The myth of working from home for the aspiring writer
Posted by mcummings
Howdy fellow aspiring writers. Well, maybe not aspiring. That's hardly a fair label - the act of writing we are accomplishing (by and large), it's the finishing and publishing that makes us all circle around the wagon together, looking for the secret sauce that will elevate us to internet fame and random snapshots of our works in public places.
Like many dreamers, I too thought it would be great if I could just work from home. Imagine, all of the time you could save and put into writing! Make your own schedule! Accomplish that novel!
I must be doing something wrong. Here are the things I've figured out so far, though: Writing in the same physical - and mental - space that you do your day job in is tough.
1. If the space and tools you use are the same, then its easy to find yourself falling into the trap of just doing more office work. OK, it's easy for me to anyway.
2. It's hard to get that mental disconnect from the day job that you really need to be able to stretch your creativity.
3. Finally, its bad for your body. If you're working for 8-10 hours on the day job at your desk, and then trying to do an hour or two of writing - that's up to 12+ hours of sitting in the exact same chair. That isn't good, and I know it isn't, but it's also hard to justify leaving your desk when you have just one more thing to do, type, save, or note down.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. You feel drained. Sitting at your desk on the weekend, you don't feel at all compelled to do any writing, because this is where you just spent 5 days, or 90 million hours, doing paid office work.
What, you thought I had solutions to these? Nope. I'm sharing so you can avoid my pitfalls. Even if that does mean you will be stepping on my face to do it. Don't misunderstand me - working from home is awesome and wondrous and great, and really does give me a chance to see my family. Just don't confuse working from home as meaning a better chance of writing. I made that mistake.
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The demise of google reader?
Posted by mcummings
It's not often that I'll speak out about something like this. I recognize right up front that Google - evil empire or last stalwart bastion of hope for humanity, your choice - offers a lot of services that just aren't profitable for them. I gave up on understanding it years ago and learned to just enjoy the pie, as it were. But the news from yesterday that Google is dropping their reader service has me left in shock. I use reader. A lot. I've always used it as the background engine to fuel whatever silly RSS reader I want to hook up in front. To have that taken away - to lose all of the saved articles, feeds, etc. (yes, I know I can export, let me have this moment of grief!), plus the money I've invested in what are for me the ideal front end readers for it - I am aghast. Simply aghast.
This feed brought to at least half of you via Google Reader.
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Yesterday words were written
Posted by mcummings
Yesterday, words were written, and it was a glorious thing. 1400+ of them, to be specific. There I (well, my lead character atm) was, standing on the rocky, mottled surface of Io, approaching the ridge of an impact crater, watching the languid flow of lava as tectonic forces overcame the confines of gravity to shoot lava into the yellow haze of a sky with Jupiter ascendant, and the next thing you know a thirty foot tall alien robot was freeing itself from the crater walls and making its way down.
It. Was. Awesome.
What was the secret? Giving up. More specifically, giving up on the tools and fancy shmancy apps I'd been using. Don't get me wrong - scrivener? Love it. But at least until they release the iPad app, it's not really a portable, multiple locale use program, and that's a real hinderance to someone who might be trying to work in multiple locations as time allowed. I've tried all of the current work arounds - indexcards (even as an app, ick), sync with external folder as plain text (my sensitive nature is put off by the convoluted structure that all of my planning is turned into when rendered as flat text), and of course a dozen different apps to read those syncs. Meh. They all suck, in my opinion, because they break the cohesiveness of the writing IDE that scrivener is on the desktop.
So yesterday, I didn't do any of that crap. Saturday night I grabbed a copy of focuswriter, then spent an inordinate amount of time playing with themes in full screen (my favorites were over here, especially the Blade Runner and Halcyon based themes). Using a plain text file saved on dropbox, I was able to seamlessly work between my desktop, iPad, and even my work laptop between work tasks. That meant I could focus more on the words, which is what it's all about, right?
N.B. - there is, in my opinion, a "bug" with focuswriter, at least when used with dropbox, which causes autosave to be useless, and manual save to invoke a dialogue of "something else has touched this file, ignore or reload?" If you try this out - IGNORE. Reload will cause you to lose everything you wrote since your last successful save. Like that witty paragraph and a half that I will never be able to recover because my brain will never again be so suave.
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I’m not good at tweeting.
Posted by mcummings
I think if anything, the last day or so has proven that I have no natural inclination to take part in social media like I once thought I did. My free time has been again whisked away by the real world woes of keeping a roof over our heads and the bills paid, which has been my excuse about blogging lately (and it looks like will continue to be until April). But tweeting? 140 characters of what's going on right now?
In the last 24 hours we've had (as it turns out) an electrical fire in our water heater, the subsequent dumping of many gallons of hot water on our laundry floor, and the joys of homeownership - the bill for replacing said water heater. A hard-core tweeter (and I know, because I follow some of them) would have documented every step of the process for the world to read. I made two tweets iirc. Or on my trip to the doctor's this morning for the pain I've had in my foot for a week - I made one tweet of questionable nature about how young the nurse was (funny aside - that tweet got retweeted by Neal Asher, which I thought was awesome not the least because I got the retweet notice while reading Line of Polity by Mr. Asher )
I am not a tweeter is the conclusion I come to, and I feel somewhat bad about it. Over the last year, I've met some really great people on twitter, people I'd like to have a chance to meet in real life some day. I also got involved in a few weekly chats that for the past month or so, I just haven't had the time or will to take part in. Those folks, I'm sure, have all written me off as a fly by night kind of guy, and maybe they're right. While I could do it for a time, I really don't have the resources to spend on being social.
This isn't to say I won't post on twitter (which is how my Facebook feed gets updated, btw). My blog posts will continue to post on twitter, mostly because they also pass on to Facebook, and because I treat them like a poor man's RSS a la carte. But as the momentous birthday approaches in a week, I think I want to start spending the precious minutes I have free in a day elsewhere.
My shout out last week about a writing group netted nil. I'm not surprised or disappointed, though I would have been thrilled if something more of it had come. Only you can make you a writer, in the end, and only by the act of writing. If you see me online, say hi, but don't be surprised if it's a few weeks between musings. Those few minutes I might be saving by not catching up on twitter or posting inane things to the world? I think I'll spend them somewhere else where the words dwell. I understand the sulfuric auroras of Io can be quite pleasing this time of the year.
A blog post in which I admit I need a writing group.
Posted by mcummings
I had another rejection arrive this week, a pleasant form letter from Asimov's. It's somewhat solidified a world view that I've been developing lately, when I haven't been obsessing over other things in my life (READ: day job), and that's that I really need some help with my writing. Not $200 a session help, but some impartial insight into where my stories are flailing behind the curtains.
I am, of course, referring to a writing group.
They do exist down here in Fredericksburg, or so I've been told, but the problem tends to be one of timing. It's all fine and good to be high and mighty and say that if the craft is that important, you'll make the time for it - but when juggling career and family, finding both the free time and applying it to when a writing group meets aren't always feasibly. So I'm turning back to my roots, as it were. I'm looking online.
I'll go ahead and put this out there - if you know of an online writing group that's accepting of science fiction and fantasy themes (doesn't need to be focussed on them, but a circle of elderly romance writers might not be keen on a story with zombie infested space carrots. Just saying.), please let me know. For my part I'm revisiting some old haunts, starting with Neal Asher's Gabble forum, where there used to be a writer's forum floating around. Finding the time to pound words into a shape is necessary, but I am also admitting, I need help figuring out what I'm doing wrong when I set that hammer down.
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