Archive for June, 2018

Figuring Out Success

I mentioned that book I just read about analyzing conventional wisdom about success. It’s called Barking up the Wrong Tree and is by Eric Barker, who also has a blog on the topic.

This is an interesting book to read if you’re trying to optimize your life, looking for ways to improve your career, get more done, or are just interested in human nature. I’m pretty much all of the above. It’s essentially a Mythbusters of success and motivation, except instead of doing crazy experiments, he looks up actual research studies.

One of the sections that intrigued me most was on dreaming and visualization. One of the big pop culture things about success over the past dozen or so years has been visualization, with the idea that visualizing yourself having the thing that you want will somehow magically bring it about. You hear terms like “manifesting.” Even if you’re not going so far as to believe that just thinking about something will make it happen, there’s the idea that visualizing yourself having what you want and seeing what your idea of success will look like when it happens is motivating.

It turns out that it’s the opposite. Research has found that visualization is actually de-motivating because it tricks your brain into thinking you’re already there, so you’re less likely to be motivated to work toward getting that thing. You feel like you’ve already received the reward, so you have less energy for going after it.

What does work is turning that dream into a plan. If you have a thing that you’re dreaming of having or doing, then you need to get specific about the exact outcome you really want. Then think of what you have to overcome to get it and come up with a plan to address that. Going through this process instead of just picturing the end result is more likely to energize you to go after that thing — unless the thing you want is unreasonable, and then you’ll lose motivation, which makes it a good test of your dream.

There’s also stuff about how turning steps of a plan into a game makes you more likely to carry out that plan and how to go about networking in a way that doesn’t come across like you’re trying to use people.

The other interesting takeaway is about finding a balance between overconfidence and lack of confidence. Being really confident can help you be effective because you go after things and stick with them, but that can also make you a jerk and make you blind to your own weaknesses. Having less confidence makes you work harder to improve, but makes you feel bad and may make others see you as less competent. The balance is “self compassion,” which is recognizing your faults, but forgiving yourself. See yourself accurately but don’t judge yourself harshly.

His blog looks pretty interesting, with a lot of lists of books to read or items from research on various topics.

And now, a key part of my plan to achieve my dream of publishing world domination is to spend more time writing, so off I go to work on my book.

writing life

Scheduling

I’ve been reading a book on how the conventional wisdom about success is often wrong, and I’ll discuss it in more detail once I’ve thought about it some more, but one thing it did do was reinforce my scheduling habit. The “conventional wisdom” was that you should have a to-do list to keep track of tasks, and the better way is to have a schedule, instead, because the to-do list doesn’t do you much good if you don’t allocate the time to do those items. Scheduling time to do the things you need to do makes you more likely to do them.

I actually have both. I use the Stickies app on my computer to keep a to-do list for each day of the week. When I think of something I need to do, I put it on that day’s list. Then when I do my scheduling for that day, I schedule those tasks.

But the schedule really is a life changer for people who tend to procrastinate or who have trouble getting started. I find that I get so much more done, and actually get those tasks on my list done, when I make a schedule every morning. It even works on weekends because I schedule my chores and the fun things I want to do. That makes me more likely to make time for the fun stuff. If I don’t schedule, it’s easy to fall into the trap of just surfing the Internet or watching TV, and then I feel guilty for doing that, so even that’s not fun. So, I schedule my Internet and TV time, along with other stuff I want to do, and then I can relax and enjoy all the activities.

That’s what the author of this book was showing, that while the conventional wisdom is that a schedule will make you feel constrained, and you definitely don’t want to have to stick to a plan on the weekend, it actually works out that you’re happier when you’re conscious and deliberate about how you use your time. You’re more likely to do the things that make you happy instead of wasting your time on things that are easy to fall into without thinking, and you feel better about yourself when you don’t feel like you wasted time. It’s nice to be at the end of a weekend and able to look back at what you accomplished and the things you did rather than wondering where all the time went.

