I’ve always been a really big fan of outlining and structured writing, particularly for long form stuff. I suspect anyone who has ever argued with me about writing, or written in collaboration with me is probably nodding in understanding (or yelling “that’s an understatement” and flipping the bird to the monitor). This probably explains my interest in things like LaTeX and Markdown, and the reason that wiki’s have been frustrating for me, and the reason that I can pull my distractable attention span together enough to be able write long form projects. I mean, I even managed that as a teenager, which continues to impress me at least.

I like outlining because it allows me the opportunity to separate conceptual activity from implementation activity to a great extent. I can write an outline, figure out what’s going to happen, what I need to tell, where I’m headed in an argument/plot, and then when I go to write, I don’t have to figure out really core/low-level aspects of the story/essay as I’m trying to figure out how to move the characters around. Writing diologue and “people,” in their world is a very different task from, figuring out the fate of that world, and a character’s thoroughly. Or an illustrative motif in an essay. Outlining helps me to isolate and deal with these problems in different contexts, as well as provide continuity between writing sessions for particularly long work.

One of the biggest challenges (and successes) of the project that I’m working on at the moment was “making enough happen” in the story. I got an outline, that told a story that was too big for a short story, and yet didn’t provide the “body,” and rich environment that makes novels so enjoyable. So I wrote this draft of an outline, and then I spent the better part of a week thinking about “ok, now what can I add?” and “If I add this B-plot how will it triangulate and complicate the lives of the other characters.” And I kept adding scenes, details, and turns that would make life hell for the characters.

In previous attempts (to varying degree’s) I’ve said something like “I need to tell a story about “Telepaths who immigrating to Mars,” and then I write the outline, and as I wrote the stories there was never enough there, characters distraught-ness was out of phase with what was happening (my criticism, other people don’t seem to have this response, as much). So this time--so far--I’ve been really pleased with the way that the “tighter, more packed” outline has really helped the way that the writing of the story has progressed. You’ll be able to judge for yourself in time, but it’s sort of cool. What follows are a collection of the lesson’s learned from this outlining process:

• Write a full outline, before you go back and add stuff. The initial concept, and layout of the story is valuable, even if you should probably be resistant to just “going with it.”
• Even if you feel the “burring impulse of creation,” outline anyway. For novels and long works, sustaining that impulse over many months is difficult. There are lots of different ways to outline (free writing, various levels of structured lists, note cards, etc.) something is bound to suit your style.
• While conventional wisdom holds that you shouldn’t edit works in process (as this breaks flow and rhythm), once you have an outline completed. Edit a lot. Not for polish, but imagine the story, and play around with the order of chapters/key scenes. Push as much of the action into the shortest amount of space you can. See what you can do to pump up the action in other parts of the book.
• Add stuff. Add a lot of stuff. You’ll be able cut later, tighten things up later, having material of “things that could happen,” and having gone through the experience of playing with your story will help you, even if you say “nah, I don’t want to write that scene,” when you’re writing, or you feel that a scene you had in your outline won’t really work anymore. Cutting is easier later than adding more material
• Three is a really great number for stories. We’re all used to “good guy” versus “bad guy” plot dynamics, and the “bi-polar” approach to story telling, while familiar becomes boring really quick. Adding “thirds” to stories makes things much more complex, and much more dynamic. Third plotlines, third characters, third-major settings, and so forth. Or at least play with the idea.

Onward and Upward!

I had an odd experience as a writer a few weeks ago. I found myself writing “copy” rather than my more comfortable “blog post,” “essay,” or “fiction story” and I learned a great deal from the experience. Mostly, “never be a copy writer if you can help it,” but I learned something about my other writing in the process: basically I write conversations.

