[crapgadget tv commercial voice]
”Inspiration hits. You really like this idea! But who has the time to take on yet another personal project?”
[/crapgadget tv commercial voice]

It can be hard to actually get to work and move a project from ‘start’ to ‘done’, even when you’re motivated (more or less motivated) to tackle your growing list of ideas, because you have no idea where to start or what to focus on. It can be hard, too, to know when to call something done so you can cross it off the list and move on to something else. (We can fix and fiddle and add to things seemingly forever, never really getting done.)

At least, it has proven very difficult for me to actually follow through on ideas (ymmv) and I think the popularity of things like NaNoWriMo and Inktober show that for a lot a folks, an extra nudge (and the “let’s all do this together” community aspect) is just what they needed to actually get over that hump. This suggestion isn’t going to be a runaway success like either of those: there is no theme, it’s going to take all year and not just a month, and odds are, you’re not going to like it.

That’s the point of deadlines though. Nobody likes a deadline. This is also why deadlines work: you have a drop dead date and you have to just get done with the thing (or 90% done with the thing) and turn it in.

We all know this, but we never — “we” in this case being me, and possibly some of you — we never set deadlines for our personal projects or back-burner stuff, the stuff we promise we’ll get to, “someday”.

Since it is going to take some sort of outside force to move all these projects along: I’ll do it. I’ll be the bad guy. Not a nudge but a shove. I’m taking a running start and ‘bout to knock you over a cliff of productivity into 2020.

_You_ will have to figure out which 13 projects¹ you’re going to tackle in 2020 but I get to be the evil editor or boss or demanding client who is going to give you a deadline. 13 of them in fact.

There is a neat coincidence about how the numbers line up between the orbit we call a ‘year’ and the rotation of this dumb rock that we call a ‘day’ and the odd-when-you-stop-and-think-about-it habit of dividing days into batches of 7: Thirteen 4-week chunks that we more commonly call months.²

Smaller projects could be paired or batched. Clean up the garage, and then build shelves & a bench, for example. Or organize all of last year’s receipts and then do your taxes and then set up a system to actually keep the paperwork organized going forward. Or just do the “one big weekend” job that is actually going to take you two weekends (it’s true and you know it) and then you have a 3rd weekend to clean up after (you know it’ll take the 3rd weekend too) and have a week off before the due date. Something that would actually take 4 whole weeks might take some planning; making the plan & doing the prep & buying the stuff could be a whole ‘nother prior project with its own due date. Heck, with the planning and prepping and going (and resting after) even a week’s vacation could be considered a “project”.³

Learn a skill. Build a shed. Iterate 8 times on a recipe idea. Pick any of the half dozen things you’ve been putting off for “someday when [you] have the time”

4 weeks is a block of time.
And we’ve got 13 chunks like that in 2020.

Here are your Due Dates for the 2020 Assignments:

30 January
27 February
26 March
23 April
21 May
18 June
16 July
13 August
10 September
8 October
5 November
3 December
31 December

Due dates are Thursdays because I want you to wrap-up what you’re doing, call it done (or done enough) and file it — and then go enjoy at least one weekend off out of four.⁴ We’ve already lost one week⁵ so your first assignment is going to be rushed and I know I popped this on you late but I have two suggestions to help cover that

.Option 1. you could use January to brainstorm (or resurrect) the 12 other really good ideas you’d like to get done this year. Your first project is find 12 projects for 2020, due 30 Jan. Should be easily do-able in three weeks. You’ll probably have time to revise your list four or five times and maybe do some prep work or shopping for the first one.

~or~
.Option B. take the three weeks now to break down that One Really Big Project into 12 more manageable, achievable chunks.

For example⁶, if the really big project is to “finally write that book” the 12 chunks might be:
.1. Read 20 books in the same field/genre
.2. Read 20 more books in the same field/genre
.3. Outline and structure – plot and setting for fiction, scope and focus for non-fiction⁷
.4. Read 20 more books in the same field/genre
.5. OK now think about what works and doesn’t in the 5 dozen books you’ve read this year. Yes, I expect this to take 4 weeks.
.6. Revisit the outline. Revise the outline. If you have nothing to revise I think you did Assignment 5 wrong, but anyway, skip the first two chapters and write starting from chapter three.
.7. Are you three weeks into writing the middle of your book? Good. Now stop that.⁸ Go back to your outline and the beginning and write the first chapter. Revise the outline, because you probably have some different ideas now than where you were at four weeks ago.
.8. Write 10,000 words
.9. Write 10,000 words
.10. Write 10,000 words
.11. You should be around a fifth or a third or halfway through your outline, well, some way through the original outline: it has probably ballooned since and you’re thinking this is going to be more than one book? Maybe a trilogy? How do professional authors do this? Anyway, Stop. It’s the 6th of November and you’re already behind on NaNoWriMo; I’m gonna need 50,000 words out of you on a completely different book by 30 November. No, don’t outline, that’s not what NaNoWriMo is about. Vomit words into a file. Go go go go you’re already late but 6 November is a Friday, you have all weekend to play catch-up. (Hopefully the habit of writing 500-ish words a day for the past 12 weeks primed you for this.) The “2020 Assignment” deadline is 3 December but go ahead and hit that NaNo goal line on 30 November (or don’t, no shame, it happens some–or most–years) and then take a break. Take the weekend, take a week. Take two, why not, get some end-of-the-year holiday madness taken care of. But there’s still one more assignment before January:
.12. Revisit your outline. Read the 30,000 or so words you wrote before November. Go back and re-write your first chapter. Go back and re-write the opening line — spend a couple of days or a week on just that, why not.