I’m still working out the best way to use my schedule. I’ve learned to overestimate how much time something will take. I only schedule half-hour blocks because any tighter than that adds to stress. If a task doesn’t take that much time, it gives me a cushion in case something else takes longer or there’s an interruption. In fact, I deliberately plan a few blocks that I know will only take a few minutes. The tricky part is scheduling writing time because I know I need a few breaks just to get up and move, but those are too short to put on the schedule, but if there’s not a firm “back to work” time, it’s easy for those breaks to expand. Using the timer on my phone for the breaks helps. It also depends on which stage of a project I’m on. I want longer working blocks when I’m drafting because I want to get into a state of flow where I’m immersed in the world. When I’m editing or proofreading, I don’t want that flow because I want to be focused and aware, so I may schedule shorter blocks with breaks to go do something else in between.

And now my schedule is telling me that it’s time to write.

Learning Never Stops

The fun thing about returning to something you last worked on months ago is seeing how much you’ve grown as a writer since then. I applied my “but” or “and so” trick to this book that I put aside to work on the one I just finished, and that immediately exposed the plot problems. Now I just need to fix them and figure out what happens in the rest of the book.

That will be today’s fun, a day spent plotting (and scheming). I hope that means I can get to the writing part tomorrow.

I have to say, I really love playing in the Enchanted, Inc. world. These are such fun characters who immediately come to life for me when I write, and I love slipping into Katie’s narrative voice because I can let my snark flag fly.

I came up with some ideas on my morning walk, and now I need to see if they fit.

writing

Now, Where Was I?

Yesterday, I reread the part of the book I’d already written and I almost didn’t remember writing any of it. That was good, in a way, since I was able to read it like a reader without knowing where it was going, but it’s bad if I have to write the rest of it and I’m not sure where it’s going.

Fortunately, I have notes about my plans for the book, but when I read them, there was mention of a scene that I could visualize clearly but that wasn’t in the book. I was rather baffled because I could swear I wrote it. I was starting to think that maybe I’d just outlined it, and the outline was so vivid that I felt like I’d written it, but then I got the idea to check my backup drive. I wrote this book on a different computer, and although I was pretty sure I hadn’t written anything after the date of the last file I’d transferred to this computer, there was always a chance I’d written more. There was a little panic behind this because the computer I was writing on has died, but I was pretty good about backing up that hard drive.

And, sure enough, on the backup drive, there was a version a few days older than the one I’d read, and it did have the scene I remembered. Hooray! Thank goodness for backups. And this is why I tend to have overlapping computers, so nothing is really lost if one dies. I guess this means I’ll soon be in the market for a new laptop.

Today, I need to re-outline the book and figure out where I’m really going with it. It’s been a while, so I may have changed my mind.

writing

On to the Next Project

I’m letting the project I’ve been working on rest for a week or so before I give it another pass, which means I’m switching gears to work on something else — a new Enchanted, Inc. book. I got about halfway through it in the fall before life got crazy and I got busy on another project, but I need to get back to it and finish it so it can go out into the world and make my fans happy.

Today I’ll be rereading what I’ve already written so I can remember what it was all about. That’s a little scary because it’s been months, and there’s always a chance that I’ll look at it and go “What was I thinking?” Or I guess I could like it.

After today, I’m planning to do a massive writing binge and make a game out of seeing how fast I can finish a draft. I’m trying to break some bad time-wasting habits I’ve developed, and I hope that if I can make new habits, I can increase my productivity. The idea is that if I spend the summer, when I’m hiding indoors from the heat, diligently writing, then I can enjoy the fall — still working, but making a little more free time.

So, now, back to a book I haven’t looked at in months. I barely remember what the main plot was about, so this should almost be like reading something someone else wrote.

TV

Ending Once Upon a Time

I never did say anything about what I thought about the finale of Once Upon a Time. I suspect that anyone who’s not waiting for Netflix or the DVDs who’s planning to watch it has seen it by now, so there will be spoilers ahead.

For the most part, the wrap-up of the plot for the current season was okay. It was nice to see the original characters again, and there were some nice moments. It might have helped if the whole season had been coherent. It mostly reminded me of a story told by a kindergartener, jumping around randomly as they think of something new that’s entirely unrelated to anything that had happened before. You could cut out huge chunks of the season without affecting the plot because they ended up being utterly irrelevant to the plot. That makes me wonder if there was some mid-season course correction as they realized that either some of the things weren’t working or that viewers were responding very negatively. I was actually kind of okay with the resolution for Rumpelstiltskin (though I think his “redemption” was missing a few steps). It seemed fitting.

But then we got to the series wrap-up, which sprang out of nowhere and made absolutely zero sense on any level.

Seriously, they decided it was a good idea to merge all the various story worlds and put them into that one little town in Maine that was created by the original curse (multiple worlds, in one little town, in Maine, which isn’t that big a state?), and then supposedly all these worlds elected Regina, the former Evil Queen (who has yet to actually apologize or show remorse for committing mass murder) the literal Queen of the Universe, with all the people she spent decades tormenting bowing to her.

Even the worst Mary Sue fanfic writer would be ashamed to publicly post something like that about their self insert character. We’ve managed to top Rose getting her very own human version of the Doctor.

Not to mention, it would seriously mess with the timeline, since the season 7 characters were about 26 years into the future before being sent back in time with the curse. But now all the worlds are smushed together, so will the “present” versions of those characters still go and do the same things, so that the curse will be cast and they’ll end up back in time? What happens if that curse doesn’t get cast, so that the events that led to those characters being where they were and that led to combining the worlds never happen?

Not that the timeline of the season worked at all. We had some characters aging enough that they were played by different actors, but then there were other characters still played by the same actors, even though nearly 30 years had passed — and without any kind of aging makeup, and with those characters being treated like they were still the same age. This in a show in which for the first six seasons it was a plot point that a daughter and her parents were the same age because they’d been frozen in time while she grew up, so it was hard to tell in season seven if this was supposed to be a plot point or if they were just being sloppy.

There was so much potential in this series. They had a brilliant premise and a mostly great cast, and they occasionally created wonderful moments. But the overall direction of the series was just so very bad that this finale was fitting. I keep wanting to rewrite it all, fixing the flaws. I hope most of the cast members find good new roles and land on their feet. I’m still trying to find a way I can file off the serial numbers and create something that looks original enough to pass but that allows me to rewrite it and fix it. I have an idea, and we’ll see if I can pull it off.

writing life

When Life Affects Art

I have reached the phase of revisions in which I’m really doubting myself, and I don’t know if there’s something lacking in the story or if I’ve just spent so much time agonizing over every word that it’s lost the magic for me. This may be when I need to let someone else look at it. I do think there are some things that need to be amped up, but I’m not sure how.

I think part of my problem is that I wrote a lot of this book, particularly the end, while I was in a mode where I needed low-stress reads, so it gets very low-stress at times, and low-stress is hard to sell.

That’s one of the tricky things about writing. Even if you don’t realize you’re doing it, your real life seeps into what you’re writing. I had to scrap large parts of Damsel Under Stress and completely rewrite the ending because one of my close friends died while I was midway through the book. She’d been a kind of critique partner, someone I sent chapters to as I wrote them. You can thank her for Owen playing such a large role in the Enchanted, Inc. series because in the first draft of the first book she loved him, and that encouraged me to give him a larger role. It was hard continuing with that book after her death. I was in a kind of fog. I didn’t even realize how gloomy that book was until my agent gave me her feedback, and after I’d had time away from it and had emerged from the fog, I re-read the book again and couldn’t believe what I wrote.

With the book I’m working on now, I wrote this draft of the ending while going through a lot of medical stuff, in the phase where there had been some tests, and those results had led to the need for other tests, but I was waiting on appointments, so there was a lot of uncertainty. My TV viewing was mostly along the lines of “let’s visit these lovely gardens” or “let’s walk around to sites related to famous novels” just because I needed to keep my blood pressure and adrenaline levels down. That made it hard to write a really gripping climax in which my characters were in danger and had to save the day.

It’s also hard to write a romance novel when your boyfriend has dumped you and you’re going through a bitter “I don’t believe in love anymore” phase.

Maybe there are some writers who can immerse themselves into their worlds so much that their own lives are never reflected in their books, but I find that if I shut off my own life, the book comes across as cold and lifeless. The trick seems to be to be able to see in the work where life has made an impact and fix it in edits. That requires a lot of self awareness, or else a good critique partner who can call you on it.

Needing Something

I got a slow start to the day because I was up for about an hour very early in the morning (around 2 a.m.) when a big hailstorm hit. I have a clay tile roof, so storms tend to be very loud. Regular rain sounds like a hailstorm, so an actual hailstorm sounds like boulders hitting the roof. There’s no sleeping during that because each strike of a hailstone sounds like it’s going to be hurtling through the ceiling. I saw posts on Facebook (while I was awake, I was checking various news feeds for weather conditions) from friends nearby who had tennis or baseball-sized hail and who had broken car windows. I don’t think it was that bad in my neighborhood. As soon as the sound of hail stopped, I looked outside and didn’t see any hailstones on the ground, so they must have been small enough to melt quickly in the rain. The trees around my neighborhood were shredded, and there are leaves and twigs all over the ground under every tree, but cars that look like they were parked outside during the storm (because they’re wet and covered in shredded leaves) didn’t have any visible damage.

Rain is good, but I can do without the hail. It took me a while to get back to sleep after the hail finally stopped and it seemed that the storm had moved on. Then I slept late.

I’m doing a near-final pass on the book I’ve been working on, and I think I’ve hit the part that will need the most revision, so it’s going to slow down a bit. The problem is that I know it needs something, but I’m not quite sure what that something is. It’s been a while since I looked at this part, so maybe that something will strike me now.

Hmm, maybe I need to add a good hailstorm.

Books

Escapist Reads

I know I’ve mentioned my search for “cozy” fantasy before, but I’ve been thinking about it again recently, and then there was some discussion on Twitter yesterday, so I thought I’d bring it up again in a form that’s a lot easier for me than Twitter (I don’t write well in short bursts).

A lot of the fan mail I’ve received about the Enchanted, Inc. series is about how these books helped people get through difficult and stressful situations. I’ve heard from moms who read them while on bed rest during difficult pregnancies, people who read them while sitting through chemo infusions, people who read them while in ICU waiting rooms, even people who read them out loud to stroke patients. These readers thanked me for writing something fun and optimistic that wasn’t too stressful to read but that was still engaging enough to hook them and take them away from their surroundings.

Lately, I’ve had the chance to see just how important that can be. I’ve been dealing with some medical stuff that’s involved a lot of tests, scans, and the like, and then waiting for results that could have been scary (they weren’t). One of the issues I’ve been dealing with is possibly high adrenaline levels that are spiking my blood pressure and pulse rate, which means that for a while, until medication got that under control, it was literally bad for me to get too tense. I was reading a book I was enjoying, but I had to put it aside near the climax because I just couldn’t deal with the stress of worrying about the characters. I could feel my blood pressure rising while reading it and could only finish it once the medication started working.

What I needed was what I guess you’d call escapist fantasy. But that’s tricky to find. For one thing, it’s hard to write because it’s a challenge to have enough tension for the book to be engaging without it being super stressful. If you do manage to write that, it’s a very tough sell because editors are looking for intense books. A lot of readers love it when a book rips their hearts out. Angst sells. “Grimdark” is a big thing.

But it’s not just about having a happy ending because the process of getting to a happy ending can be stressful. The romance genre is built around a guaranteed happy ending, but there are romance books that are difficult for me to read because they put the characters through the wringer first. What I’m looking for is really hard to define, and I’m sure it varies by individual because everyone has their own triggers. For instance, I just can’t deal with gambling in books. It stresses me out, big-time, especially in the kind of story where the person has to stake all they own at very high risk. I also have a very hard time with institutional injustice, like a frame job where the authorities are in on it, so the person has nowhere to turn.

Some things I tend to look for:

  • Nothing really dire happening to or threatening the viewpoint character — you may notice that in my books, most of the real suffering happens to other characters while the viewpoint character is the one coming to the rescue without actually going through more than worrying about those other characters. The tension is about whether the protagonist will save the others, not whether she’ll survive or be okay.
  • Moments of hope or joy even during the tough parts.
  • Friendships or relationships that provide support during the tough parts.
  • At least someone with some kind of power (magical, legal, financial, etc.) on the side of the good guys so that there’s a power balance with the villains.
  • More focus on the heroes than on the villains.
  • The stakes focus more on the world than on the characters — the story question is whether they can make the world a better place, not whether they’re going to survive

Even if books like these exist, finding them and identifying them is tricky, and you may not know until you’re midway through whether or not a book will be “safe” for you at this time. Mostly, it seems to be word of mouth. Apparently, word really spread about the Enchanted, Inc. books in some mothers of multiples forums, and that’s why so many moms were reading them during bed rest. So, I thought I might start a list of books that work for me in these circumstances and why. That may also give an idea of what I’m looking for.

  • My Enchanted, Inc. series does seem to work for other people, though for me it’s stressful reading because I want to edit it. I would like more of something like that, but written by someone else.
  • Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books are generally what I re-read when I need a comfort read. I suppose bad stuff does happen sometimes to his main characters, but there’s still a reassuring sense that it will all work out, so I trust him to get me where I need to be. The humor and sense of hope help a lot. I just wouldn’t re-read the last book if I’m not up to strong emotions.
  • It’s science fiction rather than fantasy, but To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis, is a big comfort read for me. The stakes are high — history itself — but there’s zero worry that the main characters are going to suffer horribly.
  • Stardust, by Neil Gaiman, is a lovely gem of a book that leaves me with a satisfied sigh.

I’ll have to go back through my reading logs to see what else I’ve found, but these are the ones that come to mind and that I reread often when I’m too stressed out by the real world to handle stress in my fiction. And I’m open to suggestions. I’ll have to put the list somewhere on my web site so people can find good recommendations when they need a low-stress, escapist read.

Subscription Services?

I took a short break to visit my parents, and now I’m hoping to be fully in summer work mode. There’s a lot of stuff I’d like to do this fall, once we’re back to it being cool enough to go outdoors without bursting into flames, so I need to do the bulk of this year’s writing during the summer, when I’m huddling indoors under the ceiling fan.

Of course, wouldn’t you know it, we got a thunderstorm this morning, right after I got up to go take my walk, so that kind of ruins the whole “summer” thing. Not that I’m complaining. I’m definitely okay starting a June day with the windows open, listening to the rain.

One of the topics of discussion at that conference I went to was subscription models like Patreon. I hadn’t really considered doing something like that because I make decent money from my books and don’t necessarily need my fans paying subscription fees for access to my stuff. But it sounds like this has almost become a new promotional platform, with the money you make a bonus. So, you might post a blog there that doesn’t require payment, and then there would be bonus content at various payment levels. Just the announcement of the bonus content gives you something to publicize in between books. Some writers post movie and TV reviews there. Some serialize novels, and some post short stories or deleted scenes.

I’ve been putting most of that kind of stuff just on my blog, and the thought of having to produce extra stuff, in addition to writing books, is a little stressful. But since that seems to be where the cool kids are, it might prove to be a way to stay in touch with fans. On the other hand, I don’t even have 600 Twitter followers, so it’s not that likely that I’d get enough patrons to make it worthwhile.

One thing I’ve considered to start with is doing some rewatch reviews of Once Upon a Time, from the perspective of a fantasy novelist. An online forum I’m in is doing an organized rewatch, so this might be something I’m doing anyway. These posts might be more detailed than I’d do in a regular blog, and it might be of interest both for fans of the show and for writers (because, oh, is there a lot of What Not To Do, especially as we get into later seasons). I wonder how many people might be willing to pay $1-2 a month for access to something like that, along with other writing advice-type posts.

But, really, I mostly need to spend the time writing.