Big Ed's Place

I recently had a difficult discussion with my wife. She was proposing a new system for organizing a part of our life and I was in the unfortunate position of having to say it wouldn’t work. Of the two of us, I’m the more organized and disciplined, even though she’s better than most.

This goes hand in hand with my day job. Unfortunately I can’t say much about it, but I regularly get performance appraisals that laud my ability to get things done. There’s a chicken/egg issue here in that I can’t say whether it was my job that taught me to be organized, or my organizational skills that helped me excel in my job. Nonetheless, it’s part of who I am.

So… at least for me, this spills over to my writing. I’m still squeaking out words every week despite a more than full time job and a toddler in the house. In contrast, I know a couple of writers who are stalled and writing sporadically. One of these friends is struggling hard to find a pattern or system that works for him without burning him out. I can only smile and be supportive.

Because there’s really no system. Not software that’s designed for writers to keep them organized. Not the personal approach of some famous authors that get published in various ‘how to write’ books. There are really only principles, and the rest is individual preference and peccadilloes.

The first principle is honesty in brutal self-evaluation. You have to be aware of what you do vs. what you want to do. This can be difficult, because we often don’t like what we see. I don’t like admitting how much blow-off websurfing I actually do. I know I should do less, just like I should exercise more, but “shoulds” rarely happen. Brutal self-honesty for me meant looking at my days and actually tracking how I spend my time. It means making my Sunday posts where I admit publicly how much I wrote or didn’t write during the week.

I think this is the hardest step for most people. But fortunately one doesn’t have to be perfect. It just helps cut through the iterations of ‘well, that didn’t work.’ It’s also what makes it hard to advise others. I can’t exactly tell my wife that I think she’s overlooking some personal faults if I want to avoid sleeping on the couch.

The next principle is that discipline follows desire. People always always choose to do what’s most important to them in a given moment. As an example, if eating is a higher priority than playing video games (due to hunger most likely), a person will take a break and go eat. But if eating is lower priority, say because it’s the final fight on the highest level, the player will go hungry. Another example is life and death situations–do you stop to go to the bathroom or mess your pants when being chased by a lion?

A less flattering example is my websurfing. If something like writing was more important to me, I’d be doing it. I may want to believe something else is more important, but my choice of how to spend my time demonstrates what really is important.

Which is why the principle is that desire has to be first. The first trick to being organized is to dump as many of the tasks you dislike as possible, through delegation, hiring someone, or just reaching the point where you can accept they don’t need to be done. Once an item becomes a priority, there are ways to steal time and make it happen.

This is why deadlines work well for many people, particularly if they’re externally set. They help increase the priority of something. If I have a report due to my boss next week, I may not have a lot of desire to do it. However, if I have a report due to my boss tomorrow and I know I’ll get chewed out if it’s not done, my desire goes up significantly. It’s also why rewards and punishments work–they help adjust the desire involved in a task.

But this sometimes doesn’t solve the common problem of time scales. For example, I may want to have a novel done by Christmas, but today I don’t want to write. I know that if I don’t write today, I’ll have a painful crunch later (or miss the deadline), but knowing it and making myself sit down and write are two different things. The difference is discipline. Discipline is simply the art of making yourself do something you don’t particularly want to do.

And the principle here that I’ve found works best is simply to recognize that one doesn’t need discipline for things that are routine. Take brushing your teeth–odds are, you do it as part of a standard routine and so it’s no big deal to do. You have the ‘discipline’ to do it because you don’t think about it. A personal work example for me is that my staff meetings follow the same agenda outline every week. That means prepping for the meeting is pretty routine. The day before, I sit down and pull together x, y, and z and then print the handouts. It’s not a challenging discipline–it’s just what I do on Wednesday afternoons (and I have a time slot blocked out on my meeting calendar to prevent others from scheduling a meeting during that time).

Every day I don’t have a customer lunch, I take my notebook with me to wherever I’m going to eat. Sometimes I write, sometimes I don’t. But the routine of having the notebook requires no thought, which increases the odds that I’ll actually write when I have the creative energy.

