in a day that I’ve ever had… (Except for this one time in Tasmania where we were bogged in a camping ground in the middle of nowhere for a day and a half but it wasn’t on purpose so it doesn’t count.) I’ve been using this little programmy doogie on my treo which after a few days of recording your smoking habits slowly makes you cut down by making you wait longer and longer between smoke. It’s been hard butt it’s going good.

Funnily enough though, one of the worst obstacles in quitting smoking is quit smoking ads. Every time I see one I feel like a cigarette.

What…else…

Oh!! And I killed a homeless ma… no, no, that’s a secret… shh… no one said anything.

So, It seems I have a lot to do this coming month. Including looking for a new job. I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s time for a grown-up type job… But you never know, I may put off being a grown-up for a few more years yet…

Until next month…

It’s been almost a whole month now and I’ve done next to naught.

And there’s only one person I can blame for not getting anything done.

Travis the alien. He arrived in our solar system around the beginning of the month and so, most of my time has been spent in an intergalactic battle. The stakes were high, real high. I had already lost five bucks to him and now the stakes were double or nothing. This was life or death stuff.

Darn you Travis!!

It was that and because I did extra shifts at work last week and the fact I bought a Wii… And because I hired out a few movies.

The work alternated between mind-numbingly boring and so busy you slip into automatic and your brain switches off.

The Wii is great. I love playing the tennis on Wii Sports and I downloaded ‘My Life as King’ from the Wiiware and got addicted to that for the last week or so. All in all though – a great purchase (especially since I got it for about half the price it was at the store due to a staff discount and a work bonus in the form of a gift card)

Then, once I’d finished playing My Life as King, I thought I’d finally get down to business with my writing… So I went out and hired some movies. It was dollar tuesday so I hired out five movies. Four of them sucked. The one surprise – Doomsday. I hadn’t heard about it before but the guy at the shop recommended it. Turned out to be pretty awesome with all you could want for a post-apocalypse action movie – Blood, Viruses, A ticking clock, Car chases, gun fights with high-tech battle-wear, a medieval style gladiator fight, a mad max style gang and one hot chick that’ll kick your arse sooner than look at you.

Fun!

Also, somewhere in there I did some spring cleaning and I bought a new video card for my computer. (Although the video card turned out to be incompatible with my computer but for some reason all the screwing around with the video cards made my old card start working right again. So, score!)

I have some more stuff but I’m going to split it onto a seperate entry. Do you know why?

Neither do I.

Seriously, NO TITLE!!

This is due to the fact that I’ve done practically no writing in the last two weeks. (Which may be, in part, because I got Legend of Zelda for my gameboy)… But I choose to blame it on the fact that I’ve been doing some extra hours at work. Damn you work! Damn you to Hell!

Another reason that I haven’t gotten a lot done recently is because I decided to try and write out a synopsis or make some sort of plan for my projects. This came about because of one of my projects.

I’m writing a story based loosely on a computer game I loved as a kid. One of my favourites of all time. It’s mostly just for myself but I’ve been turning out some great material that may be usable later on. But the point is – knowing where the story is going seems to really help with writing it.

So I figure writing out a few thousand words may help give me some direction. (The only problem being – it’s real hard!)

Here’s a little peak at the story anyways, See if you can guess what game it’s based on – It begins in the Janitors closet on a spaceship…

I didn’t feel like waking up just yet but something drew me out of my slumber. An alarm was going off somewhere in the space station and, as usual, they needed to let the whole place know about it. I tried to roll over and cover my ears with a mop that was leaning against a wall nearby, but it only helped to wake me up. The mop was still wet, and smelled like sweaty feet. I sat up and yawned. Deciding to get back to work wasn’t an easy decision to make, but someone needed to make the difficult choices. I climbed to my feet, opened the door to the custodian’s cupboard and stumbled out into the hallway. The alarm was louder now, a pulsing siren of annoyance. Every few seconds it was followed by a voice-over warning that my tired ears still refused to listen too. It was someone else’s problem, I told myself, I just had to clean up afterwards. I strolled along the walkway trying to remember what I’d been up to before the overwhelming desire to nap had taken hold and forced me to take cover in the closet. I was supposed to be cleaning something, maybe… What day was it? Just down the hall a door slid open with a ‘pshaw’. That’s right, I had to oil the doors. A droid flew out of the doorway and almost knocked me to the ground. It screamed in that high pitched whine that only the top quality droid’s could manage. It’s claw-like hands waved furiously about in the air, loose wires spilled from a crack in it’s bronze plating. Smoke plumed from the back of it’s head where it was obvious what the cause of it’s distress was – It’s brain was on fire. Then I heard the warning again. This time it sunk in. “This space station will self-destruct in fourteen minutes and forty-two seconds. Please exit in a calm and orderly manner, and have a nice day!” Oh, bum.

