The Surprising power of Time Slices

Just a few short thoughts to share for today. One – about the closing of Six Sentence Sunday. First off, I have to once again give big props to all the admins over at http://www.sixsunday.com for all the work they’ve put into running such a huge ongoing blog hop for so long. I can appreciate that the job only got more stressful once they announced that it was going to be closing, and that they’re sick and tired of hearing pitches about people who want to carry on the torch and want something from them.

But – man, they closed up the shop quickly! I’d been looking forward to reading more entries from last Sunday, and sixsunday.com is locked up tight. Everything’s been taken down, the linky lists, the cover art ads, the FAQ and rules list – just one post saying that they don’t endorse any copycats – and commenting disabled on the post. It’s a little sad for me to see it end that way – would it have hurt anybody to leave the Jan 27th link list available for a full week? Sigh.

Moving on – as you may know, I’ve been doing cleaning timeslices for a long time, off and on. One of my 2013 goals was to keep up an average of 2 hours cleaning and tidying in my apartment for the whole year, and I had a good streak going from December too. So after I was done with work yesterday, I looked around the living room, decided that I should probably tackle the CD containers near the back shelves in my living room, as that was one of the few loci of mess remaining on the living room floor that doesn’t really belong there. Once the floor is actually clear, I can start working on sweeping and even washing the floor! (I’ve already been through this in the other rooms of the apartment – the living room is the last holdout.)

Then I did a bit of math on the numbers from the iPhone project tracker I’ve been using for my January cleaning timeslices and changed my mind. I was up to 9 hours and an odd minute, which was enough to declare that I was keeping up on my goal for the month – I could skate through the rest of the month and dive back into the living room stuff when February started. So I sat down at the Toshiba laptop and worked on some photo conversion stuff for the old Dell Axim handheld that I’d been wanting to get done.

After an hour of that, I figured that I’d done enough for that and needed to get another timeslice marked off on my calendar. So what do I do? Completely forgetting that I’d decided to give myself three days off cleaning, I log back into the hours tracker and spend ten minutes clearing mess off the living room floor! 😀

That’s the power of timeslices right there – when doing something that you’ve always thought of as an unpleasant chore becomes enough of a habit that you find yourself doing it even after you gave yourself a day off from it, or three. 🙂

Are you doing any timeslices lately? What’s the most unappealing project you’ve gotten through a little bit at a time?

So far, Goal, and a little Motivation…

Well, I started reading through Debra Dixon’s “Goal, Motivation & Conflict: The Building Blocks of Good Fiction” this morning. It’s not a long book – a hundred and sixty-some pages, eleven chapters and a few appendices. I’m already finished the first two chapters – an introduction, and the chapter about goals. And I’m about halfway through chapter three, about motivations. (You only get one guess what chapter four is 😉 )

So far, it’s great stuff. The one thing I’m slightly disappointed in is that Debra doesn’t try to give a long example list of possibilities for character goals etcetra, but what she’s doing is at least as good – she gives some in-depth examples from touchstone movies like The Wizard of Oz and Casablanca, and a lot of helpful guidelines about what a goal needs to DO to be effective, why they work and why they might not, and so on. I’m learning a lot and loving it.

And my Nanowrimo idea is starting to come together already. I’m thinking of doing a science fiction YA story about a teenager living on a distant planet, who finds out that his parents have mortgaged his life to a corporation to finance their little souvenir stand; if they don’t pay off the loan by his eighteenth birthday, he’ll have to go up out of the tunnels to the forbidding planetary surface and work for the Corporation there. And he doesn’t believe his parents can raise the money in time, so he has to do it himself. That’s a strong goal, right? He’s motivated by not wanting to die young, working for the Corporation, and dreaming of doing more with his life, seeing the galaxy. There’s urgency, because if he can’t raise the money in time, the corporation doesn’t have to sell him his freedom.

Goals versus Expectations

I’m on Holly Lisle‘s mailing list and get some interesting tips from her on a weekly basis. There was a particularly great email yesterday talking about Goals and what she calls ‘expectations’, which a lot of people confuse. Basically, in her terms, a goal is something that you can achieve, (pretty certainly) if you work at it hard enough, but expectations are the things where all you can do is keep trying, do your best – and hope. Like being signed by an agent, being published, having a best-seller, or winning awards. I think that’s a pretty good way of looking at it.

On the other hand, I’m also a bit of a nit-picker. One of the examples Holly gives as a goal is accumulating X many rejection letters from submitted stories. Myself, I would say that submitting stories X many times is the goal. A rejection letter is an outcome that you have no control over, just like a sale, so you can’t necessarily reach X many rejection letters just by hard work. You’re quite likely to, but that’s not the same thing, because by fluke luck you might keep getting sales.

😀

Yeah, I know that doesn’t make much of a difference in the real world, but I like to think about the remote impossibilities as well.

So – what goals are you working on now, and what hopes and expectations are you entertaining?

June Goals update

Okay, eleven days into June, and I feel like I’ve got a fair bit to show for it!

• Four stories finished for Camp Nanowrimo/Summer of Shorts, and a fifth one started with a few hundred words.
• Three stories sent in for the CSSF workshop later this month.
• A dozen stories from my fellow workshoppers converted to ebook format so that I can read them through SOON and make notes without needing to have a computer nearby.
• Living room table mostly cleared off so that I can use it for manuscript editing after I get back home in July.
• New ending to ‘Tough Love’ revised and sent in to update the critters.org manuscript queue – it’ll be going out to the critters on Wednesday this week!
• Questions for the Ninja Spotlight FINALLY organized and emails sent out to my four Ninja volunteers so far!
• Eight of my own stories or scripts converted to e-book format for my own review and re-reading pleasure.