Which is a subtle but important distinction. It’s hard to have discipline to do creative tasks. The energy is there or it’s not. One can’t say “I will produce brilliant Art between 8 and 9 in the morning” and be sure it’s brilliant. Instead, the discipline is in creating the opportunities for creative tasks. I carry my notebook. Others, particularly full time professionals, carve out time on a set schedule and don’t beat themselves up if they don’t write during that time. Making the non-creative parts of the job (having the tools at hand, having gaps in the schedule of other activities, etc.) routine makes the creativity more possible.

The point is, there’s no angst and no real discipline required to follow a routine. It looks like one has a lot of discipline, but not really. It’s just habit.

So the last principle is accountability. This ties back into the first principle of self-knowledge. It’s pretty easy to self-deceive ourselves or change our mind for ignoble motives. Laziness has its draw, after all. The way to deal with that is to be accountable to someone or some people outside ourselves. That’s the second function of deadlines in most work environments. Besides upping the desire, they provide a moment of accountability. Either the project is done on that date or it’s not.

That does mean that there’s an art to setting deadlines. They have to be unequivocal and binary. Either it was met, or it wasn’t. Therefore it helps if they’re specific. “I’m going to start chapter two in August” is “met” if I write two words on August 31. Is that a deadline that’s useful?

Now deadlines are not always necessary, but accountability still is. I don’t have a deadline for my writing, but every Sunday I provide accountability. I announce publicly what I wrote. If I had an agreement with someone else to have written a certain amount, I’d announce whether I met it or not. Accountability is what prevents us from spinning out words worthlessly in the dark. Anyone can write–authors show their stuff to readers. A simple piece of accountability that makes all the difference.

So after these principles, the rest is detail. Organization simply becomes the tricks one uses to implement the basic principles. If one has the desire and decent self-awareness, finding the right personal organization is just trying a bunch of things until something sticks as a habit and actually works.

So when something doesn’t stick, I usually look at the basic principles and that tells me what’s going on. One of my staff members had problems with organization because he lacked the self-awareness of how he optimistically estimated how long things would take. Even when he was told that he was underestimating the effort, he couldn’t stop, because he just couldn’t see that he was doing it. One of my author friends seems to subconsciously go out of his way to avoid establishing routines (are they too boring? I don’t know). A friend who wanted to be a writer refused to be held accountable and so his great novel still languishes in a drawer unfinished.

Most often, the discrepancy seems to be between what people say is important to them and what really is important to them. We don’t want to admit that websurfing or playing video games or screwing around telling stories by the water cooler is so important to us that we’re choosing to do it over all the other available options.

So those basically are my secrets. I’m very well organized by following a few principles. The tricks and the discipline just flow from there.

This week served as a reminder of the realities of my day job. I put in excessive hours and still didn’t finish everything that ended up on my plate. Most of that was just due to how full the plate was, but it didn’t help that the customer liked my Thursday presentation so well that they requested I put together an Executive Summary for them to present to their bosses on Monday. So much for my plans for Friday…

It was also another week where I was reminded that I get paid for my soft skills. Communication. Arbitration. Organization. Spin. I don’t know if I’ll look back some day and be proud of what I do because I often wonder why it’s necessary. In an ideal world, about half of my job would be unnecessary. Which means I could spend my time on other things, like writing….

(and no, I’m not going to even speculate on whether writing erotica is “unnecessary” or not. )

That said, I squeezed in a little time. Deep Dish now has detailed outlines for 4 more pages. So the scripts are done for pages 1-10 and 12-15 and the detailed outlines are done for pages 11 and 16-24. I’m still 3 pages over the limit, but there’s still time to improve…

So my family passes books around. Sometimes they’re recommended, and sometimes they’re just “are you interested?”

That’s how I got an action thriller from my mother, The Secret of Excalibur, by Andy McDermott. She said it was “too James Bondy” but might be good as an airplane book for me. So I started it on the recent airplane ride and it was… bad. I couldn’t believe how bad.

Furthermore, it was obvious my opinion was in the minority. The book is the third in a series, and there’s at least a fourth, according the the back cover. It’s published by Bantam Books, which is a Random House division, and was originally a hardback release instead of straight to paperback. Additionally, the cover has glowing blurbs from major UK magazines.

But I don’t think my opinion is wrong, so I figured I’d provide a full critique, particularly of the plot elements. Perhaps that’ll be of interest to readers here, in ‘what not to do.’ Or maybe it’ll just be quietly infuriating to realize that this got published when so many works without these problems do not. Obviously, I’ll have to reveal spoilers, so the whole negative review is behind the cut…

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I’m often surprised by people who don’t recognize how powerful the feminine is. By ‘feminine’ I mean feminine energy, particularly when embodied in a woman. The apex of it is of course feminine sexual energy.