Anyway, I’m having a bit of fun with it.

Another of my projects, one that I started formulating in the last month or so, is coming along nicely. Idea-wise. It’s about a man who was forgotten by his people but not his enemies, and one day they attack. I have good idea of how it begins but after that it gets a bit vague. It needs a lot more planning before I begin to write it.

On non-writing related notes –

I Got a couple of new books. Yay me! – I got Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman (Who incidentally, has recently made it onto my favourite author list.)

I also got myself a copy of Dune. (Another computer game I loved as a kid) It’s a surprise it’s taken me this long to get myself a copy, but there you go.

My TBR shelf is now two titles longer.

Also, it’s been around fifteen years since I’ve wanted to see a new Jean-Claude Van Damme movie but, damn, this looks cool – Link… It seems a little similar to My Name is Bruce. But I’m still going to watch it.

Also, This is pretty cool.

And this one was giggle-worthy too – Link

Also, The devil gave me everything I could ever want and all it cost me was my soul. But in a strange turn of events that involved a misprint on the contracts – The devil is now cutting the bottom off all my shoes. Sucker!

I think there was more. But I can’t remember right now.

P.S. – I’m thinking about getting myself a Wii.

It seems like such a nice day.

It’s a little colder than it has been the last week or so, perfect weather for a nice hot coffee any time of the day. In fact, I’m having one now… Mmmm Coffee…

I slept in today. After four days in a row of getting up at 3 am it’s pretty sweet to roll out of bed after nine. I got up and had a coffee while I read a bit of American Gods. I had a bit of a ride on my stationary bike and then settled in on the couch to watch some Tv while I read some blog updates.

Aaaah…

Then I remembered I had to do some work today as well.

Especially since I’ve barely written two thousand words in the last eight days.

Urgh!

I have done a couple of things, though. You may’ve noticed a spanky new static front page to my site. Internet high five!

Okay, that’s about it. Just one thing.

I’m supposed to be starting my novel but alas, find myself as unmotivated as a post-coital praying mantis. Tired, drained and headless.

Every so often I try looking for a better way of working. Some way that keeps me going. Something that flips a switch in my brain and makes me crazy productive and nutty creative.

I’ve read about how several authors, Neil Gaiman for example (since I’m reading some of his work at the moment), write long hand pen on paper style for their first draft. And I’m considering trying that again.

I’m also wondering If I’m focusing on the right project. So I move from one to the other to the other again. I have one project that I know how it begins, unless I change something, but I still have no idea what the story is. I was hoping I could write a sentence or two and it’d show me itself but no. It’s to lazy to do that.

I have another project that I’m just not into working on at the moment. I think I made a wrong turn somewhere a while back, and I’ll have to go back and do something about it.

Then there’s another project that I know the whole story (I’ve mentioned this one a lot before – Project Apocalypse) but I don’t know how to write it. I’m starting to think I just don’t have the skills to write it yet. Also – I think there’s something missing. One tiny element. Not sure what, yet.

Mostly I think I’m just looking for a reason why I can’t get past the first page.

So, What’s your excuse?

A Computer that broke down… Again.

Organisation, Procrastination, and Illumination.

And learning to leave well enough alone.

It begins with a blog entry I was reading about workspace organisation and productivity. The writer talked about how they organise their workspace in order to avoid cleaning it to get out of work. I have a neat workspace, but I rarely use it anymore. Not since I bought my laptop.

Since buying my laptop, I’ve spent most of the time with it sitting on my couch in front of the television and avoiding work by clicking through my favourite sites and reading others blogs (and so on…), Ignoring my workplace for various reasons – The latest being that since I updated it to Vista it’s been having problems with the dual monitor display, Often the second display was fuzzy and unreadable. Obviously a second display isn’t necessary, but how many excuses stand up to argument?

Well?

So, after finally getting around to checking all the cables and plugs and what-nots, I realise it’s Vista and it’s lack of proper support for my card that is the problem. It came down to a choice between buying a new video card or downgrading my computer. Buying a new video card costs money, so guess which choice I went for?

So, I’m installing XP back onto my computer. Everything it going fine until it comes to installing all of my programs and drivers and everything else. All of these things were kept on my 400gb external hard drive/media player. This cool little box I could use as a second hard drive or plug it into my tv to play all my media files, at least I could until about six months ago when the Tv part of the box broke down.

And then, finally, when I needed it, the rest of it broke down. I could not access my drive no matter what I tried.

Ever since the tv part broke down, I had considered installing it into my computer as a second hard drive but… well, I didn’t get around to it. And now seemed like the appropriate time.

So, that’s what I did. I installed it into my computer, the drive came up on the bios, it came up in the hardware list in the control panel. Everything was going smoothly but the drive didn’t appear on ‘My Computer’. I figured it may’ve had it’s own formatting that only the media player recognised and I would need to put a new partition on there to access it.

I downloaded Partition Magic, because I’d had success of making new partitions without any data loss with the program in the past.

The same could not be said this time.

I lost Two Hundred and Seventy Gigabytes of backups, photos and downloads. 270gb!!!

The downloads, I don’t mind so much in losing. Although it was A LOT. I can always download it again if need be. It was mostly just movies and tv shows I liked. Including a complete collection of The Outer Limits episodes, The Young Ones, Black Books, The Mighty Boosh, Doctor Who and old cartoons like Dungeons and Dragons, The Tick and Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

The worst part was all my photos and backups. Most of the photos I don’t have anywhere else, and in the backups (amongst stuff I have on my main drive) was all my old short story attempts and other writing notes. Some of it I have on paper, but there is a lot of stuff I’ve lost there.

Over the last few days I’ve been trying with various programs to save as much as I can but a majority of the files are corrupted and unsalvageable.

I’m now almost ready to give up. I’m on my last attempt now and so far I’ve saved a little, but this has been a major loss.

But I’ve had worse things happen.

Soon I’ll clean up everything and get my workspace neat and tidy again. Then we’ll see who’s the productive one.

ME!

I’m as nervous as a haemophiliac vampire hunting.

Well maybe not that much. At least a Haemophobic though.

If your remember back here. My short story Icy Dead People is being published in the Anthology of the Living Dead

Well, a couple of days ago they sent me back the story with a couple of editing notes added here and there. A couple of small things to add or change, no biggy.

I think I made some good changes. Cleaned up the story a bit and yadda yadda yadda. I think it came out good.

And now I’ve sent it back to them.

Eeeeerghk!

apart from that, I’m feeling pretty good with my first dealings with editors and what-not and people who seem to know what they’re doing.

Back to work on my other projects now. Well tomorrow anyway, my brein is feeling a little fried right now and I also have work tonight. Gak.

P.s. – I’m not adding the changes to my site just yet. There might be more changes to make.

also, just a note, – This is my 101st blog entry. I guess that deserves a coffee.

It seems like I took a nap and a month passed by. Everything I have been doing has either slowed to a crawl or come to a complete grinding halt.

Today, I worked on my latest short story. I wrote only a couple of paragraphs.

I made another attempt at starting my novel. I couldn’t make a decision on how it should begin.

See what I mean?

The short story is, in fact, coming along. Albeit slowly. But I’ve come across a major problem. It’s written in third person but I’ve been following one character in particular. I’ve been thinking of killing that character off soon and letting the story follow another character.

But I’m not sure how disruptive this could be to the story on whole.

The way I see it, I have a couple of choices.

1 – is to not kill the character in a heroic but gruesome fashion. But where would the fun be in that?

2 – is to change the story completely, so it follows the other character from the beginning. But I’d lose some stuff I really like.

3 – is to change a part of it so it sort of alternates protagonists.

or

4 – Just do it and hope no one notices.

I think I’ll go for number four for now, I may just leave it and fix it up during the rewrite.

My Novel, on the other sock, is much worse off. I can’t even get started. I think I wrote about ten opening lines today before deleting them again. I think I got out an opening paragraph or two before deleting them as well.

I can’t even decide on whether it’s going to be first person or third person.

At first I think I’d go with first person because I could be less linear in the story telling and have a lot more introspection.

Then I think no, go third person because it can bring a larger picture into the small story and focus on the characters actions and how they deal with the situations over what one person thinks…

It is a little story. It probably won’t end up much more then 200 pages or so. I’ve always wanted it to be that way. Simple and small and straight to the heart. I think if I let it get to long, it will get boring and lose the meaning of it.

I know this story but (and if you check back through my blog I’ve said this many times before) I have no idea how to tell it.

That’s my other conundrum. or should that be plural? conundrums… I’m not sure where to begin (although on this matter I think I’m getting closer to an answer) and I’m not sure how to begin.

I’ve tried everything from beginning with a description of the area, starting with action, beginning with an amusing explanation, starting with a philosophical point of view.

It’s enough to tear your hair out by the bloody roots.

Aaargh, the plight of the indecisive.

The other thing I’ve been rather indecisive about today is my TBR list.

I finished Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde today. It’s the second book in the Thursday Next series. I read The Eyre Affair not too long ago and really enjoyed it but I wasn’t sure if I was going to continue reading the series, at least not right away. Series are a big commitment!. But after the second one, I will be continuing on.

First, though, I’m going to get through a couple more books on my To Be Read list.

But, indecisive me, I can’t choose which one to read next. I’ve cut it down to a choice of four books. It’s between The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, Gateway by Frederik Pohl, Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon or Mister B. Gone by Clive Barker.

I think I’m going to just have to eenie meenie mynie moe it.