See? Easy.

You still won’t have written a book in 2020 but now we have a plan! .⁹

And due dates. Your first assignment is due in three weeks.

¹ Ooooo… 13! Spooky and unlucky and bad. See, this is going to work out great.

² Except months are longer than 4 weeks and we have 12. And the leftover day (or two) each year. And why isn’t this standardized yet? Inertia? Anyway the calendar sucks but days are days and weeks have seven of ‘em and 4 weeks is probably enough time to tackle a project-of-appropriate-small-epic-scale. Also the Earth’s natural satellite might have influenced why we think of 28 or 29 or 29-and-half days as being somehow significant but hell, I ain’t no astronomer, and it still doesn’t explain Juli’s *or* Greg’s calendar.

³ Anything over a week or that requires a passport might take up two.

⁴ Also because the very last day of the year happens to be a Thursday.

⁵ My bad. Though to be fair I had the idea of “due dates” for 2020 last week and I just didn’t get around to writing it up until today. I’m kind of bad about getting around to finishing things. If only I could mitigate or even correct that by having some sort of external, set deadl… oh. right.

⁶ This sample project breakdown is a kind-of-on-topic digression that really could and probably should be its own post but that’s not the way I write or think so… here, have it. If you end up reading a lot of my blog output you might notice that these digressions are ‘a thing’ and damnably, I’m good at them (the digression part; the writing has to stand on its own for you to judge as good or not). I’m not saying you have to write a book in 2020 or that my 12 steps are the way to write a book but if you wanted to follow it I think it would “work” in as much as I admit that if followed, to the letter and as outlined, it’s not actually going to work.

⁷ I call it an “outline” here and throughout but “outline” might have some sort of meaning for you that differs from mine so I’ll stress that a book “outline” could be a lot of things and not all of them are formal or heavy or hard to do. You could be starting with just the story seed and a lot of background notes and half an idea for an ending but not an “outline”. That’s great; take the 4 weeks and think it over and write that down – Or 10k words in a bare-bones we’ll-flesh-the-scenes-out-later super-early not-even-first-draft-let’s-call-it-the-zero draft – Or just a list of all the clues you want to put into the mystery and the killer twist at the end – Or the history of the place you’re about to use as your setting. You might take these 4 weeks to think about your main character and supporting cast and their enemies and do rpg character sheets and backstory for each instead of developing a scene-by-scene outline of the story. It doesn’t have to be a single document, either; you could (and maybe should) use Scrivener or a mini-wiki or an index card deck or a mind map or the random notes text file in Notepad on your laptop or whatever pre-writing structure you find most useful. You might be ready to just dive in and discover your characters and pants the plot on the fly while you write, which is also valid, and so your assignment for 23 April is to just write (but take the break after 4 weeks to go read some more in your genre). Or whatever completely sensible thing you want to do (or end up doing) as part of your process that makes your process different from mine, and better. And this is a lot of really good content, down here in an end note, that quite honestly should be featured in its own post and I must be nuts why do I keep doing this.

⁸ Before the edit this sentence was, “Now stop that nonsense.”

⁹ A plan with potentially 80,000 words at the end of it, though not all one book and potentially not related – but past that and on top of 80K words: an outline & banger first chapter to take with you into 2021.

Remember to breathe
heck take a big breath right now
(and straighten your shoulders and back a little your posture is probably terrible)

and if you need to, put down the phone or get up from your desk for a minute.
Maybe just go ahead and do that anyway, “need to” or not.

Now find a window to look out of. Or if there isn’t a handy window, find the furthest point you can and deliberately adjust your focus away from the phone or desk and instead look into the distance.

Take a break, finish the thought, let it go.

…

…If need be take another big breath.

okay

Now ‘center’ yourself.
That could mean: reminding yourself of where you are, where you stand, who you are, who you love, what the plan is for the rest of the day, or none of that and a little quiet meditation instead (for those that meditate).
But find a center

and try to be there for a long second,

and hold onto as much of that as you can when you go back to the screen.

##

Hey while we’re here: if you didn’t back up your data on 1 January (New Year’s Day is an excellent day for backing up important data) then take a minute to do that before you dive back into whatever terrible news is happening. You’ll feel better after.

I didn’t post anything on the actual first day of the year because
1. I didn’t actually have that much to say (apparently)
2. This isn’t going to be a new year’s resolution thing where I post every day, no matter what
3. Actual events of the day were, after waking up: some youtube; a nap, like, got a blanket off the bed and settled in and really napped; forcing myself awake because I did in fact have somewhere to be; showering and the necessary things to be out in public; spending the afternoon with my folks, and a traditional New Year’s dinner¹ —
4. and after driving home and settling in with the blanket again I didn’t feel like writing. Or blogging, anyway; if inspiration had struck I probably would have been willing to write out a story idea or scene fragment

So there, you get the play-by-play of the 1st anyway (with an extra side of thought process) on today, the 2nd, probably around 3 in the afternoon when I get home to post this and not around 8am when I actually wrote it.

This being the internet, despite a certain bias towards the new and newly-updated, the time between creation and consumption doesn’t really matter so much. My words will likely be just as valid on 2 January 2040 as they are today, except perhaps for the detail where it is chilly enough to require a blanket.

So if the goal isn’t to produce a daily diary in web log format, or to engage in daily writing exercise as part of a new year’s resolution to “write more and make it a habit”, then what the hell am I doing here?

I write every day and have for years but way too much of that has been on Twitter, particularly in the last four years or so². I need to refocus away from that platform, and I already have a blog (with its own domain name and web hosting and the CMS and *gestures broadly at everything on this page*) so doing some very rudimentary mental calculations: here I am. Again.

I still don’t have an overall site topic, or focus, like I used to when RocketBomber was about bookselling³. I have a lot of interests, I read voraciously⁴, I like to consider myself broadly literate across many categories⁵, I have a tendency to both think I am impartial while simultaneously forming strong opinions about things⁶, and if nothing else I find it particularly easy to settle into a self-reflective mode and basically just talk to myself⁷. So the topic-of-the-day could be anything, really, or nothing⁸.

The blog should be an outlet for me to share, when I feel the need to share (or overshare; see endnotes) and scratch that itch before it incubates and then ends up on Twitter as a “Buckle in folks, I need to tell you 1/X” situation. Among other things, here I have the space for all my parenthetical asides and other digressions⁹ and can perform formatting tricks that are either impossible to do even in threaded tweets, or supremely awkward given the character limits.

You might also hear more of my “authentic” voice in the blog. Editing to fit on Twitter is actually really good practice for an author (including comedians and humorists , as the constraint is a great way to find the joke in a joke) but constantly writing in headlines is not the best way to write. Even in a thread, the rhythm of 280-characters-per forces you into less-than-ideal phrasing and constructions. You can ignore that and just post your paragraphs in their entirety, unedited, and let the breaks fall where they may, but the fact that twitter will display the tweet-chunks with those breaks forces the reader into the clunky twitter rhythm anyway. This is probably the number one reason people hate Twitter threads even if agree with the author and like the points presented: reading a twitter thread is exhausting¹⁰.

You might find my ‘true’ writer’s voice and damnable habit of digression at least as exhausting. But at least here I can vary the rhythm of the writing to suit, and you can read it as a single page and not telegraphed cue-card style, one poster-board all-caps shout at a time.

That’s probably enough “nothing” for today’s post. I’ll see what topic grabs my attention for tomorrow¹¹

##

¹ traditional German, with roast pork sauerkraut, because they’re from Ohio. I’ll fix cornbread, collards, and black eyed peas at some point for myself later. Probably Julian-Calendar New Year’s, 14 January, because why not

² the last four as a daily thing but also looking at ten years total on twitter at this point. damn.

³ “RocketBomber” as the name is itself an artifact from a time when I thought I’d be blogging about science fiction. See also: archive.rocketbomber.com – or maybe not, on second thought. The words are all still there, and links to individual articles should still work, but the formatting has not adapted well to its new home and it’s a bit of a jumble at the moment.

⁴ too much of my reading is online only, I need more books. Literally more fiber (things printed on wood pulp paper) in my media diet

⁵ literacy in the age of digital print is about more than just being able to read; parsing and understanding information now also requires both some basic understanding of the visual but non-verbal ways we communicate—art and charts, sure, but also things like font choices and formatting and page layouts—and also approaching sources with healthy skepticism and a critical eye. Too often “a thing” is seen as “more true” just because the presentation was slick and the tone authoritative, actual facts aside. Literacy can also mean a certain grounding in a few of the more important fields, i.e. scientific, financial, cultural and multicultural literacies, and civics, and etiquette (online and off; rules often unwritten and never really covered well) and increasingly, being “literate” across a couple different fandoms. This endnote would really have been better as a post all on its own; I’ll drop myself a reminder to revisit the topic in a few months.

⁶ …the actual worst possible combo for writers on the internet. I only hope my self-awareness of the problem serves as possible inoculation against being “that guy”.

⁷ When writing for myself, I tend to write both first-person and in constant dialog with myself, with past-me and future-me, so much so that I often use the pronoun “we”. Like, note-to-self-style, “We should probably check and see if talking to yourself is still a symptom of something in the DSM-5”. We find it fairly easy to write in the mode, and we find it helps with planning and projects that are going to span a length of time that will require more than one “me” to accomplish. This is a mental-processes thing (not neurotypical, but I like it and it’s mine) and not an identity thing – my pronouns are still he/him. Not least because it’d be Supremely Weird to ask others to use “we” and we ain’t that special. And without access to a time machine I’m pretty sure you’ll only ever talk to one of us at a time. This is another endnote that would have been better as a stand-alone post and I fear that if I continue to use endnotes this will continue to come up as an issue.

⁸ Today’s post—this post—might be a good example of what “nothing” from me looks like. I hope you like the content because if nothing else, I can guarantee a lot of “nothing”

⁹ exempli gratia, vide supra

¹⁰ obscure history threads are an exception. I love me some obscure history threads. Twitter-threads-as-a-medium seems all but custom designed for ‘em

¹¹ If you’d like my take on a particular topic, perhaps an expansion on a point in one of these end notes, you can let me know on Twitter. Of course on Twitter. obviously.

This is posted the night before but is “the order of the day” for 31 December 2019. Last of the year.

I’m starting this as a habit before the actual new year because it’s not a New Year’s Resolution. It’s not. It may only last a week. It may only last until I go back to work on Thursday. But I need to write something to get in the habit of writing something, and if that means a damn daily “web log” or journal we’ll give that a go for a month and see where it takes me.

Today, Tuesday, my Dad and I are moving his bee hives from the old community garden (which has a certain run-down funky charm) to the new community garden. The new garden is… new. I can’t think of anything else to recommend it. I should have some pictures after the deed is done, though sadly you won’t get to see me in all the bee gear because it is hard to wear that stuff and deal with live bees and take a selfie.

I’m meeting Dad at 9am and we’ll knock that out and after? I think the plan is to buy some beer, hop online, and maybe play some more World of Warcraft, though I’m slowing down a bit in WoW Classic and I’m back to playing Hearthstone more often than not.

I should also move furniture and build bookcases and finish moving in (I’ve been here for a year and a month now; the disassembled bookcase parts leaning against walls and mocking me daily) but I’m not feeling that ambitious. It is still a rare day off and I’d rather squander it, deliciously.

There was a time, maybe 15 years ago or so, where I was fairly certain just about anything could be learned out of a book, if you were patient and went about learning intentionally.

To that end I read around three dozen books on how to write fiction.

Some of these were (and are) classics about writing in general, like Bird by Bird, On Writing, Telling Lies for Fun & Profit; some were more straight-forward nuts and bolts type books on dialogue, story structure, & building characters; plus a smattering of style and grammar guides like Strunk & White. I immersed myself in ‘how to’ books on writing, took notes (maybe I need to dig those out), and spent maybe six months going through and going back again to books like these, to see if somewhere someone had a flash of insight and managed to boil it down to “10 Rules You Should…” or “One Weird Trick”.

After all that, I did in fact come up with a lot of ideas and felt like, if I invested just a little more time and got to work I really could write a book. But here’s the plot twist: it would have been a book about writing. A book just like the dozens I had read.

…that I’d read back to back, one after the other, with an eye to study them and while taking notes and thinking about the sorts of things that were repeated in more than one book and the different angles each author took to the subject matter.

So what mattered wasn’t that I had picked up a bunch of books on writing. What mattered was how I read them. I studied them, like I was taking a class.

+1 for method. But overall: I’d made a mistake in choosing what to study

I would have been better off if I had spent those six months reading 25 novels – if my goal was to write a novel. I should have gone deep into one genre, or sub-genre, or niche genre, and read two dozen books that were pretty close to what I eventually wanted to write. Because if you read enough of the almost-same thing, and start to study the way the ideas are laid out, and the structure of it, eventually you’ll also get the shape of what your version of that book might look like. A book just like the dozens you’ve read, but *Your* version of that book.

I won’t tell you what you shouldn’t read; read a little bit of everything, & read what you enjoy. But if you want to write fiction, skip the how-to books, and read fiction. When setting off into unexplored territory, don’t just read about logistics and what to pack and how to prepare: know your route. Check out the paths others have taken to get to that border before you pick where to cross it.