I’ve had this song in my heart today.
21 Reasons You Think You Don’t Have Time To Write
Stolen from Tumblr. I’m going to bold the ones that I can definitely plead as ‘guilty’.
1. You are letting people tell you that you should be doing other things with your time.
2. You can’t live with the level of clean that your family accepts as normal.
3. You haven’t decided to treat your writing seriously and so no one around you treats it seriously, either.
4. You haven’t made yourself a writing space.
5. You haven’t realized that you need help.
6. You do what is urgent rather than what is necessary.
7. You don’t let your kids and other people solve their own problems.
8. You think that someday you will have more time for writing.
9. You are spending time doing things you actually don’t care about.
10. You are actually using distractions as an excuse not to write.
11. You are terrified of writing, of actually sitting down and putting yourself on the page.
12. You are too busy criticizing the best selling books that you are reading to write something better.
13. You don’t know what to do with a blank page.
14. You don’t know how to turn off your internal editor.
15. You talk a good game, but you don’t play it.
16. You need to do a little planning and research before you start.
17. You don’t actually like writing. You like having written. (Join the club.)
18. You need to write the first line of the next chapter before leaving for the day.
19. You need to spend time remembering what it is you love about writing.
20. You have convinced yourself that you need 2 hours to write and don’t know how to use the 20 minute chunks you actually have.
21. You don’t have notebooks scattered through the house, including in the bathroom, to jot down inspiration.
Now, I’m guilty of #21, but I don’t really jot down much. Maybe I should!
The one that took me the longest time to defeat was number 20. I don’t think in terms of time per day, just in terms of words. But it was important for me to realize that carving out two uninterrupted hours or writing a day just isn’t going to happen, until I manage to get to the point where I can write full time. Will I ever get there? I hope so. For now, I’m just going to write my arse off. And if twenty minutes is all I have, then hey — that’s 300 words or so, if I’m on my game. If not, it’s 200 or so.
Write when you can…and be liberal in your definition of “when you can”!
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Something for Thursday
Two Hundred Years of Wagner
Today is Richard Wagner’s 200th birthday.
From Lohengrin — my favorite Wagner opera — the Prelude to Act I and “Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral”. Wagner’s reputation is often one of bombast and thick, dense orchestration. This music is as delicate as anything.
The overture to Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg. Wagner’s other main reputation is one of unrelenting seriousness — but this is as sunny as anything you’ll hear by anyone else.
The Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. The emotional payoff here is one of the most staggering I know in all of music, anywhere, in any genre.
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A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
What’s your ‘limit’ on social media sites? Not as in ‘How do you limit how personal you get’, but…what’s a prominent social media site that you know of but don’t use because you’re on enough already? I have a LinkedIn account, but I almost never use it (and in truth, I don’t even know what it’s for or why I should use it), and I just deleted an account on something called SchoolFeed because it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be and saw little use for what seemed like a Facebook-clone for people who attended the same school.
(And sorry for the lack of posting this week…downtime has been a bit tougher to come by than usual, and the novel comes first!)
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Finally! A Flickr app for Android!
I’ve been waiting for this. Hooray!
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Past tenses and such
Kevin Drum has a post on the IRS scandal, which doesn’t interest me all that much (this whole ‘scandal’ strikes me as everybody chasing the wrong bouncing ball). What does interest me is this sentence at the very end:
They are among the first in what is quickly becoming a whole new subgenre: the story about how the Cincinnati office of the IRS is completely and totally FUBARed.
Here’s my thing: Isn’t FUBAR already past-tense? Can something really be FUBARed, when the -ed suffix has already been used in the F part of the FUBAR acronym? Seems to me that FUBAR covers all bases, in terms of tense:
“That’s gonna be so FUBAR!”
“Wow, that is really FUBAR.”
“That whole thing was just so FUBAR.”
Anyway….
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Making Fun of Benedict Cumberbatch
Busy Busy Busy Busy Busy
