Friday, January 21

Happy Birthday Podiobooks!

From what I've read on Twitter this morning, today is Podiobooks' sixth birthday!  Happy birthday to them!

For the uninitiated: Podiobooks is a website that allows authors to distribute serialized audio versions of their novels as podcasts.  There's a lot of great stuff on there; check it out now because some of these authors are the ones everyone's going to be reading in the next few decades.

Wednesday, January 19

Don’t Break the Chain

I've found that one of my biggest problems when it comes to writing is staying disciplined and writing every day. I know that it's important to do so, but sometimes other things come up that prevent me from doing so. What they are, whether or not they're justified, ultimately doesn't matter: they're there, and they're something I need to deal with.

With my writing goals for 2011 firmly set in my mind, though, I knew that I needed to nurture daily writing, and so I turned to the internet for help. I ended up reading about Seinfeld's "Don't Break The Chain" method. Seinfeld puts a year-at-a-glance calendar on his wall, and every day he works on his current project, he puts an X on the day, eventually putting together a long chain of X's that end up serving as inspiration.

It seemed reasonable, so I decided to give it a shot, and because I'm a bit of a nerd, instead of hanging a calendar on the wall I created one in an OpenOffice spreadsheet with some conditional formatting rules built into it. So, for every day I write, the little box for the date turns green, and for every day I don't write, it's red. I'm defining "writing" as a minimum of 250 words, using Cory Doctorow's rationale that that's approximately equal to a page, which is a good starting point. My ideal goal is 1,000 words per day, but when life's getting in the way, 250 is extremely reasonable.

After starting this, I got a nice, respectable chain of 8 days. Last night I broke it. Today I start a new chain, hopefully a lot longer than the last.

Thursday, January 6

January!

Started my January story for Write 1 Sub 1 last night.  I don't want to say too much about it yet, aside from "It's got superheroes in it," and it's an idea that's been swimming around in my head for a couple of years now that I've never been able to get down in a satisfactory way.

The goal is to get it finished by next week so that I can polish it up a little and then submit it to Crossed Genres, who are currently accepting submissions for a superhero-themed issue.