That’s all I can think of, but it’s not bad, huh? Have you been able to make a dent on a to-do list this summer?

My calendar of goal tracking is in trouble!

Because it can’t stay on the wall. 😦

I think it was on Sunday that the calendar fell for the first time, while I was across the room. I let it sit for a while, then figured that maybe that first adhesive hook had run out of life, and that since it stayed stuck for about three weeks, maybe I should just keep going through the rest of the pack of nine, and it could last me for another six months or so.

Stringing Words Day 1: Monthly project threads

One minor announcement first – I’m going to be posting a special interview with somebody who’s a part of the Office of Letters and Light and afiliated with Nanowrimo. Look for it in the week leading up to Christmas! And I’m taking suggestions for question ideas. Is there anything that you’d like to know about the people who make Nano and Script Frenzy happen? Leave them in the comments or email to chrisken zero at gmail dot com. If I use any of your questions, I’ll send you a digital cookie, and my heartfelt thanks.

And now, some more great stuff about the Stringing Words community! I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to get to twelve days of Stringing Words in December, but I may give it a try!

Today, I’ll focus on the monthly project threads. It’s a simple idea, but I’ve found it a powerful way to motivate myself. At the start of the month, you list some goals that you want to reach, and then, through the month, you cross off whatever you’ve finished, mark incremental progress for something that you’ve done halfway, make changes if your priorities have altered, and chat with other people in the thread, talking about what’s been easy, what’s proving tougher than you thought, and cheer each other on. Overall, it’s a lot of fun, and I’ve probably got a lot done over the past few years just because I put it on my monthly to-do list.

So – is there anything on your December to-do list? Or are you just relaxing and recovering from November?

The fallacy of ‘If I only had time to write…’

I really should know better than to fall for this one.

But it’s so tempting – you see so much of your days taken up by going to work, routine chores – or conventions in distant places, whatever – and still you manage to get a little writing done. So the idea’s obviously going to occur to you at some point: “If I only had a few days with nothing to worry about but writing, how much could I get done?”

I’m off work this week without any impressive travel plans, and I’ve managed to get some things from my to-do list crossed off, including critiques, finishing up a revision, and catching up with the Campaign. I’ve even gotten a new chapter finished on a crossover fanfic that I’ve been wanting to tie up.

But I still feel like I’m going to fall short of the targets that I’d hoped for stay-cation productivity. And that’s mostly because of the obvious reason that time to write is not enough. You need to have mental energy to draw on, and inspiration, and focus. After this summer, I didn’t really realize how low my reserves were getting, and doing other things to recharge them is much better than pushing too hard.

Like Aesop’s tortoise, I’ll get there in the end – wherever it is that I’m heading.

And thank you very much to Brinda Berry for the Irresistibly Sweet Blog Award. 🙂

Blogosphere Monday: And this time, concentrate!

Blogosphere index

I’m still feeling the blogfest love, so this week I’d like to spotlight one of the founding homes of the ‘Show me Yours’ blogfest – “…And this Time, Concentrate!”

At this point, Summer’s blog has lots of cool stuff on gaming, pictures of snowy weather, advice for writers, resolutions about books to read and discussion of writing goals. Also some kittens, and Summer’s ‘Show me Yours’ is still halfway up page 1.

More than anything else there, though, I really love the paraphrased quote up at the top of the blog, from which it gets its name.

So, enough of my rambling on. Go follow the link and read Summer’s rambling!

Oh, and I’d like to give Misa a very special Blogosphere thanks for sending a Stylish Blogger award my way! Whoo-hoo!

New goals for December

Not too much to report right now. Made it back home safely on Tuesday, been back to work, took a while about adjusting back to Eastern Standard time because I didn’t actually get home on Tuesday evening until 11:30pm, which for me was like 8:30 pm.

But I’m back on my usual schedule, it’s the weekend finally, and I’m still trying to settle on my December goals. Probably nothing too strenuous or wordy, though it’d be nice to get a few crossover fanfics updated.

One interesting item is that I have signed up for National Novel Publishing Year, over at their new free digs. I’m not sure if I’m really determined to get published in a year, but it seems like a good place to get support for editing and critiques and query letters and a bunch of other stuff I want to be working on for this coming year – and this past year too, actually, but I really thought that NaNoPubYe was dead until I checked a link that somebody posted of Nanowrimo spinoffs and saw the ‘we’re moving’ announcement.

I also want to get moving on putting my applications together for the 6-week summer workshops – Clarion, Clarion West, and Odyssey. That’ll involve getting more critiques on some of the shorter original fiction I’ve been working on lately so that I can figure out what to revise and submit for portfolios. I was thinking about that today at work, and realized that I wasn’t even sure how many stories I had that fit the bill. Worked it out this evening, after going through all of my word count tracker sheets since February. (It’s pretty crazy that I can’t even sort out what I’ve been writing without a spreadsheet, huh?)

There’s six stories on the list, two fantasy and four science fiction, which seems like a reasonable number to manage. If you’d be interested in giving something of mine a read, let me know!

Also, I thought today would be a good day to play around with some Wordles from my November writing. This first one is just for the Nano 50k proper that I finished on NOWD night:

And this one is for all of my November writing – still dominated by the same keywords, but not quite as strongly it seems to me. Can’t spot an obvious keyword from any of my shorts though: