Only a short post this week as I’m seriously behind. Cal Newport has a long and interesting post about the use of ASMR in Immersive Single Tasking. (Along with a retro image of Bob Ross painting, which was what caught my attention in the first place.) Immersive Single Tasking is the new sexy in productivity, […]
Deep Focus While You’re Writing (or Plotting!) Read More »
As you can imagine, I read a lot of productivity books. Every month, more of them pop up. And over the last year or so I’ve noticed a trend in the common philosophy of many of them. It is the tiny habit approach to productivity. And I can’t tell you how much that trend
How To Use Tiny Habits To Make Yourself Write, Every Single Time. Read More »
There’s a great deal of chatter online at the moment about the mental health of everyone still in lockdown and stuck at home. I can vouch for that, and I even know why. The first two weeks of being stuck at home, I could not get my shit together for neither love nor money. I
How to Pull Yourself Out Of Your Funk – An Unexpected Method Read More »
This Is The New Normal In April, 14 Million people in the USA applied for unemployment benefits. Six million people applied for emergency assistance in Canada. Around the world, the numbers of unemployed and those with reduced income are proportional to populations. Last week, my government spoke for the first time about the duration of
This Is The New Normal Read More »
Just a quick post this week. I’m getting back into the working groove and suddenly becoming (re)aware of the plethora of distractions that can lure you away from your manuscript–especially when you’re working at home, which is pretty much all of us right now. When you’re at home, you don’t have people looking over your
A More Deadly Weapon Against Distractions Read More »
Words used to flow easily for me. Not so much, these days. I — like you, I am sure — am struggling to get words down in a regular manner. The puzzling thing for me was why am I struggling? I’m not sick. No one in my immediate family is sick (thanks to whoever
Distractions Always Happen, and You Aren’t ‘Less Than’ Because of Them Read More »
It’s one of life’s bizarre anomalies. I stopped writing blog posts, and traffic shot up when I did. I won’t read the obvious into that. 😊 But it has been an interesting few weeks “off”. I have been doing a lot of other stuff in the meantime—some seismic scale shifts in direction and focus
Taking Time For Yourself. Read More »
Last week I spoke at length about stashing your time–well, stashing anything you can, actually, as a hedge against the vagaries of the publishing industry. Stashing time is a matter of deliberately working ahead of your production schedule. (And if you don’t have a production schedule–a timetable of releases–then you’re missing the backbone of
Do You Need Transition Time in Your Schedule? Read More »
Part of being prolific is having a great many ideas for stories, from among which you can pick and choose what inspires you the most. Also part of writing quickly, is having plenty of resources at hand for ideas for characters and settings, story beats, personal ticks and characteristics, and much more. Quirky appearances,
How to Never Run Out of Ideas — For Anything Read More »
I’ve been forcibly reminded, lately, of just how fast I write. And just how fast everyone else writes. I’ve been spending some time mixing with real live writers (as opposed to hanging out on-line), and that is where the reminders have popped up. The inevitable question that is raised, when mixing with writers, is “and
You’re NOT Slow. (You’re Not Fast, Either). Read More »