This makes sense on a number of levels. First, it explains why I enjoy blogging as much as I do, and why I write for the blog in the way I do. Blogging is a conversation, I write stuff, you think about it, you comment. Repeat. Or I read something, and I respond with my “part” of the conversation. Secondly, I’ve occasionally been told by recipients of particularly quick emails that I “write just like I talk,” which makes sense given how I type, and how “natural” that is as a communications medium for me. Third and finally, people who’ve read my fiction, routinely comment on the dialog.¹

This may also be why “being a writer” (professionally, creatively) has been a struggle. On some level the writing, even the fiction, is a means to an end. Banging words out on the keyboard for the blog is a means to have a conversation with you, dearest readers; writing fiction is a means to explore ideas and conversations that I couldn’t begin to articulate except through fantasy (on some level.)

When I tried to write knitting patterns, I wrote these essays that were basically me standing up with a finished sweater saying “so if you want to make this, start here, and then do this …” and so forth through the entire sweater. On one hand they were stories, on another it was just me talking.

I don’t know what this means about me, what I write, or how I write. Frankly, I’m not sure I’d like to know much more, but you can draw your own conclusions.

Onward and Upward!

When I took a break from Critical Futures near the end of last year, I had intended to begin with the new year with renewed energy and vigor, but when the new year rolled around, I found myself somewhat lacking in vigor. So I’ve waited, and I kept waiting. And now, its the end of January, and I still haven’t restarted, and I think it’ll be good to talk for a moment about that.

A big part of this is the fact that holiday vacations (such as they are post school) are never quite as long as you ever expect them to be. So I didn’t get that massive fiction writing binge that I was expecting and hoping for. And I also didn’t get that website redesign binge that I was hoping for. Alas. So I’ve needed more time, if not to do things, then to let projects breath. So my one or two week vacation turned into a month or more.

Secondly, my “write more resolution” (such as it is) that I talked about in this post, is a practice that’s a little more than a week old at this point. that’s not a problem, but preparing content for posting when I’m not actively writing on a project very much feels draining. Also, I’m aware that my “supply” of fiction is going to run out, well. Sooner than I’ll be ready to resupply it, particularly since the novel I’m working on now, isn’t really a Critical Futures project. Well, it is, kind of.

So with that in mind, what lies in wait for Critical Futures?

Well…

Recently I’ve started working more on the ending to Station Keeping’s second “season” I’m not keeping a special eye on it, but I’m probably half way done with the second season (which is all new). That’s helped my morale a good deal. Also, I’m beginning to see some real progress on the new novel project (yay for being less stuck), which is a help. While it’s a long way off still, knowing that this is going to end up as a podcast (and that this podcast will be a part of Critical Futures) that’s been inspiring for my feelings of writerliness. Putting my “job” as a writer above my “job” as an editor/publisher was something that I really had to do in order to make it worthwhile.

So the plan? I’m going to post fiction less regularly. The pieces might be slightly longer (but probably not much). I’ll probably alternate Tuesday/Thursday weeks with Monday/Wednesday weeks. When the podcast starts, I’ll probably do a pod-cast episode and a piece of fiction a week. I’m not going to change the design of the site, much, but I think some tweaks are in order, and I need to add/update some of the static pages on the site.

If anyone has suggestions, quirky science fiction that they’d like to submit to Critical Futures, or wants to help out (with designs or the like), I’d love to hear from you.

Onward and Upward!

I’ve mentioned that I’m in the process of doing a somewhat lengthy “blog redesign” project of tychoish.com. The astute among you, who don’t visit via RSS, will probably notice at least a little bit of a change recently, but I think there’s more in mind. While I resist the temptation to write lists in my posts, I think I’m going to give in just this once. ;)

What I hope to accomplish in this redesign.

I want to have a home page that’s more dynamic. I think the fact that the landing page looks the same as every other page on the site is a sore spot for me. I want to go for a site that has:

• A list of recent essays
• The most recent essay
• Excerpts from a couple (2) other recent entries
• Links to other Blogs
• Several (3-5) recent coda posts.

In general, I think that the landing page should provide a good gateway to what’s happening on the site, it should be dynamic and simple. It should load fast, and it should be more “clean.” I’m also considering digging up some AJAX bits so that I can have a couple of design widths (so that I can avoid variable width designs) and also have a dynamic browser for, say the excerpts of recent posts, and the coda posts.

I also want tychoish to be less of a blog, and more of a host to different/additional kinds of activity. Like I’ll probably host a wiki here for the research I’m working on with open source, and I think it would be fun to make some conceptual space on the site for something other than just another blog, and see what happens. Given the shape that my “career” is headed, I think this has some pretty interesting possibilities.

How I plan to accomplish this redesign.

Slowly.

The first order of business, is to start to play with the templates and design before I switch to some new system. I think trying to juggle a smooth transition with two balls in the air is just an invitation for me to screw things up royally.

The basic template for blog pages, will probably linger for a while longer than the front page, and that’s fine. I’m kind of fond of the site. It’s functional, it’s simplistic and very “old school,” which suits me just fine.

Steps towards implementation:

1. Write additional CSS classes to describe a new layout. Including rounded corners. (Grrr.) 2. Create JavaScript enhancements that make the site pop a bit, while also making the vast quantity of text more digestible. 3. Create template files for wordpress to facilitate the export to the new system. 4. Create staging area(s). For testing purposes. 5. Move to a host that gives more administrative rights. 6. Profit?

Why this is a good thing.

My hope is to make my blogging system/environment much more modular, so that I can add and modify it more easily. The CMS’s I was using 5 years ago where much more along these lines, and while I didn’t know what I was doing very much I did appreciate that level of control.

To say “I want a more modular and dynamic” website sounds a bit trite, but I think it’s the most true. If the site’s more modular, that is, if template organization and content display (which are the same thing with WordPress) are less connected, I think I’ll be able to have all the benefits of “dynamically generated pages” without the overhead of the database system. And if that’s the case, then my relationship to the content of the site isn’t via a constrained text field in one system, which I think will be a good thing, indeed.

Or I hope, at least.

Last week as I was wrapping up a project, I found myself reading an article by Gabriella Coleman¹ about ethical systems and free software/open source development communities (pdf link). It’s a great article that helped me connect a few desperate projects, and I think it also provides a very useful foothold into talking about the ideologies of free software without getting encumbered by free software’s internal ideological “drama.” In turn:

Before I got absorbed into open source and free software stuff, I was interested in issues around the construction of individual’s identity in reference to group-based cultural scripts about identity. For example how “gay men” think of themselves in relation to gender/sexuality/race, and how they made sense of the social constructed-ness of these categories. But the underlying structural question applies to all sorts of people and groups (“people who knit” and “communities of knitters;” immigrants/refugees and “Americans”/national identities; etc). There were a lot of reasons why that didn’t work out (on top of some stuff about my background): the biggest one is that there isn’t a good field² to do this kind of work. In retrospect, It’s a good thing that it didn’t work out for these and many other reasons.

Nevertheless, even as I’ve been “reinventing” myself and my interests in the last year I’ve discovered that my interests in open source development and free software, have a strong parallel, as I’m interested in collaboration and shared creation in the context of open source projects. This time I have a bit more going for me, of course.

So how does this connect? Well, I read a bunch of literature the first time around on “moral development,” and it turns out (I would have never guessed this before) that there’s a lot of very cool recent work on how social factors (like communities and group membership) contribute to the development of moral systems, that isn’t “Kohlberg-esque” (and thus decontextualized in harmful ways). Before someone pushed me to read these articles, I don’t know that I would have sought out the connection between “ethics” (moral systems) and group identities, but it’s there. Reading this article addressed ethics of free software communities strengthen these connection for me, and I think is a great starting point for thinking about free software projects as a entities onto themselves. I have some more thinking to do here, of course, but there are some cool possibilities.

So about ethics and software freedom, anyway.

The article explores the ways that the Debian Project is not only rooted in a strong “software freedom” ethical tradition (the DFSG, the close alliance with the FSF³) but also--as the article explores--promotes and develops this ethic in amongst its many developers. That while Debian attracts a certain predisposition toward free software and open source, participation in this project reinforces a shared set of ethical perspectives. We talk about “copyleft” licenses in free software as being “viral” because the mandate that derivative works be distributed under their terms (and thus spread in “viral ways,) but really they’re also viral in the way that they shape the ethical systems of developers who use them.

That’s kind of awesome. It’s also, I suppose not ground breaking (I think you can see echos of this in some of rms’ essays, for instance) but it does let you (or me) talk about the ideologies of free software without participating in the (different, but connected) ideological debates of free software. Which is a good thing indeed.

Onward and Upward!

So I’ve written about current projects on this blog, and I think every knitting project that I’ve talked about thus far I haven’t yet finished. In a year or more. Rather than disappoint, I have another post about a new knitting project, but it comes with a bit of a story. Sorry to the members of the queer-knit-list, as this will be something of an old story.

In the summer of 2005 I lived in Kansas City with my grandmother. It was after my first year in college, and it was a great experience. I got a job in a yarn store, I knit a lot, and it was a great experience. I’m an only grandchild on that side of the family, and I think it was a really good experience. That spring-into summer I was really big into knitting shawls, and I think from that April-to-August I think I made 5 fairly large Pi Shawls. (I think I also made two or three sweaters during this period as well, it was intense). One of the Pi shawls I made was a red one out of sport-weight alpaca, and my grandmother took to it like a fish to water.

I should comment on the shawl before I go any further. It’s bright red. Really bright read. I think “stop-sign” or “fire-truck” begins to capture it. It’s also fairly heavy as a shawl. While fingering weight makes a nice shawl, I’m often of the opinion that sport weight is a bit too heavy for shawls. Something about drape or heft. I’m not sure. To complicate matters, I attempted to do a knit and purl pattern (don’t ask). Words to the wise: texture in alpaca doesn’t work because the fabric is too limp, and furthermore texture in shawls that are knitted loosely doesn’t work. I also attempted at some point to do big lace-diamonds, which I can’t explain or justify. The biggest error, however, is the fact that I ran out of yarn before the shawl was done, and rather than pick out the cast off, I pulled out the previous few rounds and used that yarn to finish off the bind off. So there’s kind of a notch missing out of one part of the shawl.

So it’s an odd object.

The second part speaks to my grandmother. Her style for many years has been to wear jackets and shirts with nice patterns in the blue-purple spectrum over black slacks. In short, not very “grandmotherly,” for years and years. A year ago, I spent a couple of weeks with her, after she had a knee problem (fractured knee cap!) and she was wearing a brace and she dug out a skirt because her pants wouldn’t fit over the knee brace, and it was clear that the skirt was at least as awkward as the knee brace for her. As I think about it I don’t think it would be unreasonable to suggest that she doesn’t own any (other) objects of red clothing.

So she took this shawl with her every where. To the movies, to restaurants, on vacation. Because like any good shawl, it was just the right thing to provide easy and accessible warmth. Everywhere.

I’ve not blogged a lot about this, but it’s been a tough year for her (and us as well). The aforementioned broken knee cap, were the last straw for those knees, and she decided that it was finally the right time to do knee replacements--having previously decided that she was too busy to take the time to get her knees replaced. Knee replacements are hard, and this was complicated by the need to do a repair on the second one (which was even harder to recover from, for a lot of reasons). I’ve been back and forth between the city she lives in and the city I live in at least 5 times this year (and my father has done the trip about as much). Thankfully things are looking up, and she’s set to go back home (from rehab) right as rain in a bit less than a month.

I decided a couple of weeks ago, that I really ought to make an updated shawl for her. I chose alpaca, this time in light and dark gray that I had in the stash, and rather than do a pattern, I’m just knitting it plain, with a stripe of light gray before the end. I’m even doing increases via the “make one by knitting into the front and back of the stitch” method, rather than yarn overs (so that there’s really no open work in the shawl). And I’ve been planning so this time

I showed her the work in progress a few weeks ago when I went for a visit and she seemed quite impressed. So I trust the final product will go over well. The knitting has been really pretty quick. I worked pretty steady the first week, and I’ve been pretty consistent about it the past few weeks, but not quite as steady. I expect that I’ll be done in another couple of weeks. And of course, I’ll post pictures. Right now it looks kinda like a gray sack/awkward beret. I’ll spare you, for now. But we’ll be in touch.

Onward and Upward!

It’s only comparatively recently that I’ve returned to the world of being a desktop computer user. I built my own computer when I was in high school, and it died after 3 years (or so), and I replaced that with an Mac laptop, which I updated a couple of times, but until this last fall, that was my window onto the Internet and my main academic/scholarly tool for a long time. This “laptop only” modality, is I think pretty common among a layer of contemporary computer users. Students, Internet-industry professionals (start-ups, programmers/hackers of a certain breed, etc.) are all prone to this kind of setup. And the truth is, that given today’s technology, just about any laptop will pretty much whatever anyone needs from it. There are some limitations on the high end, but not many.

Indeed the reason that I moved to a desktop was the realization that I do about 60% of my computering in the study, at my desk. I also found myself needing a lot more screen space¹ than any laptop that I’d like to carry on my back could provide. It is also nice to be able to have a computer that’s always on (downloading, file server stuff, etc.) and always connected to the Internet. Nevertheless, I still have a laptop and I find that I use it a lot. I tend to write in the morning in the living room, I reflexively (though I’ve gotten better at leaving it at home) take the laptop with me when I leave the house.

I used to think that having more than one machine was a bit of a hassle, and I suppose it is, but I’m sort of interested in thinking about how folks--particularly people who also have a desktop--use laptops. My laptop, despite being really half as powerful as the desktop, is configured the same way my desktop is, it has all of the same software, and nearly all of the same data. This seems like an ideal situation from a workflow perspective, but I can respect that there are other approaches.

I end up using the laptop as a “change of pace,” and as a “more focused” situation when I need to hunker down and write more seriously.

I intended this post to be less about general workflow stuff and more about my experiences with replacing my Macbook with the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad X41t of which I’ve become quite enamored. Particularly, with respect to its “tablet,” feature.

A few weeks ago I started to use the Macbook again incidentally, and my conclusion from this experience is that, while I have a lot of respect for OS X and the mac platform, it’s not something that I want to use myself in any kind of day to day way. So I’m back using the thinkpad, and I’m tracking around for a second one (long story) so that I can sell the macbook without hurting the family’s ecology² of computers. And it’s a great thing. In a sort of minimalistic and technologically frugal sort of way, this machine does everything I need of a laptop, which is kind of cool

When I got the laptop, I was really excited about the prospect of having a tablet-formed machine. I could annotate PDFs effectively, I could read ebooks more comfortably in bed or on the couch. Turns out to not quite be the case.

Basically the implementation of the tablet part of the computer is perfect: the hinge is great, the texture of the screen is great, it just works--even on Linux. The problem? I don’t have a hell of a lot of use for a computer without a keyboard. I like the experience of being able to turn it into a tablet to be able to concentrate a little bit better at the document at hand. That’s useful. But the truth is I use it, maybe once a week if that.

Does anyone else have a tablet and if so, how much do you use it as such, or is there something really cool about tablets that I’ve totally missed?

Onward and Upward!

I’ve been sort of coy about the details (because I don’t want to jinx anything and there aren’t many details out there), but I’ve decided that the novel I’m working on will probably appear as a podcast sometime late in the year. Scott Farquhar will do the reading and it’ll be over on Critical Futures (and other places?) I’m excited about this, as I think it means a higher profile for my work, I’ve wanted to do a podcast for a long time, and it gives me something to “work towards” for this project, which had heretofore been a “so I’m writing another novel for myself because that’s what I do,” and that purpose is really good for my process.

This post, however, is a writing-meets-technology post. I store all of my projects in git repositories. This is good, because it lets me track changes and revisions, back up and synchronize files between machines, and because I thought it might be fun to use git to collaborate with editors/provide history/source for the novel once it’s more “done,” or at least, as a fairly linear writer, I’ve gotten to a point where its clear that I have an intended shape for the story.

While I’m an avid git proponent, and fascinated by the prospects contained in the software on a conceptual level, I don’t do a lot of “distributed workflow,” stuff myself on a day to day basis. Yet. So stuff about publishing branches, and even having more than one developer working at the same time in the system is a bit foreign to me because I haven’t had to use it ever.

So it’s taken some getting used to, and I was tempted through the whole process to cave and get a git-hub account (with private collaborators) because I think the web-based interface for forking repositories is basically what I’m trying to do inside of one repository with (semi) public branches. Here’s the setup:

I have a bare repository on the server that I use as a centralized dumping ground for a lot stuff. While strictly speaking this isn’t required it’s nice to have a backup, a single place to collect data, and I have git-web setup on the server so I can git a birds-eye view of the repository if I get confused. I do all of my work in the master branch. I tag important commits if there’s something unique that I delete out of later commits. And basically that’s about all I’ve done in the fiction projects.

Now, what I want to do is let Scott clone my repository and have a branch where he can edit, create files, leave notes, and so forth without affecting what I’m working on. Because I’m still writing pretty intensely, this also lets Scott (and potentially others,) get my changes as I push them onto the server, rather than having to exchange emails and all of that. Then when I’m ready to edit, I make my own editing branch based the latest from “master” merge/review Scott’s edits, and then go through and edit myself once, and then when it’s golden, I merge my editing branch back into master, and hopefully there’s a book. There’s also, something cool and performance about publishing not only the text of the book, but the development of that text.

I can understand not wanting to let “previous and unfinished drafts” out into the wild, but there’s something about the way that distributed version control systems don’t just produce “previous drafts,” but all previous drafts, which can as a group convey a certain kind of story onto themselves. I mean, I’m not particularly likely to go read through a total revision history, but I think knowing its there is pretty interesting, and being able to see key moments, drafts, and the editing process at work, is something that has a lot of merit.

I’m not sure that I’ll do this exactly the same way again in the future (paying for git hub seems like its worthwhile now that I know how to do it myself), but we’ll see how it goes and I’ll be sure to post a review of how the process goes, and at some point, you’ll be able to see for yourself.

Onward and Upward!

This fall I visited with a bunch of my friends from college for the first time since I, you know, graduated from college. In a move that surprised just about everyone, of my core-friend group from college, I’m the only one who’s not in graduate school right now. One thing I realized, however, is that I haven’t exactly dropped off the face of the academic-earth. Every semester since graduation (until this one), I’ve been enrolled in classes and have accumulated a number of credit hours because it was fun, because I felt like I wasn’t done with school.

On Sunday I sent in a paper for the last of these projects. I did something last semester with a philosopher professor (and friend, really) on free software and open source development methodologies and processes, though the project was at least vaguely anthropological. Part of my plan with doing this last project was to get a little bit of “open source” and not-psychology not-women’s studies on the record; the second part of the plan was to delay the student loan people until I’d collected enough dough to be debt free when the grace period finally wears off. With both of these goals firmly accomplished, I’m entering what will probably be about 2 years of not applying to graduate school, so graduate school would start in the fall of 2012. But I might do a trial application to two places a year earlier. Anyway…

This chance for a break is a really good thing. My previous attempts at academia have all been for the wrong thing, which hurts. I’ve also been really young (spring birthday, college in three years) which doesn’t help either. So spending the next few years learning stuff outside of school, becoming more of a historian/anthropologist, writing a few novels, letting tychoish.com break the million word mark, working in an awesome job, saving money to do things like go to a residential writing workshop (giving in, I know), and contributing to open source projects. It’ll be good for the soul.

One thing I realized before I started the project that I just finished, was that I hadn’t written anything academic-like in years. I mean really sat down and wrote something new. By the time I got done with school I was settling into a rut and I had enough of a background in what I needed to write--for academic things--that I was really stuck. So this past fall when I started to set down the goals for the project, although I wanted to spend most of my time doing background work (reading the literature, and ’living/working’ in open source worlds), in the back of my mind I had the notion that this research (such as it is) that I’m doing now will turn into a paper sometime down the road.

So that’s on my mind, as a project for my “not in school” period. While it’s clearly a long way off and I have a lot of work to do to get to the point where I might have an essay of any useful depth, it’s terribly interesting to think about doing scholarly work outside of the confines of academic schedules. I’ve never really had the opportunity to write a single piece of intellectual work that I could work on for more than four months from inception to typesetting.¹ Graduate programs expect students to have research experience and undergraduate curriculum are designed to provide students with research experience, and yet sustained attention to a research project is something that’s really hard to schedule/arrange before graduation.

Every day’s an adventure after all…

I have a tendency toward binge writing, it’s true. Also, as a “professional writer,” (of sorts, saying that still makes me giggle) I write a lot. Even on days when I’m feeling pretty lackluster, I probably write a total of 2,500 to 3,000 words a day, and on days when I’m feeling better I suspect the total gets closer to 5,000. It’s not all productive work, always, and it’s certainly not all fiction words,¹ but one of my guiding philosophies as a writer is to “keep words flowing.”

This is to say, that the act of continually committing words to proverbial paper is more important than the words that you write. Writing, for me, is an experimental act. I try a bunch of shit out and hope that I can look back at what I’ve done and decide what works and what doesn’t in retrospect. It’s hard to experiment without data, and hard to let the editing process do it’s job without content. Also, I take the opinion that “getting momentum” is the hardest part of any productive/effective process. Once you’ve got a head of steam, creative work is easier. Long(er) time readers of this site will certainly recognize this approach.

So I write a lot, and as I settle into a work rhythm and come to grips with the fact that I’m unconditionally an adult (not, student-adult, not adult-like but just another 20-something guy who writes a lot,) I’ve been trying to figure out how to regulate fiction projects and fiction writing as part of the “what I do.” How to balance fiction writing with other projects, how to carve time out for fiction², how to nurture that process, and other stuff related being a fiction writer.³

When I was writing fiction in high school, I had a pretty religious “thousand words a week,” rule that I almost always accomplished, and since then I’ve generally stuck to the “thousand words a day,” when there aren’t other major commitments, and no less than a thousand words a week when writing time has a major conflict (like day jobs, or school). For the last 4-6 months I’ve taken the same approach, and while I’ve been moderately successful, I don’t think that I’ve been successful enough. There are entire weeks when I haven’t written very much if anything, and even though I have time, I don’t often use the time particularly effectively.

Maybe it’s a result of being too flexible, but I often find myself falling into the following trap: I’ll have a few hours, and a number of things to do, ongoing projects for work, a few personal projects of some importance, and fiction, and I’ll realize that I don’t have enough time to be able to write 1,000 words of fiction, so I just spend the time on other projects. Which is kind of backwards logic, I have the time, but because I don’t have “the ideal amount” of time, I forgo it entirely.

That’s kind of dumb. The past few days, rather than just set a somewhat idealistic goal of what I want to get done, I’ve set a range, and a hard “maximum goal.” So rather than “try and write 1,000 words,” the goal has become to “write a page or two and never more than 600 words (on one project).” I’m not sure if it’s working, but less than 600 words is manageable, it’s enough finish a novel or two in a year, and I suspect that my weekly word averages will be a bit higher, though I’m not particularly good about tracking word counts (and I should be).

So, it seems like, I’m trending away from being a binge writer, at least from fiction. Which is a really weird mode for me. I’m not particularly in the business of giving writing advice, but if you think this kind of advice would be good for you, then please consider it, otherwise, that’s what I’m up to.

Onward and Upward!