Now I do mean feminine and not feminist. The latter is a political/cultural attempt to get women to be seen as more than just their sexuality. At least as it tends to engage me. My personal experience is that people who call themselves feminists rarely are interested in talking to me, and even more rarely interested in listening to me. There’s a political price to this disengagement, which is probably a topic for a different post.

For open feminine sexuality is incredibly powerful. Masculine men (hereafter referred to as ‘men’ or ‘guys’ depending on their maturity/awareness) simultaneously crave it and fear it. We adore it. We love being with it. We daydream about. And part of us is absolutely terrified of being overwhelmed by it.

The Koran says, “God made desire in ten parts and gave nine to women.” It’s used as justification for forcing women to cover up, which is little more than a recognition of how powerful their sexuality is. Similarly, prohibitions against women’s displays of sexuality throughout history would be meaningless if men weren’t afraid of it. You cage the tiger and not the housecat, after all.

Now I believe that a real man could resist temptation and carry on with his life, unlike boys in men’s bodies. But there are few real men in the world, making it in many ways a moot point. But I do recognize and have felt the fear of being drawn and consumed.

But that doesn’t prevent us men from craving women’s open sexuality at the same time. We create and visit strip clubs, which give us a simulacrum of open sexuality. We fall all over ourselves chasing the Mae Wests of the world. We write porn that is full of hot assertive women who crave sex with us, and often with more than us. Just spend some time on storiesonline or other free sites. The female characters usually have that open sexual energy–loving sex for sex and not being afraid to go after it. Also consider, why else would lesbian porn and bestiality porn be exciting to guys? There aren’t any guys in the picture for us to imagine ourselves as. But the thought that a woman likes sex so much that she’d be willing to get it wherever–that’s the draw.

I often think the whole madonna/whore or virgin/slut dichotomy can simply be traced to men’s push/pull fear/attraction of honest open female sexuality. Hookers and sluts let us get a taste of it for an hour or a night without having to live with it day in and day out where it might overwhelm us.

Now of course, I could be way off. I can only speak for myself and my observations, plus some of the men I’ve had honest conversations with about sexuality.

But one observation by Michael Korda made sense to me. He said that most guys can remember that point in their life when puberty played a nasty trick on them. They woke up and discovered girls and their desire for girls. Unfortunately, the girls their age had long hit puberty and were chasing or involved with older guys. Older girls wouldn’t look at them, and the younger girls were too young. As a result, they felt a strong sense of powerlessness.

I know I did. And it was awful, both then and later. To want, and to not know how to get. Why are time travel stories also popular on Storiesonline? I think largely because they provide a way of revisiting that time with the knowledge and therefore obliterating the residual memories of powerlessness. I also consider much of the ‘sour grapes’ behavior I’ve seen in guys in their 20′s as part of this. Some still don’t quite know how to get that energy, so they denigrate it.

But I also learned, in my transition from guy to man, to live with and surpass that fear and sense of powerlessness. After all, it wasn’t the women/girls doing it to me anymore–it was myself.

And as a result, I discovered a richness of living that was previously unimaginable. Being with a woman in the full throes of her sexuality can be like being in a boat in a storm. Yeah, ya gotta hang on, but what a ride! At the same time, just being with women can help me open my heart and feel deeper. A woman embodying her feminine energy can pull me out of my head faster and more effectively than any other trick I know.

It’s amazing, and I’ve come to adore women as a result. Because power is just that–energetic power, neither bad nor good. When we stop fearing it, we can find amazing uses for it. We just have to see what’s there.

This past week has been a demonstration of cascade effects, which unfortunately has led to little writing. It’s also a reminder of how full my life is even before I try to add in time to write.

Sunday afternoon we flew home from our family trip. Unfortunately, the flight home turned out to be a doozy. The airline cancelled our direct flight and routed us through Chicago, which experienced travellers know is delay-city during summer afternoons. We were originally due to arrive home at 4pm. We got home at 2am on a night when both my wife and I had to be at work at 7:30 the next morning.

Then the cascade started. Monday night became an attempt to catch up on sleep. Tuesday became an attempt to catch up on the ‘welcome home’ chores (unpacking, laundry, etc.) that didn’t get done on Sunday or Monday nights. Wednesday night was more catch-up and Thursday was then catching up on the usual Sunday through Wednesday tasks (dishes, watering plants, etc.) and…. the net result is we’re still not entirely unpacked or caught up a week later.

Of course it doesn’t help that the world didn’t stop while we were on vacation. The weeds in the yard exploded, and there’s probably a good several hours required to get rid of them–if we had a good several hours and if we could deal with the heat (it’s been bad here this past week) and mosquitoes (I got six bites Tuesday night in an hour in the yard). Similarly, I’ve been putting in extra hours trying to catch up at work. I’ll easily break 50 hours next week on the clock, which takes both time and energy away from other things I want to do.

Like write. Desire doesn’t help, even in stealing time, if one is too exhausted to follow through, or just has to devote one’s energy to higher priorities. It’s frustrating. Very frustrating.

Nonetheless, I did scrabble out a bit on Deep Dish (nothing on Unmasked). Pages 1-10 and 12-15 now have complete scripts. I’ve completed the detailed outlines for pages 11 and 16-19. Page 11′s giving me a bit of a fit because I’m vacillating on where to set it. I’ve also reduced the length to 67 pages total–3 more to cut, somehow. I’m confident I’ll get there.

It just takes time. And the cascade effect means I feel like I don’t have any. Hopefully I’ll recover soon.

This past weekend, some screwups by an airline resulted in my family arriving home at 2 am on a night when I had to be at work at 7:30 the next morning. I managed only four hours of sleep before the next day.

It was a challenging day, both for the sloppiness of my work and my difficulties in concentration, but also because I realized I had to watch what I said. Lack of sleep had lowered my inhibitions, much the way alcohol can.

Which got me thinking about parties, particularly college parties where it seems that lowering inhibitions is the point. They start late, they involve alcohol, there’s enough people there to get a contact high and peer pressure to do things that one might not do on one’s own. Mix in a lot of single people with a lot of hormones flowing and it’s little wonder that hooking up for sex is often the result. The question is–would the hooking up occur without the lowered inhibitions? Or would the participants balk for one reason or another?

It also got me thinking about a conversation with a swinger friend of mine. He said that swinger parties often had alcohol flowing and sometimes to the point of definite excess. At the same time, the ‘action’ often didn’t start until midnight or later. He himself admitted that sometimes he and his wife needed a drink to help ‘loosen them up’ before they were ready to play.

So… you’re going to a club, planning on having sex with people there, and yet the inhibitions still need to be lowered. Hmmm…

In contrast, the bdsm clubs are pretty strict about no alcohol. The ‘play’ can be pretty dangerous if done wrong, and the line between right and wrong isn’t that broad. For example, spank someone across the meaty part of their ass–it can feel good. Hit their tailbone, and it just hurts (and can cause damage). Those two points are only a few inches away, and if you’re standing a few feet back with a flogger, your aim had better not be compromised by those beers you had earlier.

Yes, sometimes bdsm parties don’t get started until late, but most of the ones I attended started ‘play’ well before 9pm, and you could leave at midnight (as I usually did) having seen or done plenty.

Which means the ability to lower inhibitions is completely different. And it leads me to wondering if the result is a different type of people.

For me, I had to talk myself into going to a bdsm club over several months. I had a lover/friend who was a member and introduced me to other members in a social dinner well before I took the plunge. The first time, I pretty much clung by my friend’s side. It took a few visits on my own before I truly felt comfortable enough to lower my own inhibitions and join the play.

I also didn’t drink until I was in my mid-twenties, and I’ve never been drunk to the point of being sick. Hangovers, yes, but only in my own house. And then only with very close friends, where the comradery was the point, not trying to hook up.

So… the experience of drinking late in the night to lower one’s inhibitions as a desirable act is foreign to me. Instead, when I find my inhibitions non-intentionally lowered these days, it usually means that something went horribly, badly wrong.

This past week, I’ve been at my in-laws. This is not the most conducive environment for writing–even ignoring the content issues involved in what I write. We’re here to spend time with them, after all. Burying myself in the basement with my laptop isn’t exactly spending time with them.

But that hasn’t prevented me from stealing time, mostly after everyone’s gone to bed. The irony in me losing sleep on vacation is not lost on me, but such is the nature of life.

I did finish scripting 10 pages of Deep Dish, with detailed outlining of pages 11-18. I also knocked out a draft of the synopsis, which will require a few more revisions before it’s ready to use as a fundraising document. No progress on Unmasked, leaving it neglected at 3,466 words. I did it in scrapes and scraps of time, with many of my gaps being due to lack of internet while I worked.

But such are the steps we take when we’re obsessed.

An author friend of mine appears to be recovering from a year of burnout. I say ‘appears’ because until he releases his most recent work in progress, it’s hard to tell if this is a true recovery or just a temporary spurt of enthusiasm.

The burnout’s been difficult to watch, secondhand. A lot of it was that he’d hit the dreaded marathon mile 22, when it just hurts to continue, but the end isn’t in sight yet. Some of it was because he had some writer’s blocks that were both subtle and difficult. He didn’t realize how one loose end was slowing him down, even though it wasn’t something imminent in his story. It was like the dirty dishes on the table that make it hard to concentrate on the computer because you keep thinking, “I need to take those to the kitchen” but don’t actually do so. Then add in the fact that his life became more complex and non-writing elements became more emotionally rewarding and thus more distracting.

Like I said, it was difficult to watch. Sometimes he’d complain about not wanting to write. More often, he’d spend a great deal of time analyzing why he wasn’t writing, but the analysis would never turn into actual writing. He’d identify ‘all I need to do is x” and “x” would only last a few days. He was thrashing in emotional mud and there wasn’t much I could do to help.

For writing, especially when it’s not a career, is a largely solitary, self-motivated effort. Outsiders can’t compel creativity to flow onto the page. Bribes can sometimes work, particularly with some people, but not always. There are times when the emotional burden is just so great that an author would rather mop their floor than write another word, even if the rest of the time the writing is a joy.

Which brings me to the flip side and opposite extreme–obsession. Damn. I’ve been obsessed lately with Deep Dish, and this is rare for me. It’s not just the ‘thinking about the story in the idle moments of my day’ that seems to be common for most writers. It’s staying up two hours later than I should so I can keep hashing out a single page of the script. It’s wondering if I’m sitting far enough back in the boring business meeting to pull out my notes and work on it (which would be disastrous if I got caught). It’s spending hours trying to find just the right picture of a 1970′s diner to pass on to my artist so he knows what I’m thinking of (and, FWIW, it’s all but impossible to find such a picture). It’s not wanting to do my standing obligations, or even other aspects of writing that I love (like this post) because it’s taking me away from my obsession.

When I step back from myself, it’s fascinating to watch. It isn’t quite as painful as watching burnout, though in some ways just as scary. Am I going to sacrifice something I shouldn’t? Am I going to push things further than I should in stealing time from elsewhere? What if, despite my obsession, it doesn’t work out, either creatively or as a project? I could do a ton of work and still end up with something that’s either crap or that I can’t get published/finished.

It’s mania, to burnout’s depression.

I don’t know if other authors go through such swings, or if this obsession looks familiar to them. But it’s a wild ride right now. And perhaps it’s just a touch of mania that we need to keep us going sometimes.

…at least from the internet.

My family and I are on vacation, and it basically means no internet access. I’ve got a small window for this post, but that’s about it for a few days. It’s an interesting change of lifestyle for someone who’s pretty much connected the entire day.

I worked on the Deep Dish script this week. I’ve got the first three pages completely scripted out and the next seven partially scripted out. That’s allowed me to compress two pages out. I’m aiming for 64 total pages and my coarse outlines says 68 now. It was 70–hence the script work. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to tighten as I write.

No progress on Unmasked. It’s still on my mind, but not to the level that Deep Dish is. I think it’s partially because I’m being driven by the urgency to figure out the page length. For Unmasked, it just doesn’t matter–it’ll be what it’ll be because I’m posting it here and there’s no real difference between 10,000 words and 12,000 words. However, for Deep Dish, the difference between 64 pages and 65 pages is a printable vs. unprintable book (if you think about it a minute, you’ll realize why a graphic novel has to have a number of pages divisible by four). But it’s what’s consuming me.

Anyway… more when I’m no longer liberated from being online.